Your projects receive over 200 million views a month.
That audience is about to have a lot more project to enjoy.
Introducing: A 1400 pixel-wide canvas with full-width images
Photography has never felt more immersive.
Interaction Design is finally pixel-perfect.
And Graphic Design has never been more vivid.
Update your projects or create and share something brand new.
“Set it and forget it” is not a phrase that should come to mind when setting up your creative portfolio, especially as a student (though for roasting chickens, it’s fine) As we’ve discussed in the past, the best portfolios are fresh ones. And we’re not just talking about the work. For students and professionals alike, few quick updates, mindful edits, and a tweak to your creative process can whip your portfolio back into shape in time for your next semester or your next interview.
Appreciations are a way to send genuine kudos to another creative professional on Behance. This is our community’s way of curating the network, so that the best projects gain the most exposure. Here’s a look at two of the most appreciated projects on Behance this month:
We dig this kid-friendly riff off of Youtube’s classic design – because kids should be able to enjoy everyone’s favorite procrastination tool too, right? Hello Monday says: “We were inspired by our own childhood best friends, invisible pals, and favorite toys. It’s fun, quirky and embodies the YouTube Kids brand.”
James Oconnell doesn’t have much in the way of description for this popular series (the third installment found above), but gives us this much: “colors and lines applied across a wide area of themes including the Oscars, films, TV, fat men on the beach and coca cola.” We love this truly one-of-a-kind style. Keep the series’ coming!
The latest addition to Adobe’s family of mobile apps is here! Adobe Comp CC, a free app for the iPad that enables the rapid creation of layout concepts for mobile, web, and print has made its debut. As energetic as sketching with pencil and paper, Comp CC amps up the ideation phase of the design process. Then it enables designers to add polish to the quick-gesture comps with custom type and personal creative assets.
Behance co-founded Scott Belsky sums up its power: “Comp CC takes advantage of the iPad’s advanced touch screen with an intuitive interface and makes the beginning of the design process integral to the finished result. Doing creative work on a mobile device is only useful if the results can be opened on the desktop, where the project can be perfected in a precise, professional-grade tool like InDesign or Photoshop.”
Early in the road to product launch, we knew we wanted to change the way people worked. We knew that enabling people to work (really work) away from their desks, capturing thoughts and ideas and concepts as they flew through their minds, that we could enhance the creative process.
Built on the Adobe Creative SDK, Comp CC couples intuitive iPad gestures, fonts from Typekit, and the personal assets stored in Creative Cloud Libraries to provide designers with the perfect mobile brainstorming and layout work surface. Then, with a single click, comps can be sent to Adobe InDesign CC, Adobe Illustrator CC, or Adobe Photoshop CC (where CC Libraries assets and fonts from Typekit are also synced) to fine-tune and finish the work. It’s this powerful connection back to the desktop, where designers do so much of their work, that makes Comp CC, and all of our mobile apps, so valuable.
The app made its first appearance at Adobe MAX in October 2014 when Khoi Vinh, former design director of theNew York Times, revealed it, and his collaboration with Adobe, during the Project LayUp Sneak. He said of that collaboration, “The company’s deep expertise in creative software plus the comprehensive power of their Creative Cloud platform were essential to this product—only Adobe could have brought Comp CC to life.”
Everyone remembers their first time…using Photoshop. Some of us remember life before layers (it was a dark, dark time) and while others might not even know what Creative Suite was. No matter when you clicked on your first brush tool, Photoshop has had an impact on the creative world beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. To celebrate Photoshop’s 25th Anniversary, Adobe and Behance have been on the lookout for twenty five of tomorrow’s creative superstars who have worked Photoshop’s magic into their process.
Since February, Behance members under twenty five that have uploaded and tagged their work “PS25under25″ have been dazzling us with their sweet ‘shopping skills. We’re excited to showcase the first three featured artists: Fredy Santiago, Tom Anders Watkins, and Shaivalini Kumar. Each has been created an original piece of art to celebrate the 25th anniversary and over the course of the next year, each of the will stage a two week takeover of the new Photoshop Instagram channel, sharing their story and their art with the world.
