In doing our part to help build the environmental design community online we’d like to recognize a few folks who’ve already done a fantastic job facilitating community through blogs of their own. Arrows & Icons certainly wouldn’t be without being inspired by and following the lead of these great sites.

Whether you love them or hate them, creative briefs are a necessary part of our creative process. Each one is different, everybody has their own way of writing them, but there is no denying the importance of a good brief.

In celebration of our launch we’re giving away some great design books! Help us spread the word or provide a little feedback for your chance to win. We’ve got three books to give away, so the giveaways are spread across three platforms: Twitter, our email newsletter and right here on the site.

It’s hard to believe that we’re already launching! It seems like so long ago that we started planning this thing, and now here we are, finally coming to fruition and realizing how much more we have yet to do! As you’ll no doubt be able to see, the site in its present form is pretty bare. While it may look a little sparse now, things will start to fill in over the next few months.

Well, we hope you are anyway! Regardless, I’d like to welcome you to the first edition of Arrows & Icons Magazine. As cliché as it may be, our first article will serve as a somewhat necessary introduction to the magazine – we’ll talk about how we came to be where we are, and where we hope to go from here.