Time to change your desktop wallpaper! Smashing Magazine shows 55 free December desktop wallpapers and mine is featured too.

After your artwork is finished in Illustrator, you often need to change the dimensions of your image. You can crop a teaser from an illustration to use for publication on a website. The crop tool in Illustrator is very helpful.

Take a closer look at the current compression methods for using images on the web. I will briefly describe when to use a GIF, a JPG or a PNG. Each image format has it’s pro and contra’s. Before exporting images to one of those formats let’s dive into their specifications. We start with:

In this tutorial we"ll trace a scanned drawing with the pen tool in Illustrator. The image will be used as a vector illustration and icon. We will only draw half the part of the figure and flip the other part so that we have a 100% symmetric object/character. By drawing just a half, we’ll save some time. (you can import a sketch to work on). Feel free to post your sketches or drawings to the Flickr group Sketch and Draw.

I got the calendar 2008 for free today from FontShop! Thanks. Looking for fonts is always a time consuming activity. I often use the FontShop website to look for fonts or to search for a specific font. On the FontShop website you have large search capabilities, you can search by font, by family, by foundry, how a font looks, etc…

I took my change and decided to send an entry to the “What is Graphic Design Poster Competition” organized by Veerle Pieters from Veerle’s blog. The competition had some awesome prices for the winners, but i didn’t win unfortunately. But I enjoyed it very much and the results were actually very good and suprising.

What is your inspiration? What media do you use for inspiration?
I really like to know what you find inspiring. Sometimes it is difficult to name or to describe your sources of inspiration, but I find it very interesting when someone can describe just in a few words what and why something is interesting to look at.