In honor of 2 very special birthdays (June’s & my very own), I’ve collected a few of my favorite birthday cards. Enjoy!
Posts Tagged ‘design’
Calligraphy with Illustrator
Monday, September 12th, 2011
Sometimes calligraphy brushes in Illustrator just don’t cut it. As much as you may try, a brush style in Illustrator just can’t mimic the flowing hand drawn style we crave. In the past, Illustrator was very limiting in creating flourish elements. To get shapes the way you want, you had to rely on your skill with the pen tool and the Bézier curve. With Illustrator CS5 in our hands, we now have the ability to manipulate line weight at different points on a line, making a job that would have been very time consuming, a breeze.
1. To mimic the hand drawn calligraphic style, I’d suggest starting on paper. Erasers are definitely your friends. Grab references of calligraphy styles you enjoy. Play with flourishes at the ends of words and with how words interact with eachother. Draw out your words. Don’t worry about the line weight at this stage, we’ll be adding this in the next steps.
2. Scan in your sketch. Bring it into Photoshop and clean up your drawing. This step makes it easier to trace in Illustrator.
3. Open your clean sketch in illustrator and starting tracing. Using the pen tool, trace over all of your lines. I’d suggest trying to keep the number of points to a minimum, but if your having trouble getting smooth lines, I’d try using the smooth tool.
4. Now we can get crazy with those curves. Press Shift (W) to begin using the width tool. Once you have this selected you can click on any point in your illustration to adjust the width of the line. Just click and drag away from the line to create a thicker stroke or toward the line for a thinner stroke. This will adjust the width of the entire line from that single point. To have more control over the whole stroke, use the direct select tool (white arrow) to select a point on your line. Then press Shift (W) and adjust the point. This will only effect the width of the line from that point until it reaches the next point on the line. This method is great for getting high-contrasting line weights on a single line. A great way to start is by scaling down the width of the line on each end-point of your type. This creates clean beginning and endpoints and helps the lines feel more brush-like.
5. With your reference images in hand, mimic the line weights you see. I’d suggest trying to keep all of your thick strokes a similar weight and thin strokes a similar weight. This way your type has a very consistent and cohesive feeling. Once you have all of the type in the style to your liking, try playing around with embellishments. Add extra flourishes or lines to enhance the design. To finish up my own design, I added a soft gradient halo around my text and a subtle feathered drop shadow to make the text stand out from the background.
Now get out there and start experimenting, you’ll be surprised at what you can make and how easy it can be to get fabulous looking designs!
The Trend Effect
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011
I’ve been living on Pinterest since I first signed up and I am constantly getting a first hand look at some great trends in action. With Pinterst you see all types of images that members are bookmarking across the internet, from fashion, interiors, to graphic design. It allows you to get a first hand look at what’s popular and new.
There is always a trickle effect in design trends. I’ve said it before, that what you see in fashion effects the world of interior design and finally touches on graphic design. These effects can be seen through color, pattern, shape, balance and even texture. Keeping up with the trends in all three areas is important. It allows us to see design trends from a different angle and lets us evolve our own designs.
On Pinterest you may need to do some wading, but there are definitely some great current trends that you can pick up on. Below are a few trends I’ve been noticing in the fashion and interior realms and how these trends may effect design choices for current graphic design.
Industrial: Industrial design is everywhere in interior design. It’s a mixture of clean lines, heavy metals, warm woods and simple shapes. Industrial is all about form and function without any fluff.
How it translates to graphic design: Minimalist designs, heavy gritty textures, shiny and smooth surfaces, dark moody grays, taupes and blacks, chunky slab serif and modern serif fonts, simple icons, and geometric forms.
Pattern: Geometric, tribal and Southwest patterns are all over fashion and interior spaces. Patterns are generally a wonderful mix of rich vibrant colors combined with neutrals like soft gray, white and black.
How it translates to graphic design: Exciting geometric designs, bright colors and contrasting neutrals. Subtle patterned backgrounds and unique color pallets.
