Well it’s two sleeps till Santa so I thought we’d take a look at some of the festive design work from around the net to get us all in the festive spirit.

This year Cre:Source ran it’s 3rd annual photoshop design contest and as usual had hundreds of entries. With a pretty depressing brief “Apocalyptic Christmas – The cost of living is up, our savings are gone, our jobs are at risk and the economy is in free-fall. Now all we need is a seasonal greeting card to match!” here are some of the winners and the best runners up.

There has also been some really good design work in the Christmas Ad campaigns this year a few of which I have included below.

Finally, if you’ve left it till the last minute to get your loved ones a gift and don’t want to brave the shops, why not do your bit for those less fortunate and have a last minute look at the charity sites. Oxfam as usual has an excellent array of cyber gifts with real world applications, and they have joined forces with one of my favorite quirky artists, Edward Monkton, to help promote their cause.

So from everyone at DDA, we would like to wish all our readers a very merry Christmas and hope that Santa brings you everything you asked for.

Got another fantastic example of graphic design work for you today, these come from a MR Danny Ronald Hananto, an excellent designer from Singapore.

He has quite a distinct style which you’ll see in many of his pieces but its extremely detailed and he does some really impressive colour work alongside the stylisation.

Here are a few of my choice picks from his Gallery, you can see more at deviantart.

Sanctuaire by the Design Chamber

Mystica by the Design Chamber

Certainly something special, I even like his business card!

This is definitely one to watch to see how things should be done and gleam some inspiration for work you do in the future. Although amazing I do think the design has limitation (in an application sense) but this doesn’t stop it being beautiful.

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As a further note I got myself a new graphics tablet this week, it’s an early Christmas pressie but I couldn’t resist start to sue it right away!

Specifically it’s a Wacom Intuos3 and is an excellent piece of tech, the marketing blurb says it has 1,024 levels of pen and eraser sensitivity and has advanced tilt sensitivity.

Contrast to my old tablet it has some really useful ExpressKey buttons, a great feature that I don’t know how I lived without!

The tablet itself is solid and stable and not too chunky or in the way, it’s attractive and an odd graphite/silver colour. The pen is also really nice, it has a soft texture and is a decent size and weight.

It also comes with a fairly nice optical mouse but its no where near as sharp as my Razer mouse.

Definitely a recommended product.

What pen tablets do you guys recommend and what do you think of our featured designer today? Let us know with a comment!