Since we’re steadily moving towards fully appropriating and settling into our new studio (home/office), I’ve posted a few pictures of our new location.

If you’re Dutch, you may recognize the artistic direction of the building as ‘de Stijl’;

(… De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. [It] advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour — [members of de Stijl] simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colors along with black and white. – wikipedia )

The similarity is not coincidental, as the entire block was designed by the founder of de Stijl, Theo van Doesburg. As such, we considered it to be the perfect location for such a graphic studio!

Feel free to check out more of the images on our flickr.

I’m a big fan of virtual desktops. Essentially, they expand your working field by providing more ‘screens’ to distribute your windows over. In Tiger, when Leopard’s Spaces application wasn’t in the picture, there were several solutions; my favorite one being VirtueDesktops by Tony Arnold. VirtueDesktops, or more shortly ‘Virtue’, was abandoned when Spaces came out, and I’m using Spaces ever since. I did miss several features that the virtual desktops of yore offered, but the new features made up for it.

You can imagine I was thrilled when Tony approached me to design the icon for his new Spaces-enhancing application, Hyperspaces. The name, purpose, and features of the application instantly appealed to me, and we set off to make a great icon for it.

Continue reading…

Because there’s life in the blog yet!

In the last month and few weeks, I’ve had an astonishing time in my life where I had a hectic moving of home and office, a set of challenging projects to work on with hugely talented people and world-class products, and other time-consuming challenges I had to overcome to get back to my regular life. As a young individual running his own startup business, it’s not very easy to get a mortgage and to learn about everything that comes with such a big step in life. I’ve also released a few details of what I’ve been working on, with a lot of updates coming soon, including the long-awaited Orion Extended freeware icon set that’s fully ready for replacing the system icons on your Mac or PC.

Continue reading…