Veerle's blog

Last week I worked on a website project that needed some illustrator refreshments. My client delivered me Word files for the content of the website. It included both text and pictures. The text is as always no problem, copy and paste and done with it… The pictures on the other hand needed some redrawing since most of them are bad black and white scans. In one of my previous posts I talked about how to redraw these kind of images in Illustrator with the Pen tool.

Have you ever created a webpage with a Flash animation overlapping other elements of your page? Well I haven’t so far, have been avoiding situations like this. The thing is the Flash content will (almost) always go on top of the other layers regardless of the stacking order ("z-index") of those layers.

Selecting the right font is a job on itself within the process of a project. For me, together with color it’s one of the most important parts of a design. Sometimes, or maybe more then often, we work on projects where we don’t have to choose this, because we need to follow housestyle guidelines. When defining a housestyle is part of the job, then selecting the right fonts is one of the things I start with. Even when I design a logo, finding the suitable font is almost the first step.

Sometimes small tips can make a difference and make life of a designer easier. Here are some of my (frequently used) Photoshop tips:

Sooner or later you have to deal with navigation maps. That is of course if you are a graphic designer. Whether you need it for a brochure, an invitation card or website, you need to draw this in a program like Illustrator. In other words you need a vector-based application, since they give you the flexibility you need.