Veerle's blog

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…

You can’t believe how many times a week I get the question what the font’s name is that I use for my titles on this site.  So high time for an introduction to René Albert Chalet, the designer of the lovely Chalet typeface. René Albert Chalet could easily be one of the most underappreciated typeface designers in history. He did significant contributions to the fashion industry (especially prêt-à-porter clothing in the 1960s and ‘70s) and to the world of type, yet he still is an elusive figure. His main contribution is setting the commercial model for the present fashion industry.

Did you come across the following situation before? This happens to me several times a day when I’m designing : you want to scale a huge picture that you just pasted in a smaller Photoshop document. The transform handles are out of reach, way off screen. What I normally do is change the ‘Reference point location’ to top left and I enter a value of 10% as width and height and then I drag the handles to achieve size I want. But there is a better, much easier and faster way, namely ‘Fit to screen’ or command/control + 0. Maybe it’s a tip a lot of you already know, or maybe not? So simple and yet I never thought of this before. Well hopefully I’m not the only one.

Ok! I know a lot of you have been waiting for this very moment. So here it is, part 2, all wrapped up in a (H.264 AKA MPEG-4 Part 10) movie for you to download and watch (14.9 MB). You have to excuse the fact that I often have to drag things back into the movie. I’m using just a small portion of my (big) screen, so the center is way out of the capture area (for example when I zoom in or name the layers).

A reader raised the question why I don’t use the Live Trace instead of tracing the sketch with the Pen tool. It’s simply because the lines of my sketch aren’t ‘clean’ enough to make it work with Live Trace. The outcome depends a lot on your orignal, as you can see here in these experiments. Not that you can’t do magic tricks with this tool, of course you can.