Veerle's blog

Sometimes readers mail me with the question on what’s the best approach to trace logos or illustrations. They ask if I do it with the Pen tool. Yes, I do, but I have been using this tool for more than 15 years. So it’s safe to say I’m very routined. Still, there are certain situations that I wish there was a tool that could do the job for me. Let’s say on a occasion that you don’t have the time or budget to charge the time needed to redraw company logos that are delivered in jpeg or gif format. The Live Trace option in Illustrator isn’t bad, but it doesn’t give me the expected result on most try-outs (too many nodes or noisy result, path imperfections…) . Recently the developers of an application called Vector Magic gave me the chance to test out their desktop app. Here is a short review…

It has been some time since we last talked about being a print designer. How fun and exciting the web can be it’s still no replacement to physically holding something you created in your hands. An essential tool in doing that is Pantone, you know the industry standard for color specification introduced 45 years ago. The designers landscape has changed a lot in those years and it’s time for something new.

Like I promised in the previous article, we will explore some applications that I have been testing to finally find the one I have been looking for. One of the most important decision factors is the ‘User Interface‘, that’s why I said it has to have the attention to detail like CSSEdit to name one. There is one application that earns that title and it’s called Billings. You feel at home and you don’t see artifacts of badly designed icons or counter productive ways of working. It’s truly a Mac application and it shows the efforts that the engineers have put into it.

I am working on a redesign for for several touristic regio sites here in Belgium. If you think of vacation, you want to see pictures and when I start designing stuff, I want my files to be as big as possible to have all my options open. That’s when e-mailing large files comes into play. You know, we have an Xserve and an FTP account for clients but not all of them are happy or technology minded to use it. You probably have been there too, some of them would even mail 100MB if it would be possible :o)

While I’ve learned HTML back in the day when there weren’t any WYSIWYG editors yet (1996), I’ve always believed in their added value. I never developed websites entirely in the ‘Design view’ (even not during my table-based period), but I always appreciated the fact that I had the choice to switch between ‘Code view’ and ‘Design view’. During my table-based’ period I used DreamWeaver’s ‘Split view’ a lot, this way I kept an eye on what was happening under the hood. If you select an item in the ‘Design view’, the corresponding code is highlighted, a real time saver if you ask me.