Having put them in the post, poetry fan Frances Whittle-Butler thought little of her entries into the Arvon national poetry contest.

That was until she was called to London, having been short-listed. When I received a couple of emails in October telling me of the news, I was surprised and delighted. said the 47-year-old, who lives in Laxey. It is such a prominent competition and, of the 33 short-listed, I had two different poems incorporated.

The Arvon Foundation is one of the world privileged in artistic writing, founded in 1968 by the writers John Fairfax and John Moat, both close friends of Ted Hughes, who went on to become poet laureate in 1984.

The poetry rivalry, founded by Ted Hughes, is now in its 30th year. As it is of universal implication, there are significant cash prizes and global recognition for the winners.

Digital Juice announced today that it has released Juice Drops Collection One obvious aim the first in a series of new and expanded layered Photoshop graphics collections. These new Collections will each contain over 400-layered images delivered in a wide variety of styles, themes, looks and size formats. This first offering, Juice Drops Collection One clear INTENT, takes its inspiration primarily from the existing Digital Juice Fonts library with many of its illustrations designed to support the addition of DJ Fonts headlines and text layouts. The resulting collection contains more than 400 original customizable images in a useful text template format.

Our focus the last three years has been on rapidly rising our motion design and compositing products, says David Hebel, Founder and CEO of Digital Juice. That’s why you have not seen any new print and graphics creations lately. We are now getting back to our ancestry and plan to release a host of new vide and print graphics products starting with the prelaunch of the Juice Drops line.

What are Juice Drops?

The Juice Drops library is a set of royalty-free layered backdrop and illustrations that are completely customizable. Often described as Art You Take Apart each background is a finished complete graphic, delivered with all the original layers intact for easy customization for any type of design use from billboards to web pages, from motion graphics to print advertising and packaging applications. Artists can use the graphics trodden in their inventive composition or they can mix and merge layers from different backgrounds to create new and unique looks.

Caitlin Karolczak, who’s painting Storm poises the cover of the fall issue of MOQ, grew up on Minnesota’s Iron Range and then came to the Twin Cities to earn degrees in fine arts and art history from the University of Minnesota in 2005. She lives in Minneapolis and is co-owner of Spinario Design, a store and gallery at 1300 Second St. NE that sells mid-century modern furniture and accessories, and fine art from many centuries, all of which inspires and influences her own artwork.

Karolczak’s art is on view at Spinario, and she has a show coming up at Design Within Reach. Her semi-annual open studio takes place during the Northeast Fall Fine Arts Show, Nov. 19-21, at The Bottling House, 79 13th Ave. NE, no. 203. More information on these and other shows will be posted on her Web site. She will also have several paintings at Gallery5 in Richmond, Virginia, for a show called Memento Mori, from October 29 until Dec 17.

Karolczak likes to realize the flaw of the human mind and body, and draws inspiration from her group of epoch medical photographs, which she says blur the line between artistic portraiture and scientific graphic. She combines classical techniques and vintage materials such as the 400-year-old paper snippets incorporated into Storm with modern materials and metaphors, blending both figurative and abstract motifs in her paintings.

Eerie, whirr calls plug the sky on a frosty April morning. Hundreds of sand hill cranes collect down the edges of Fruit growers Reservoir, on the southern edge of western Colorado’s Grand Mesa. Tucked amid cropland and wise-spotted pastures, the tank is a vital rest stop on the birds long spiral voyage from New Mexico north to Montana, Idaho and Canada. They kited in the previous evening just prior to sundown, back-flapping their great wings, lowering their spindly landing gear. Now, some stalk the shore, looking for bugs and grain; others smarten their glossy sand-gray feathers, getting ready to obtain voyage once again.

As the sun warms the air, the cranes fling themselves into the sky. They broadcast wildly, extending their legs backward and their necks ahead until they look like flying arrows. Then they knit themselves into torn V formations, strengthening up and up to gain the altitude they need to cross the 10,000-foot-high mesa. Their feathers flash silver in the morning light, and their rolling chirrs grow fainter and fainter as they head north.

It took a couple of years to labor out what was dissimilar. Strolling through Edinburgh’s Bristo Square, I found myself persistent by the hoardings so that I could look at the posters correctly. Running up the Pleasant, I really stopped and asked the street teams to hand over their flyers.

Eye-wateringly bright posters on every accessible surface and handfuls of surplus flyers are required evils of the festival season, besides being shouted at by students clothed as Restoration courtesans on the Royal Mile, really leisurely-changing traffic lights and a lack of sleep. They are another weapon in the month-long opulent stabbing that is the trimming.

Philip K. Dick is the inspirations for current film makers like Nolan who have taken it forward themselves to question the table of certainty.

FONT face=Arial size=2>Science fiction author Philip K. Dick (PKD) can be held liable for implanting a few of the craziest dreams in the optimal minds of Hollywood. These, in turn, have twisted their versions of Dick-Sian fantasy. The newly released, Inception, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, explores the concepts of firmness and dreams which is wholly PKD territory. The movie has widely explored memories, interchanges worlds and suspicion, and has still maintained its pulp-fiction story plot. These were exactly the tools that PKD used to entertain his readers for years.

One of the eternal quests of the human mind has been to understand the true nature of reality. This quest is mostly pronounced today when there is paranoia related to psychology, technology and sociology. As the machines become smarter, people have started to ask themselves about what it really means to be human. This is something that the Matrix trilogy oppressed to the fullest extent.

It’s no secret that web design is a rapid-growing industry. Almost every kind of business is in need of a value website. There are opportunities at the great agency level down to freelancers rising small-business websites from home.

So how do you break into this thrilling field? With little or no experience creating websites, getting yourself up to speed can be a daunting task. There are so many special avenues of design and progress to explore. Which way should you go first? Which ability sets suit you the best?

You can’t become a skilled web designer suddenly. It takes years to attain an skilled level in any aspect of the field. But everyone starts somewhere, and there’s no superior time than the present begin your web design education.