Featured Designer: The Art Messiah Masako Miki

Today’s featured designer is Masako Miki, whose work with mixed media invokes surreal, fantastical narratives.

The artist, born in Japan but now residing in California, often draws on issues of cultural identity in their pieces and uses drawings of animals to convey mysticism and challenge the identity. Common elements include drawings of wolves and deer, and installations with sound and light to provide an interactive experience akin to walking through stars.

Utilizing both 2- and 3-dimensional media, the artist’s work includes drawing, sculpture, installation, and painting. In recent years the color and composition have become more minimalistic, allowing the message to- both figuratively and literally- shine through. Be sure to check out more of Miki’s work below.

Masako Miki

CLD Exclusive Freebie: 120 Coins of the World Icons (SVG PNG)

Today’s exclusive freebie comes from our good pals over at Freepik! We were all kids once and while times have changed, the art of collecting hasn’t.

For those of you born in the era of comic book, stamp and insect collecting, I’m sure coins have crossed your mind more than once. If you didn’t collect it I’m sure a sibling or geeky neighbor did.

Freepik has compiled and created a bunch of neat vector coins from around the world from Europe to Asia and everything in between! Perfect for your next art project, these flat icons come in SVG and PNG and there’s a total of 120!

The freebie can be used for personal and commercial projects so go ahead and download them after the jump!

drop some coins on me!

Feature Work: The Happiness Identity by SUPERFICTION

Today’s featured work is “SUPERFICTION”, an identity design project that focuses on the concept of happiness derived from unique experiences and emotions.

As their Behance page states, “SUPERFICTION pursues the concept of ‘the happy life’ by delivering unique experiences and emotions not only limited to our minds, but to our eyes, ears, hands, and our hearts”. With a bold yellow that’s sure to bring happiness from the first glance, the project is sure to bring a smile to the viewer.

Adding new value in the fields of design and art, through creative play and joyful practices SUPERFICTION builds and grows this lifestyle brand. To learn more, check out their site after the jump!

SUPERFICTION

Featured Designer: Pop Kulturaficionado Olly Moss

Today’s featured designer is Olly Moss, an illustrator and graphic designer from the UK. Moss creates stunning movie posters with bold color and minimalistic compositions.

Taking inspiration from pop culture and popular movies, Moss creates posters that are simple and yet incredibly memorable. The images are clean and crisp, and yet have enough information to convey to the viewer a feel for the movie. Utilizing silhouettes, Moss is able to add just enough elements from the movie to engage the viewer and pique their curiosity.

With some licensed characters thrown into the mix, Moss’ work is a great inspiration for both designers and fans of pop culture. To see more of his work, check out his website below.

 

Olly Moss

Featured Photographer: Dark Hopeful Evan Atwood

Nature. Longing. Humanity’s relationship with the Earth. These are some of the themes that Evan Atwood’s photographs convey.

With a bit of wanderlust, Atwood captures stunning landscapes with a singular figure in the foreground, challenging the viewer the relationship between man and the environment surrounding them. While in some cases the figures appear to be in danger- whether drowning in the water or exposed in the hot desert sand- their emotions convey a sense of calm and peacefulness.

Atwood’s work definitely shows the sublime in the intensity and beauty of nature, while challenging the viewer to consider their role and perception of the beautiful world surrounding them. To see more of his photography, check out his portfolio after the jump!

see Evan

Featured Work: Knitterkopf by Jan Ploch

Today’s featured work comes from Jan Ploch, a designer and illustrator from Germany. The project ‘Knitterkopf’ is a series of portraits that are drawn to resemble crumpled paper.

Knitterkopf, which translates roughly to ‘crease-head’, is a series of graphite drawings and portraits where the figures are distorted in such a way that the faces look like they have been crumpled up like a ball of paper. Perhaps most distinguishing is the eyes- though distorted, they are still strong and hold a sense of both invitation and despair.

It’s hard to pull your eyes away from these enigmatic portraits. Though very abstracted, the viewer is challenged to reconstruct the portraits in their mind and discover the emotion within each piece. To see this project and more inspiration from Ploch, check out the artist’s Behance site below!

Knitterkopf

 

Exclusive Blogger Bundle: Get 50% Off All WordPress Plugins

Plugmatter’s aim, mission, focus and raison d’être is ‘to make plugins that genuinely (and seriously) matter’. Plugins that make a dent in the WordPress universe.

Which, by the way, totally reflects in their work.

Their WordPress plugins address the fundamental functions on a website that are imperative to having a flourishing, thriving and a kick-ass business. Built to make your journey as an online entrepreneur smooth and uninhibited – these plugins are not only easy enough for beginners, but also feature-packed enough for even the for the most advanced online marketer’s needs. Sweet!

So, this Black Friday, we’re excited to share their plugins with you. In the spirit of abundance, we’re offering a whopping 50% discount on ALL the plugins.

