Scott Jackson

Depending where you are in the world it’s Blog Action Day and bloggers across the world are blogging around the topic “Climate Change”.

I’ve already seen many contributions by other illustrator about this subject so I thought it was time for me to add mine.

Okay I didn’t create this especially for Blog Action Day as it’s from another personal project that I’ve been working on but as it’s a good cause I’d use it as a sneaky peak.

Mine is called Ride a Panda to Work Week. It’s to encourage alternative and less polluting forms of transport. In this case a Panda. I think it could really take off although I don’t know how happy the pandas of the world would be about it.

I recently did an interview with Gareth Coxon who runs Dot Design and keeps a brilliant design blog.

If you fancy a read then you can take a look by clicking here.

While you’re there check out the rest of his blog which is full of articles and interviews.

I was recently asked by the nice people over at VectorTuts+ to write a tutorial about putting an overview together about the process of designing a mascot for a web site from the brief to the finished article.

I admit to underestimating the amount of work these things involve but I enjoyed it none the less.

The tutorial shows how I created the VectorTut’s+ guy and I’ve included some tips into character design for the web and also a number of links to further inspiration on the web.

As an added bonus the original vector files of the mascot and his nine poses are available for free download for your own use.

If you want to check it out it can be found here.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I occasionally frequent the character design community over on Mojizu.

Mojizu is derived from ‘Moji’ the Japanese word meaning character and if you’re not familiar with the site it is a community where character designers can post their creations and the best are chosen to compete in the Moji War.

The winner is decided through several rounds of voting by the other designers and the two top Mojis compete in the Super Match to decide the champ.

Above was my own entry “Ice Cream Angel” in which a little girl cries for the loss of her ice cream as it’s soul drifts off to Homogonised Heaven as it often does.

Well, she walked the walk and did me proud to come in as the Moji Champ.

I’m now off to the freezer to celebrate with two scoops of vanilla flavoured fatty goodness.

Yum!

    A while ago I was contacted by a very nice person called Carla Kay White who had happened across my desktops on the web and was kind enough to take the trouble to contact me to say how much she had liked them. This in turn led me to check out her wonderful and inspirational blog.

Carla had been working on an iPhone application called Gratitude  based around the idea of keeping a gratitude journal and the idea is you jot down five things a day for which you are grateful. She was inspired to do this after keeping her own journal and benefiting from the life changing effects that happened as a result. Even more impressive to me (not a morning person) was the fact that she had worked on this every day between the hours of 5 and 7 before starting her day job.

Anyhow, Carla had seen the little Buddha guy that resides on the pre-loader of my site and thought him just the right image to use on the icon of her new app’. Considering the nature of the app’ and that she is donating 10% of the profits to charity I was very happy to agree.

Gratitude Journal was released on December 12, 2008 and shot up to #2 in the Lifestyles category within it’s first week. It remains around that position now. More importantly, it has received nearly all 5 star reviews.

Just a reminder that today is Blog Action Day.

Something worth chirping about.

I’ve added a new section to my portfolio called “Identities” where I’ve started to show some of the logos I’ve made for different projects.

Above are some that I did for a social networking application for the lovely people at Renkoo who are based in sunny California.