A quick inspirational post today (a quickie but a goody!) showcasing a selection of beautiful hand-drawn doodles in web design; a trend that is becoming ever more popular as the weeks pass by.

There are nine designs in total, a small amount, but together are sure to inspire you much more than you expect! Hold on to your seats, let’s go!

Coopers Kids

Coopers Kids uses a lovely grungy splattered background, with a lovely hand-drawn doodle of a clown holding a selection of colourful balloons.

New to York

New to York uses a great composition in its web design, using diagonal lines and a bright yet limited colour scheme. The use of a hand-drawn hand gun makes the design much more visually appealing than it already was; a real stunner!

Lindsey Jayne May

This soft and modern design makes use of some great photo-manipulation techniques, blotchy watercolour effects and the use of texture on a simple grid-based design. The hand-drawn line drawing of the a humans skeleton in the header of the design adds that extra “oomph”, not to mention how superb the colour scheme is!

Red Velvet Art

This design is quite busy but surprisingly works very well. It reminds me a lot of a well used notepad or sketchbook, two items that are quite commonly used when it comes to art-related topics, whether it be traditional art, digital art, photography or even knitting! The colourful scheme makes this site a happy one, perfect for all art lovers!

Adam Amaral

The great portfolio of Adam Amaral is simple and is purely based on a sketch; from the header, writing and even the navigation and image frames. The illustration in the top left corner tops this design off, a great composition!

Made To Kill

Made To Kill doesn’t use as much hand-drawn elements in the design of the site compared to others in this selection of designs, however where it does, it is done very well. The Made To Kill logo has been hand-drawn to make it look like chalk on an old-fashioned chalkboard.

Esteban Muñoz

This great design has a superb hand-drawn doodle/sketch in the bottom right corner of the site, which, if visited, will follow your cursor around. Some may find this annoying, but at full-screen, it’s a piece of art in itself and for me is pretty damn beautiful!

Freszki

The majority of this design is rather standard. The header design, however, is incredible. It is based completely on a sketch, using hand-drawn elements to create a border for the logo and navigation. A fantastic idea that works very well with the rest of the digital-based design.

GNL Entertainment

This flash-based photography portfolio uses some digital fonts that have been made to look like handwriting, mixed with some simple but lovely hand-sketched icons at the bottom of the page, linking the user to various social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

What’s your favourite hand-drawn website? We’d love to see your designs (or just your favourite!), so be sure to link us to them in the comments section below!

To celebrate a couple of Circlebox Blog’s recent milestones (1,000 approved comments and the one hundredth post), we have a superb giveaway giving away two subscriptions to the new “Access All Areas” premium member area on the ever-popular Blog.SpoonGraphics, the creative home of inspirational Chris Spooner.

The Prize

There are two subscriptions up for grabs, which allow you access to the new “Access All Areas” section on Blog.SpoonGraphics. By becoming a member (usually $7 USD per month) you will be able to access exclusive design tutorials, giveaways, download exclusive themes designed by Chris Spooner himself, and receive various discounts to a range of awesome design related products. Sound right up your street? Entering is easy!

How To Enter

Entering is easy. Simply follow these straight-forward steps!

1. (Optional) Subscribe to Circlebox Blog via RSS or Email so we can run more great giveaways in the future!

2. Tweet this post using the “Retweet” button at the bottom of this post. Make sure you don’t remove the “RT @callumchapman” bit, otherwise I won’t know you tweeted it!

3. Leave a comment on this post telling me and Chris why you want to win a subscription to become an “Access All Areas” member – make sure you leave a valid email address so we can contact you!

That’s it… Easy, huh?! The competition closes on Sunday the 14th of March, 2010. Be sure to enter before midnight (GMT) on that day for your entry to count! The winners will receive emails on Monday the 15th; please reply to the email within 48 hours just to let me know you’ve received the email!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any textures, but I’ve been hard at work making some recently, mainly for a secret project that I am working on with the great Benjamin Reid (Nouveller). Stay tuned for more information on that in the coming weeks and months!

Anyway, this pack, which I decided to post here at Circlebox Blog, includes eight high-resolution textures which were hand-drawn using various colored pens on card. They are completely free of charge, and can be used in both personal and commercial projects!

Preview

The total pack comes in at almost 55mb, and can all be downloaded at once in a .ZIP archive file.

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Good Wives and Warriors (GWAW) is the creative partnership of Becky Bolton and Louise Chappell, who met each other whilst studying at the Glasgow School of Art. Rebecca means ‘good wife’ and Louise means ‘warrior’, and together they create weird and wonderful illustrations and sprawling wall paintings. They have participated in exhibitions all around the world, including Europe, the USA, South America and Australia, and are still continuing to work on their projects using their unique and experimental approach. They are currently based in London.

They have worked for a huge amount of clients including some very popular brands such as Adidas, Swatch, MTV and Urban Outfitters. There client list is growing, and it’s easy to see why if you take a look at there incredible work which is showcase below.

The Work of “Good Wives and Warriors”

Good Wives and Warriors Links

Be sure to check out a few of these links to keep up to date with this great pair of artists!

