Months ago, i bought a copy of Espresso, a html editor designed and made by Macrabbit, a Belgian company. Macrabbit is well-known for their award winning CSS application CSSEdit, a helpful application to help you visually make up your designs with CSS.

I regret not having written about the EECI we attented back in october 2010 held in Leiden because the New Adventures (referred to as #naconf on Twitter and Flickr) reminded me of the excellent speakers and the friendly and open atmosphere. These events contain so much good ingredients that you always feel so inspired afterwards.

A good thing about spending too much hours on the web looking for inspiration, is that you find historical resources that shows us manuscripts that are absolutely stunning to watch at.

Lately, i visited this new launched Belgian project: de bijbel van Anjou, an exhibition that showed a royal manuscript dated 1340 revealed. This bible is completely digitized and can be viewed online. This exhibition took place in Museum M in Leuven.

Bene is taking a break from december 24th until 3 january 2011.
We wish you all the best for the coming year. Have a great christmas too.

Zalig kerstfeest en gelukkig nieuwjaar!

I started drawing a christmas card some weeks ago in my sketchbook. Some days later, I tried to make a vector based illustration from this sketch. I posted some parts of the christmas card on Dribbble and some people asked me to explain how I did this illustration

Lately, i’ve been working on print related projects. Designing Adobe © InDesign templates for posters and leaflets and brochures.
One question that keeps returning from clients is: can you optimize this design for web use? Although I constantly explain the differences between print design and web design, the same question keeps coming back: but can’t you do some optimizing, so that we can use this design on our webpage? Or: can we put this leaflet on our webpage?

This year, I really liked the talk by Greg Wood on Editorial Design at EECI 2010. Greg Wood did a great job in showing and explaining what editorial design is and why it is important (his blog is an excellent example on the topic).

I’m working on a redesign and am looking into the possibilities of CSS3. I made a Photoshop mockup for an “elsewhere on the internet” page in which i wanted to list social networks on a different way. So I made “flags” placed next to each other where each flag represents a “social network”.

Back to school ... that means homework mostly every evening of the week for my 2 boys (9 and 7). I try to make these homework moments as pleasant as possible and as short as possible. A short moment on the iPad or iPhone with a great app is guaranteed fun for the sons. A week ago, i search and found some real cool school apps in the iTunes apps store (most of them are only available in English). I share them here in a short overview: