Bene

One of the websites I made in the spring of 2009 was for a Belgian contemporary artist/painter/illustrator and friend of mine, Benoît van Innis. His website is a portfolio of his artworks and projects.
Recently, I did an interview with Benoît, asking about his work method and the things inspiring him.
The interview was done in Dutch but i’m translating it to English. (I’m not a native English speaker, I appreciate your correction/comment)

Some time ago, I was designing some avatars and wrote a little about the use of avatars when I read on the EE Blog they were looking for a couple of new avatars for the new default avatar set in the 2.0 version.

Some time ago, a client asked me to do a “green” logo, meaning it had to reflect ‘eco-friendliness’, ‘connected to earth’, ‘nature’ and so on. I liked his briefing and decided to go for it. After doing some research and gathering some ideas and inspiration I started to draw and color.While I was looking for the ‘right’ green color, I found out that it’s hard to find a beautiful green. It took me a long time to decide what green I should use. I created a Graceful Green Flickr gallery to collect inspiration from the color green and the green idea.

Yesterday, a person on Twitter was complaining about the fact that some other company/person had stolen his/her avatar. It resembled the original avatar quite a lot. In fact, there are a lot of avatars with the same look, same colors etc… I think you can avoid having your avatar looking similar to others if you spend a little more time when you choose your avatar and look for some ways to be more unique, more special, more attractive ...

Recently, I rediscovered a book I bought when I was in first grade of art school. It made me think of the times we had to discover patterns and inspiration from that book as students. Now, so many years later, the plates are still incredibly rich and the book is a very good inspiring tool for graphic design also. If you look for patterns, for (irregular) shapes, for logo inspiration, poster inspiration, etc.. Even for a webdesigner, you can find lots of inspiration from the book to make bullets, header shapes and so on.

A bird shape is not that difficult to draw with regular shapes in Illustrator. With a circle, a rectangle and a oval you’ll get a bird shape really quick. I’ll show you how I did this in Illustrator and made a wallpaper with this bird shape.

A new wallpaper for the month of July 2009 is available for download.

I made them in 2 different options: with a calendar for July 2009 and without calendar.

A new wallpaper for the month of May 2009 is available for download.

A closer look into the design method to create large background websites.
I was making a mock-up for a new website and started with an illustration. Sometimes an illustration can take a lot of attention so I decided to use a white body content and use the illustration as a background image. So here is my experience with the design and the xhtml + css design.

February is almost gone, the shortest month of the year. That means spring is ready to begin, no? Because it is my favorite season, I made this March calendar free to download and to use it as a Wallpaper for your screen.