Japan 日本 is one of my favourite countries. I love the culture, the food and technology. Located in the Pacific Ocean, Japan is an archipelago that comprises 6,852 islands and has the world’s tenth largest population with over 127 million people. The Greater Tokyo Area is the largest metropolitan area in the world with over 30 million residents. The characters that make up Japan’s name mean “sun origin” and is ...

Web design has become more hand tooled, organic and versatile. Classic retro and vintage typography with authentic textures and withered paper backgrounds have helped bring back the grunge web design trend. Grunge gives web design more style and less uniform, there is no structure only worn out and faded graphic elements, these look beautiful and creative. The trend is inspired by the vintage and retro design...

A soon as I clapped eyes on these cute little artisan food miniatures I fell in love. The painstaking work that the artists have put into creating these great tiny masterpieces is just amazing. An artisan if you didn't know or craftsperson is a skilled manual worker who makes items that may be functional or strictly decorative, including furniture, clothing, jewellery, household items, and tools. An artisan is...

DestinyBlue (a.k.a Alice de ste Croix) is a professional anime artist from London, England and she has exhibited for over 40 anime and comic events. Alice has also run courses with the BBC on how to draw manga and has a range of bath goodies, lip-balms and candles branded with her unique style. Alice states that Final Fantasy has been her biggest inspiration for her amazing artwork.  Take a look at some of ...

While I was visiting London the other month I came across some truly amazing 3D street art. 3D street art although drawn in 2D gives a 3-dimensional illusion when viewed from a specific standpoint. Some of the artworks are visually stunning and you can almost believe that what you are viewing is real. A lot of the street art you may see is actually clever advertising commissioned from a variety of the big...

The 90's isn't the one of those decades that sticks out for memorable design but one thing I do remember from the early 90's is the bright, trippy, euphoric design of UK rave flyers. If you can remember dancing your ass off all night to trippy repetitive beats from DJs like Sasha, Carl Cox and Grooverider whether it be in a club or field then some of these flyers you might recognize from back in the day. Let's...

Capturing star trails can be a lengthy process but the end result is definitely worth it. How is it done? Well, it's done when the line of light which is recorded on a photographic medium and a time exposure is made of a star in the night time sky and using a camera on a fixed mount, and the trails are caused by the rotation of the earth during the period of time when the camera's shutter is held...

8th December 2010 - I love animation and I have a vast collection of animation on display on my media shelves at home but on there you won’t find the sugary sweet world of Disney Cinema (apart from Pixar collaborations!) but a huge collection of Japanese anime. I’ve been hooked on anime since I was very young. I think the first experience of anime was Castle in the Sky and Akira. In this post I wanted to show ...

Although we are now near to the end of February it is still time to get yourself a brand new business card design for 2012. I have searched around the web and found some great FREE templates for you to use and customise from Own Business Cards and Fresh Business Cards. Whether you are a designer, hairdresser or sales representative there is a neat collection to choose from. Get downloading today! I hope you...

If you are a Photoshop fan then you must know about the importance of textures in Photoshop. Online Photoshop community is awesome enough to provide huge number of free textures and brushes to fellow Photoshoppers. Wood textures among those which bring awesome background look to any design instantly. Especially when you create any model portfolio then these textures helps you to create a really cool wooden...

There are some inspiring photographers out there but there are non-more inspiring than the gravity-defying Natsumi Hayashi. Natsumi is a photographer from Tokyo, Japan and can be spotted jumping up and down around the city armed with her SLR and amazing self-timing which capture these truly amazing shots. The photos which are taken at exactly the right moment show Natsumi simply levitating in her...

A logo is a small graphical element that has as main scope the representation of someone/something. This attempt of definition is preferable to the one provided by the Oxford Dictionary or Wikipedia because the main essence is synthesized. It’s simple: you instantly recognize an Apple product after the worldwide notorious logo. In the beginning, nobody figured out the importance of logo and many people consider i...

Whether you’re interested in designing logos, building websites, or helping clients to create incredible PowerPoint presentations, you may find that working as a freelance graphic designer appeals to your professional sensibilities and your distaste for traditional job markets.  There certainly are a lot of benefits to working for yourself; no annoying bosses or coworkers to contend with, no frustrating commute, ...

Today’s post is all about some of the great work by Ben Heine and his exciting  series titled “Pen Vs Camera”. Ben states  - "Pencil Vs Camera" is nothing but the result of a long graphic exploration and a logic consequence of my artistic evolution. It's a new concept. My primary intention was to create a "battle field" between 2 disciplines: drawing and photography, mixing imagination and reality. The onl...

The concept of good design represents the sum of several elements, all of them realized in a professional manner and then blended together. The final result is beautiful and functional at the same time. From this perspective, it is simple to comprehend that the quality of a design depends on more than just the components on their own. A very important factor that contributes to the overall aspect of a website in...