Mod/Mid Century: The 60s are coming back with tailored clothing, contrasting stripes, warm leathers, rich wood tones, and pops of vibrant color paired with charcoal grays and blacks.
How it translates to graphic design: Bold geometric shapes. Vibrant mix of muted warm colors paired with strong dark neutrals. Heavy use of typography and a mixture of font types.
Romantic / Organic: Softer shades are emerging. Dusty Rose is back in along with nudes, taupes, and creams. Gauzy fabrics, organic materials, tufted furniture, velvet, reflective mirrored surfaces and elegant shapes and lines.
How it translates to graphic design. Heavy use of neutrals, soft organic shapes and textures. Hand drawn calligraphic fonts. Light and subtle textures. Thin lines, natural shapes and soft curves.
Web Design Trends 2011: Typography
Monday, August 29th, 2011Web safe fonts. If you are a web designer or developer, names like Arial, Verdana, Georgia, or Tahoma instantly come to mind when you hear those words. Up until recent years, designers (sometimes begrudgingly) relied on these and a small handful of other web safe fonts to allow visitors to view fonts correctly on screen. Internet browsers could only display fonts that were installed on a person’s individual computer, so this standard set of fonts became the typographical foundation for most websites.
With only a few web safe fonts available, web designs of the past have been extremely limited in the use of exciting and engaging typography. Specialty fonts online were generally reserved for main headlines and could only be placed in as static images, limiting the functionality of the type and hurting search engine optimization (SEO).
In recent years, there has been an emergence of font-embedding services, like Typekit, letting designers break out of the “safe” zone. Designers have more font options and can not only play with font style, but also the important details of leading and line height. These new options for fonts allow text to be easily updated and copied and selected from the browser, meanwhile maintaining a positive effect on SEO.
The font-embedding tools have created a boom in typographical exploration. Strong typography on a site can help tell a story as well as evoke an emotion from the audience. It can also set a tone for the site or emphasize a chosen theme. This year are seeing designs that are using large and exciting font choices, both through the use of static image and services like Typekit.
The big trend right now is to go huge with your headlines. These over-sized headlines capture the attention of the audience immediately and can make a site stand apart from their web-safe counterparts. Not only that, they can also create a visual hierarchy with the rest of the elements on the page as well as improve legibility for the viewer. The trend of typography on the web is definitely long-awaited and something I think it will keep growing and continue to be explored through a variety of methods. Typography lends a richness to websites that we haven’t seen in past years and gives web designers a whole new way to present information.
Check out the designs below for great uses of large typography.
Tutorial: Tilt Shift Photography
Friday, June 10th, 2011
I have an obsession with small things. Starting at a young age, I can remember building tiny cities and farms with my brother with wood blocks and small plastic figurine pigs. I continuously checked out the same book on making my own miniature doll furniture, and was way obsessed with decorating Barbie’s dream house with all of her miniature accessories. Even a bit more grown up, I still find myself in love with small things, from miniature brass figurines to tiny tiny lamps and, as most here know, dogs with short legs.
Tiny is just too cute, and so I love the emergence of Tilt Shift Photography. I can now make everything appear at a smaller scale. Tilt shift photography gives the appearance of a scaled model, with a shallow focus, high-contrast, and vibrant colors. Today, I’m sharing a fun way to create this look in Photoshop, so you too can start shrinking your world.
1. Select a Photo. Generally a model is seen from above, so make sure you’re choosing a shot from a high and wide angle, this will give you the best results. For this tutorial, I choose a photo taken out of my upstairs window of the street below.
2. Enter Quick Mask Mode. Open the image in Photoshop and enter Quick Mask Mode. You can do this by pressing Q on the keyboard, or select the Quick Mask icon at the bottom of your tools palette.
3. Draw a Gradient. Select the gradient from the menu by pressing G. Choose the reflected gradient. Draw a line where you want your main focus to be on the image. In this picture I choose the car to be the most in-focus element. If you look closely, I drew a line from the bottom of the car wheel to the top of the car. Keep using the gradient until you get the placement you’d like.
