Posts Tagged ‘Illustrator’

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Deke’s Techniques: Creating an ambigram in Illustrator

Published by | Tuesday, October 11th, 2011

This week, Deke’s Techniques turns our world upside-down, only to find that it’s the same as when it was right-side up. Deke sets out to create an ambigram in Illustrator, and he chooses a particularly appropriate word (both in its structure and meaning): Adobe.

For those of you who aren’t devotees of either Douglas Hofstader (Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid) or Dan Brown (Angels & Demons), an ambigram is a typographic treatment that—to quote Hofstader— “…squeezes two different readings into the selfsame set of curves.” The particular type of ambigram Deke explores this week is one in which you turn the letters over, only to find that it looks and reads exactly the same in the new orientation:

The free video this week shows you how to exploit Illustrator’s dynamic Transform command to work out your ambigrammatic tendencies, watching as you create one half of the word and see it flipped in real time on the other side. For members of lynda.com, Deke’s exclusive video addition to the Online Training Library® reveals a more complicated double-word phrase that can still be turned upside-down without a shift in meaning.

Stop by next week for another free technique to find out what mysteries Deke has in store.

Interested in more?
• the entire collection of Deke’s Techniques 
• courses on Illustrator in the Online Training Library®
• courses by Deke McClelland in the Online Training Library®

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Deke’s Techniques: Designing an updating pattern in Illustrator

Published by | Tuesday, September 6th, 2011

 

In this week’s free episode of Deke’s Techniques, Deke shows you how to set up a repeating pattern in Adobe Illustrator that can be updated  quickly and efficiently. He starts by creating the repeating pattern grid with the Transform effect, applying it multiple times to fill the document with a single element.

Why would you do this rather than use a tiled pattern? Well, by using the Transform effect to create your pattern grid, any changes you make to the source graphic are dynamically updated in all its ‘clones.’ Change the color, the shape, or even add another dynamic effect to your master graphic, and it will disseminate throughout your grid of replicants. The result is a pattern that can change with your needs and whims.

Illustrator magic this week on Deke’s Techniques. See you next week for another free technique from Deke.

Related links:
the entire collection of Deke’s Techniques 
courses on Illustrator in the Online Training Library®
courses by Deke McClelland in the Online Training Library®

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Deke’s Techniques: Creating custom starbursts in Illustrator

Published by | Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

You don’t have to settle for the ordinary, even when it comes to creating a starburst in Illustrator. In fact, this week Deke shows you two techniques for giving your stellar compositions a customized effect in this single movie. In the first example, you’ll start with a simple star shape path, then use such unintuitively named features as Roughen and Pucker, in order to create a celestial body to contend with. And even better, these are dynamic effects you can assess and adjust to your own taste:

In the second example, Deke shows a less adjustable—but no less effective—means of customizing the star shape he used in last week’s technique. By using a much more intuitively named feature, the Crystallize tool, you can make iterations of your original path, adjust the opacity, and end up with this effect:

Either way, you’ll end up with a couple of techniques in your bag of star-based tricks that allow you to take your celestial creations to new heights.

Every week, there’s a new free technique from Deke. And lynda.com members can see the entire collection of Deke’s Techniques (along with some exclusive members-only videos) here. Meanwhile, Deke will be back next week with a new Photoshop technique that’s out of this world in a completely different way.

Related links:
Deke’s Techniques
courses on Illustrator in the Online Training Library®
courses by Deke McClelland in the Online Training Library®

 

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Deke’s Techniques: Creating a shooting star in Illustrator

Published by | Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

We’re reaching for the stars this week with Deke. Well, we’re actually making one beautiful glowing star that spreads its luminance across a dark sky. In this week’s free movie, you’ll see how simple paths and the deft application of blending in Illustrator can create an absolutely stellar effect. And you don’t need the latest and greatest Illustrator to play with this feature in your own projects. Although Deke is using Illustrator CS5 in the video, the tools involved have been a part of the application since 1988!

Deke starts with some simple paths, isolates them systematically, then applies blending and some careful pen tool machinations to make them dance to your will. You’ll even see how Illustrator blends from completely opaque to completely transparent, and along the way, you’ll find out how Deke creates this striking star trail:

Want to see more Illustrator illusion? Members of the lynda.com Online Training Library® can catch this week’s exclusive video here, in which Deke shows you how to automatically create the repeating effects of his gargoyle’s wings, the sarcophagus it protects, and the fence around the cryptic tomb.

Frankly, sometimes I find Illustrator a little mysterious, but Deke’s Techniques will give you stellar powers in under eight minutes. And if you want to explore Adobe’s vector-drawing powerhouse, you can check out the first course in Deke’s Illustrator One-on-One series. Meanwhile, seasoned Illustrator explorers shouldn’t miss our deep-dive series—Illustrator Insider Training—with Illustrator commander extraordinaire, Mordy Golding. (Start with Illustrator Insider Training: Rethinking the Essentials, for a look at what you might have missed if you started with Illustrator before warp speed was introduced.)

And next week, Deke continues the galactic travels in Illustrator with a custom starburst. Every week, a free technique from Captain Deke!

Related links:
Deke’s Techniques
courses on Illustrator in the Online Training Library®
courses by Deke McClelland in the Online Training Library®

 

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Poll: What new weekly tutorial series would you like lynda.com to start publishing?

Published by | Friday, February 18th, 2011

Deke's TechniquesIt’s official! Deke’s Techniques, the weekly video tutorial series of creative Photoshop and Illustrator projects in 10 minutes or less is a hit! We started publishing these weekly tutorials in January, and our members are loving this new format. While we will continue to publish the longer form courses that we are known for, we are ready to start expanding the weekly format to other subject areas—and that’s where you come in. Would you please tell us which of these weekly series you think we should add by taking the two polls below?

