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The US government portal meant to give United States citizen’s information about the government and the ways to go about getting things from passports to information from the many government entities has recently been given a face-lift.

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At times designers have to cram a ton of statistics into a considerably small space, the information needs to convey it’s importance, and still be visually appealing at the same time, all together it’s not a small order.
There is an entire group that are half statisticians and half artists who are able to convey an absolutely incredible amount of information in a very stylish way.
While you may not need to show quite as many stats as the examples below, they prove to show that you can still be informative and beautiful.

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Right off the bat, there needs to be some apologies for that punny title, so consider this that apology.
Facebook has a new position that is giving it even more control of the web.  While the OpenGraph is still being adopted and heavily debated over, considering the amount of people using it already, it looks poised to take over Google’s link positioning.  Google’s algorithm depends on websites linking through to each other, while Facebook’s OpenGraph is more user-oriented.

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There is a school of thought that any traffic is ‘good traffic’, unfortunately it simply isn’t true.  There is both good traffic and unproductive traffic, and the SEO of your website will decide on which one you will ultimately receive.  If you are checking your search statistics and are finding that many are getting to your website after searching for unrelated terms to your business, you are suffering from not-so-great SEO.

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Friendgiftr is a new company with its roots directly traced to social media and social networking, the  inspiration behind it came from the virtual gifting applications in websites like Facebook (where you can use real world money to give friends little images of various things).
It is interesting to see what companies come up with to integrate real world things into the virtual networks and while there may be some vaguely similar things out there, it’s Friendgiftr’s full integration of real world and virtual interaction that makes it stand out.  I recently had the chance to ask Friendgiftr’s CEO Rob Carpenter a few questions (found …

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I’ve had Willard Wigan’s artwork here before (his piece is #2 on that list), and honestly- I just can’t get enough of it. He uses an enviably steady hand to create such tiny pieces that when he has a showing, viewers look through microscopes to see them.
His work is no stranger to the internet, sure- but it’s hard to see* these amazing pieces and not be stunned.  Even his tools are incredible, from microscopes to single hairs- there’s little to not be impressed by.
But, enough of my talk, below are some of his older pieces, and seriously- visit his website for more.

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While I did make this, I can’t really take too much credit.  The above image was generated using a freeware program called Paint.NET (freeware).  It has both Mandelbrot and Julia Set generators, and really- stunning, right?
 

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After the jump is an guide on how to make your own brushes in Photoshop (shown in Elements, but it’s the same with the full Photoshop).  While the process is basically the same exact way as making a pattern, for the sake of ease I decided to make a separate tutorial.