For more on these artists, check out the Adobe Inspire Blog Post here.
Fredy Santiago
Do you remember the names of all your best friends growing up? Kevin Coppel, Austin McDonald, oh, and don’t forget Spider-Man! Dennis Salvatier‘s Lil BFFs 3 takes us back to the good ol’ days when we would hang out with our friends every Saturday morning. His work shows that just because we grew up, doesn’t mean we can’t still be pals.
How did you first get interested in graphic design and then later do it professionally?
I’ve been drawing since I could remember. In first grade we watched Pete’s Dragon and we were asked to draw a scene from the film. Not only did I draw my favorite scene, but I drew my second and third and fourth because I was asked by my classmates to draw there’s for them. I always knew I wanted to be creative but it wasn’t until getting into art school that I saw the potential of design in my life. I was supposed to be an animator, but back in 1999, the industry was shifting and the competition was becoming even more fierce. I decided if I wanted to work I had to fall back on my design skills (which were terrible at the time) but I worked at it and honed it and learned to teach clients about design as opposed to just designing for them. That’s what set me apart.
Many of your projects feature cartoon and comic book characters. Do you seek out clients that will allow for you to make works featuring these characters, or are you really lucky?
I believe strongly in personal projects. They keep you creative and sharp. It’s through my personal projects that I’ve secured more paid work and a better clientele. People can see that you’re having fun by looking at your work and it get’s people excited to have that same energy on their projects. But in the last 3 years, I decided to take on only projects I’m excited about. In my early years, I got paid a lot of money to work on projects I didn’t believe in — there’s more to life than getting paid.
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Behance had a large presence at Adobe’s Creative Camp during SXSW this year. The two day long series included lessons, insights and conversations about creative tools and the creative process with Adobe & Behance evangelists, product managers & design experts. Both Roxanne Schwartz & Scott Belsky represented Behance in Austin with their talks which included tips and tricks on promoting your work on the web, insights on the rise of the creative economy, as well as a book signing for Behance’s first ever book, Super Modified.
Middle Earth, Gotham City, and wherever it is The Wild Things are. What connects these seemingly distinct worlds is the art of illustrator Nico Delort. We got a chance to find out what makes him tick, and he how comes to visualize these worlds in his own unique way, as highlighted in his Best of 2014.
Your illustrations have an impressively large range, from the films of Werner Herzog to Charlie Brown, and yet you’re able to make them all visually work together when placed side by side. How do you go about choosing your subject matter and adding your unique visual style to it?
As far as choosing projects go, I usually always pick things that resonate with me on either an emotional level or an aesthetic level – also projects that I know I can put my personal touch on, like if someone asked me to do, say, an Adventure Time piece (as much as I love the show), I’d have a super hard time doing something because it’s so far from my own aesthetic and I’d have to change what makes it unique to fit my ‘vision’ and I don’t want to do that.
Can you describe your creative process when making an illustration?
For client work I always start out with a few thumbnails – once we find something we agree on, I move on to Photoshop to make a first draft of the selected thumbnail. All the preliminary work for my pieces is done digitally, as I love the flexibility the medium allows. I only move to the final ink artwork once my digital comp is 100% tight. I print out the lineart, transfer it on clayboard with carbon paper and then ink and scratch away.
Behance’s first-ever art & design book, featuring content exclusively from the Behance Community, is now out! We’re thrilled to present 288 pages of work that demonstrates how classic approaches to art and design are being subverted, blurred, and reinvented by you, today’s creatives.
We dive in 18 themes, each showcasing work that riff on the idea of “super-modified” creative work. From unexpected uses of humble materials like felt, to how branding is moving far beyond the unchanging logo, to how handmade lettering is making a comeback – it’s clear that exciting things are happening in today’s creative landscape.
