Flashmint.com which sells Flash Templates is holding a Contest for Flashmint Blog Design. Designers can win $500 for the best theme design and Bloggers get up to $300 for driving the largest audience to the website.

So, here is what they need - a custom WordPress theme for their FlashMint Blog.

It should come with the following features:

• 3 columns;
• fixed width (optimized to 1024×768 resolution) and widget support;
• coded;
• the colors and style of the theme should correspond to Flashmint design!

Even if you didn’t emerge as the winner, your design also gets the chance to be showcased at Flashmint blog along with the links to your websites.

Submission starts now and ends on 1st September, so hurry now and submit your design.

The second part of the contest is of great interest for the bloggers. Bring the largest number of visitors to their website from August, 1st till September, 1st! The prizes are $300, $200 and $100 respectively for the top 3 bloggers who drawn the largest viewers. Simply write a blogpost about the contest and link back to Flashmint website or add the code fragment under your latest post. For details, visit Flashmint blog.

I have just launched my first vector pack. Enjoy great illustrations of kids party when you download the vector pack. It comes with 15 amazing party illustrations in EPS 8.0 format and is fully editable with Illustrator. You can use it to print invitation cards, cover designs or use it as a design element for your projects. Buy now and use the discount code below to get additional 10% discount!

Discount code: 9WK3QP (Valid till 31 August 2008)

See more about Kids Party Vector Pack

Designing a logo is a common task in Adobe Illustrator. In this final project, we will sum up what we have learnt so far in Illustrator to create your own custom logo. I will show you the process in drawing a logo and hopefully you have more confidence after this tutorial.
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In this lesson, we will learn how to crop your artwork for exporting to JPG for website or printing. We will also cover about EPS file which is the universal format for saving vector graphics.

Savings Files Using Crop Area

When you try to export your file to a JPG, sometimes you may notice white areas around the image. This is due to the hidden images under the mask (see example below). Illustrator exports the bounding box of all the objects in the artboard regardless of whether it is masked away. To solve this problem, you will need to define a crop area to tell Illustrator this is the area to export rather than exporting the whole graphic.

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With Clipping Mask and Opacity Mask, you can quickly mask away any unwanted areas you wish to hide. Let’s take a look how it works…

Clipping Mask

In this illustration I have 3 layers. The background, sunburst effect and the sun. I will need to mask the sunburst to a square.

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