Veerle's blog

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.

Do you remember my post about those stunning photorealistic drawings? They use complex gradient meshes to achieve such result. If you have some Illustrator experience and you wonder how such gradient mesh works or you wonder how to start, I’m sure this tutorial might help.

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 ;-)

Today I will bring you the next step of our tutorial about designing a CSS based template page. This part is about choosing the right color scheme and creating a nice background pattern for our webpage. Here is part 1 for those who missed it and want to catch up.

As you all know, my initial idea was to give you a small tutorial on how to create glassy buttons in an easy way. That’s why it might look a bit odd to you that we will think about color-schemes in the 2nd part of our tutorial. This should actually be our first step, then the creation of the buttons, the background etc.

I’ve been using Photoshop CS for a while now and some of the new features are really cool. For instance the previews of the Artistic, Brush Strokes, Distort, Sketch and Stylize filters are very handy. You get a good idea of what the filter will accomplish after applying it.