Continuing on from our previous post Creative 80’s Music Videos here is a superb collection from the 90’s. A decade where I think the music video really came alive.   Aphex Twin – Window Licker Love it or hate it this video by Chris Cunningham and Richard James which mocks the bling of hip-hop videos of old. The video starts with a particular lengthy intro and features a very long limo. The ...

Being an art student myself I really like anything which shows creativity, imagination and talent. One of the types of art I am really digging at the moment is Anime/Manga style. I like the look, the fantasy, the sexiness and the cuteness. I know that Web Design Mash has featured anime many times (See the list at the bottom of the post for more), but I wanted to feature some new artworks that I personally have...

I've always loved fireworks. They paint the dark sky in bright neon colours and can make a huge bang that gets your heart racing. No doubt this year in November I will be standing in the cold on Guy Fawkes Night which is a celebration in my country. I will probably be holding a nice hot chocolate in one hand and a toffee apple in the other going "ooohh" and "ahhh" at the many fireworks being let off into the sky...

Geisha (芸者?), Geiko (芸子) or Geigi (芸妓) are traditional, female Japanese entertainers whose skills include performing various Japanese arts such as classical music and dance. The word consists of two kanji, 芸 (gei) meaning "art" and 者 (sha) meaning "person" or "doer". The most literal translation of geisha into English would be "artist" or "performing artist". Another name for geisha used in Japan is geiko (芸子)...

Macrophotography is close-up photography, usually of very small subjects. Classically a macrophotograph is one in which the size of the subject on the negative is greater than life size. However in modern use it refers to a finished photograph of a subject at greater than life size. Source   Source The ratio of the subject size on the film plane (or image sensor plane) to the actual...

If you have been fortunate enough to be using Google+ recently you may have seen one of Trey Ratcliff's stunning photographs being shared in your streams. Trey is best known for his blog StuckinCustoms.com which is the No.1 Travel Photography Blog on the web and had the honour of having the first HDR photo ever to hang in the Smithsonian. Trey's background is in computer science and math, so he brings an...

Well over a year ago we featured a very talented digital artist called Davidope in the post Truly Amazing Hypnotic Animations. Davidope (dvdp) is the creative director and founder of the design atelier volll and Fredlig.  He currently lives in Budapest with his Dachshund Susie and loves the danger with drinking 2 litres of Coke and smoking 40 Camels a day! You can find a daily dose of inspiration at his ...

Every business needs a website and every website needs a contact form. Contact page should be visible and accessible on websites; it should be eye cache and error free. It should be with possible fewer numbers of fields and security code enabled to stop spammers. You must have seen different contact forms online with titles ping me, awake me, stay in touch, get in touch, etc... Yes, designers showing...

Well unless you have been hiding under a rock for the last several years then there must be some time in your life you have heard of or come across the No.1 social networking juggernaut that is Facebook. Love it or hate it and with more than 800 million users (real and bogus!) on there and companies and brands favouring promoting their Facebook page over their own websites it is hard to avoid these days. I have...

You may be mistaken for thinking that these are photos taken from the set of one the Lord of the Rings movies but in actual fact these are real examples of living architecture. The bridges you see are from Cherrapunji, India which is one of the wettest places on Earth and are actually made by tree roots. These bridges are very much alive! The amazing War-Khasis tribe in Meghalaya have been harnessing the...

Typeface and their history is obviously an unappreciated evolution. However, the typeface from the first days of print until now is an ever changing medium, with more to it than there could ever seem to be. Typography is the study of typefaces and the evolution of printed letters. Early printers, were also typographers and the first registered one was a man named Claude Garamond. Garamond didn't invent type,...

Throughout the ages, artists found ways to express their creativity and more importantly, themselves through different forms of art… now that we are in an era of digital revolution is no exception.  Photo manipulation is a technique where an artist (graphic designer) uses different photos or images to create a whole new scenario using a graphic manipulation application (e.g. Photoshop). It can also be a single ph...

My latest iPhone app addiction at the moment is the social drawing game Draw Something. When I have a spare 5 mins I have a quick blast against numerous friends and family no matter where they are in the world. If you've never played Draw Something then it's like having a mini game of Pictionary where you can draw on your mobile touchscreen devices and the other person has to guess the word from your drawings....

You may think you are viewing photos of miniature villages but these are in fact photos of real life. These photographs have been taken using the special art of tilt-shift photography. The effects can be produced by the use of camera movements on small and medium cameras. The name originates from the tilt-shift lens which is normally required to produce this effect optically.  The tilt refers to the rotation of ...

The album cover plays an important part in the world of music. It's used as a marketing tool and also an expression of artist intent and over the last 50 years or so the album covers just keep getting more and more creative. In this mixed collection of album covers ranging from The Beatles to Daft Punk you can see some amazing works of art and they clearly they do their job of getting peoples attention. Although...