Veerle's blog

Today I want to show you how you can create a spiral ornament in Illustrator and reuse this ornament throughout your artwork multiple times resized, rotated, mirrored, whatever… by turning it into a Symbol. I’ve talked about Symbols before and I showed you how to use the Symbol Sprayer Tool. This time I’ll focus a bit more on the creation of the ornament itself. Like always I’ll talk you through the entire process step by step. By explaining every little detail of each step, this tutorial should be a good exercise for the beginners among you. You’ll learn to use a lot of several tools along the way and you only use the Pen Tool a tiny little bit. Hope you enjoy and learn :)

One of the ways to create nice color combinations is to extract colors from a photo. It’s one of the methods I described in my article Choosing color combinations from a while ago. Adobe® added this feature in the new version of Kuler, an online Flash application from Adobe Labs®. Kuler let’s you create your own color combinations from an interactive color wheel. In this article I will share some of my experience on how I compose color themes in Kuler together with some tips on how to compose your own color combinations.

The Modern Home Design category mostly features design for the house or garden but for today’s post we leave our comfort zone in search for an affordable design hotel in Belgium. London, New York and Paris already had them but since a few years Brussels now also has its own ‘White Hotel’.