Veerle's blog

Just a quick question on this gray Friday here in Belgium. I’ve put up my thinking cap for the next version of this blog and I wonder if I may pick your brain for a minute?

I’m constructing a grid of things that I consider important and was wondering if I should keep the calendar item in the next revision? Do you use the calendar to browse to older posts or not? Other suggestions are welcome too. Thanks in advance.

The last days a thought crossed my mind about conversation topics in shops. Don’t know how it is where you are living but here in Belgium not all shopping is done in large outlets.

We have a lot of little shops where you can buy meat, bread, groceries etc. While waiting my turn I’ve noticed that almost 90% of the time people talk about the weather. So I can imagine that the owner must know a lot about it since he hears it several times a day :-)

Now on to my question that has been in my head for the last day or two. Is this a global thingy? I’m asking because I have a hard time picturing such conversation in a country where the sun always shines. Let’s say that we have a rather bizarre climate, for example 2 weekends ago I woke up in a snowed landscape. And the week before we had a light summer breeze. So plenty to talk about! A light topic to get into the weekend ;-)

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.

I have this typical habit of giving my HD a personal name, and mostly I give it the code-name of the machine or a name from one of my favorite TV series etc. My new Apple PowerBook 17” is called Hammerhead, its actual code-name. Don’t they all have cool code-names? Take “Dark Star” for instance code-name for an Xserve G5, or the original PowerMac G4 was called Yikes! Here is full list for your inspiration ;-)

These are some of the names we use: Hammerhead, Dark Angel, our Airport Extreme is called SD6 (not that we’re bad…but SD6 is the bad alliance in the stunning TV series Alias), ... We always change its icon too, another habit I guess ;-)

So now I’m wondering if I’m alone in this. And is this only a Mac thing? Please post how yours is called and free me of this bugging curiosity :-D

2 days ago I made a post about design trends to give you some inspiration and ideas and to lay out an overview of the different popular styles these days. One of my members, Reinier made this comment:

"great post, although these trends are (should be?) known to many designers already, it's nice to see them shortlisted here."

This made me wondering who my readers are. I'm not just asking this out of curiosity. One of the reasons I ask is because I was planning to add some more Photoshop tips & tricks in the future and to post about design in general. This way I get some kind of an idea whether it would be interesting to do this, and if so how advanced or how easy the tips should be.

So I'm just wondering, are most of you web/graphic designers? Would you be interested in reading some designer's advice in general or posts about design related matters?