Mobile Web Design
Monday, June 6th, 2011
Mobile web design is a whole new beast when it comes to design. We are working with a new set of variables as designers: screen sizes are smaller and their dimensions are across the board. Mobile design is relatively new, so there is a bit of discovery and experimentation when it comes to user experience and interaction. Plus, mobile devices are rapidly changing, so you have to stay flexible so that a design can adapt to meet the needs of the audience. And let’s not forget about differences in bandwidth between phone users. These variables create a whole new mix of ingredients that effects how design decisions need to be made.
To add to the mix, we are no longer working with the same exact user as we do with the standard web. The mobile user is generally on the go, (waiting in line, walking the aisles in a store, in their car lost…) and trying to get information quickly without having to wade through tons of excess ads and information. Mobile users browse less, and it’s more likely that they are on the hunt for something specific. Information has to be streamlined and clear of clutter—only key information is given to the users, so they can get what they need quickly.
With mobile’s such limited screen space, sites are often a paired down version of their web counterpart. Often, you also see a link to the full site, a good way to keep your bases covered. A normal sites’ large graphics, videos and odd fitting content, however, can cause viewers to run, not to mention slow their phone down. So, removing the excess (without removing the what keeps users excited), and keeping a more liner vertically scrolling site, is extremely key in keeping the design effective for your users.
When designing for the mobile environment there is a bit of guess work and important considerations that need to be made before jumping head first into design. You need to consider phone and screen-size restraints, but I think most importantly you need to have a good understanding of your users, what information they will want to access and were they will be accessing it from. By streamlining and cutting the fat of our full sites, we can keep our audience’s need for information satisfied. But, we can’t just cut out all of the fun and beauty that keeps users engaged. A great mobile site needs to be functional, fit, and still maintain the excitement of the full website.
USDA Releases MyPlate Graphic
Thursday, June 2nd, 2011
Today the USDA launched the new MyPlate graphic to replace the old nutrition pyramid. From an info graphic standpoint this is a huge improvement. The graphic is simple and easy to understand at a glance. The use of a plate instead of a pyramid allows the graphic to immediately translate to a real world usage model and takes away the need for complicated measurements. Info graphics are meant to take complex information and explain it quickly and clearly. In order to achieve this, the concept needs to be boiled down to the most vital information and extraneous content needs to be eliminated for the sake of clarity. This is where the new graphic succeeds, where the updated MyPyramid (launched in 2005) failed. MyPyramid is a perfect example of an info graphic gone wrong and screams of design/decision making by committee. I can perfectly picture the countless meetings that must have occurred where each stake holder chimed in with “can you just add this, what about that?, oh and don’t forget that, oh and last but not least, add some stairs on one side so that we can communicate the importance of exercise as well”. The result is a graphic that includes everything but communicates nothing. In this case less is definitely more.
I must say, visually, I still prefer the earliest USDA guidelines — “Basic 7″, that were used from 1943 to 1956. But from an info graphic stand point, MyPlate, is the most successful by far.
InDesign Dimensions Include Stroke Weight?
Thursday, May 26th, 2011One thing that has driven me crazy about InDesign is that by default, unlike Illustrator, the dimensions of an object include the stroke weight. So if you draw a box that is 1″ x 1″ that has a 1 pt. stroke applied to it, then remove the stroke, you no longer have a 1″ x 1″ box. You have a 0.9861″ x 0.9861″ box. Conversely, if you draw a 1″ x 1″ box and then add a 1 pt. stroke, it becomes a 1.0139″ x 1.0139″ box. This has plagued me ever since I started using InDesign and has wreaked havoc when trying to align things.
