Awesome artistic inspiration from music magazine adverts

I was browsing some old NME music magazines and I realised some of the advertisements for festivals and bands truly are works of art, they can provide some good ideas for any designer be it for web or print, lots of textures and colours to get some creative inspiration.

Below is 20 examples that I scanned in to the computer, You can also see part 2 of Artistic Music Magazine Adverts

Intel Studio

Design Features: Torn paper, torn paper background, abstract image in centre, vibrant gradient colours on black paper.

Intel Studio

Fenchurch

Design Features: Wood grain, vintage, torn paper, old creased card, whites, blacks

Fenchurch

Bloom

Design Features: handdrawn, bold colours, note book paper, greens, blues, blocks of info, distressed.

Bloom

Loaded in the park

Design Features: torn, grunge borders, star burst background, vibrant colours

Loaded in the park

Laura Marling

Design Features: Worn Floral pattern, depicting a man

Laura Marling

Latitude Festival 2008

Design Features: foliage, floral borders, 3D Title, faint sky water colour background

Latitude Festival 2008

KOKO Black & White

Design Features: Black and White, floral design surrounding text and border, vintage

KOKO Black & White

KOKO

Design Features: Old Vintage design, black and red, small sketched images, floral design

KOKO

Hydro Connect

Design Features: Coloured floral border design, floral dividers, light blue gradient background, green, blue, white

Hydro Connect

Hot Club De Paris

Design Features: Vintage poster style, blue, red,

Hot Club De Paris

The Hoosiers

Design Features: abstract foliage and wildlife border, white

The Hoosiers

Green Man festival

Design Features: floral star burst, vector drawing, greens, yellows

Green Man festival

Gola

Design Features: Vibrant colours, white background, simple

Gola

Hydro Connect Festival

Design Features: Coloured floral border, photos, gradient background

Hydro Connect Festival

Cage The Elephant

Design Features: grainy background, hand drawn skull, multicoloured, purples

Cage The Elephant

Bradford Music Week

Design Features: yellow, black, grunge, blocks, paint splatters, stripes, distressed

Bradford Music Week

Biffy Clyro

Design Features: Blues, water colours, focus on image, left aligned

Biffy Clyro

Bandstand

Design Features: green blue background gradient, hand drawn floral border and butterflies

Bandstand

Babysahmbles

Design Features: Red, old, worn creased, vintage border, expensive looking card

Babysahmbles

Awesome Badges

Design Features: Circus, poster, floral pattern, red, yellow, vector art

Awesome Badges

You can also see part 2 of Artistic Music Magazine Adverts

Ultimate Source for tiled background patterns

Repeating background patterns and images, patterns such as these can be used for a host of things such as a web page backgrounds, or adding that extra detail to a containing block, adjust the visibility and you’ve got a great new look for some thing that would normally look quite plain.

Here you’ll find some tutorials on how to create your own patterns and some resources to download patterns.

Download Patterns

Below are a few sites that have huge collections of background patterns for you to download and use for free.

Brusheezy Patterns

brusheezy_patterns

Deviantart Patterns

deviantart_patterns

Squid Fingers Patterns

squidfingers_patterns

Pattern 8

pattern8

Patterns Ava7

ava7

Din Pattern

dinpatterns

Everyday Icons Patterns

everydayicons

Pattern Cooler

patterncooler

k10k Pixel Patterns

k10pixelpatterns

Noqta Patterns

noqta

Make your own patterns online

Make you own custom patterns online and downlaod them, or use someone elses as a base for you own creation.

Stripe Mania

stripemania

Bg Patterns

bgpatterns

Stripe Generator

stripegenerator

Tutorials

A collection of useful tutorials on how to create repeating background patterns of your own.

Other Resources about patterns

There’s probably a lot more sources out there and id love to know about them, so if you’ve seen any awesome pattern sites or tutorials on how to create patterns feel free to leave a comment where they can be found and ill add them to the list, hope this has been useful.

22 Online Web / Design magazines you should look at

I was looking for some nice resources and found some really cool online art and design magazines that provide some very interesting reading while I wasn’t working,

This post isn’t based around web design in particular and explores other areas of art and design, there are a lot of interesting ideas that can be found once you start looking.

some of them have a few links to other new and exciting websites and blogs, The work found on these sites are very artistic and inspirational and I’ll certainly be looking further into some of these, hope you all find it as interesting as I did.

