Every week I am emailed by at least 2 companies wanting to promote their product or service however I rarely get a chance to post about them due to time restrictions and also because I do not want to clutter your RSS feeds however this week I have had quite a number of quite varied requests so I thought I would share them with you along with some Twitter Link Love, 31 New Design Blogs and various other paraphernalia. Enjoy.

Win A Laptop

This one only applies to Australian’s that own a blog but all you have to do is blog about their competition and you could win either a Laptop, Monitor or a Webcam. Personally, I would love the laptop so I could take it travelling which would be great for when I go to Canada next year so I could still run the blog and do creative things while I am away! You can get more details about the competition here.

ProofHQ Launch

ProofHQ has officially been launched this week. ProofHQ is a smarter, easier way to manage review and approval of designs, artwork and documents. It is an online collaboration, proofing and approval tool built specifically for brands, agencies, designers, print and production. I am currently trialling their service.

New Mother Energy Drink for Aussies

Last week I got contacted by an PR agency working for Coca-Cola, who were promoting the new Australian “100% new tasting and reformulated” Mother energy drink and they asked me if I wanted to try out the new drink so I thought why not…

I got a pack in the mail a few days later and to my surprise it was quite massive – they had sent me twelve 500mL cans! Soon as I opened the box there was the old 250mL mother can all crushed up which was pretty clever. I didn’t waste any time in trying the drink either as I had just come back from the gym so I was pretty thirsty.

The taste was, to my satisfaction, 100 times better than the last one… it really gives Redbull and V a run for their money but beware, it is very sweet! You can find the new taste Mother energy drink in stores around Australia.

Blog Redesigns

Over the past few weeks a number of blogs have undergone redesigns (including ours) which is always great for keeping your site fresh for your readers. Check out some of the recent redesigns below: Noupe, David Airey, Randa Clay, Creative Curio, Brian Yerkes (soon).

Alex & Cocco Photography

Alex & Cocco asked me to promote their photography company this week so I thought I would give them a plug not just for any reason but because they have some truely amazing work so go check them out. Alex and Cocco are a production duo working exclusively on fine arts and advertising projects around the world, with recent personal series from Sydney, Paris, New York, Tokyo & Shanghai.

Twitter Link Love

I asked my Twitter friends if they wanted to be featured in my next blog post for some link love… add me on Twitter so you don’t miss out next time!

• How To Choose A Good Designer from Randa Clay
• Collection of Sketchy Brushes from ResourcePile
• 5 great photography projects by Philippe Toledano from Designer Daily
• 32 Examples of Websites with a Brave Colour Scheme from We Function
• 100 Design Articles To Keep You Motivated from EliteDesign
• Logo Inspiration With A Yellow Focus from MyInkBlog
• Free Fabric Texture Pack from Fudge Graphics
• A Funny Comic from Brad Colbory
• Crazy Art Gallery Cypress from Eating Design
• Top 7 Reasons Why It’s Better To Hire A Freelancer over a Large Design Studio from Branded Designs
• My First Year As A Designer from Ryan Downie
• The Difference Between A Creative Genius and You from Creative Something
• Using Click Heatmaps to Understand Your Viewers from Tutorial 9
• The Adventures Over Europe… Drawn from PaperTank
• How to use WordPress as a Truly Customized CMS (Multiple Headers, Footers, Sidebars and more!) from IDesignStudios
• Image Is Everything from Doug Cloud
• Have You Hugged A Devloper Today from Oastler
• How To Install New Fonts on A PC from Techathand
• 16 Fractal Photoshop Brushes from Digital Artist Toolbox
• I’ll Gladly Pay You Tuesday, For A Design Done Today (maybe) from Arbenting
• Free Vector Wing Pack from BittBox
• MMolai – Design, Art & Technology Blog
• Cherp.us Launches (A Twitter Creative Agency) from Cherp.US
• Rethinking CSS Font Sizing Techniques from PeakFlow Design
• Wallpaper Inspiration from DTSN
• 27 Business Card Designs from DeviantArt from Your Design Blog
• Photoshop CS3 for Beginners from Designers Bookmark
• Quick Review: Photoshop Express from Latent Design
• 3 Questions for 3 Top Design Bloggers from Brian Yerkes (features me)

31 New Design Blogs

If you didn’t think there were enough design related sites and design blogs already, well here are 31 new ones on the block. Thanks to Liam from WeFunction who let me use this post below.

1. Design Shard

From what I can see, this site only went live on July 25th, and it’s already had some popular content. I suggest you check out the 300+ Free Hi-Res Grunge Textures, as it’s my favourite at the moment.

2. My Ink Blog

A very well organised and well focused blog with some brilliant tutorials, links, resources and articles. So far there has been a lot of great posts, and I don’t see any signs of this changing. I was really impressed with the tutorial on Designing with Swirls & Flourishes, really top notch tutorial.

3. PSD Fan

Quickly becoming one of my favourite tutorial sites. The site offers not only tutorials, but resources, which are both of very high quality. Looking at the amount of content it’s hard to remember that it’s only 2 months old. My top pick: Design a Unique Grungy Website Layout, a tutorial on a whole new level of great!

4. Kreativeuse

This site is probably the most useful in terms of keeping up to date. It’s got regularly updated web/graphic design news. Launched on the 5th of July.

5. ShareBrain

Another regularly updated blog, which is brilliant! Especially when you consider how good the content is, I particularly enjoy their interviews. The ones with Jon Phillips & Steven Snell were my favourites. Keep your eye on this blog for sure.

6. Design Blurb

The content is impressive and they even have their own collection of “New Design Blogs”. Anyway, great blog & content, check it out.

