A career that predates the web

Veerle Pieters began freelancing in the early nineties, before the internet was part of the job. The first five years were a struggle, and she earned almost nothing, reaching the point of considering a full-time job before deciding to stick with it.

The route in was accidental. A printer technician fixing her Macintosh kept mentioning that a driver could be downloaded from the internet — a repair that showed up on the invoice at considerable cost. That prompted her to look into what the internet actually was.

At the time it was text-only. Then Netscape arrived and pages could carry images, and they grew steadily more graphical. Curious how such pages were built, she picked up basic tools including Bare Bones BBEdit and the visual editor PageMill. Print was never abandoned: logo design, brochures and interactive work ran alongside each other, including Macromedia Director CD-ROMs that required heavy testing across Mac and Windows, and later Macromedia Flash, used less for the web than for presentations for ad agencies.

A second turning point came with GoLive, after which designing webpages evolved quickly.

Drawing, hands and tools

Pieters is left-handed but was taught to write with her right in school. As a four- or five-year-old she drew her name in mirror image without understanding letters, and her mother held the paper up to a mirror so others could read it. The result is genuine ambidexterity: mouse work in the right hand, drawing with the left. Wacom tablets made that split a constant dilemma and a source of frustration, which is one reason she prefers drawing on an iPad with a pencil.

Pencil and paper still come first, even though an iPad can be just as fast. Sometimes, though, there is no sketching phase at all. On one ongoing icon design job, deadlines run to the same day, and for technical and specific icons — not familiar ones like a hamburger menu or a home symbol — she searches Google by keyword and browses the concepts that come up before drawing.

For collecting references she uses Milanote to gather design styles, color palettes, compositions and mood-board elements that may be only loosely tied to the project.

Style, and how big clients arrived

Asked to define her own style, Pieters resists a single answer: she adapts to the client. On a book project for a long-term client, every page carries an illustration featuring people. Her first proposal used very simple figures with blue, fantasy-like skin, on the reasoning that blue is colorless and any kind of person could be represented by it. The client rejected that and, from the directions Pieters presented, picked a different set of images — so the style shifted. Colorful and playful are the constants, within the restrictions each project imposes. What she is not is a pure illustrator whom clients hire for a fixed, recognizable style; her range is broader, and dry corporate work holds little appeal.

Her visibility, and with it the larger clients, came from writing and sharing. She spent hours on weekend blog writing around 2004 to 2008, with no fixed publishing schedule. Earlier, her Macromedia Director expertise — including interactive material built with the application — earned a site of the day and site of the week nomination from Macromedia, which led to being approached by the Library of Congress, a job she declined. Google and Facebook found her through CSS galleries and awards. The Facebook project never launched and never made it into her portfolio.

Most important of all was a tutorial aimed at designers who wanted to learn some code: how to build a homepage, explained step by step — header, content, footer — starting from a Photoshop design that was sliced apart, then covering how CSS works in very simple, rudimentary language. It was picked up by sites far bigger than hers, lifted her profile, and led to conference speaking invitations. A subsequent blog redesign won another award, and invitations kept coming. A fifth redesign is not on the table right now, but she is adjusting colors, work that is always harder on your own site and hard to find time for.

Today's visibility landscape is a different problem. Pieters hears from junior designers who struggle to get the word out, and where once only a few dozen people were publishing and being public, now everyone posts — with AI able to generate a perfectly SEO-optimized article. She believes that in the same position now she would probably use Instagram and TikTok to show her work, rather than relying on the channels that worked then. Her own route into Twitter came through Jeremy Keith's recommendation, and she was also on Pownce. She credits reaching out to people she admires — who often do reply — as central to how she grew.

Hard projects: CD-ROMs, screensavers and time

The toughest work came before the internet. For Ernst & Young, Pieters and Geert produced a CD-ROM project called Oscan, winning the job against another agency and then handling it from A to Z: the design, the production, and packaging shaped like a large browser hand that held the disc. It shipped in five languages with voiceover, was graphically rich, and demanded extensive Windows testing. It took more than a year to finish.