I wanted it to work like Illustrator. In Illustrator, If you draw a box and add a stroke, it does not include the stroke weight as a part of the dimensions. One way I would get around this in InDesign was to align the stroke to the inside of my shapes. This worked all right until I butted two shapes up against each other. If those two shapes had a 1 pt. stroke then where they touched it created a 2 pt. stroke, again, raising my blood pressure to new heights.
So finally, after years of insanity, I decided to see if I could find a way to fix this and I found it! I don’t know why I didn’t search for it sooner. It is very easy fix but somewhat hidden. You would think it would be in InDesign’s Preferences but it’s not. (Believe me, I looked there many times!) The setting is located in the fly-out menu of the Transform palette! Duh.
If it is not already showing, you can find the Transform palette under the Window menu then Object & Layout.
Then in the Transform palette, in the fly-out menu, uncheck Dimensions Include Stroke Weight.
Much better.
(You can also find this setting in the fly-out menu of the long, skinny Control palette at the top of the screen when you are using the Selection Tool (black arrow)).
Find All Open Paths in Adobe Illustrator
Monday, May 23rd, 2011A few weeks ago, I was working on an illustration and I noticed that the Divide function in my Pathfinder palette was not working the way it was supposed to. After a little troubleshooting, I found out that it was because one of the shapes I was trying to divide was not a closed path. I looked to see if Illustrator provided an easy way to find and select unclosed paths to no avail. It seemed to me that you should be able to find it under the Select menu where you can select stray points, all text objects, same fill or stroke color, or same blending mode etc. It seems like selecting all unclosed paths would be a pretty common query. Nope.
I did a Google search to see if anyone else had this problem or knew something that I didn’t. I ran across a free plug-in that adds Open Paths as well as 17 additional object types under Illustrator’s Select menu. It is awesome. Now I can easily select Guides, Open Paths, Closed Paths, Filled Paths, Unstroked Paths, etc. instead of spending valuable time and sanity hunting these rascals down.
The screen-caps above show Illustrator's Select Menu without (left) and with (right) the SelectMenuCS3 Plug-in.
You can find this and many other useful Illustrator plug-ins here. Thank you Rick Johnson! Download the file and then drag the plug-in into Illustrator’s “Plug-ins” folder. (On the website, it says it only works with CS3 and CS4 but it works for me in CS5).
The above plug-in only finds open paths. It is up to you to close them. I found a script that will find and close all open paths in Illustrator. I found this one on vectips.com. It actually contains 2 scripts; one that closes all Open Paths and one closes all selected Open Paths. To use the scripts, in Illustrator, under the File menu go to Scripts then Other Scripts… and navigate to the downloaded script and click Choose.
A dialogue box will open and let you know how many open paths it found and ask you if you want to close them all.
If you want your scripts to show up automatically without having to navigate to find them, store all your scripts in Illustrator’s Scripts folder. You can find Illustrator’s Scripts folder here: Applications/Adobe Illustrator CS5/Presets/en_US/Scripts.
Sweeeeeeet.
Get up and Goe
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011Just introduced in 2007, Pantone Goe System has finally made it’s way into our grasp! Today we received a large box with coated and uncoated swatchbooks, as well as a set of coated GoSticks (sticky backed color chips). The Pantone system, if you are unfamiliar, allows for a precise and reliable way to print color during the offset printing process by the use of specified inks. It felt like Christmas morning, opening the box and discovering the magic inside. The Pantone Goe system offers more than 2,000 NEW colors in addition to the original Pantone Matching System. In the past, the old pallet could feel very limiting; I couldn’t quite get just that right shade of orangy-red, soft green, or 50′s sea-foam blue. It’s great to have such a new and large selection of colors to play around with. I’m definitely excited to see a HUGE array of green and blue hues (my favorite!). Better yet, they are now arranged in an intuitive, chromatic order, simplifying the process of selecting the perfect shade without having to jump through the color palette. The new chip books also have nice sticky backs, so we’ll easily be able to play and experiment with colors, and then attach and share with fellow Zoomers and clients. I just can’t wait to start experimenting!
My current top picks from the Goe System: 
