This latest issue was very helpful for me this month. After the debacle of receiving last months issue late, with fairly significant damage to the pages (thank you US postal service), this issue was a breath of fresh air for me. I don’t always find the articles helpful, but this months cover article on sketchbooks was intriguing. It has rekindled my love of the rough, unfinished drawings and sketches by showing off the sketchy work of:


* Oh Yeah Studio
* Ville Savimaa
* Pomme Chan
* Jon Burgerman
* Micah Lidber
* Johnny Kelly
* Rex Crowle
*

The Interview this month is Hillman Curtis, A New York based designer who used to work for macromedia. I have not read it yet, so more on that later.

The Tutorial section this month was particularly helpful. First off there is a tut by YUP covering how to do more exploration based vector illustration work, by combining Photoshop filters with Illustrator graphics for shading. There is also a Dreamweaver tut on creating an animated web gallery using two java scripts called jQuery and Easy Slider. I have already worked on modifying it to display my own work, although for now I will keep the layout fairly similar to the tutorial as I may be having an interview in the coming weeks and I want my site online and ready to go ASAP. There are even more tutorials on liquid grid layouts for blogs, and surreal collage work in Photoshop that I have not even gotten to yet. Just when I was starting to think the magazine was becoming stagnant for my current level of knowledge, issue 162 comes along and reminds me why I am a subscriber.


check it out