Christian San Jose is a graphic designer and illustrator based in Pasig, Philippines. By day he is a senior web designer for an internet marketing company, and by night he works as a freelance illustrator. His list of clients include Nike Phil., The Coca-Cola Company Phil., ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corporation, and OctoArts Films, among others. He loves illustration and thinks that it is an amazing way to express oneself. Read more about him in this interview.

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Dacosta is an independent artist currently based in Vancouver and is the founder of Chocolate Soop, Inc. He specializes in vector graphics and character design. This self-taught designer has over 10 years of professional experience. He’s influenced by Japanese culture, graffiti and industrial design. He works in a variety of mediums from toys, concept designs, illustrations, character designs, animated projects and more.

Dacosta has numerous playful and bold projects in his portfolio, like his character “KidKat,” a custom chocolaty, vinyl toy. You can learn more about his vector character design process in his tutorial “How to Make the Vector Character “Cactus King” – Vector Plus Tutorial.” In this interview, he talks about his creative growth since childhood, the importance of story in his character design, how he pushes new creative ideas into his work, and his sophisticated approach to developing both personal and client projects.

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Over the last three days we’ve been steadily rolling out a new Tuts+ theme across all 8 sites. The new design is a refinement more than a big change, with lots of little improvements in usability and more suited to big screens. Read on to learn more about the redesign and lots of news about Plus!

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Hello everyone! It’s time for yet another monthly round up of the vector design community. As you know, each month we round up some of the best vector content from around the web. It seems like each month it gets harder and harder to choose which articles to showcase, but this month we managed to narrow the choices down to just a few.

In this article you will find some amazing vector tutorials, freebies, and inspirational articles from some of our favorite design blogs. We really enjoyed reading through some of these articles and we hope that you will too. Please take a moment to review some of these fantastic vector design articles from around the web.

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Fans of Vectortuts+ are certainly familiar with the vector tutorials of Jonathan Patterson. He’s obviously a talented vector illustrator, there is however a wide variety of work he produces in addition to his vector artwork. Jonathan is a Michigan native working as a Senior Art Director at an advertising agency. Jonathan has over five years of experience as an art director. He shares with us his experience in the creative industry and how you too can succeed.

Learn tips on presenting your portfolio, landing a job, networking, working at a large versus small ad agency, and more. In this interview, you’ll also learn about his range of creative projects, skills needed to be successful in the creative industry, his approach to design, and his inspiration. Let’s get to know Jonathan better.

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We have another great Vector Plus tutorial available exclusively for Plus members today. If you want to learn how to take your retro character illustration to the next level, learn how to shade your characters, compose scenes, and other tips, then we have an awesome tutorial for you.

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Over the weekend and into Monday we unfortunately experienced some pretty severe downtime on all Envato WordPress blogs. The downtime was due to problems in the data centre of our current hosting company which was out of our control.

It seems to all be resolved now, but I just wanted to make a quick apology for the inconvenience and interruptions. We’re going to be re-examining our hosting setup to make sure we avoid this situation in the future and to generally try to pull up the quality of service across the board.

In the meantime there may be some further minor interruptions as we shore up the setup. Thank you for your patience!

With his fifteen years of experience, intelligent and humorous style, graphic designer and illustrator Glenn Jones from New Zealand, answered our questions on building a career, discovering his talent, finding inspiration, and the process of creating his pop t-shirt illustrations. Let’s have a chat with Glenn.

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Many people completely overlook business cards when starting up their new company, mainly due to the capabilities of social networking on the world wide web. However, traditional networking is still a very valuable source when looking for new customers and clients, and the best way to network in the “real world” is by word of mouth. In most cases family members, friends and other members of the public forget about new start-up companies (which is unfortunate), therefore they need something to remember you by. You guessed it: a business card.

If you want potential customers/clients to hold on to your business card, it needs to stand out from the crowd; it needs to be something special. This amazing compilation showcases some of the freshest die-cutting trends used in business cards – so get your thinking cap on and start designing your business card now. After all, it is likely the most powerful piece of card your company will ever see.

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David Pache is a branding expert from Switzerland. His work is grounded in design principles, which gives him a strong platform to create unique identities from. He has recently rebranded his studio under the name Helvetic Brands, as that better describes his services.

David prides himself in not overcomplicating identity solutions. He feels a solid brand is easier to remember when delivered simply. While he has a well developed approach to creating client solutions, he consistently experiments with various tools, such as markers, legos, paintings, and photography.

In this interview, David talks about creating custom typographic logo designs for clients. Learn his process for this and how it elevates the solutions he’s able to offer his clients. He also talks about his sketching, conceptual process, presenting solutions to clients, and more.

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