Cutting edge Brit Artist Stella Vine heads up the judging panel. Joining her are up-and-coming artists Jimi Crayon and Harry Pye who have also created their own limited edition designs.

VISTOBRAHMA is open to anyone in the UK – whether you’re a painter, illustrator, photographer, street artist or anything in between. All you have to do is create a design based on the spirit of Brahma and Urban Brasil – originality, authenticity, style and flair – and submit it via post or our website rent a car bulgariaWWW.VISTOBRAHMA.COM.

Not only will the winning design be put into production and be seen and touched by hundreds of thousands of people around the country, but there’s also a CASH prize of £5,000 on offer - so the winning artist could even visit Brasil and experience the spirit of Brahma for themselves.

Stella Vine became involved in the project having previously worked with other competitions and projects that are designed to encourage people to get involved in art and design. Stella, who ran her own project space ‘Rosy Wilde’ from a disused butchers shop in East London for emerging artists, hopes that VISTOBRAHMA will show that the arts can offer career fulfilment as well as cultural stimulation. She said:

“VISTOBRAHMA is a brilliant example of a cool brand asking people from the creative community to interpret its image from their point of view. It’s great that a young artist will get such a strong boost to their career, as the exposure that the winner will have is huge. On top of that Brasil has amazing cultural heritage so there should be plenty of inspiration to get people started.”

Not only will the winning design appear on our packaging throughout the UK, but nine runners up will also have their work feature in a touring exhibition and will receive a cash prize of £500 each.

Brahma has been involved in art and design since its launch in the UK in 2005. Having collaborated with Brasilian street artist Speto to create their advertising campaign and packaging, Brahma also showcased the best of UK street art in a bespoke book and exhibition in 2006.

Competition is open to UK residents over the age of 18. Visit WWW.VISTOBRAHMA.COM to see the full brief and terms and conditions.

Please enjoy Brahma responsibly: www.drinkaware.co.uk

The Brief

It’s a pretty open brief – take the flowing curves of the Brahma bottle, immerse yourself in the vibrancy and spirit of urban Brasil and let your imagination run wild.

Then, do what you do. Your work, in your style, in your way. Just make sure that the work reflects Brahma

Before you start, take a look around the VISTOBRAHMA website at some of the other great work that has been created for Brahma. We want you to be creative, but naturally there are some considerations as we’d prefer not to see anything that might upset someone’s mum - you can read the full submission guidelines on our website.

Brahma is about improvisation and living with effortless flair, so your focus should be on the spirit of Brahma and Urban Brasil as opposed to the traditional stereotypes. To learn more about Brahma go to WWW.VISTOBRAHMA.COM

Submission specifications
Create your design in any medium you like, then use either of our two submission methods to get them to us. Which ever medium you create your work in is fine by us, but there are a few things that you need to consider:

In the event that your work is selected as a winner, we will need to have access to the original work in order to produce artwork. Please note that there are a few things that we can’t use in our imagery for legal reasons, examples of these are:

- Pictures of people who look under 25

- Any rude or offensive language, words or gestures
- Imagery that alludes to creating success through drinking alcohol

Otherwise it’s over to you to get creative…

Digital Submissions
You can upload your digital entry at WWW.VISTOBRAHMA.COM. Once you are at the site, please follow the registration process and send us a digital file in either a Jpeg, TIF or PDF format. Your file should be no larger than 5MB in size.

Please note that your entry may be auto-resized to fit our gallery pages. If you are sending us a photograph or scan of your work, please ensure that you include details of the actual size of the original.

The closing date is 25 January 2008.

Postal Submissions
Please ensure that your work is no larger than A3 in size.

Unfortunately, we will not be able to return any work sent by post unless return postage and packing is included with you submission. In the event that your work is selected as a winner, we will need to have access to the original work in order to produce artwork.

Please carefully package your submission and send it to the following address:

VISTOBRAHMA TMS

Fort Dunlop

Fort Parkway

Birmingham

B24 9FD

The closing date is 25 January 2008.

“Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. Helvetica is currently screening at film festivals, museums, design conferences, and cinemas worldwide, followed by the DVD release November 20th.”

Visit the website for more info!

1. Flashblocks
2. fCMSPro

I checked out both and did the demo for both. I opted to purchase the Flashblocks just to try. I really like Flashblocks, it’s pretty easy to use for both client and myself. You do need to know the basics of how Flash works of course. The one problem I ran into is for some reason my server did not upload the images from the image browser (RESLOVED-SEE UPDATE BELOW). At one point, it has the uploading process bar hang, but when I refreshed, the file did show up. So I updated php on the server and now the images does not upload at all. I’m quiet certain it’s a server setting issue because I tested it out on another server and the images upload quickly and without any issues. Although I can’t get it to work yet and will have my host look at it when I have a chance to get back to it, I would give this 2 thumb and 2 toes up. It’s really awesome. Though I do wish it would have a version that uses MySQL database.

