About

  • - INDEX -
  • About Us
  • Green Energy
  • Our Tools
  • Client List

Happy Monsters' Studios started out when Chrischa Van de Voorde began freelance illustrating in the early 90's - where amongst other projects, she provided illustration for the city of Gent and Croky's chips via another Gent based studio. Through positive word of mouth, she built up a diverse range of clients, and quickly became an in-demand illustrator across her home province of East Flanders.

happy monsters hq

Having established herself as a professional illustrator, Chrischa turned her attention to graphic design, and after extensive research and training, began offering her design services to past clients. Not long after, she became interested in designing covers for books and CD's and in early 2000, she officially formed Happy Monsters' Studios.

Over the years, Happy Monsters has grown from serving small local businesses, to designing for multinational companies and book publishers. Along the way, Happy Monsters' Studios has invested in web design, and in 2008 announced a cooperation with UK design firm, One Man & His Laptop, to assist with the increasing amount of web design work required by Happy Monsters' Studios.

chrischa van de voorde

Going forward, Happy Monsters' Studios is in fine shape, as a firm we continue to work with small independent businesses, but have proven that we can rise to the challenge of larger companies when asked. We are extremely grateful to all of our clients who have put their trust in us, and enabled us to establish Happy Monsters' Studios as a leading Belgian design studio.

At Happy Monsters' Studios, we believe it is the moral responsibility of every business to strive to put as small a burden on the environment as possible. To this end, we have ensured that our two main sources of energy consumption come from green or carbon neutral sources.

dreamhost

Firstly, our website is hosted with US firm Dreamhost, who since 2009 have been certified by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) as a carbon neutral web host. What this means is that they use renewable energy where possible, and where not, they purchase renewable energy credits, to off set their use of non-green energy sources. You can read more about Dreamhost by clicking here.

lampiris

Our second principle energy requirement, is of course the energy used in our home and office. For this we signed up to Belgium based energy provider, Lampiris.

Lampiris is a 100 percent green energy supplier, whose energy is derived from a mixture of wind turbines, biomass and biomethanisation. You can read more about Lampiris here.

Finally we have worked with the University of Gent, to design a logo for their ongoing campaign to encourage people to switch to renewable energy suppliers, such as Lampiris. The campaign is called: Wissel Stroom, and has received an extremely encouraging response since it began in 2009. You can read more about the project by visiting their website at: http://www.milieuadvieswinkel.be/.

wisselstroom

Through these initiatives, we can assure our clients that Happy Monsters' Studios is a firm you can hire with a clean environmental conscience, and we hope to continue to do more in this area as we continue.

Tools:

We pride ourselves on using the finest tools in the design industry. The foundation of our design software is Adobe's Creative Suite, whilst all of our hardware comes from Apple.

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is the premier digital editing software available to designers. With its third release, it brought the use of layers, and revolutionised the way digital artists could work. Now up to its 11th edition, Photoshop remains unchallenged in terms of features and versatility within its field.

Adobe In-Design

Adobe In-Design is used for document layout. Launched in 2002 as a direct competitor to Quark Express, In-Design is now regarded as the best layout software on the market.

Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is now in it's 14th revision. It's used for the creation of vector art, which offers its users a wide range of tools to precisely create and control the shape of vector graphics. Illustrator has proved a popular tool for the packaging industry, and is also used extensively in Flash based applications and sites.

Style Master

Style Master is a css editing application, which features a variety of preview and de-bugging options. The site also features a range of excellent tutorials, to help people get started with CSS editing.

Espresso

Espresso is an advanced web site management and creation app, allowing users to create and organise web projects with ease. With Espresso, users can easily set up and edit their web project, and program in most popular web languages. Serious Mac based web designers should certainly check it out.

CSS Edit

CSS Edit is the sister app to Espresso, which allows users to quickly and easily create CSS layouts and style for their web site. The app is fully loaded with a variety of preview and editing options, and works smoothly with Espresso.

Apple Mac Computers

We exclusively work with Apple computers, and OS X.

Apple Mac Displays

Apple Displays are renowned for their high quality, and greatly help us to assure correct colour balance in our projects. We do all we can to ensure that your colours are preserved from screen to print.

Canon Printers

We use Canon printers to print out our general stationary and proof copies for clients. Their rich colour and super fine inks have kept us loyal to the brand since we began.

Wacom Pads

Wacom pads are ideal for fine digital illustration work. We use Wacom pads in conjunction with Illustrator, to illustrate many of our digital characters. We also use it for completing touch up work on hand drawn illustrations.

