I was hoping to publish a post about some of the recent projects we’ve embarked on, but I decided to steer clear of that for the moment, because something more important has caught our attention. Yes, it is none other than spam; only not the spam in the can, but the appropriated name that refers to e-mail blasts that you receive from soliciting bots, companies, and other unlikely characters that fill up your inbox with junk messages about VIAGRA, PARIS HILTON, GAINING A FEW INCHES, LOSING A FEW POUNDS, and any other ridiculous message that has nothing to do with who you are as an individual.

Now, let’s take it a step further. Why is it that people who are bent on being unsociable are so quick, and inclined to join the ranks of the so called “socially elite” or in other words “social networking sites?”

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Alright, so we finally sent off our submissions to Communication Arts yesterday. Now we wait, and hopefully at least one of our submissions will make it in. I was going to post which submissions we went with, but I think I’ll wait until we hear whether or not we got in.

On another note, we’ve just recently been invited to join the Behance network. When it comes to social networking sites, Behance definitely takes the cake. If you haven’t been there yet, it’s a pretty dope network of multidisciplinary media professionals, and everyone is super responsive, and very friendly, so I would highly recommend checking it out. Unfortunately you can’t just sign up and get a profile. You have to be invited to get in. Either way, if you get in, take advantage of the tools you have at your disposal. It’s truly a great way to make new connections in various creative fields.

That’s all for now. More to come soon.

- m / Colorcubic™

We thought we should take this time to give a shout out to the individual entities who have deemed us worthy of featuring us on their sites. Thanks a lot everyone. We really appreciate all of the buzz.

Peace,

- m / Colorcubic™

These days, we’re busy working on a lot of baby-related design projects and we just completed splash page designs for Blank Apparel Baby and RockMyBaby, two Australian-based baby apparel sites being launched in the next couple months. We were given carte blanche to design the brands and here are the results:

RockMyBaby is a rock-centric baby apparel site. We designed a “rock” wordmark with a cute skull being swaddled by the R’s decender as well as a cool VIP pass for the splash page.

A soft and fun approach was taken when designing the Blank Apparel Baby logo, integrating a rainbow, cloud, and subtle smiley face. I don’t know about you, but this whole scene makes us feel like warm laundry and fabric softener.

- c / Colorcubic™

This is the first of two myspace redesign concepts we’re creating for our boy White Car at Nueva Forma. The concept is alright I suppose, but it seems that the whole vintage, worn, tattered theme has really blown up in popularity among designers over the last several years. So much that it seems a little too conventional to go down this road.

Don’t get me wrong… Christy and I love creating the nostalgic illusion of a piece of print media from the late 60s - early 70s era, but I think we’re probably going to run with something else entirely.

Again, this is version 1 of 2 that we’re creating for White Car. Who knows, we could very well end up taking a trip back into the 1970s for some aged colors, and paper.
Peace,

- m / Colorcubic™

Alright, so I thought I would post a tutorial on using and understanding the “displace” filter in Photoshop CS2 and CS3. Since the steps haven’t really changed with the recent improvements in CS3, I’ll be referencing CS2 for this tutorial, seeing as how there are still a lot of people who aren’t using CS3.

If you’ve noticed some of our posters, and or websites, you may have noticed us using ornamentation effects, fractals, as well as aged / grunge effects that help give the design some depth.

For now I’ll just be covering the “displace” filter which produces an effect like this:

If you’ll notice the background, and how chaotic it is… that’s the “displace” filter working.

In today’s tutorial I’ll be covering step by step directions on how you may achieve this same effect for your work. Regardless if you’re interested in using this effect for web, or for print, the process is the same with the exception of canvas preparation regarding the resolution you’ll be working in.

Anyway, if you’re ready to brave this tutorial, then please read on:
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So we just found out this morning that version 2.0 of “the Combi™” was approved. We’re very excited about it, and we’re even more excited to see it put to work.

Check it out if you haven’t seen it yet. We posted a preview of the Combi v 2.0 in yesterdays post.

Also, we’d like to apologize for not picking up on this sooner, but if you’ve tried to leave a comment on our blog, you’ve probably had very little success. Unfortunately we’ve neglected our current site a little, say for minor updates, and keeping up on our blog due to redesigning colorcubic.com, and our current projects underway.
Anyway, we’ve resolved the error, thanks to one of our mates (Gejius) at nuevaforma.com for pointing that out. So you can now, (once again) leave comments… or not.

Peace,

- m / Colorcubic™

Well, unfortunately we had some unexpected downtime. Our site was showing up as “expired.” Fortunately it was not, and we have resolved the issue now.

I was supposed to have a tutorial posted over the weekend, but instead I’ll be posting it in a couple hours.

Peace,

- m / Colorcubic™