I was excited to receive The Smashing Book - User Interface Design in Modern Web Applications. This is the first book from the excellent Smashing Web site. I have not had a chance to read the book but I'm impressed with the production quality and have already absorbed several interesting web design tips just by skimming the book.

Want to recreate the iPhone, Macbook, some Apple icons or wallpapers? If you're an Apple fanboy (or girl) then this is a perfect combination of Photoshop and Apple. Plus you'll gain some new Photoshop skills. Check out this useful list of tutorials from 1st webdesigner.

I found a great tutorial on dawghouse design studios today. Check it out. I love postage stamps. If you want to shortcut a few steps check out my Photoshop postage stamps brush set. If you don't want to buy try out the free demo.

PhotoshopIsland.com is in the process of moving to a new, faster and better hosting option. As with all change there's always a few bumps in the road and this is not exception. You can still purchase products and enjoy all our freebies. All will be in good shape very soon.

If you have not signed up to our email list you should consider it. Besides our FREEBIES that are available to all PhotoshopIsland.com visitors we now have special MEMBERS ONLY FREEBIES. You can only access these items through a special login for members. If you want an idea as to what sort of Photoshop FREEBIES you’ll find check out the previews at the bottom of the sign up page.

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You can spread holiday joy to your friends, family, or customers with a personalized holiday card from you! Try out this alternate version sample of our Holiday Card Photoshop Templates Volume 1 Easy for FREE. You can order prints, send out digitally or post on your favorite image sharing site. The PhotoshopIsland.com standard license applies.

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The great people at Mpix have provided me with a special discount code for orders of 4”x8” prints. This size is perfect for holiday cards and work perfectly with our Holiday Card Set Volume 1. This is the product I used for my holiday cards (but did not get this nice discount).

If you already have your 4”x8” print art ready to go just head over to Mpix.com and place your order. If you need art for your prints make sure you check out the PhotoshopIsland.com Holiday Card templates. They are easy and fast to use. You should also check out the 4”x8” templates available at EasyDigitals.com. If you need instructions on adding your image to our Holiday template check out our tutorials.

Here’s the details on the offer...

Promo code:   psisland
10% off 4x8 prints w/ envelopes
One-time use
Expires Jan 1st

More about Mpix... their simple Website and software let anyone create professional quality prints, press products, greeting cards, books, and more. And when your prints are ready Mpix will ship them fast! Order now and make sure you get your holiday cards out to your friends and family.

Giving a photo calendar as a gift to a loved one this Christmas is the gift that keeps on giving. Every month your recipient will be able to reveal a little more of your present as they turn the page to the next month. Since it is a personalized gift, you are able to decide what photos go into the gift. The possibilities for a photo calendar are endless. You can do a family calendar to give out to the entire extended family. Or you can concentrate on grandparents and grandchildren photos for the grandparents in the family. You can even help friends relive good memories of vacations together or fun outings.

Christmas gifts today are becoming more impersonalized and costly. Photo calendars are the opposite. Not only will each calendar cost you a few dollars each, but they are very meaningful. Photographs hold a lot of sentimental value in them. They allow the viewer to remember beautiful time and people who mean a lot to them in their life. Combine this with a calendar and you have a gift which makes the user feel happy every day as they use their gift. It is also a very useful gift as you can help them remember birthdays and other events quite efficiently. While creating your personalized photo calendar, add in dates such as birthdays, anniversaries, holidays and other important dates to remember.

PhotoshopIsland.com offers Brushes & EPS for Photoshop that allows you, the user, to create your very own personalized calendar right at home on your computer. This is an inexpensive yet creative idea to be able to create as many personalized calendars as you want for one great price. You can save yourself publishing fees by printing your creation on high quality ink jet printer paper. Mini calendars that will be used for desktops and small offices that be printed on regular photo paper at stores such as Walgreens and Wal-mart or get great right from your computer professional quality prints from Mpix.com (my photographic print vendor of choice). The Photoshop Island feature allows you to use your imagination and artistry to create one of a kind calendars with exciting features and tools. There are also royalty free images available that can help make your calendar even more special.

This Christmas, use your imagination to create a one-of-a-kind gift for your loved ones by making a personalized photo calendar. The gift is meaningful, fun, unique and inexpensive to make. Best of all, it is useful all year long.

You already know about our Holiday Card Set 12 Layered Photoshop Designs Volume 1. What you might not know is that they work perfectly with the photo service Mpix. I designed these 4"x8" templates with Mpix in mind for print ordering. Here's what's super cool, I customized one of my templates and order  4"x8" cards for myself Sunday. Boy was I impressed when later the same day I received a message stating that my order had been shipped. WOW! The Sunday after Thanksgiving and Mpix was working hard. I want all my customers to use Mpix!

I'm busy putting together a new currency oriented product and got to thinking about money and art.

In so many ways, we're defined by our relationship with money. How much of it you have, what you do with it and what your attitudes are about it say a lot about who you are as a person. So it's only natural for artists to explore the subject of money in their work - but some artists take the exploration to really provocative and even mind-bending extremes.

I think the most intriguing and original "money artist" may be J.S.G Boggs, a native of New Jersey who travels the world "spending" hand-made drawings as well as, more recently, computer-generated images of paper currency. Though he's become quite well known in the art world and his work is displayed in the Smithsonian, The Art Institute of Chicago and many other places, he prefers to do transactions with merchants who don't realize that a Boggs one-dollar bill could be worth thousands of dollars. He only "spends" the face value of the currency his artwork depicts. Then he goes and sells the receipt and whatever change the merchant may have given him to an art buyer. It's then the art buyer's job to track the merchant down and negotiate a price for the Boggs bill.

How brilliant is that? Representational art meets performance art. This is the kind of stunt Andy Kaufman might have aspired to, but he wasn't nearly this clever or ambitious.

Money origami, or "moneygami," is becoming an art form all its own. Some artists use money to make cute, innocent designs that would seem to clash with the cold, hard world of economics. Others fold and twist currency so that it highlights the face on the bill, then further bend the bill to make a commentary on that face - giving George Washington the pointy ears of a court jester's cap, for example.

For those who think the purpose of art is to pull us out of our everyday assumptions and examine our lives more deeply, money art certainly does the trick. If you make a paper-mache sculpture of a dog with dollar bills, have you wasted money? If you sell it, doesn't the price you set become a part of the statement your art is making? Say you used 200 one dollar bills on the sculpture, and then sold it for $2,000? Or $20? Or exactly $200? The monetary value others place on the work becomes an integral part of the work.

What is money besides paper? And since our currency is no longer backed by gold, isn't the value of that paper a kind of institutionalized illusion? Appreciation of any art requires a suspension of disbelief. Aren't we habitually suspending disbelief by collectively agreeing to give paper and pieces of cheap metal that they don't, objectively, have?

I think what I love about Boggs is that, to me, his work suggests that this institutionalized delusion isn't necessarily a bad thing. There's something charming about the fact that he gets art buyers to scurry all over town looking for some average Joe who agreed to treat a Boggs bill like a real bill. Money can drive people apart and when you look at the world and its history it's not much of a stretch to believe money is the root of all evil. But maybe it's also an everyday symbol of our attempts to unite. Your delusion meets my delusion and, in the process, we achieve a kind of harmony.