What a fake contest. I was named the winner of the below fake contest and then not awarded anything, I send the contest starter a PM with my paypal ID and nothing. Some forum that is, they don’t have anyway of protecting us designers, I think it’s appalling. If they’re to hold a contest forum they should add the necessary software, take payment from end user, when winner is selected forward it to winner, take a slice of the pie, that’s how professionals do it. Not like this fake contest forum at V7N.

Recently I joined the V7N Forums. I got to know old friends and met a few new ones in a very short period of time, the community there is by far one of the friendliest I have ever been on. Although it lacks a professional presence and those with knowledge on there could probably be counted on one hand, it’s looking bright as mods and admins are gearing towards a change, a big change I have been told.

I have been reading up on some topics, although few in number some are rather informative, and then I ran into a new contest. It was a T-Shirt Design Contest and after reading the topic starters post, I decided to join and test peoples art abilities on these forums. My entry did not take time to finish and the concept pretty much hit me in the face, it was not at all hard or thought provoking, rather simple, it’s message too was direct and to the point.

The contest is still open and I’m not sure if i’ll win, so far there has been 4 or 5 design entries including mine with a few people working on it still, so who knows. I do hope I win as the prize is $300, and even though to some that’s not a lot, for me it’s a good month worth of living.

Wish me luck.

Mike Erickson of Logomotive is one of my all time favorite logo designers, not because he’s a handsome guy but because of his sexy designing skills. The guy is beyond creative, he’s in a league of his own and if only he had more time to do his own thing, he’d be on everyone’s tongue. I’ve had lots of people contact me about designs, I have around 78thousand unread comments most of which are spam (sorry to those that haven’t been spamming, there’s no way for me to sift through them all in a timely fashion), anyway so I personally can never get round to designing for everyone and many projects end up being declined.

So, people, if you need a logo designer you can rely on, someone better than me, i said it, someone who can really bring your ideas to life then Mike Erickson of Logo Motive is the logo designer for you! If you really want a logo designer that can create a unique, professional looking logo for you then go to LogoMotive.net NOW!

So Black Fish designs are not that common, fish logo’s actually are not that common, i think it’s because the shape of the fish is hard to implement in a cool way. I call this design the BlackHat Fish. It’s a logo, and a concept that I think would be great as a BlackHat Blogs logo or a forums logo perhaps. Maybe I should Message QuadsZilla or Eli or someone about the concept, they might like it enough to honor me by using it as their own, maybe not!

So how did I come up with this idea, well I didn’t, it just hit me! In the face! It’s simple, concept is origamy, which to me should give the feeling of patience, simplicity, complexity too, a calm and collected logo. Creative and unique, just something out there.

I always like to flip through magazines, check out photo galleries, read ebooks, comics, anything and everything that could inspire me, it’s all about inspiration.

Hope that inspired you, maybe these Photoshop brushes will help too! Anything to help, you know me!

Download this brush set (18 brushes)

Anyway, on the subject of Origami here’s a nice Ebook that you might be interested in, it gave me a lot of ideas while designing this logo!

DOWNLOAD IT BY CLICKING HERE

Update :

BlackHat Fish is, to me anyway, the process of playing with content in a way that it does not stink of spam, but is so full of shit that it knocks a bot out before it even gets crawled. Still it’s not fool proof, as there is no doubt Google is developing a way to detect the process I have just slightly described. In fact I would not be surprised whatsoever if they already have an ‘anti-algo’ to somewhat suppress the virtual mass of dupe/spam content filling up the internet and the Google index, at such a staggering rate!

In fact, if they don’t have one, they better get one soon as, to them, the problem has to be considered very dangerous. Imagine a scenario where, with the development of its revolutionary ‘relevance’ technology both in serving ads and in indexing the web as a whole, Google, now fattened from it’s billion dollar profits sits idly by and watches as it’s search engine becomes, well, irrelevant!

Not likely. But if it was to happen to the darling of today’s internet, it would be remembered as nothing short of a Shakespearean blunder on the grandest scale. We BlackHat Fish are innovators in our own right, we are the greatest.

We Black Hat Fish think global, who says you can only use content written in English for spam? You might be interested to know that I actually make a lot of money from non-English content as well, and I barely speak my own language!
Let me explain, quickly name the top 3 search engines in the world! NOW!

You said, Google Yahoo and MSN didn’t you? You are WRONG! Baidu (baidu.com which you may never have heard of) is one of the larges three search engines in the world today, Chinese based

Yes, we fishy blackhats know it all. -Ash

Rarely do I have fun doing something useless, but this is an exception. Not much to say about what you’re about to lay your eyes on, something I read over at QuadsZilla’s blog that I found interesting. Here are my entries, excuse me if they are weird, I’ve had a bit too much brandy to drink tonight

Who knows, Quad might like my scribbles so much he’ll give a poor ass Slovenian designer like me a free pass into his forum, maybe not, wishful thinking I guess?!

And that’s the end of that, I need another glass of Brandy! Oh and always remember to have fun every now and again, work kills, so does brandy, whilest driving, I don’t know what i’m trying to prove here but yeah, brandy! Cheers!

I’ve been working on a few smiley packs for bloggers. These will be sold one time each only, exclusively to bloggers who would like to use these on their blogs in their comment section. I may also make a pack for a VBulletin forum theme I am making, similar to the style of this blog.

There are so few premium smiley packs on the market today, and more and more packs are being develped that seem to almost mimic previouse packs before them. I will also be creating custom smiley packs based on a collection of celebraty photographs, and peoples photographs.

If you have a personal blog and would like your own custom made smiley pack, shoot me an email, with some photographs of yourself friends or relatives and i’ll create a pack exclusively for you!

To all the male models out there, watch out because theirs a cuter breed of models in town, the cartoon sort! I got an email from a friend asking if I still did tablet stickmen, which I did. He could not get in touch with a good friend of ours (who I hope gets well soon) so I was his second best choice, which was fine by me. Lucky grab, I got to work on an entire photo shoot!

The aim was to replace the male models in the photographs with cute, petite looking stick men. It was a game of fill in the blanks for me, so I filled in the blanks with little stick men! It was fun and tough at the same time, as simple as these stickmen look to draw, they’re not., plus I was rusty and had not been practicing! Check the sample out for an idea of what’s I am talking about.