Another early project was a screensaver called Caveman, with volcanoes, which was great fun even though the pixelated result now looks like the dark ages.

Comparing then and now, she sees the tooling as easier — what takes two clicks in Illustrator once took more than two hours — while the volume of applications to learn is its own difficulty. The creative challenges themselves are unchanged.

Because her projects are so varied — illustration one day, print the next, then a website, then app design — she has never felt the urge to abandon everything for a completely different field. Designing a font has crossed her mind, but the specialty put her off: the letter O needs to be slightly larger because it is round, and tracking and kerning add further demands. Her only font work came from a book project by the founder of Skillshare, who asked a group of creative people to take on tasks outside their comfort zone; hers was to create a font. It existed purely as a design printed in the book, never as font files.

Pieters has not used AI in her work so far. She likens the current moment to Photoshop's effects arriving and everyone rushing to try them, and finds the output artificial. She expects it to serve as a tool, but has open questions about copyright and the images such systems draw on, noting that Getty Images has already raised the issue of its collection being used. Her conclusion: trouble lies ahead, and the situation is not straightforward.

Friedman adds the terms-and-conditions angle — some image-generating tools state that output is for personal use only — and the underlying problem that the images being mined were designed by humans, with no credit and no compensation. He was seriously impressed by DALL·E and Midjourney output, sometimes unable to distinguish it from a photograph or artwork, though results can look too perfect and can produce defects such as a person with six fingers instead of five. Figma's image generation for something like a barista in a tiled Portuguese bakery, he notes, is stunning.

One case unsettled him: an administrator several months into a project was let go after the company said it had fifteen images and could design the rest with AI by mining his style along with other images. Those first images were paid for; the remainder of the work was cancelled.

Pieters' response is a practical one — put copyright terms into estimates before taking on a job — and Friedman expects such terms and conditions to become a standard part of contracts. Both are relatively hopeful: Pieters does not believe AI will overtake the entire job, because human needs human emotional touch, and she hopes it stays a tool rather than a replacement. Asked whether she might write a blog post in a few years on speeding up her creative process with AI, she says who knows — or it could acquire a bad reputation and fail to survive.

Learning, side notes and advice

Pieters has been picking up Figma because a client's developer and other designers work in it, setting aside Adobe XD. She is at the first steps but enjoying it, and finds copy-paste from Illustrator important given how much icon work she does for webpages and a web app. She has also tried Affinity Designer a couple of times, for roughly an hour so far, another step outside the Adobe environment. On iPad she does a lot of digital watercoloring, experimenting with brushes.

Her long-running inspiration stream fed client conversations about direction, which is how Friedman's consulting work used it: a shared reference point for whether a project should be playful or formal. On social platforms, she is not active on Twitter much anymore and is on Mastodon. She is also planning more writing on her own blog, in the form of short posts she previously would have put on Twitter under the name "Side Notes" — still in the making, intended to replace the Twitter feed once online, and a return to what she did before Twitter existed.

Her advice to future designers is to keep learning and keep an open vision: soak up inspiration everywhere, including nature, and look at street and shop signs while walking.

Long rides are her other measure. Her longest was 207 kilometers, in Belgium, with routes occasionally crossing into France and the Netherlands; the Balearic Islands is the furthest destination she has ridden. She is still surprised by how many small roads she has not yet covered near home, and her Strava heat map of Flanders is dense with repeated routes — enough total kilometers to have circled the world a couple of times. She rides more than she drives, roughly double the kilometers in a year. The Black Forest is a place she would love to ride, encouraged by her local baker, a mountain biker who spends his holidays there every year and offers route suggestions.

On a dream project, what would already make her happy is a client who allows enough time: boundaries, but room to reach full creative potential without a tight deadline, done from A to Z. Roughly 10% of her work ends up in her portfolio, because much of the rest had to move too fast or was implemented incorrectly after launch. In school she dreamed of packaging design, and her ideal would span a brand logo, packaging and the interior of a shop or building. She did design an icon for an airline — a star shape, small in scope but proud work because it flew on a plane, though she never flew on it herself.