Blog

04 Dec 2009

Hopper’s quiet realism

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.

Illustration

01 Dec 2009

Graceful Green

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.

Art & paintings Graphic Design Webdesign

19 Nov 2009

Creating a unique avatar

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 ...

Art & paintings Webdesign

29 Oct 2009

Attending the EECI conference as a designer

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.

Events Bene news

24 Oct 2009

EECI 2009 - European ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter Conference

On the 22nd and 23rd of October the first European ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter Conference ever was organised. A unique opportunity for us to meet our fellow webdesigners and the people from Ellislab to exchange tips, best practices and bad jokes!

Events CMS & Blogs Software

14 Sep 2009

Making a style guide

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.

Branding Graphic Design Projects Bene news

13 Aug 2009

Art forms in nature

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.

Art & paintings Graphic Design

07 Aug 2009

Creating a vector bird shape

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.

Art & paintings

02 Jul 2009

Summer vacation

Bene is taking a break this summer from 6^th of July till 27^th of July 2009. Our office will be closed, in urgent matters, you can call us at +32 (0)472 31 00 98 or you can send us a mail at support@bene.be. Have a great summer vacation too!

28 Jun 2009

A new wallpaper for July 2009.

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.

Bene news Graphic Design Art & paintings

05 Jun 2009

Redesigning existing websites

The last couple of weeks, I redesigned a few websites. This websites existed for a few years but needed a redesign. The fact that they were initially made in Flash came also into play. The website owners asked me to convert them into websites with a back-end that they can administer. For all of these website, I used ExpressionEngine as CMS.

Webdesign

23 May 2009

BeneMailer screencast 1: How to create and send campaigns?

In this first screencast we demonstrate how easy it is to create and send mail campaign yourself using our mailmarketing platform BeneMailer

Email Marketing