Yum! Chocolate and Radish!

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If you're a Photos.com member and receive its monthly newsletter, you're familiar with the Photos.com Challenge that we run on our Graphics.com site. For those out of the loop, we'll explain: each month we provide a handful of thematically-related images from the collection, with a challenge to create an original image using at least part of several of them. At the end of each month, six entries are picked and receive Photos.com subscriptions of one or three months in duration. The concept is simple enough, yet after more than four years the Challenge is still running strong, with some amazingly creative entries to be viewed and commented on each round. But if you're familiar with the Photos.com Challenge, what about the AbleStock.com Design Brief?

The AbleStock.com collection resembles that of Photos.com but with a significant difference: every image is provided in 25 and 50 MB sizes. These are ideal for use in print pieces, since even a highly-cropped segment of such an image will be large enough to reproduce well. The Design Brief has a more formal structure than that of the Challenge, since each iteration involves the presentation of a brief for a design for a mythical client. These have included designs for a wine label, a CD cover, a brochure for a chain of sushi restaurants, an environmental poster, a billboard for a telecommunications firm: well, you get the idea. The July Brief was for the cover of a bar of chocolate for a Belgian firm introducing a new line containing a variety of tempting vegetable flavors, including scallion, tomato and radish. Not the easiest thing in the world to design effectively, we think you'll agree. The illustration above, by Craig Rogers, was one of the winning entries.

The current Design Brief is a bit less tricky, with the design requirement being the creation of the cover of the inaugural issue of New Food magazine, which "will focus on new trends in the production of raw ingredients, as well as the producers, chefs and restaurateurs that embody this philosophy." If you're up for stretching your design skills a bit in a fun and supportive environment, we encourage you to check out all four design challenges on Graphics.com. As well as being fun, you can take home some subscriptions to various Jupiterimages stock content sites. In the case of the Design Brief you can snag one of three prizes of three-month subscriptions to AbleStock.com.