7. Graphic Design Blog

There’s a good number of posts on this blog, each with great tips.

8. Observin

I couldn’t include this one for the design alone (as much as I wanted to), fortunately the blog posts & resources that I’ve seen so far made me want to include it for another reason, the content. To see what I mean just have a gander at the free Old News Theme. I predict great things for this blog.

9. Digital Artists Toolbox

I stumbled upon this website through the brilliant 41 Amazing Tilt-shift miniature faking photographs post and I’ve been checking back ever since. A wide range of content topics, from resources and freebies, to interviews and amazing collections. One to watch for sure.

10. DesignO’Blog

Niki runs a blog which again has a wide variety of content, although being focused around design and the internet I love blogs like this, she clearly has a great eye for interesting stuff and a good sense of humour, also offers some very useful content. Great blog to follow.

11. Brush King

I’ve always gone for Quality over anything else, which is why I’m really liking Brush King. The collection of Photoshop brushes they’ve got at the moment are truly impressive, it’s clearly being run by someone who can spot quality brushes. My top pick, Flowers First.

12. Script & Style

This new website put together by Chris Coyier which aims to bring you the best user submitted community news. So far so good, I’ve read a lot of interesting stuff which I found via the site. So be sure to give it a good old rummage though.

13. Dev Snippets

I love it when sites like this come along, I’m not really huge on web development, but I realise how useful these are and I like to browse demos of things like this to find things that would be useful for future projects. They’re also running a great contest too.

14. Pattern Tap

Pattern tap is a great idea, its a new site which allows you to find specific collections on certain web elements. I think it makes finding inspiration that little more effective, as usually it’s certain elements that I get stuck for inspiration on, rather than the overall concept.

15. We Are not Freelancers

These guys have got a really nice blog up and running, and its showing no signs of slowing down. The design (although this post is not about the design) is just absolutely amazing, I love every aspect of it. The posts that I’ve read have been very well written and informative, so all in all a welcomed addition to my RSS reader.

16. Design Feedr

Design Feedr is a blog which aims to showcase collections of top quality inspiration and resources. They have a great eye for what looks good and similar tastes to my own. One of my favourite posts of theirs is the Masters of Digital Paintings collection which I really love!

17. Inspiration Up

There’s that word again; Quality. I really like this site because they seem to think a little more than certain CSS galleries about their entries, so overall I’d say there is a better quality of sites on display.

18. Color Burned

A talented designer sharing various sources of inspiration and freebies. It’s always reassuring to receive resources off a guy who you know, knows what he is talking about. I really love the guy’s work just as much as the posts he shares, so a great experience all round.

19. Booooooom

Probably not the easiest domain name to remember in the world, but thankfully the posts and quality of the work is a lot more memorable, the post on Ian Francis‘ work for example is amazing! The site is based around art, design, photography & culture etc. This is a great site to spend some time exploring.

20. Apps Mania

The basic concept of the site is a gallery of web applications, it has a small amount of information, ratings and tags. Making it a great place to browse if you’re on the look out, or need some inspiration for, a cool new web app.

21. Doodlage

I can’t remember how I came across this site, but its been in my favourites for a few weeks and I’m really impressed with the postings. Its quite a fun little site, sharing lots of doodles/sketches/drawings and is a great source of inspiration.

22. Vi.sualize

Social Bookmarking for images. It’s that easy. A simple great idea.

23. Coded Preview

For a better way of presenting your design mock-ups you can use Coded Preview, it allows you to modify the settings such as a background image, alignment margins etc. To give you an idea of how this can help, take a look at this example; Single Image compared to Image on Coded Preview. I think its a great idea, probably the best place you could upload your designs for presenting mock-ups. More ideas for mocking up web designs here.

24. High Resolution Textures

Textures, a vital ingredient in so many forms of design. Textures are becoming more and more popular in web design, so that makes this an ideal website for you to add to your RSS reader. There really are some great textures on display here, and regular updates mean you’ll never be short of textures.

25. Beeex

I’ve not strictly been following this site, but it keeps popping up here and there and each time I visit I am impressed, so It’s long overdue but I’ve added it to my RSS reader now. I particularly love their Ultimate Collection of Free Textures on the Web.

26. Skout

A user submitted list of design/web related resources. A wide range of categories, resources and inspirations. One of those sites where you can lose a good couple of hours and not realise.

27. Usability Post

So far the posts on this site have impressed me, the blog talks about aspects of interface design, which means not only the way things look but how they work and how the function. I’m looking forward to reading more here.

28. Knowtebook

Knowtebook brings you the best news about design, ideas, web trends, technology & more. The usefulness of each post cannot be questioned, each and every post I find very useful, so that’s why it had to make the list, this web-based business collaboration tools post is a great example of that.

29. Designm.ag

This latest project by Steven Snell is already off to a great start. A very community focused design blog with community feeds, links, a gallery and of course some amazing posts, this blog really does look set to grow bigger and bigger, and with posts like this: Favorite Design-Related Sites of 21 Designers, its not hard to see why.

30. Fudge Graphics

Since April 2008 Fudge graphics has been making some amazing posts. There is a good mix of links, resources, inspirations, featured artists. Check it out!

31. StyleTime

StyleTime is a very new design / blog with a twist… it features twitter interviews (Twun-Liners) and you can actually register and write up a bio about yourself and post it on the blog. I am not sure where this website will go as it is very new but it struck me as having potential so I thought I would feature it.

Update:

#32 – Eating Design

#33 – AgroKrag

#34 – Did I miss yours?

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this massive list of inspiration, tips and resources. I am sure it will keep you busy. Be sure to add me on Twitter so you do not miss out on the next link love session.