Craig and his team of vis/ressers have gone and done it again, made an awesome little publication that showcases the best in upcoming talent. If you haven’t got one, I strongly recommend you go and buy one right now, they won’t be around for long, and they will form a nice collection when future issues come out.

James Sanderson, a Bradford-based designer, found this carrot, took a picture and posted it to his blog. Clearly following the Dadaist route of Readymades, Like the great Duchamp Jim has a playful attitude to his work, spicing his blog up with carefully crafted bits of nonsense as well as some slick branding, illustration and type. And just like a few people we met last week he’s not afraid to make a nob gag.

This* makes for a nice way to say something about yourself as well as your work with your web presence - people want to see a person as well as a portfolio.

*His whole site, not specifically the carrot.

UGBOT, aka Gavin Edwards, is an illustrator with a strange imagination and a real talent with vector-based doodles. On browsing through his website one gets the impression that everything is in some way linked to a grand narrative that you will never truly comprehend (a bit like star-wars but more bubbly).

That said, his chock-a-block website is proof that ignorance can be bliss.

Nick had one of those ideas that everyone wishes they had had themselves - and boy has he run with it. Some elegant sculpture here that makes me - not inherently an ‘OMG-I-JUST-GOTTA-BUY-THIS-LAMP’ kind of person - want to buy ten of them, have them all face into a white wall (that I currently don’t own) and pretend my room is like the one in Roald Dahl’s ‘The Twits’ (those pesky monkeys!).

The only thing more impressive is the list of blogs he’s been featured on, a list that doesn’t include us. So I apologise if everyone’s seen this stuff a million times on fffffffound and other ‘user-curated-image-bookmarking-sites‘ [said in a robot voice] but sod it, it’s pretty and we like.

Spotted on visual culture publisher: Gestalten, this video features the illustrator Niemann, who has done illustration blog work for the New York Times and a number of nice covers for the New Yorker.  I just like listening to his accent as he chats sincerely and articulately about data visualisation.

Cracking mixed media portraits using old floppys from Nick Gentry. His official blurb is that his focus has been to explore how technological advancement is affecting society. Each floppy disk used in the paintings has a history and story of its own. It represents the increasing pace of the modern life cycle, where objects are created, used and disposed of quicker than ever. To challenge this notion, as these personal artefacts of life are cast aside, the obsolete are now given new life and a renewed purpose by using them as a medium for art.

In between sorting out crap for you guys to do (cue shameless plug for our BIG EVENT) and picking our noses, us here at ShellsuitZombie occasionally venture into the chasm of BS that is Twitter. It’s the tool you love and hate, like that potato-peeler with an uncomfortable grip that cuts so damn good*. And sometimes while sneaking around trying to tweet unnoticed we stumble upon a talented designer/illustrator like Shane.

This guy graduated only this year but his work shows a maturity beyond his years. With influences from Build to Non-Format, the Horndog** clearly knows his design, and we look forward to encountering him further in the future.

*note to self, never attempt another analogy. Ever.
** This name is Unapproved by Shane, but we like it.

Some amazing illustrative work from Tahgasa Bertram, a.k.a Sweaty Eskimo.

William Hibberd, the gentleman behind Just Us. and JADB has updated his portfolio site, which is very nice indeed.

Canadian born and New York based Ed has some awesome work, including this real clever illustration for Spot The Tiger.

In ‘98, aged just 14, aspiring cartoonist Amir Avni wrote to his then hero and creator of the brilliant (if nightmare-inducing) Ren and Stimpy, John Kricfalusi. Above is one page of the extraordinary reply he got from the great animator, the rest of which can be read here. So inspirational was it that Amir, currently in his fourth year of studying animation, is rather good himself.

Skills like these should never die or become irrelevant in a digital age so it’s encouraging that there are still those willing to devote themselves to them. And if it means our children grow up watching beautifully rendered masochistic pets break each other, so be it.

Spotted this parkour video on voice of youf, threebillion.com, it’s by Singaporese graphic design student saggyarmpit and it took 4 weeks to plan and create.  She doesn’t even think it’s that good!  I think it’s great that in this era of CGI where any reality seems possible, people are still creating dynamic, engaging lofi work by hand.

Tree:Mix is a platform for designers and illustrators to show of their creative skills to the world through a variety of collaborative projects. We posted a while back about ‘Rip Rip, the project where people illustrate halves of a magazine page‘. Well this idea - started by recent design grad James Robert Fox - pushes that even further.

In ‘Digital:Mix’ one person does an illustration in either Photoshop or Illustrator and submits the artwork file to the website. This artwork can then be downloaded by anyone to embellish/improve with the only rule being a link to the existing piece. There is also ‘Scanner:Mix’ which caters for the hand-drawn technophobic illustration style by not allowing any computer trickery.

Both options are free for anyone to have a go at and the idea is brilliantly simple - in fact hopefully SSZ will have a pop at one over the christmas hols (if we can see over our collective bellies post-turkey that is). Then anyone can rate each mix and view them all in the provided gallery, or use the forum to chat to the artists.

Honestly, this site has everything a christmas-holiday thumb-twiddling aunt-avoiding wine-infused image-maker could ever need. Get yourself there, download the files and have a go. Your new Xbox can wait.

Wear It With Pride has been going for a little while now (by a while I mean 7 bloody years) but Darren recently asked us to let everyone know that there’s a new range of work on sale to celebrate WIWP’s site relaunch. Some of you may baulk at the prices but for original work by the likes of Build, Non Format, Wilfred Wood, Pure Evil (above) and Rankin it ain’t that bad, perfect christmas prezzies even (Mum, if you’re reading this I’d like the FONS SHEIDON one).

Just be sure to get there fast, honest to god they’re going like hot cakes.

Ricky Diaghe graduated in June from University of Creative Arts, the duration of his design degree seemingly having been spent wiggling his arms around in the dark. As a result his impressively large collection of light art shows what can be achieved with just a maglight/bike light/candle/flare and a camera with a long exposure function.