Epson Scanners

We have been using Epson scanners for close to ten years now, and have zero complaints. They offer a fantastic level of quality, which gets us great scanning results.

Adorabel Beeldig Theater

Adorabel Beeldig Theater is an all round children's entertainment firm, who specialise in the art of living statues.

Africa Fashion

Africa Fashion is a clothing store based in Holland, which has required a complete design solution from Happy Monsters, ranging from logo design and website creation, to regular news letters.

Avothea

We have had a long running working relationship with theater supply shop, Avothea, and have thus far provided them with business cards and advertising materials. We are also in the process of designing and coding a web site for them.

The Blue Hydrant

The Blue Hydrant Program has been one of our longest standing clients. We have handled all of their design needs, from logo design to packaging.

Cake Company

Cake Company is a firm which designs cakes for specific occasions. They can work with a variety of different cake types, and you're guaranteed a stand out result.

Dave Varlet

Dave Varlet was one of our first clients, he came to us for a CD album and single cover design, to be used on his solo album, "Act of Romance".

Dobby

Dobby Entertainment Rental specialises in the rental and setting up of bouncy castles, and various other out door amusements. For them we have created a new website and provided extensive search engine optimisation techniques to ensure they rank well in Google etc.

Dune Records

This specialist music shop was one of our very first clients. For Dune we provided business card and advertising designs.

Education Center 4 Tattoo Art

Education Center 4 Tattoo Art is Europe's first professional tattoo training center. Situated in Antwerp, the center has a fine tradition of training up perspective tattooists into fully trained tattoo artists. We created their new 2010 website, and created a brochure for them to distribute.

Effortless Gardening

Effortless Gardening is an initiative from Feldenkrais graduate, Miriam Levinson, and aims to teach people how to use their body in a way which will alleviate strain and injury. For Effortless Gardening, we created a logo and book cover.

Face Paint In Progress

Face Paint In Progress is the highly regarded face painting federation for Belgium and Holland.

Fakkeltjes

Fakkeltjes is a bi-monthly magazine for children aged between 6 - 18. We are a regular contractor for the magazine, and provide numerous illustrations.

Fido & Finesse

Fido & Finesse is a Gent based hair stylist and maintainer for dogs. As Fido & Finesse were a brand new business, we were asked to create them a full business identity. This included business cards and flyers, along with a full website promoting their services.

Fun Station

Fun Station was a short lived game shop in the Gent area. We designed them a new logo.

Global Marketing Company

We have handled all of Global Marketing's design needs, ranging from web sites, logo design and brochure design.

Hair Design

For local hair dresser and Perfumerie, Hair Design we designed a new business card.

Luc Delanghe

For Luc Delanghe, we helped him launch his firm, Delanghe's Projects, providing a log, business card and website for his venture business - Training on Track.

Regency Book Publishers

Regency Book Publishers is our newest client. We have so far illustrated two books for them, and have provided extensive web sites for both series. Regency itself is a new firm, which has established itself with the book series "I Am..." and has continued this with the fairy tale series "Princess Samantha".

Spinnekoppen

The Spinnekoppen is part of the Happy Monsters' Network, and is one of the biggest and most renowned face paint studios in Belgium. As such we have of course catered to all of their design needs.

Speelmarantje

The Speelmarantje (Play Market) is a well loved video game shop, based in Gent. For them we provided business cards and small print runs on their cards.

De' Sven

De' Sven is a great firm who bring circus entertainment to your door. For de'Sven, we revitalised their logo, and created a selection of T-Shirt designs based on their mascot characters.

Trademark Troll

A one off assignment for Dick Troll (The Trademark Troll) resulted in the design of this affectionate mascot.

Wakaba

Wakaba Dojo is a Gent based Dojo, run by Kurt Wullaert.

Wisslestroom

Wissslestroom is a Belgian based action group, who both encourage and educate people in how to switch from traditional energy providers, to green energy suppliers. We donated them a logo design.

Zele Police

For the Police of Zele, we created an information brochure, which detailed their upcoming schedule.

Oh wonderful - what did I say? Hmmm, well sod this for a lark - I'm outta here!
  • Now, don't you go pressing the destruct button! It's hard enough running this place without visitors constantly blowing it up around me.Thankfully for me, only browsers which support 3D transitions can fiddle with the destruct button, but I'm certain you wouldn't want to press it, even if you could!
Well nice one genius, you had to press the big red destruct button. Sheesh, well go on, press the reset button and we can all get back on with our day. Tssk, humans....