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:

Recently i’m doing a lot of sketches. Mostly in the evening when it’s quiet and when i’m done with client work. For inspiration, i look regularly on Flickr. I find a lot of impressive material. Lots of collections and sets from amazing people. I found this collection where I took some inspiration of for this drawing tutorial.

We are taking a break after a year that has been great so far. Now is the time to reload our batteries so we can deal with all the projects that are coming our way in the second part of this year !

We take our summer holidays from monday 19th July till monday 9 August 2010

A good client of mine, asked me some time ago to design the lettering of a new truck they ordered.
It was kind of strange to do such a design because it’s not what I do on a daily basis, but I took the challenge and did some research before I started my design for them. This week I took some pictures of the end result: the final the lettering on the new truck.

A new Valentine calendar for february 2010 is available for download.

I made this calendar in only a few resolutions, if you would like to have it in a different resolution, please ask me (benedikte at bene dot be)

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.