August 18, 2008 – 7:00 am
Making a pattern in Illustrator is an excellent tutorial for beginners. Not only does it help you gain some familiarity with the Illustrator tools, patterns can also be applied across all kinds of different projects, including posters, websites and flyers. Today everyone can find a large numbers of patterns on the web, even pattern generators, but making your own pattern has a certain sense of satisfaction and of course, you get some great practice in with Illustrator.
There are a few approaches to making your own pattern.
1. Find some vector images, play around and make something you like.
2. Some fonts come with ornaments that can be useful. dafont.com is one resource if you don’t have professional fonts that include ornaments.
3. Drawing it yourself.
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to do it yourself.
August 15, 2008 – 7:00 am
Give your design a personal touch. Think about adding some origami or note-folding to it!
See examples and get plenty of links to money folding, note folding, traditional origami, Toy Paper monsters, even Star Wars origami (and diagrams!), plus amazing paper art by the likes of Jen Stark, Peter Callesen and Richard Sweeney!
Will this inspire you to create something unique for your next design or ad campaign?
Over the past few weeks we’ve been taking an intensive look at the elements of design—the basic building blocks of graphic design and composition—through real world examples. It’s great to know the theory, but applying it is where all the knowledge comes together to form a successful design.
I presented them in the order I originally did […]
Texture can be the element that really takes your designs to the next level. Textures create visual interest and add those touches of detail that were previously missing. Think about what kinds of textures are inviting (silky, soft, fluffy) and which you’d rather keep away from (rough, hard, thorny).
Texture can be used to
Define shapes or space
Add visual interest (detail)
Create […]
January 21, 2008 – 11:13 am
Photoshop brushes can be intimidating to use for the first time. First, you don’t know where to go to download them. I would suggest BittBox, Brusheezy and Obsidian Dawn for starters. But then once you get to those sites, there is an overwhelming amount of brushes to look through!
August 15, 2007 – 11:18 am
Texture can open up a wide world of sensual experience.
When the audience can relate to your design, which is telling the story of a person, business, product or service, they can have a much deeper connection than with a composition devoid of that experience.
August 8, 2007 – 10:35 am
Do you only think of circles, rectangles and triangles when you think of shape? True these are the basic shapes that almost everything is made up of, but there’s so much more!
What is a Shape?
Shapes convey meaning, aid in creating direction and can be used quite effectively for drawing attention to a particular section of the design. There are three basic categories to put shapes into: geometric, natural and abstract.
