Blog

15 May 2014

Stitches, patterns and brushes

Lately i have been working on stitches for fashion design, patterns for summer clothing and pencil style illustrations. I have created a bunch of brush and pattern sets in Illustrator. I made a little shop on Creative Market, it's a super friendly community of people sharing their creative ideas in products for low prices. In case you are looking for a unique brush, action, pattern, label, picture, illustration, font, style, template or anything in particular for your creative production, the answer is probably on this market. I created a short summary of the products i sell on Creative Market, i'm in the middle of building my little shop, so come back regularly to discover more ...

Illustration Online & Offline concepts Projects Bene news

14 May 2014

The history of Adobe Illustrator

Back in time: the first time i created a logo (sort of) on a Mac with Adobe Illustrator was late in the nineties in a friend's studio. It was my first experience with Illustrator and since then it has captured me till today in my daily work. My friend had her own studio at that time and I was eager to learn how she made all these beautiful stuff so i asked her to introduce me to the basics of drawing on a computer. It took me some time to learn these drawing skills and i am still finding new ways to accomplish certain drawing tasks but it quickly became a tool that i use on a daily basis. In that period of time, i used Freehand and learned most of vector drawing in that tool, later on i switched to Illustrator. I was watching these wonderful short movieclips about the history of Illustrator and want to share them with you - i particularly like the story about the logo and the Botticelli "The Birth of Venus" painting in the Chapter 2.

Typography Illustration Art & paintings Software Graphic Design Talks Video

28 Apr 2014

Designing a splash screen for mobile

For Designmodo - a popular blog about design topics - I wrote a step-by-step tutorial on how to design a splash screen for mobile.

iOS-Mobile Tutorials Illustration Bene news

10 Apr 2014

Mailserver improvements

Better spam protection for our mailserver using RPD from Cyren

Hosting & Domainnames Bene news

09 Apr 2014

Creating text effects in Photoshop

In this tutorial, i'm showing some text effects that can be applied using the effects panel in Photoshop. First, i'm giving some research tips and references, next i'll show the final result of the text effect and give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the text effects. Resources, fonts and textures that are showcased in the effects are listed at the end in References.

Typography Tutorials Illustration Graphic Design

21 Mar 2014

Tutorial on how to make your sketch an app icon

I wrote a step-by-step tutorial on how to convert your sketch to a full vector app icon.

Video Talks iOS-Mobile Tutorials Illustration Bene news

14 Mar 2014

RetroInk

RetroInk is a massive Illustrator pack with a bundle of Graphic Styles from RetroSupply. These add-ons can be used for textures, for type, brushes, swatches etc.. I bought this huge Illustrator Kit from Creative Market and am experimenting with it now. It looks a great way to spice up your designs.

Typography Illustration Graphic Design

13 Mar 2014

Font Men

Jonathan Hoefler or Tobias Frere-Jones: before their recent split, they collectively ran the most successful and well respected type design studio in the world, creating fonts used by everyone from the Wall Street Journal to the President of the United States.

Typography

11 Mar 2014

Amazing Photoshop actions for building iOS 7 user interfaces

Jérémy Paul posted a animated gif on Dribbble demonstrating a collection of Photoshop Actions to create iOS 7 iPhone mockups. No need to download a PSD and alter. You can watch and read about the actions here:

iOS-Mobile Tutorials Apple Video

26 Feb 2014

Bene is taking a winter break

Bene is taking a winter break from 28^th of February till the 9^th of March 2014.

Bene news

12 Feb 2014

Style guide collection

Lately, i have been doing more and more style guides to guide my clients in their online presence. Last week, an excellent article "Getting Started With Pattern Libraries" by Anna Debenham was published on A List Apart explaining the steps to take for coding and maintaining a pattern library. Anna explains how she did the ALA style guide, for web designers to use as guidance. She also wrote a book about this Front-end Style Guides, published by Five Simple Steps.

Tutorials Branding Webdesign

05 Feb 2014

Mike Monteiro - How Designers Destroyed the World

I like to watch this talk by Mike Monteiro from Webstock 13 titled "How Designers Destroyed the World". It's a great inspiration directed to designers and the responsibility that comes with design. Mike Monteiro also wrote an absolute must-read book "Design is a job" published by A Book Apart.

Graphic Design