Here are the top 5 albums we’ve been listening to in April 2013.

Bonobo – The North Borders

Emcancipator – Dusk to Dawn

Beacon – The Ways We Separate

Teen Daze – The House on the Mountain

Finding Time – Ten Million Sounds

Here are the top 5 albums we’ve been listening to in March 2013.

M’Michele – Magnolia

Odesza – Summer’s Gone

Chrome Sparks – Sparks EP

Lapalux – Nostalchic

Herve – The Art of Disappearing

To start off, lets create a new document in illustrator that is 600x600px.

The grid makes this whole process easier, so lets enable that by going to View > Show > Grid.

Now, create a rectangle that is exactly 1/2 the size of our canvas. To to this, select the shape tool (U), make sure rectangle is selected, and click once inside your document. From the parameters menu that comes up, enter 300px for both fields.

Center the shape, assign a fill color and then lock the layer so it doesn’t get in the way.

The first thing we need to do when creating this type of pattern is to align our icons to the outer edge. In this case, I brought in my amplifier icon and positioned the halfway point on the left side of the square.

The most important thing to note, is that each shape on the edge of our square needs to have a duplicate icon exactly in the same position on the other side. This is super easy to do since our pattern is 300x300px, as all we need to do is open the transform window (Window > Transform), and type in +300 after the value in the X field. Adding 300 pixels will move our icon over to the right, while subtracting 300 pixels will move it to the left. The same can be said for the Y axis, only adding pixels will move the object down, and subtracting pixels will move it up.

Now we have our icons exactly where they need to be for it to repeat seamlessly.

Follow the steps above to place your icons around the outside perimeter of our shape.

Next, start placing the rest of your icons inside the shape. The trick here is to try to keep it visually balanced as much as possible, because once the pattern gets repeated, it’s very easy to see any spacing irregularities.

That looks like a decent start. Now lets unlock our bottom square layer, and remove the fill.

With the selection tool, highlight all the elements of the pattern (including the square unfilled shape) and drag it into your swatches panel (Window > Swatches). In the dialogue window that pops up, select ‘Pattern brush”.

That’s it! Lets test out our pattern by creating a new shape (U) and filling with our pattern by selecting our new swatch in the panel.

Add a complimentary background color, and you’re good to go!

The first thing I noticed was almost a complete redesign of the UI, making it much more clear how the app works. They have done a great job at making a mundane task of cleaning up space a little more fun with some nice illustrations and animations.

One of the coolest new features is the addition of a section that allows you to check out large, unused files. You can sort the list by date, which quickly shows you files that you can probably get rid of, or archive considering they haven’t been opened for 6+ months.

Check out the trial version to see if it’s something you think like you’d use, then unlock the rest of the features with the paid version.

Learn more

This short documentary goes over the process of David Adrian Smith creating traditional hand-crafted reverse glass signs for John Mayers latest album – Born & Raised.

The amount of detail he puts into these pieces is staggering, and the process will no doubt want you to fly to England to get him to teach you how it’s all done.

Here are the top 5 albums we’ve been listening to in February 2013.

Blue Sky Black Death – Euphoric Tape

Lusine – The Waiting Room

Long Arm – Organic

Flume – Flume

Giraffage – Needs

Please note that this is is more of a guide than a tutorial, so beginners might get a little bit lost in the process. The style we’re going to be trying to acheive is based on this delicious Batman poster.

Apart from the obvious beautiful illustration, the rest is fairly simple. We can see a limited use of color, some texture in the form of noise, and what seems to be a gradient map to tie the whole thing together. This is what our end product will look like.

Lets get started.

Create a new photoshop document at 800×1035 and set the background to black.

Next, we need to figure out a simple figure to illustrate. Since I’m by no means an illustrator, I referenced some Google images and came up with something relatively simple for our buddy Wolverine. You can do this step in either Photoshop or Illustrator, I ended up doing it in Illustrator, but to be honest, I wish I hadn’t (it’s much easier to just edit paths in Photoshop when changes need to be made). The main thing to note here is to try to limit the colors as much as possible, so I only ended up using two (#bab5aa and #dad4c8 to be specific).

Next, we’re going to want to go pretty insane with masks to hide certain parts of the illustration. I started referencing the original Batman image, and started working my way up from the bottom to top with a large, soft round brush.