You can have your pick from :-

Optin Feature Box – Crank Up Your Email Subscription Rate by 200%

The Optin Feature Box lets you speedily create a non-intrusive subscription box under the header of your homepage, where it is proven to convert better than any other opt-in method.

Customizable, responsive, video-friendly, segmentation-friendly, and much more – without writing a single line of code nor using a design tool.

Document Importer – Losslessly Import .docx Files Into Your WordPress Editor In a Blink

The simplest and quickest way to import your docx files into WordPress Editor without losing the document formatting. Spend more time writing and growing your blog and less on formatting content, uploading images and fixing bullet points.

Pricing Table  Plugin – Design, Convert & Sell Better than Your Competition.

With pricing tables designed using behavioural research and CRO studies, our plugin’s business is to amplify your business.  Use the most-advanced WYSIWYG editor in the WordPress industry and conversion-focussed features like A/B split-testing and Google Events tracking to sell better than your competition – only with our Plugmatter Pricing Table plugin.

Promo Box – More Leads, More User-Engagement & More Revenue.

The smartest way to get the most out of your blog posts by increasing user engagement. Create contextual optin boxes and boost your email list by 200%, promote content upgrades, sell your products and services with our call to action boxes right within blog posts and do a lot, lot more!

Head over to Plugmatter and get 50% off this Black Friday!

 

Improve User Interaction on Your Website with Micro-Interactions

Micro-interactions are a great way to enhance the user experience on your website.

Micro-interaction, as the name suggests, is a small type of interaction on your website which grabs the attention of your visitor. Micro-interaction is an engagement, based on a single task in any digital manner. Be it switching off the alarm on your cell phone or putting your viewpoint through votes on the internet, micro-interactions fall in different categories.

What are Micro-interactions?

We deal with Micro-interactions every day, in every appliance, website and device. Micro-interactions play an important role in making a brand memorable and unique. From changing a song in your iPod to posting a status on your social media networks, Micro-interactions are all around us.

You can perform numerous things with Micro-interactions.

• Helping the user understand something
• Passing over information through feedback or review
• Checking out the result of a particular action.
• Connecting different devices together
• Customizing a setting
• Switching a function or feature on or off

Even though micro-interactions are everywhere, we generally fail to notice them unless something goes terribly wrong. However, in spite of their small and negligible size, they are extremely important.
In general, Micro-interactions consist of actions or moments for elements.

How to integrate Micro-interaction in your website?

There are various different ways of integrating micro-interaction in your website. Some of them are shared here.

1. Highlight changes

Change is a major part of digital world. Nothing can be achieved without making small to major changes. Highlighting changes are the best way to keep your user informed about various processes. Often, these changes are shown merely by replacing a button with another when required. Also, changes can be highlighted when a user hovers on a specific button. Animation is the best way to grab the attention of a user.

2. Envisage input

From filling up a registration form to finding required information through a search box, data input is an important element of any website or app. Consequently, the user becomes dependent on it. Filling this data can be quite boring and cumbersome for the user. However, micro-interaction is here to turn this boring, monotonous process into interactive and highly interesting task.

3. Convey system status

Web users tend to navigate away from your website if it does not load up fast as they are aware of the fact that there are many other websites available on the internet which can provide them the same information but in less time. Therefore, it becomes all the more important to keep your visitors interested in your website preventing them to navigate away from your site. Micro-interactions have the power to keep the visitor interested while taking its own time for loading a particular page or information. Adding system statuses through micro-interactions can do wonders for your website. Do not let your users get bored; uplift their mood by showing them progress in an animated manner.

4. Non-Standard layouts

Micro-interactions can also help your users deal with uncommon and new design layouts. Rotating characters, scrolling graphs, forward flipping photos or easy scrolling are great examples of micro-interactions.

5. Calls to action

Not only micro-interactions help users interact with a website or an app, but also have the power to persuade them to keep scrolling, like or share a particular content, just because it keeps the user interested in the website.

Micro-interactions are interactive and do not leave a user bewildered about the website or app.

Author Bio: Elvin Roy is a professional blogger who is great at bringing knowledge in her writings and associated with Wordsuccor that is a fastest growing WordPress Theme Development company giving service of HTML to WordPress responsive, Converting HTML to WordPress theme which also giving proficient theme & templates customization services across the globe. If you need to hire a WordPress developer, feel free to contact her Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

Featured Designer: Creative Chaos Maker Niklas Åkerblad

Today’s featured artist is Niklas Åkerblad, a watercolor artist from Sweden. Drawing on Japanese mythology, his paintings are strong, vivid, and otherworldly.

Though primarily a watercolor painter, this designer also utilizes pen and ink as well as the digital medium to create stunning imagery. With bold bright colors and a strong, confident line quality, the artist captures the viewer’s attention and draws them into the Japanese symbolism.

Also a musician, Åkerblad creates the artwork for his own albums to emphasize his eclectic style in both mediums. To see more of his dynamic work, check out his portfolio site here.