Nov 01
5 Steps to achieve nice aqua effect
25 comments 2004 at 02.10 am posted by Veerle
Due to popular demand, here it is, a step-by-step tutorial on how to achieve an aqua effect on a circle. Fire up your Illustrator CS (or 10) and get ready…
Oct 20
Corporate housestyle evolves over time
15 comments 2004 at 04.39 am posted by Veerle
As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, a strong logo can evolve over time and still remain recognizable. When designing a logo you can be influenced by certain design trends. To achieve a strong logo you need to find a certain balance between being timeless and modern. Modern, to keep it a bit trendy and stylish, and timeless, to remain recognizable and strong. Not an easy task.
Oct 14
Corporate identity is important, it sets the style of the entire design
16 comments 2004 at 03.49 am posted by Veerle
Creating a new logo is always a challenge. So how about improving a logo and give it a serious update? That is something different, sometimes leaving some of the old design in the new design is advisable. In other circumstances it’s better to give the housestyle a 180 degrees turn around. It’s my experience that making a design work with an ugly logo can be very hard and a serious restrain on the inspiration. It’s not the first time that a feeling hit me that it doesn’t fit anywhere. Something to that extent can be a deal-breaker.
Oct 06
Simple cogwheel shape in Illustrator CS
17 comments 2004 at 06.38 am posted by Veerle
Recently I needed to draw a cogwheel for a project and I wonder if the steps I used to draw this is actually the fasted way to accomplish this. Maybe there are better, easier and faster ways. Of course taking in account that you need to draw this yourself and that you don’t go looking into some graphics library, since I’m pretty sure you’ll find it in most libraries. Actually this is something you should drag and drop into you “Symbols palette” for future use once you’ve drawn it ;-)
Oct 01
My NetNewsWire icon v2: Listening and learning…
7 comments 2004 at 04.04 am posted by Veerle
Something great about blogging is that I learn a lot because it’s so interactive. I’ve listened to the reactions about the creation of my NetNewsWire icon, so this made me thinking I should just make a second version, an improved version (I may hope!).
Sep 29
Illustrator madness part II
7 comments 2004 at 05.03 am posted by Veerle
Via kottke these stunning photorealistic drawings in Illustrator popped up. After the amazing cruise ship from Kevin Hulsey another fine piece of art that makes me dream of applying gradient meshes. A whole lot of patience is also needed to create such a drawing. You can view the drawing in outline to figure out how it was done. First class stuff!
Sep 24
My NetNewsWire icon
19 comments 2004 at 03.27 am posted by Veerle
I haven’t tried the new beta version of NetNewsWire 2.0b3 yet, but I’ve taken a look and one thing is for sure I don’t like the icon. Especially the hard black border around the satellite and the globe is rather disturbing to me. I’m more a sucker for the smooth or liquid style. So I fired up Illustrator CS and redrew the globe and satellite in my own style.
Aug 26
How do you slice today?
39 comments 2004 at 05.30 am posted by Veerle
Since using CSS to code the design of my webpages I came to the conclusion that less slices are needed compared to old-school table layout. And because of that I just crop and export my images right from Photoshop instead of FireWorks like I used to. For me this is faster and easier, since you have only 1 document instead of 2.
Jul 07
It took them long enough….
10 comments 2004 at 05.29 am posted by Veerle
Not so long ago I had a bit of trouble while installing Quark 6 on my new computer. For those that aren’t up to speed you can still read the horror story here. Quark only grant you a license to install it on one machine. So in my case transferring to a new machine was a serious hassle especially with a company that has a track record for lousy customer service.
Jun 25
Designing a CSS based template - part I
52 comments 2004 at 02.52 am posted by Veerle
This is the start of a step-by-step based tutorial about how to create a CSS based template page. This will be a tutorial consisting of several parts: part 1 covers the creation of the navigation buttons in Photoshop CS*, the 2nd part will be the creation of the background, next on the list is the header and layout of the page and finally the implementation in CSS and XHTML.