UPDATE: I love Flashblock! Ok, so the creator of Flashblock is just awesome. He continued to work on resolving my issue with the server and figured it out. It was one little server setting that caused the issue I had and everything is working out perfectly. He is a very nice person and I feel lucky to have found this Flash CMS Flashblocks.

You can view a list of big name sites such as Engadget to Washington Post on the DailyBlogTips http://www.dailyblogtips.com/google-changing-the-pagerank-algorithm/ and Andy Beard http://andybeard.eu/2007/10/pagerank-update.html that have been hit with a lower PageRank. Wow, even Forbes.com!

Matt Cutt from Google has been saying over and over that paid text link ads that passes PR is against googles’s policy. They do have all the power to do what they want to since they are in control of the whole Goodle PR. The only thing users can do is not use Google. But really…can you not use Google? I use Google for search, email, calendar, weather, analytics, and 411. I mean Google does offer a lot of free things, so is it so bad for google to ask people not to have paid text link ads on their site that passes PR? I guess it depends on who you ask. If your site is making an income solely on provide Google Juice, then you’ll probably hate what Google is doing. If your site is high traffic and really doesn’t matter if you have PR or not, then it wouldn’t matter to you that much.

Does PageRank really matter that much? I guess it depends on what you are trying to do. For companies with sites that can’t really be SEOed, it’s easier to buy text link because it does help those keyword show up higher in Search Engines. Though for sites - especially design sites that are heavy with Flash or design sites that just want to keep it clean without a keyword sprinkles, it is usually done through other forms of marketing and the point is to have the site be seen by people, not just by spiders (though spiders do a pretty good job designing their web - yeah, that was dorkist).

I’m guessing that currently google is penalizing sites manually, but maybe they could be “testing” their new algo (though there are still PR7 sites selling text links…so maybe not). The problem is how will they be sure some links are paid for. Who knows…but seriously, Google is starting to piss a lot of people off who use to be fans. I don’t know how they can stop using Google though…

Anyhow, you can read Matt Cutts blog about backlinks http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/tell-me-about-your-backlinks/ from Dec 2005. It mentioned two sites buying links from ketv.com. The odd thing is the ketv site has been a PR6 and until recently, I guess it’s going down to a PR4 - why wasn’t the site penalized even back then if Matt Cutts knew about it? If you want to know more about what you can or might be able to do and not do, then read his paid links post from him.

PR is useful in some ways, but I don’t think it’s everything in getting good organic traffic.

“We did not learn everything we hoped to. Ambiguities in some parts of the survey yielded ambiguities in some data. After an analysis of the survey itself, we now possess detailed recommendations for improving future surveys.” –A List Apart

I’m sure as a designer, it is still something fun to look at since it’s been translated into graphic charts even if it’s not perfect.

The thing is that the past ones did have a wireless card that you can buy online or in store and install it yourself. That was for G4 and G5, but for some reason they don’t have this “card” at the store or online that you can purchase and it may not even be a card anymore (don’t know what it is). So you just can’t do it yourself. So make sure you order one with wireless already there, if you ever will need wireless.

UPDATE: So I just search for more on this and found this which basically says that you should be able to get it at the store. My husband said it might be that you have to convince them that you are capable of installing it yourself since it’s not just putting in a card like how it use to be.

You can enter online or take a look at more info on STEP website.

STEP also holds a Best of Web Design competition, but unfortunitely it already past for 2007. Good news is that the issues are already out on the newstands as of September 1, 2007.

Check HOW’s site for more info and also download the rull and entry form.

Anyway, Time also came up with 25 sites we can’t live without. Of course, google is my pick too. Funny thing is they had Second Life as one of the 5 Worst Websites. I’ve tried Second Life. I just couldn’t get myself to really like it. I ended up at the casinos trying to collect virtually dollars. Sad, but true. Then outside of the casinos, it’s hard to know where to go. Even though it shows you dots where people were, you can get there (teleport it’s called, which is cool if we had that in real life) and it’s just strangers. Unless you already know people already on it, it just doesn’t seem like there’s much to do. Unless you can design virtual clothing and stuff…but even that was a bit hard to learn for me. Some people are very into Second Life, spending their real life money into this virtual world. I think I’d rather spend my money in the my Real Life than my Second Life.

One of the sites on the best list was Weebly. I thought that was actually nice for general web users who didn’t know how to design or build a site, but I would likely not use it myself.

The deadline is September 22, 2007 - check Joomla! for more info.