Veerle's blog

The last couple of days brought me a lot of inspiration, because of the places I’ve visited. No stress, well expect to catch a train at 6.30 a.m. for Paris after 3 hours of sleep coming back from London. In fact, that was a bit crazy. A little too much in a short time (London, Paris and then driving to Normandy Honfleur). And so, I felt the urge sketch and draw this weekend and so I came up with some ideas, like using art brushes on text in Illustrator ...

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…

Most of you might already know that if you create your pages using CSS, you need to switch off ‘slice-mode’. Slicing and tables are yesterday’s news if you are a web professional. I guess I don’t have to explain why, so we move right onto the practical question: How did I start converting my blog design? First you need to analyze your design and define the areas that will be converted into a container div using an ID or a class.

Some tools don’t get enough attention, this tool might be one of them. You could compare it somehow with the Healing Brush, although there is a difference. This tool works like a regular paint brush, it manipulates the color on your image while the underlying texture stays unaffected. Because of this, you can apply a color change in a more precision way.

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.