Check as many of the series ideas below that you would want to see available on lynda.com:

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If we could only add one more weekly series this year, which one would you choose?

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Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. And if you have an idea for a different weekly series not listed here, be sure to tell us by adding a comment to this blog post.

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Posted in 3D + Animation, Business, Deke's Techniques, Design, Developer, Home computing, Photography, Polls, Video, Web | 101 Comments »

New Year creativity resolutions from lynda.com authors

Published by | Thursday, January 13th, 2011

To celebrate the new year and my new position as content manager of the design segment at lynda.com, I decided to quiz some of our lynda.com authors about what kind of advice, warnings, or personal goals they might have for 2011. Here are some of the useful tips, gentle admonitions, and personal goals they shared:

David Blatner suggests that we take a little time now to make styles, master pages, learn keyboard shortcuts, set up workspaces, or other time-saving shortcut skills, in order to save a lot more time downstream. I so agree with David on this one. And while I’m really good (obsessive, really) about creating styles in InDesign, I’m a horrible procrastinator when it comes to learning shortcuts. Which is silly. A few seconds of concentration on learning how to navigate the Layers panel in Photoshop with the keyboard would probably pay off before I even get around to breaking the rest of my resolutions.

James Fritz wants to learn more about new technology, and since Fritz is the author of InDesign CS5: Interactive Documents and Presentations, his thoughts naturally run to ePub and hopes we have something in the works there. (We’ll get on it, Fritz.) He also recommends brushing up on HTML5 and CSS. Don’t know where to start? Try James Williamson’s Web Design Fundamentals course.

Deke McClelland thinks you should stop adding those heavy-handed precious-memory vignettes to your portraits no matter how easy they are to create in Photoshop/ACR these days. Let’s face it, vignettes are the drop shadows of the new millennium. Unless you are shooting actions shots of dinosaurs, of course, then vignette away (check out the Adding grain and vignetting effects from Deke’s Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Advanced course for why this last bit makes any sense whatsoever).

Mordy Golding thinks learning  to exploit Illustrator’s Appearance panel is definitely worth your 2011 attention. In fact, Mordy once claimed that “…the Appearance panel was the source of all things about modern Illustrator usage. The path to Illustrator righteousness. If you aren’t using it yet, you need to get with the program.” (Illustrator that is). You can get Mordy’s rundown on Using the Appearance panel from his Illustrator CS5 Essential Training course.

All good ideas, I think. Any bad design production habits you want to replace with better ones this year? Any good habits you hope your friends and colleagues adopt? What about things you want to learn—and how can we keep our resolution to help you with that?

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Posted in Design | 1 Comment »

Illustrator CS5 One-on-One: Advanced preview—Phase six: Scaling and editing

Published by | Friday, October 29th, 2010

Phase six: Scaling and editing traced artwork

In this exclusive preview of his upcoming Illustrator CS5 One-on-One: Advanced course, lynda.com author Deke McClelland shares six phases in the creation of an authentic five-by-three-foot pirate flag. In this last episode, Deke uses Illustrator to enlarge, recolor, and edit a group of paths to create a finished piece of art. Look for the full course to be released in its entirety later this year.

Topics include:
• Using the Scale tool to resize a piece of art
• Selecting and recoloring a collection of paths
• Moving a few subpaths to perfect a piece of art

Part one: Sketching
Part two: Editing scanned line art
Part three: Adding contrast and color
Part four: Live trace and resolution
Part five: Expanding and separating artwork

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Bert Monroy reveals his latest digital masterpiece, Times Square

Published by | Thursday, October 28th, 2010

lynda.com author and digital painter Bert Monroy with his latest work.

Today, lynda.com author and digital painter Bert Monroy publicly revealed his latest (and massive!) digital painting entitled Times Square at the PhotoPlus Expo conference in New York.

Bert Monroy's Time Square

Bert Monroy's Time Square.

Bert has been working on this hyper-realistic illustration for four years, and says he’s not quite done with it yet. It is the largest image he’s ever created, and it definitely pushed the boundaries of the software and hardware he had available to use. Every element has been meticulously created from scratch using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. The 5 foot by 25 foot image is filled with the likenesses of Bert’s family, friends and scores of luminaries from the imaging and creative industry—including our very own Lynda Weinman, Bruce Heavin, Deke McClelland, David Blatner, Chris Murphy, and Colleen Wheeler.

Standing next to John Loiacono of Adobe are our own Bruce Heavin and Lynda Weinman.

A 25-foot light box was constructed to display the piece that has been printed on a new material being introduced by Epson called DisplayTrans Backlight Media that Bert helped develop. If you are in New York, you can get up close and the incredible detail for yourself by visiting the Epson booth at PhotoPlus Expo being held at the Javits Convention Center through Saturday, October 30, 2010. Alternatively, you can pan and zoom in on an online version of the piece.

Some interesting facts:

• The image size is 60 inches by 300 inches.
• The flattened file weighs in at 6.52 gigabytes.
• The painting is composed of almost 3,000 individual Photoshop and Illustrator files.
• Taking a cumulative total of all the files, the overall image contains over 500,000 layers.

We are thrilled to also let you know that Bert will begin production on a Making of Time Square video course later this month, which is likely to be published early next year. Until then, you can find out more about the incredibly talented Bert by watching the Creative Inspirations documentary we published on him earlier this year.

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Posted in Documentaries, In the news, Photography | No Comments »

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