Veerle's blog

Picture this: you are sitting along the river in beautiful surroundings creating what’s bound to be your best work yet and you aren’t feeling pressured. Sounds lovely, isn’t it? Too bad it isn’t reality. Now there seems to be an almost impossible deadline around every corner.

It has been some time since we last talked about being a print designer. How fun and exciting the web can be it’s still no replacement to physically holding something you created in your hands. An essential tool in doing that is Pantone, you know the industry standard for color specification introduced 45 years ago. The designers landscape has changed a lot in those years and it’s time for something new.

If I take a trip down memory lane to the time that I was looking for a job, I immediately remember very vividly how hard it was to get noticed or heard. I’m talking pre-internet days so things were handled via snail mail. If you were lucky, you got invited for an interview to show your portfolio and hope for the best. So fresh out of school with nothing much to show from the ‘real’ world in my portfolio, except for school work was a hard nut to crack to be honest. Even desktop publishing was in its early days so most of my work consisted of hand crafted dummies, painted logos and lots of sketches, paintings and drawings.

I’ve talked about this a bit at WDN with Dave in our presentation. A good idea is more likely to origin from an inspiring environment than from an uninspiring work place. I think that’s a great starting point for today’s post. Personally I think it would be great if at the end we all snap a shot of our working environment and inspire each other. How you decorate your personal space is only part of the larger picture of course.

All important but often elusive: tips on creating your next color palette

Color is a subjective experience, it is a mental sensation, a reaction of our brain. We say that an orange is 'orange'. But is it really orange? How do we know? We cannot get outside of our eyes or brain to find out, but we do know that when the sun or light disappears; color vanishes. We take colors for granted. It's only when we are actually drawing or painting that we realize how much value color brings to our daily life.