Man, I’m so busy with designing websites and some really personal stuff I don’t have enough time to write something useful here. However all the hard work is paying of! last week Quipment-ISN, a dutch company, launched it’s new website which you can find at www.isnbv.nl. We used a template design for it and made a redesign in Flash from it.

ISN is also the first company in it’s branche that offers a translation to arabic and turkisch! A lot of work, but as you can see it payed of!

I’m using InDesign fairly often to design newsletters for example. For work I had to send a PDF fail of a freshly made newsletter. However the PDF showed some strange artifacts around certain graphics. I printed it out and saw that the artifacts didn’t show up on the printed version.  I decided to send the document anyway and asked the printer for some tips. And what a nice tip they gave me! In my 4 years of working with the program I never used this tool!

You are probably wondering, what is he talking about. Well, I’m talking about the InDesign Ink Manager! It’s a really neat little tool that converts all spot colors into full color equivalents. So if you design full color documents keep in mind to convert every color into full color mode! Below you’ll find an example of the Ink Manager with the right settings for a full color print.

Friday at work I was looking for an easy way to cut out an object in Photoshop. I was working on a newsletter and needed a quick way! Totally unexpected I ran in this tutorial. I immediately send it to my home mail address. It’s a very good and well explained tutorial and, even more important, you don’t need any 3D plug-ins for Photoshop. I just finished trying out the tutorial and I can tell you guys it will take a bit longer then expected. However the results will be astonishing.

Last Friday I finally made an long awaited action to put me a few steps higher up that ladder. For months I was struggling with myself  about the fact of going back to school again. After tons of study guides and information my internal CPU almost overheated! Then I looked at the closest option there was available, which was HAN university of applied science. I found an interesting bachelor study which is Communication & Multimedia design. It’s a relatively new study and met all my requirements.

Friday I asked for a meeting with my two bosses. I explained that I found a good study and that I thought it would make me better in what I’m doing at the company right now. And they decided to help me out! I felt great! If I was a gamer I would say w00t! Oh I am a gamer…..w00t! The day after I went to HAN in Arnhem because I wanted to be very certain that the study is what I thought about it. Well, it is! So today I signed up and sent an email or two  to make it official! I’m getting my Bachelors.

A few days ago I received an email with the message that the picture I took was used in an article.
You can find it here.

This is the second time this picture is used somewhere across the world! Pretty nice indeed!

This evening I was browsing the web (yep again) and found this great tutorial. It gave me a whole new meaning of the usage of Illustrator. I normally use it to design logo’s in vector after I created them in Photoshop (hm, maybe I should turn that procedure upside down).

It gave me a very arty impression.  I have the same type of artwork hanging on the wall only mine is really painted by an painter (logical isn’t it?). Of course I tried it out myself but found out it’s costing me way to much time to make this in a few minutes so this is also going into a state of delay.