We had a pleasant surprise the other day. As it turns out, ThinkMule, a design shop we’ve been following for a long time, has turned local. Jeremy Pruitt, the talent and brains behind the operation, has been holding down a steady job at Cultivator for the past year. Lucky dogs.

Do yourself a favor and check out his stuff. You can also take a gander at his Flickr set, and his artist collective, Art Dorks.

He’s the latest addition designer addition to our Recommended Talent list, so give him some love, Denver.

New music service rumblings and rumors via Creativity.

With so many tech-savvy, sleuthing bloggers on the web nowadays, subversive viral campaigns for NIN’s Year Zero and JJ Abrams’ Cloverfield were quickly unearthed and pieced together. The same seems to apply for Nokia, whose upcoming N Series is at the heart of a mysterious, brain-teasing website simply dubbed 070829. With eye-catching, un-branded banner ads leading to it, the site features floating shards of clickable pieces from what appears to be the N81 (a purported rival to the iPhone), which eventually merge and formulate a silhouette of the model.

According to rumors circulating around the blogosphere and even in Fortune magazine, the viral site, traced back to global interactive design firm Lightmaker–whose offices aren’t permitted to discuss the project at this point–is part a new full-scale music service launch from Nokia on August 29th (hence the above URL), which will include an offline London event at the Ministry of Sound nightclub and more importantly, the launch of the new Nokia website. The destination, which already includes a WAP profile for the N81, will let consumers download songs to their PCs and then transfer them to mobile phones and other portable music players, which is a similar model to iTunes. Also its expected that Nokia will let users transfer songs to non-Nokia phones using digital-rights-management software.

We get a decent amount of work submissions to the Egotist. A lot of the work that gets sent to us is really top-notch and a lot of it, well, we think it deserves posting anyway since they took the time to send it. In the end, this is a subjective business we work in. And we’ll stand by our belief that honesty serves Denver best.

Here’s a short list of submissions we’ve recently received:

Adam Espinoza motion graphics.

Big Orange Planet web and branding studio.

Kerndt Design print and motion.

Ever been curious as to who’s been churning out the latest crop of Apple iTunes ads? Or perhaps you’re just in the mood for some ultrasexy motion work. Either way, check out Logan.

Generally speaking, we avoid Photoshop effects like they were the latest Rob Schneider movie. But this one actually seems like it may come in handy at some point.

We’re on the fence about Digital Events, a local production company that sent us a link to their site. So, we thought we’d ask your opinion. Have you ever worked with them? Do you know anything about them? What do you think of their reel? Their client list seems impressive. Their work seems technically sound. They just don’t seem to be pushing it as hard as they could. Your thoughts?

Paula Scher makes us feel miserable about ourselves.