2 years of inspiration, and still counting! :-)
Written by: milardovich | August 5, 2010
I’m not used to write personal things in this blog, but today is a very special day both in my life such as in Leonardo’s. Today is the 2nd birthday from our small portal for art, Coolshowcase.
I would like to share with you a small story about how the idea was born, how were the first months, and the actual situation and future of the website, you don’t need to read it all, but if you like our project you could write a comment in this article to give us some feedback(we would really appreciate that).
I think it was in the summer of 2007 when I met Leonardo, at the moment I was making my first steps with web programming, and he had the popular webmaster resources website webnova. I clearly remember that I was looking for some PHP scripts for some experiments I had made, and in the footer of the website I read ‘Firmat’. I couldn’t believe what my eyes were seeing. There were other people near my area making the same thing I was making, and using the same new technologies as mine. I didn’t hesitate and I sent Leo and email making some questions of(I don’t remember very well) some linux topics. I had a quite good feedback and we were in touch for some months sending each other some emails, and sharing some useful information (and ubuntu CD’s 
).
It wasn’t until May of 2007 when Leonardo proposed me to start with a graphic design showcase. He send me an email with 2 basic layouts he had made, and with an open source software called Plogger, which at the moment it wasn’t so developed like nowadays. He said it could be an easy work and I just said ‘yes’ without thinking. We met some more times in the year 2007 and we discussed about how the project should run. We also had the chance to assist to some free software and web2.0 events in some cities of Argentina, and share really good and pleasurable moments together.
It wasn’t until August of 2008 that we decided to release the project. At the moment it wasn’t so mature like here, but we had a very good reaction from the users, and we had in some months a very active comunity which were responsible to report as many bugs as they could find. After some months we could say that coolshowcase wasn’t officialy longer in Alpha status. In that year we also appeared in a lot of well-known websites, and we had a very good promotion from some other artist.
The year 2009 came with a lot of good news. One year after the official release we had more than 1.000 registered users, and always more and more works. The works were also growing and always more and more people came to the community.Today we are pleased to announce that we have; 1702 papers approved, added tools 6592 and 1668 active users. This is great!
For personal reasons we couldn’t meet each other this year, but we were always in touch and making a lot of things to improve coolshowcase. We made the resources section, a lot of radical optimization changes, our weekly journal! (released last week), and so many other smaller modifications that maybe you didn’t notice, but were made to simplify your stay in CSC.
At the moment, we have some experimental things in our test host, and we are thinking on releasing some new features, specially in the topic of usability. We don’t have actually so much time to develop like we used to have in 2007, but we’re hard-working in our free time to make CSC better and easier-to-use each day. We are totally open to new suggestions, hand-lending( 
) and productive critics. If you would like to help us, don’t give us money, the best you can do for us is keep on spreading the spirit of coolshowcase to your comrades and friends.
We just want to say thank you to all of you, for using and trusting in CoolShowcase to be your daily dossis of inspiration, we hope to see you soon again in this website!
Cheers!, The CoolShowcase.com staff.
Categories: Announces, Improves, Inspiration | No Comments »
Creative Calendar
Written by: leocorrea | February 23, 2010
Because we love the illustrations, I show you this excellent creative work of design studio “Knock Knock“. It is an illustrated calendar that shows through the eyes of truckers from around the world. One for each month. 
Omar Thanks for the link!
Categories: Cool Sites, Cool Works, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Mathias Kollros
Written by: leocorrea | February 23, 2010
Mathias Kollros Austrian is a digital artist specializing in digital art. Knows how to create an atmosphere very captivating and surreal scenes. Kollros focuses mainly on fantasy art, portraying scenes from fiction and, wizards, dragons, witches, ogres, princesses, etc.. With an impeccable management technique of texture, color and light this artist has not ceased to amaze me since I learned of their work.
Mathias build different situations and characters that surprise you. Revealing a decent creativity and sensitivity of a complete artist. Your website conveys the same spirit mysterious and surreal work. Highly recommended.
Gallery of his work on CGSociety.
