One of the many New Year’s Resolutions I made this year, is to blog more. I want my readers to know about the projects i’m working on this year. On of the websites I made in 2009 was for a Belgian contemporary artist and friend of mine, Dirk Zoete. His website is a portfolio of his artworks and projects. I really enjoyed making this website.

Dirk Zoete’s gallery is currently Annie Gentils in Antwerp.

Recently, I did an interview with Dirk, 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.

I have a few art books and every time I see the Edward Hopper book, i cannot resist to open it and start looking and reading about his paintings. Although Edward Hopper lived from 1882 till 1967, his work looks still very “modern”. He is known for his quiet and silent realism but I think he reveals a very strange and honest beauty in the everyday objects and lives.

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 ...

Last week, Tim and I went to the first european Expression Engine and CodeIgniter conference, held in Leiden, Netherlands. The conference was held at the Scheltema complex and organised by Whoooz! webmedia from Leiden, they did an excellent job! It was the first time we had the chance to meet with the EllisLab community. As a webdesigner myself, i was very anxious to meet with and listen to the speakers and attendees.

The previous months and weeks, I’ve been busy with some projects for both web and print. The print projects have my full attention at the moment and so I wanted to share some of the things I’m making for a client. Because I cannot share the name of the client, i have replaced the logo with my own, hope you don’t mind. I’m going to show how I did the style guide for this project. A style guide can be a really helpful guide. For me, it is an anchor point to refer to when I’m busy designing for the same client. It helps me focus on the colors, the style, the elements that are important when building an identity for print and web. I designed this style guide with Adobe InDesign.

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.