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Illustration Collaboration Hey Go Media faithful! As Go Media has evolved over the years, we’ve learned that collaboration with other artists and designers can be a very powerful tool when trying to deliver the very best product to your client. Different designers have different skill sets. When Go Media assembles a team to work on a project some of those people may be in our firm and others may not. I recently had an amazing experience collaborating with a good friend of mine; Steve Knerem on an illustration for Cage Spawn Clothing . This article will be kind of a hybrid – half tutorial and half discussion on the idea of collaborating. Getting Started The design brief for this t-shirt design was fairly simple: “Make a sick looking Samurai t-shirt.” I’ve been working with Preston Bennet of Cage Spawn for a while, so he has total faith in my abilities. It’s nice to work with clients that throw you a simple concept and some ideas, and then just let you go to town.

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Collaboration! Two samurai (artists) are more powerful than one.

Go Media president Bill Beachy sits down to give you some daily inspiration and advice. Bill shares his years of experience building Go Media into the company it is today. Topics in this video series include Getting Started, Happiness, Humility, Patience, Flow, Focus, Productivity, Business Systems, Courage, Eating Well, Obstacles, and Creativity. For more information about Bill Beachy, check out his bio on gomedia.us . Bill is currently accepting opportunities to speak at your event, university, or business. View all episodes of Daily Inspiration here Sponsored by Prooflab The Daily Inspiration video series is brought to you by Prooflab – a client and project management app built and used by Go Media for designers. Hope you enjoy the video! Or download the podcast Daily Inspiration: Go with the Flow is a post from: GoMediaZine Go Media is a creative agency based in Cleveland, Ohio. Besides the GoMediaZine, we also work for clients and sell stock artwork and design files on the Arsenal.

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Daily Inspiration: Go with the Flow

Before We Get Started Hello dear readers! Simon and Jon from Studio Ace of Spade here. Today, we have the chance to write a tutorial about one of the Studio’s recent projects, the poster we did for Lost and Taken . What’s great about this particular project is that it gives us the occasion to do a tutorial we’ve wanted to write for a long time: texture, texture and more texture. We already had a writeup including some tips and tricks about textures published recently, but it was web oriented. Web is a world were subtlety is a key word, so we had to restrain ourselves quite a bit. This time, we can use the full extent of our texture repertoire on a print project. Throughout this tutorial, we’d like you to keep in mind that we don’t want to give you a “recipe” that you’ll follow exactly and religiously, but rather a open-ended answer to a creative problem.

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The Lost and Taken Poster: A case study and texturing tutorial

The GoMediaZine has the pleasure to be able to give two lucky winners a Drobo S. What’s a Drobo you ask? It’s a storage solution for creative professionals and small businesses that retails for approximately $800 bucks. You load it with hard drives and it does the rest. You could have like 15 TB of storage and backup for your design projects, music, photos, etc. I own a Drobo FS at my home and my wife and I use it to store all our photos, music, and movies on it. At Go Media, we have an intense and expensive server room with racks of equipment protecting our data, but we realize not everyone has the space or budget for this type of solution.

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Giveaway: Win a Drobo Storage Device ($800 value)

Finding the best web hosting service is a task that is anything but easy – and twice as hard for the first time user. Most people learn it the hard way by using the ‘trial and error’ method and sometimes that can cost them a lot more stress and money than is advised.

So here are a few tips by which you can zero in on the best web hosting method:

#1: Capabilities

It’s not difficult to notice that there different web hosting services often provide different types of services such as WordPress, Ecommerce, Windows and business web hosting. You also have to think about whether the service is capable of handling traffic to or the size of your website.

#2: Handling Downtime

Every website experiences downtime at some point of time or the other. What makes the web hosting service reliable is when they are able to minimize this downtime as much as possible. Since the objective of every person who owns a website is to keep it online as much as possible, ask each web hosting service how they intend to deal with technical difficulties that can arise.

