Starbucks has a remarkable logo. Cheers to Doug Fast - The designer of the latest green Starbucks logo :).

After some research, I came to this site, http://www.deadprogrammer.com/starbucks-logo-mermaid, and found it comprehensive about Starbucks logo. Here’s the brief of the evolution of Starbucks logo:

There’s a chapter about Sirens in the book called A Dictionary of Symbols by J.E. Cirlot. The woman-graphic in the center of Starbucks logo was believed originated from the mythological half-women, typically called Siren (with the half-bird/half-woman and the half-fish/half-woman varieties). The half-fish type normally called Mermaids. Wise mythologists came up with an answer that it is a two-tailed mermaid sometimes called a Melusine.

The original brown cigar band-shaped Starbucks logo had an slightly altered Siren from that book. The belly button and the unattractive shading around the bulging tummy were removed and the tail-legs was merged. The new Siren also smiles a little compared to the 15th century one.

This is the original “cigar band” logo.

New “cigar band” logo with the nipples covered up:

Next, here’s the more familiar stylized green Starbucks logo.

The current logo, with the Siren image cropped, only showing a hint of the tails.

This is the new supporting graphic of Siren image with only one tail. It was used as part of store decoration and product packaging.

Below is one of the latest coffee bags that re-imagines the siren in a modern and attractive way.

Need inspiration for new design, animation, digital art, CG, advertising idea, flash design, etc.? Wanted to know about some outstanding designers in another corner of the world? NewWebPick provides E-Magazine specially for designers.

To start downloading the magazines, first you need to sign up as member (Yeah, it’s free!). Then go to http://ezine.newwebpick.com/, login and choose the series that you like.

Well of course not everything is free, they provide free or lite version here: http://www.newwebpick.com/_issue/. If you like their magazine and want to download the complete version then you’ll have to pay. It’s well worth anyway I think. Oh ya! The complete 16th issue is given out for free! More pages, more pictures, more designs!

How complex can an illustration be? You must check this out: the site of evgeny kiselev, a digital artist. You’ll learn what we call Amazing!

After some time messing around with Photoshop, we couldn’t recall what is the original setting and we’ll want to reset everything. There is a pretty simple way to reset the Photoshop preference to its factory setting.

1. Hold all three buttons: ctrl + alt + shift
2. With all these three buttons held, open the Photoshop program
3. It will prompt you “delete the Photoshop setting file”, press Yes.

Now you get everything reset to its original setting!

Photoshop brushes is a very convenient tool. It helps to create cool visual effects without taking much of your time.

There’s a great resources of photoshop brushes in deviantART. Follow the link here to enjoy this resource: http://browse.deviantart.com/resources/applications/psbrushes/.

You can also create your own brushes. Here’s one of the way to make it:

You can actually create the brush with almost anything. First of all, create a new file in Photoshop, set a size, say 500px by 500px, Grayscale color mode.

Copy the image over to your new photoshop file.

Adjust the image before it is brush-worthy, use the Level, Curves, Brightness/Contrast.

Make a selection around the area you want to make it a brush.

Next, go to Edit > Define Brush Preset and give a name to the brush, and TADAA! The brush is created.

Now, you can choose the Brush tool, right click on the new photoshop page, choose the newly created brush, select a color (foreground color), and click on any space as many times you like to “re-use” the graphic!

Are you a Photoshop fanatic? http://www.worth1000.com will worth your time visiting! You’ll be amazed with the “artwork” done by the contestants. See some sample below:

Click here to go to the gallery of worth1000.com to view some jaw-dropping images.

Travis Beckham is kind enough to share these nice patterns for website background: http://squidfingers.com/patterns/. Currently there are more than a hundred patterns free for use, of course a credit is always a plus and appreciation to the creator or owner.

Apart from these nice patterns, Travis Beckham has a nice website and there are some works worth spending some time browsing through. Great portfolio as reference and inspiration.

Maybe some of you may have faced slightly a little problem when come to choosing nice colours combination for your design, this post might brighten up your days.

It is a community blog where all the colour lovers hang out. Whenever they’ve new ideas on the combination of colours, they’ll just post it there to share with the rest. Most of the combinations are really cool. So, refresh your ideas and start rocking on your inspirations. Let’s go!

Korean web design industry has been one of the most promising and vastly-improved industry through the last decade. If you’re looking for a web design reference or just to have a quick boost to the ideas that has been running in your mind all day long, you may want to pay this website a visit. www.dbcut.com It is Korean website design directory that host many of the great designs that has been tailored in Korea. Have fun!

Ever faced this problem? You have an Illustrator file (.ai) that works fine, you open it, modify your work, and save it as usual. Suddenly you can’t open it, though there wasn’t any problem when saving it previously. You can try the solution below:

• Open the file in Adobe Acrobat (not Adobe Reader).
• Select one of the text or any graphic.
• Move it by pressing any of the arrow key, move one step is enough.
• Save it as eps or pdf.
• Try open it again in Adobe Illustrator
• Now it can be opened! Weird huh?

It works, but not for every single case. Well, at least give it a try before recreating your illustration or vector graphic.