• GWAW’s Homepage
• GWAW’s Shop
• GWAW’s Behance
• GWAW’s Flickr

I am hoping to get a new artist showcase out to you every week from now on. They’re a great source of inspiration, help the blog grow, and will hopefully help the featured artist or agency grow, too. It’s a great thing for everybody! So if you like this post, please be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss anything like this in the future, and help promote the post by using the buttons below to stumble it, digg it and bump it! Thanks!

As all of my readers know, me and Fiancée went to Barcelona last week, from Wednesday the 24th to Sunday the 28th. This is just a quick post to share a few of my favorite shots from the trip, which will hopefully serve as a little bit of inspiration for you guys and girls!

The Hotel: Hotel Silken Diagonal

We stayed a really modern hotel called Silken Diagonal. The lobby was fantastic, and was even better at night when the bar was glowing blue. The rooms themselves were superb, complete with a see-through bathroom; the bathroom walls were made of glass! If you’re looking to go to Barcelona, don’t get put off by this – the toilet is in a separate room! I can’t recommend this hotel enough, so be sure to check it out if you’re ever heading over to Barcelona for a few days!

The building and interior itself was designed by a Barcelona based architect, and looked superb from all angles.

Amazing Architecture

One of the things Barcelona is famous for, and what we were more impressed by, was the great architecture throughout the city. There were so many impressive buildings, old and new.

Public Parks

We walked everywhere in Barcelona instead of using public transport (although it looked great!). The main reason for this is because we wanted to see as much as possible – traveling underground on the metro tends to mean missing things! So with our trusty canvas shoes we probably stacked up at least 60 miles worth of walking over three days. Yes, our legs killed, and our feet were even worse – but it was well wroth it! Along the way to main attractions such as the Ramblas, we found loads of public parks, some of which contained some amazing sculptures and buildings.

The Ramblas

Probably the most visited attraction in Barcelona. It’s full of market stalls selling rabbits, mice, turtles, chickens, ferrets and various other animals, “Hello” and “Hola” magazine stalls and some pretty awesome shops. Not to mention the various performers and human statues.

The City Life

I loved the center of the city, it was full of designer shops and awesome Spanish stores, and plenty of English ones, too! Crossing the road is quite scary if you’re use to sensible driving, there are about a million mopeds and motorbikes whizzing around everywhere you look, and if you’re going to risk crossing the road when the green man is flashing, you better sprint! Here’s a few shots of the very center of Barcelona.

Wanna see more?

That’s enough for this post, but if you want see more there are another 100+ photos on my Flickr profile, including more architecture, graffiti and just about everything else, be sure to check it out!

The first two months of 2010 have been very busy, exciting and at times, a little stressful! This article is a quick run-through of everything me and my Fiancée have been up to in the early stages of 2010!

Home Hunting!

This month has been a very busy one for both me and my Fiancée, which is why there haven’t been all too many new articles recently! We have been hunting for somewhere to live (our first home together) for a few weeks now, and have looked round several properties; some nice and some terrible! We have finally found somewhere, and had a stressful, expensive and exciting few days of paying fees, filling in forms and getting them handed in on time! At last, it’s all done; now we’re just playing the waiting game – the forms are being sent off so they can nose into our daily lives to find out whether we’re loyal enough to look after someones property; I never knew renting in my country would be so difficult!

Moving out is going to be excellent. As well as getting to spend much more time with my gorgeous Fiancée, I’ll have a little more time to focus on my work, as well as having a real office space instead of a small corner in my very small bedroom which I somehow managed to fit a double bed, a 32″ LCD TV, a Blu-Ray Cinema System, an office and lots of books, clothes and various other things in; I’m looking very forward to being able to sleep in a different room to where I work!

Barcelona!

With the majority of the stressful stuff out the way now regarding home hunting, we have a few nights away in the busy city of Barcelona, which we hear is quite stunning! We will be staying at Hotel Silken Diagonal, a very modern hotel (inside and out) designed by famous Barcelona architect Juli Capella.

It’s going to do nothing but good to get away for a few days and have a nice relaxing break and see a few famous sights. I’m planning on taking lots of photos so expect a follow-up post! Hopefully Barcelona will provide plenty of inspiration and I’ll come back refreshed with lots of great ideas!

A Huge Thanks!

Over the past few weeks, Circlebox Blog has been featured on various blogs across the design community, and the subscriber count has doubled since the New Year. I’d like to say a huge thanks to all the subscribers and visitors for your support over the past few months! Another huge thanks goes out to those advertising on Circlebox – if you haven’t already, be sure to check their sites out! If you fancy joining in and getting some great targeted traffic from Circlebox, be sure to check out the Circlebox BuySellAds Listing. You can grab yourself an advertisement spot from $10 per month with 65,000 impressions!

When I said this is a quick run-through, I meant it! We’re leaving in about one hours time for the airport, and flying out at about 4pm. So, whilst I’m gone, feel free to check out some old articles by browsing through the growing archives! I’ll probably post the odd photo from time to time via Twitter if Barcelona is big on WiFi spots, so be sure to add me on Twitter and Facebook to keep up to date with my daily-doings! Expect a follow-up post sometime next week!