Veerle's blog

Roger published an interesting discussion on “Light text on dark background vs. readability” . I think that most accessibility/usability experts have no clue how hard life of a designer really is. We constantly have to battle in our mind coming up with something creative and if not we fail in our profession and will likely not convince any clients. The thing is, where do you draw the line? It is about making the right choices and that’s what I did when I designed this site.  I know that some things fail on this site with the color analyzer but they only contain 1 or 2 lines of text tops. My main concern was the article section and I made sure these were within the recommend guidelines. Because that’s were you are likely to stay the longest.

Oh man! Never let me design something again for somebody who’s into accessibility, those guys are a major pain in the ass… JUST KIDDING!! :o) Maybe there is a little bit of truth in the fact that it is more difficult to design something really nice and take as good as all accessibility factors into account. So it was quite a challenge because I also had restrictions in what I could change and what I could not…

Not sure if this is a cool tip, but this is something I always do when I start on a full bleed design in Photoshop (I mean a design for print, obviously). I thought I share this one with you…

Just got back from Paris today. After @media London, we decided to travel a bit and go to Paris with Dave. It was an honor to speak on @media about design with 2 of my favorite colleague designers Jon Hicks and Cameron Moll.

On a regular basis I receive requests on how to create those Mac OS X backgrounds, so this weekend I played around in Illustrator trying to create a nice looking desktop using gradient mesh. This all goes well as long as I stick with 1 simple shape, some organic looking bow. As soon as I try to add other bows by adding gradient mesh points things fall apart. Using separate layers each using transparency seems to be the solution, but still this ain’t no walk in the park if you want to achieve the complexity as those real Mac OS X desktops. I congratulate and bow for the designer who made those. I gave up and resorted to Photoshop CS2 and hoped for a better result…