The key to advertising and marketing is to convince your potential customer that they should choose your product or service in the shortest amount of time possible. Email or online marketing campaigns are a great option to reach the quickest audience in the shortest amount of time possible, however, it lacks a great deal of personalization that is very important to today’s consumers. Instead of sending out an impersonal Email campaign, consider going for a more creative and interesting route with a postcard mailing campaign.

We have two new stars of Astute graphics this Month! InkScribe and DynamicSketch! Throughout May we are going to be focusing on both DynamicSketch and InkScribe with tutorials, free webinars and giveaways to help you make drawing in Illustrator a breeze !

When the global economy is still trying to recuperate from recent years of recession and baby boomers and Gen X are struggling to move up the ladder in cash-strapped corporates, generation Y is all set to make their own fortune in innovative ways. But one of the biggest struggles for the Gen Y entrepreneurs is to be taken seriously by investors and customers alike. In fact, most investors, consumers and business professionals believe young entrepreneurs to be amateur leaders just trying to live their impractical dreams.

The awesome Stylism is taking centre stage as our product of the month. The whole of April will be dedicated to Stylism learning material, all focused on getting to grips with this powerful revolutionising plug-in. Even better news is that for this month only, you can now get 30% off Stylism!

1001FreeDownloads.com is a great new site where you can find thousands of images, which are not only free or royalty free, but can also be used for commercial and business purposes. No registrations, just pick and download, that simple.

This HUGE floral bundle from The Hungry JPEG includes over 1900 illustrations and graphics, as well as 17 beautiful fonts. Priced individually these items would cost $688, but just for the month of April we are selling them all together for only $29. Thats an insane saving of 96%!! All items included can be be used for both personal and commercial use.

To make the hard work of every designer a bit easier, we present you links to a variety of very useful resources for designers. Free templates and fonts, color matching, icons creation and much more. It’s great to have such tools at your fingertips!

Free service — M-rank gives you an opportunity to see new hits in top vector images on Shutterstock. You are also able to see in real time the best portfolio by its ratings, by its growth during the week, by marketability, by total amount of vectors, and by the number of added vectors in a month. The analysis of your portfolio or of a separate vector, comparison of your ratings with other authors might help you to find your strengths and weaknesses and become a more successful stock illustrator.

Every month of 2015, we are focusing our attention on one plug-in at a time to show you it’s full potential. This month, we’re focusing on Rastinero — the tool that really does crop images in Illustrator. Not only this but it trims, re-links selections and quickly sets resolutions of embedded images too!

We have made this simple plug-in available so that all Illustrator users can start thinking about the possibilities and let us know what forms of texture they wish for. And we’d very much like you to be a critical part of this suggestion process. This is your chance to shape the power and offerings this new tool will feature!