#3: Cost

Now, once you have asked these important questions, it’s time to decide which web hosting service you will opt for. Once you have made a final list of web hosting companies, the final step is to check for the prices. It’s important that you get everything you need for your site at the least possible price. Just remember that the quoted price is not usually the final price – sometimes you can negotiate for a lower price with the web hosting service.

Last week, we featured Jim LePage’s “Words” series on the Zine . We also announced that Jim was giving one of the prints away. Today, we’re happy to announce that Andy Gattis , with comment number #7, wins the print! We choose the winner by following a simple process: we grab the total number of comments (minus ours or any doubles), use a random number generator and taadaa! Congratulations to Andy once again. If you didn’t win, stay tuned for more giveaways in the near future. “Words” series print giveway winner announced! is a post from: GoMediaZine Go Media is a creative agency based in Cleveland, Ohio. Besides the GoMediaZine, we also work for clients and sell stock artwork and design files on the Arsenal.

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“Words” series print giveway winner announced!

Remember, remember, the fifth of… Oh wait, wrong date. Anyway. End of the month, still digesting turkey, amazing stuff piling up in the Flickr group, need to showcase it, you know! Also, you should see and/or read more about some of the works in there soon! The showcase The November 2011 Go Media Flickr pool showcase is a post from: GoMediaZine Go Media is a creative agency based in Cleveland, Ohio. Besides the GoMediaZine, we also work for clients and sell stock artwork and design files on the Arsenal.

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The November 2011 Go Media Flickr pool showcase

I’ve yet to be privileged enough to visit Canada for longer than an hour or two, but I’ve always wanted to take a trek to for an extended visit with our neighbors to the north. Now—budget willing—I’ll have a great excuse. Montreal Meets 2 (MMTWO) has begun the countdown to their second iteration. Since MMTWO is a small, intimate design conference much like Go Media’s own WMC Fest, we are quite excited. Here’s why you should be, too: Montreal Meets 2 will feature: Fabio Sasso Hailing from Porto Alegre, Brazil, Fabio is the founder of Zee , a web design firm, as well as one of my favorite showcases for tutorials and inspiration, Abduzeedo . His hyper-colorful, cutting-edge work has earned him clients like MSNBC, Wired UK, and Adobe.

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Why You Should Attend Montreal Meets 2

Christmas is fast approaching and the Christmas wreath is a staple design element for all kinds of projects. Instead of spending a lot of time, I thought it would be useful to have a base, simple design that I could tweak as needed later. In this tutorial we will create a base leaf pattern, convert it to a scatter brush, and paint a wreath. You can customize this as much as you want with various leaf shapes, colors, and textures. But if you need a quick Christmas wreath in vector format, here’s how it’s done: Step 1: Basic Leaf Shape Use your favorite tool, but I used the Line Segment Tool to quickly make an ugly leaf shape. Just make sure the ends of each line touch so we can join the shape in the next step. Step 2: Joining the Lines Using the Selection Tool, select the entire shape, right-click and select Join: Step 3: Create Some Curves Now, grab the Convert Tool (in the Pen Tool menu). On each of the corners where the leaf points meet, click and drag to create a curve.

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Five Minute Christmas Wreath in Illustrator: But You Can Spend More Time if You Want To

Hey Zinesters, Jeff here with news about some big discounts this week on the Arsenal and on my ebook Thread’s Not Dead . We decided to put some extra love into our #BlackFriday deals this year. You’re going to flip. Check it out: Going on Right Now 25% Off Thread’s Not Dead eBook Bundle Now through Monday you can get 25% off the digital bundle of Thread’s Not Dead: The Designer’s Guide to the Apparel Industry. Just enter code BLKFRI2011 at www.threadsnotdead.com to get the discount. The bundle includes the ebook in PDF, ePub, and Mobi format as well as an audiobook narrated by me, and a collection of resources, files, templates, and a lifetime discount code to the Arsenal. 20% Off Everything at Go Media’s Arsenal All week long we’re offering a 20% discount on everything on the Arsenal . Just use the coupon code BLKFRI11 (case sensitive) at checkout to receive your discount

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Black Friday and Cyber Monday Deals from Go Media