Now we’re at the head, continuing to mask out certain parts of the image. I felt like the mask needed a bit more detail, so I used the pen tool to draw some contour lines during the masking process. I also used a large brush to paint in a light glow behind his head to help see what I was doing.

To add more detail, decrease the brush size and start to paint in areas that are casting shadows under the mask.

After you finish brushing in your (semi) final details, lets convert all the layers to a smart object to keep things a little bit neater in our document, as well as ease of use to make some minor edits later on.

Next, it’s time to let the typography flow. Inside of the smart object, use a condensed font for the smaller stuff, something contrasting for the movie title, and you’ll be off to a good start. One the type is added, lets do the same thing we did for the illustration and start masking out bits here and there. Once you’re done, exit out of the smart object so we can go bananas with effects.

The first thing we’re going to want to do is add some noise to the smart object (filter -> noise -> add noise). Here are the settings that I ended up using (keep in mind the filter is on a smart object, so all of these settings can be tweaked later on).

The amount of noise is fine in our case, but it’s really in your face. In order to tone it down a bit, double click the filter blending options (marked in a circle below) and bring down the opacity of the effect to 70%.

Now lets add a gradient map to our image to change the color tones. Make it a simple left to right gradient using the colors #121017 and #dec999, and mask out the bottom section over the type to make it pop a little bit more. Note that I made the eyes light instead of dark around this step as I felt it needed a bit more contrast, but ended up going back to dark in the final image.

Hmm, now we’re looking a little bit dull. Create a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer and bump things up accordingly.

It’s still looking a touch dark, so lets add a levels adjustment layer and slide over the white slider just a tiny bit. The original poster still looks a bit more purple than ours, and instead of wresting with the gradient map layer, we can always add a purple (#a01fdc) photo filter and drop the opacity to about 25%. In order to keep the yellow tones intact, I made a quick mask of the lighter selections inside in the photo filter using a soft brush. Lastly, I gave it a very slight vignette in order to frame the image a little bit better.

There you have it!

edit: After some Twitter discussion, Olly has clarified his process. 

edit2 : It looks like he meant set the brush tool to ‘dissolve’ not ‘diffuse’

Download the PSD

Sure you can just screen grab from Safari but then you have a nice 500px black shadow being cast around your nice designs, not so appealing is it?

So voila, find below a simple and clean PSD template for mocking up your designs into.

Download the PSD

Sunrise is noticeably different as soon as you open the app and compare it to the default iOS calendars app. Emphasis is placed upon actual events coming up in a timeline view instead of the actual calendar to begin with, but by swiping on the calendar it quickly brings up the full monthly view. Instead of tapping on clumsy little arrow icons like in the Calendars app, you’re quickly able to swipe through months at a much higher pace, which is handy if you find yourself looking a couple months ahead on a regular basis.

With Facebook integration, you’re naturally shown upcoming birthdays, but as a nice twist, you’re able to send them a text message through the app if you don’t want to make a generic wall post like everyone else. By using the Google Maps API, it’s a pinch to add locations to events and quickly find directions by tapping on the map. Another nice little feature is a simple weather notification on dates that you have something planned which could serve as a reminder to bring an umbrella on the walk to that meeting.

Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with it so far. I’ll most likely be switching to using it as my fulltime calendar app unless I find anything substantially wrong with it in the coming weeks. With a free price tag, I couldn’t resist at least trying it out.

Download it for free, or check out their website.

It’s a super simple strategy game kind of similar to shuffleboard, where the point of the game is to land as many of your game pieces on your opponents side of the board using simple swipe gestures.

The more you have on their side by the end of the game, the more points you accrue, and the higher your global OLO ranking becomes.

The app has a 2 and 4 player mode, as well as the option to play with random strangers online, or friends through Game Center (shudder). I wish more apps took the Draw Something route of using facebook to find friends, instead of making me enter their email in Game Center.

Anyone could have made this app, but what really sets it apart in my eyes are the general aesthetics  It’s all done in solid colors with as little distractions as possible. It has tons of variance in color, from constantly changing backgrounds, to the skin tones of the fingers and nail colors (which of course co-incide with the game board to identify the player sections on the board. If you’d like to support the developers and mix up the color palette, there are also a bunch of themes available for purchase inside the app.

My favorite thing about the app definitely has to be the music and SFX. The theme sounds like some 60′s lounge music, and the victory chimes when the game is over and the pieces are getting counted is oh so satisfying.

Check out the offical site, or get it for $1.99 on the app store