Categories: Cool Artists, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Robert Crumb: Critical, Satirical, Subversive…
Written by: leocorrea | February 19, 2010
Robert Dennis Crumb (born August 30, 1943) — known as R. Crumb — is an American artist and illustrator recognized for the distinctive style of his drawings and his critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream. He currently lives in Southern France with his wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb.
Crumb was a founder of the underground comix movement and is regarded as its most prominent figure. Though one of the most celebrated of comic book artists, Crumb’s entire career has unfolded outside the mainstream comic book publishing industry. One of his most recognized works is the “Keep on Truckin’” comic, which became a widely distributed fixture of pop culture in the 1970s. Others are the characters Devil Girl, Fritz the Cat, and Mr. Natural.
Categories: Cool Artists | No Comments »
The Hard Art of Simon Bisley
Written by: leocorrea | February 17, 2010
I met Bisley’s work for years. If you would have to define their art in two words say, ‘toughness and sensuality. ” With a line so definite that seems cut your face, Bisley has sought and found his own style and has earned a respectable place among the international comic artists.
Simon Bisley (born March 4, 1962) is a respected British artist of the comic strip. It is known for his work in 1990, ABC Warriors, Lobo and Sláine. For its work using acrylics and inks. Contrary to what you may think you do not use airbrush.
His work is sometimes dark and violent, filled with monsters, creatures and muscular men. In his work, women are athletic, with big breasts and are loaded with thrilling sensuality. His style reveals the influence of masters such as Frank Frazetta and Bill Sienkiewicz.
Categories: Cool Artists | No Comments »
Optimization changes
Written by: milardovich | September 15, 2009
For several days we have been doing maintenance work on the site and we were able to significantly improve the load time of images and the web in general.
We thank all members who have contributed their bit to keep on developing coolshowcase, notifying about the different bugs that were emerging, and we also would like to ask you to notify us if you find any fault, error or unusual behavior at the site .
Categories: Announces | No Comments »
RSS dates issue fixed
Written by: milardovich | September 12, 2009
I’ve just fixed the RSS dates issues that shows all the items on the year 1970. Thanks to Jono for sending us a message explaining the bug . Now you can keep enjoying the feeds with the correct dates.
Categories: Announces | No Comments »
Happy birthday!
Written by: milardovich | August 5, 2009
Just writing this post to announce that it is already a year of coolshowcase is online. Really, the project started about two years ago since Leonardo sent me an email posing the idea to do a job much more complex than those i usually made.
Today, i was looking in my old backups in search of some old files I needed for a project and then, suddenly, I find a cd that said “backup showcase 07-07-2007″. It was one of the first backup that you made the code coolshowcase (then did not even have the name, it was simply “the showcase”). That got me quite nostalgic! Haha.
Well, we would like to wholeheartedly thank all the people registered in our small community (already over 1000 mad-for-arts), and especially those who were involved with the project from the outset, helping of without ask nothing in change.THANK YOU!. It seems inappropriate to start giving names because I will surely forget some and I prefer to avoid any possible friction and 
.
We will not rest on our “laurels” in any way. I am sure that this is just the first year of many that will take this young project.
Both Leonardo and I are continually looking for (despite the setbacks) perfection and maturity to the site, although we recognize that sometimes is still immature in some respects. But we promise to do our best for that to change.
Finally, we want to thank again to users, the few fans we have, and all the people who are already part of coolshowcase and makes every day the project progresses!.
Cheers! Sergio.
Categories: Announces | 4 Comments »
::Changes in moderation
Written by: milardovich | August 4, 2009
We have received a lot of emails asking about the way of moderation of the showcase. Well, until last week we just “delete or aprove” the jobs, but now, we implemented a new method of moderation: we can also accept jobs that will not appear in the homepage.(BTW, now you will also receive an email in case of your work will not be aproved).
I think it is a better way to add more works on the showcase and it’s better for new artists that want to have an “online portfolio”.
Categories: Announces, Improves | No Comments »
Be a part of coolshowcase! :-)
Written by: milardovich | July 22, 2009
We invite you to get involved by coolshowcase suggesting content (whether resources, images, links and soon videos) via twitter. Click here to visit our twitter. All the content is welcome .
Categories: Announces | No Comments »
