My 21st birthday is a few days away. Contrary to the previous years, where I posted on my birthday and occasionally reflected on the past, the way I live and work today is far more oriented towards what is yet to come, and as such I won’t do that again this year. 2008 was a great year for me, and 2009, so far, has not been any different. I won’t be posting about my birthday on April 29th; instead, I’ll be posting some new downloadable goodies on that date. For now, I want to look forward; there’s a pretty elaborate schedule ahead.

Apart from small and large clients that have booked my time, I’ll be in San Francisco in June for WWDC – with no conference ticket; I am really not doing so well that I can pay a whopping 1300 dollars for some days of networking with people, although I do intend to meet up with as many of you as I can – and the Fall season will involve one or more trips to Japan and possibly other asian countries. I also hope to show off some great work I have done in the last few months in May / June.

Regarding Asia, I am not sure why, but my Japanese (and Chinese) website traffic has been increasing tremendously (こんにちは!), and I have gotten a lot more Japanese clients as well. Perhaps my learning Japanese has something to do with it, although I haven’t talked about that a lot; Japanese culture fascinates me, and I am pleased with being able to get closer to it. I’ll probably be showing off some videos of my work for Japanese companies in the Fall of 2009.

And then there’s this blog. While my writing dwindled a bit under the stress of some extended projects, I will be finishing a lot of blog posts in the next weeks. I will preview the next version of Icon Resource (new course material is free for existing members), release a small new icon set, and talk about iPhone icons and the iPhone OS 3.0’s new color profile, which I have investigated. I will also publish an article about my own billing and accounting workflow complete with an interview with the guys that provide my top billing solution: Marketcircle, and, best of all, several nice software (and hardware) giveaways are coming up.

Due to this, I’m now also entering a partnership with the cool guys at Fusion. I have never considered advertising on my blog, but Fusion has a beautiful format and shows products I use and love as well. I think it’d also suit the blog and your sensibilities as a reader. Your input on this is of course welcome. I hope you enjoyed this peek at what’s in the pipeline!

Sometimes, you get the strangest, yet most appealing ideas walking down the street instead of when you’re at your desk nibbling on a pencil. It just hits me, sometimes before I go to sleep, or when I’m waiting in a queue. More often than not, I forget the idea, but lately I’ve been putting them into my iPhone, in a list. And when I looked back at that list yesterday, I found one particularly interesting.

“Design a series of corporate brand identities based on Pokémon.”

Guys? Stay with me here. When I was about eleven years old, I played a Pokémon game on a gameboy emulator on my PC, and I still think the creatures that Ken Sugimori designed are very iconic, characteristic designs. The crazy idea of doing some logotype work for them enticed my curiosity enough to actually do some work on it in my spare time. Here we go: corporate brand design, the Pokémon edition.

If you like it, please digg it.

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As promised in my last post, I’m reporting on my progress of picking up drawing and painting again with a Wacom Cintiq. A selection of speedpaints this week, with a lot of landscape exercises and one teaser of my first real client ‘painting’ work!

I haven’t really settled on a format for these weekly updates yet, so please do leave feedback on what I should and shouldn’t post. I’ve excluded most of my sketches and doodles. Techniques from painters or wanna-be-painters are of course, also welcome. For these speedpaints, no reference of any sort was used, except for the Portal speedpaint.

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I’ve been averse to using tablets since I got first introduced to them. Don’t get me wrong, I really love drawing stuff. I think I’ve been drawing before I learned to walk. But tablets seemed counter-intuitive. “You don’t draw in one area and look at another!”, my mind screamed. It took a lot time for me to reconsider. What really made me reconsider was something a touch more… futuristic.

The Wacom Cintiq is a pretty neat combination of an external monitor and graphics tablet. It comes in 12 and 21 inch flavours, and for the sake of digitizing my sketching and contract signing process, I’m trying it out. The 12 inch model, mind you. There’s no way I could fit one of these on my desk next to my (really) big Cinema Display. Since I’ve barely used tablets, and haven’t done drawing with colors since I was a freshman in the Academy of Arts (quite a few years ago) I’ll share some so-called ‘speedpaints’ with you every week. This way, you can follow my thoughts on getting used to such an interesting piece of hardware and see the results.

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In anticipation of Apple’s next iteration of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, I created this wallpaper based on the artwork of Apple’s Snow Leopard website.

While I’m unaware of the new wallpaper and UI changes in Snow Leopard, this should last you until more is revealed!

Snow Leopard Wallpaper – 588 KB

This wallpaper is intended for personal usage and desktop customization only. Mac OS X 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’ is © 2009, Apple Inc.

Now here’s some speed icon drawing! :)

I did this simple icon drawing of Apple’s just-announced iWork.com service, which was previewed in the keynote on a slide. I based this icon off that.

Grab it here:

iWork dot com icon (Mac + PC) – 940 KB

Again, please do not use for anything other than personal computer customization. iWork.com’s logo and name are trademarks of Apple Inc.