Dirty Mouse // Food For Designers’ Dirty Little Mice

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The Illustrative is the biggest art exhibition dealing with illustration worldwide. Every year at two different creative hot spots in Europe, the exhibition displays an inspiring collection of current graphical art with over 400 works from more than 60 artists. After appearing in Paris and Berlin in 2007, in 2008 it’s going to Zurich.

Also, fancy a competition? Then enter the Young Illustrators Award 2008, and win a corking prize in association with Swatch! Thanks to Claudia for the email.

Today is my birthday, so I’m having the day off from posting. I’ll be back over the weekend with some fresh stuff that landed in the inbox yesterday. If you’ve got any links, sites or news, then send ‘em in to the email address over here—->

This article from Design Week over average salaries in the UK market makes for interesting reading. The figures seem a touch higher than I’d expect, but Design Week report “salries are holding strong, and it’s still a buoyant, candidate driven market.”

As money is the subject of this post, then it seems appropriate to mention the winning new Royal Mint coin designs by Matthew Dent. Very nice.

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while since Andreas Widman, a current Hyper Island student, let me know that Creatives Unlimited was released.

We originally posted about the teaser-trailers on the site, but now it has had its full release, so to check out some of the hottest work from some of the finest graduates, go and have a peek at the site.

It appears that we are now back after Pipex managed to spanner up a complete day of downtime. So, sorry about that. Monday was our best day yet in terms of traffic, and Tuesday would have probably beaten that, but obviously these two were looking after the server yesterday…..

Big apologies to Chris of We Shall See/The Amazing Shape for how late this post is. He recently sent us this ace poster of his (below) and I promised to post a pic of it on here, but due to constantly not taking a picture that’d do it justice I kept holding back on it. So, in the end, I’ve just nabbed this pic of it off his site.

Chris has been hard at work on The Amazing Shape doing an illustration a day for a month. Go and have a look, some of them will be for sale (in fact, one of them is, from Howies!)

Those super-talented kids from Hyper Island have been in touch to say they’ve released a teaser-trailer for their upcoming showcase website. I’m always astounded at the quality of work Hyper Island students turn out, so this site will be one to keep an eye on.

We got this press release from Visto Brahma some time ago regarding a design competition, but stupidly on our part the email got trapped on a different machine.

Still, designers like to work to a tight deadline (this one is the 25th January), and with a rather tidy £5000 to be won, plus the chance to see your work actually on the beer/packaging, some of you might fancy a bash this weekend.

From Brahma…. “All you have to do is create a design based on the spirit of Brahma and Urban Brasil – originality, authenticity, style and flair – and submit it via post or our website www.vistobrahma.com. It’s a pretty open brief – take the flowing curves of the Brahma bottle, immerse yourself in the vibrancy and spirit of urban Brasil and let your imagination run wild. Then, do what you do. Your work, in your style, in your way. Just make sure that the work reflects Brahma.”

You can get all the details from their website, but we must clarify that this competition is solely for UK residents who are over 18.

Dirty Mouse would like to wish all our readers a Happy New Year, and hope that they enjoy a prosperous 2008.

We hope to improve the site a bit in the coming months, especially now we’re growing to a healthy size. Also, don’t be shy at sending stuff in. We rely on contributions to keep the site healthy and choc full of content. We’re also on the hunt for new contributors, so if you fancy posting fresh new stuff on the blog, then drop me a line at dan [at] dirtymouse.co.uk.