365 Awesome Designers

Last week we brought you a daily dose of inspiration which included a new project by Austrian designer Matthias Mentasti. Prefering pixel pushing to skiing, this year he's going to be highlighting the work of a different designer purely to spread some inspiration around on a daily basis. The project's called 365 Awesome Designers and simple though it may be, already there's a buzz about it.

"I love design and had the idea of publishing a new designer everyday for the next year," says Mentasti. "I literally did a quick and dirty solution for the site so I could go live on 1 January. The feedback on the site is stunning so far. I've received tons of mails and tweets about the site including those from designers who want to see their work on 365awesomedesigners, which was totally surprising, because the site has only been up a few weeks. The help of the design community is playing a part in its success."

Natrually, it features many of the creatives Mentasti likes most, and he selects them from quite a few areas of design, from illustrators to user experience designers. The site was put together in WordPress and links back through to portfolios of images in Dribbble. Already he's featured the likes of Dan Matutina and Lukas Haider - you can see there's a taste for grainy textured retro illustration styles.

"These days, Tobias van Schneider is definitely the designer who inspires and influences me most. I just love his attention to details and his recognisable and classy style. But there are tons of other awesome designers out there, who inspire me in my daily work. James McDonald, Dann Petty or Eric Hoffmann to name a few," he continues.

A miscalculation means that Mentasti will get one day off in 2012. Being a leap year it has 366 days. At least that will give him a chance to catch up with his own work. As a freelance web designer he's busy with a redesign of Bikemap, which has 150,000 users.