The weekly "badge review" with all the daily features from Monday 03/16/2009 to Saturday 03/21/2009: 

I've been spending a lot of time at Pictopia!, the 3rd Pictoplasma conference for character design that takes place in Berlin this week. The festival and conference was initiated in 2004 and has been on show in Berlin before as well as in New York. The conference is organized every other year, taking turns with an animated film festival.

Here's what they say:

As market-friendly branding or its subversive inversion, loveable kitsch or urban art - contemporary character design, abstract and reduced to the essentials, has redefined aesthetic standards of visual communication worldwide. By playfully sampling and remixing visual codes, these characters evade established pictorial norms, confronting the viewer head on, emotionally and regardless of cultural background.

There are lectures by established and up-and-coming character designers like James Jarvis who's lecture I visited today. There are urban street artists and illustrators, presentations of their work and an affiliated 'character walk' through galleries in Berlin that host openings corresponding to the conference.

This year the designers come from 16 countries worldwide, presenting a lovely compendium of character design today. Check out the website here to find out more. If you are in Berlin, I highly recommend a visit at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

We want to give everyone an update on what's happening at the printers right now:

This week we printed two designs: Crazy!Happy! by Sinned and Lester, The Man-Eating Bear by JackMartin.

Crazy!Happy! is our magically wonderful, feel-good cartoon guy with the magenta shorts. The shirt will be a three colour screenprint on a light blue shirt. In the pictures you can get a look of what it will be like...

Lester, the Bear is another amazing illustration by our featured designer JackMartin. A four colour screenprint on a cranberry shirt. We can already say that the colors work wonderfully together. Right now the shirts are getting their neckprins and we are working on the right settings for the shop photos in order to have them ready for you as soon as we can!!

Badge Review featured the second edition of always chapas this week, a participative button badge exhibition project in Madrid. 

We have just posted a new designer profile in the designer section of the site: Shelly Perkins.

Shelly is our recent Silver Prize winner from It's All About.. Competition. Her tee design Early Bird is currently in print and should be available in store any day now together with remaining designs from the It's All About competition. Here is a little about..

I graduated from UWE Bristol in June 2007 with a 2:1 in BA Illustration.  Since then I have been working as a Graphic Designer in the education sector, I have also worked free lance for companies like the BBC and The Engine Room as well as for private clients...read more

The weekly "badge review" with all the daily features from Monday 03/02/2009 to Saturday 03/07/2009. 

The weekly "badge review" with the daily features from Monday 02/23/2009 to Saturday 02/28/2009. 

CAN (CreativeApplications.Net) have a good article on their site about using Scriptographer for creating halftone patterns. 

Scriptographer is a scripting plugin for Adobe Illustrator™. It gives the user the possibility to extend Illustrator’s functionality by the use of the JavaScript language.

They also created a small video guide showing you other things Scriptographer can do.

Whether you want to experiment with halftone patterns or generate your own scripted tools, Scriptographer allows the creation of mouse controlled drawing-tools, effects that modify existing graphics and scripts that create new ones.

In addition, Scriptographer is also a webpage on which users can exchange scripts and ideas. You can download a number of different scripts, some very simple and some slightly more complex.

Read more here

The weekly "badge review" with all the daily features from Monday 02/16/2009 to Saturday 02/21/2009: