The Brilliant creative team blog

Martin Schoeller is a New York based photographer hailing from Germany whose style is distinguished by similar treatment of all subjects whether they are celebrities or unknown, capturing them with a slightly embellished visual representation of their personality traits.

It seems that there is nothing Martin can't get people to do which ultimately ends in a fun insight into the subject.

His most recognizable work are his portraits, shot with similar lighting, backdrop, and tone. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Outside Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, GQ, Esquire, and Vogue.

Whilst doing a bit of research on uber long websites I found this fantastic design for the Volkswagen Beetle, not only is it beautifully designed but very different!

This is a totally awesome animation by Philippe Gamer. At first I thought it was some sort of promo for Nissan but maybe just an unorthodox choice of vehicle to use, you would expect to see massive Hummers or tuned Gtr's. The ending is fantastic too.

Most children are amazed by their first pop-up book, and I felt like a kid again when I first saw Beercamp 2012. A website promoting the after-party of the 2012 Front-Ends conference programme (a gathering for front-end lovers to discover the current trends to build a professional career out of innovative website front-end development), it takes the pop-up book idea to the next logical step. All built in HTML 5, it shows just how creative this new web technology can be. Go to Beercamp 2012 and get caught by the monsters.

Ji Yong Ho is a Korean artist who uses tires to create new sculptures that show the material's possible mutations, reborn as a whole new other form of life. His works vary from an 11-inch-tall dog to a 10-foot long shark.

There are many more showcased on his website from animals to hybrid animal/humans to total mutants check it out.

This week conceptual designer and illustrator Ralph McQuarrie past away. Even if you don?t know it, you will all have seen his work come to life on screen.

Ralph was the concept artist behind the original Star Wars trilogy, George Lucas commissioned Ralph to draw up some scenes from a space-fantasy script and ended up designing most of the main characters including Darth Vader, Chewbacca, R2-D2 and C-3PO. His artwork heavily influenced the film with Lucas taking a lot of reference from Ralph's artwork when considering scenery, buildings and vehicles.

McQuarrie played the role of General Pharl McQuarrie in The Empire Strikes Back and he also appears in Echo Base on Hoth in the film's opening sequence.

So not only did he get to design Star wars, and star in it but an action figure in his likeness as "General McQuarrie" was produced for Star Wars 30th anniversary... how awesome is that.

Star Wars is not Ralph's only triumph, he also worked on the original Battlestar Galactica TV series, E.T., Cocoon, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, batteries not included and Jurassic Park.

Cheers for all the beautiful illustration and inspiration Ralph.

Summer Streets is a series of typographic illustrations designed for the New york summer streets festival produced by Chris Labrooy. The festival is all about using New Yorks streets to play, walk, bike, and breathe, getting outdoors, having fun and enjoying NYC's environment.

Nearly seven miles of NYC's streets are opened for the festival over three Saturdays during August.

Check out the rest of the series or visit the Summer Streets festival website for more info.

This morning I stumbled upon the portfolio of Max Kostenko whilst googling the date for mothers day (It's the 18th by the way), I'm not sure what I clicked on to find Max's portfolio but I'm damn glad I did... the power of random link clicking hey.

Max is a Russian Illustrator and that's about it really because everything on his blog is in Russian so all that is left is to go and enjoy his stunning work.

Seeing how the 'social dictatorship' that is Facebook is forcing its users to switch to the new timeline layout, we decided to bite the bullet and do something about it now. I wont rant on about how unintuitive the customisation options are or how bad the compression is when you upload an image, if you haven't experienced this yet then you're in for a treat.

I wanted to see what others had been doing with their space other than use a poorly cropped image and found a huge amount of blog posts on the subject with a few people changing their cover images weekly... and yet once again, Facebook have to go and spoil the fun with a set of ridiculous rules such as no calls to action or contact information, I'm sure this list will start to expand over time.

80 Creative Facebook cover images.