  1. Computer Arts – Awesome online tutorials as well as an inspirational gallery of work by readers.
  2. Urban Collective – creative images and design sites worth a look
  3. Beast the bible of inspiration – Design, typography, art, illustration, photography, mind & matter and all kinds of creative exhausts, published in PDF format but sadly no longer in publication.
  4. Vitamin – Excellent source of reading just choose which topic you want, some of the categories are CSS, Design, Web Apps
  5. Booooooom – Cool articles about art, design, music etc also check out their friends list for more cool work.
  6. Communication Arts – Showcasing some of the best advertising graphic design, check out some of the links on the features dropdown.
  7. Smashing magazine – Huge amounts of web design information and inspiration.
  8. CSS Globe – A site dedicated to web standards, and fresh articles contributed by members.
  9. .net – Tutorials and interviews with professionals for developers and designers.
  10. Design is kinky – Showcasing some of the most inspiring art and design portfolios.
  11. Design melt down – Excellent galleries of websites as well as articles covering problems in web design.
  12. Digital web magazine – Educational articles about aspects of web design such as css, business, and social networking.
  13. Eye magazine – Intriguing articles about graphic design, check out some of their issues lots of reading and not a lot of pictures though just click on issues.
  14. Format – Some very nice work and articles can be found on this site that will defiantly inspire.
  15. Graphis – Under construction but will provide a good source of photographic inspiration i expect.
  16. Net diver – Design and digital culture some exciting pieces of work.
  17. Sitepoint – Interesting industry news.
  18. Surf Station – Interesting art and design news.
  19. The dezine – Galleries of inspirational work.
  20. Think Faest! – A peculiar blog with excellent, work check out the categories and blog roll sections.
  21. My computerlove – More interesting articles to get you thinking.
  22. Design Diary – art and digital design lounge, check out the links signal part lots of nice sites to be seen.

 

Reader Recommendations

  1. Typesites – Weekly showcases of websites with interesting typography
  2. I love typography – A vast resource of every thing to do with typography
  3. Free Design Magazine – created to inform designers about the latest news about design, and also free resources
  4. Destructed – Art and design PDF magazine
  5. A list Apart – Explores the design, development, and meaning of web content.
  6. Graphic Competitions – Graphic design competitions.

Any one knows of any other magazine sites that provide a good source of interesting reading and imagery.

Create a stunning grunge background – A video Tutorial

With the release of my 300+ hi-res grunge texture pack i thought id do a nice quick simple video tutorial to create a stunning grunge background using the colours from a photo on deviant art and a texture from the texture pack,

The result from this method creates a cool background that could be used for the basis of a poster, showing off your work or as web site background etc. just add your own cool designs to the mix.

This is what we shall be creating:

Using the colours from “Be nimble”:

bg_stock

The Online Video tutorial


Watch the HD version here

Download Files

  1. Stock Image (deviant art link) Credit to anaritalanca on deviantart
  2. Slate Texture Right Click – Save As

Download Video Tutorial Versions

  1. HD Version (66 mb)
  2. ipod Version (20 mb)

A cool background made simple, if some one could test the ipod version for me and tell me what it is like that would be great as I don’t have an ipod, and I cant preview it that would be awesome. Thanks for looking and don’t forget about the RSS feed.

300+ Free Hi-Res grunge textures you’ve never seen before!

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http://www.mediafire.com/?vyx32lsmkou
http://www.mediafire.com/?9dz2hbw4lds
http://www.mediafire.com/?1j11y9dbv6tnwks
http://www.mediafire.com/?smgns1dnwij
http://www.mediafire.com/?4drsmwj4wbx

 

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[tab title=”Rapidshare download”]

http://rapidshare.com/files/169937887/grungetextures.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/169972509/grungetextures.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/170006923/grungetextures.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/170020193/grungetextures.part4.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/170006924/grungetextures.part5.rar

 

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Here is a free Hi-Res texture pack that i have made over the weeks for you all to download, the pack contains over 300 grunge, worn, torn and weathered textures that i have taken in and around my house with my camera,

Below is an example of what is in the pack streamed from my Flickr profile, 45 of the textures included can be seen on my Flickr see more or you can use the links below to download all 300+ of the textures.

Random textures included in the pack see more

Additional info:

  • Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ 18
  • DPI: 72
  • Resolution: 1600 x 1064
  • Original Resolution: 3264 x 2448
  • Contains: Wood grain, Slate, gravel, tarmac, dirt, peeling paint, rust, paper, carpet

Note

  • Please do not host these textures on you own servers for download, please link to this page if you want others to know about them.
  • You are free to use these textures for what ever purpose you intend, commercial and personal, show me the work if you want id be interested to see what you make.