Well not exactly “make” but it’s more of an exercise to better understand the relations between letters and it also helps a bit in future logo creation. I made this one by taking the letter “o” from Arial Black and then cutting into it, modifying the edges and such, to create a whole typeface. This is not a finished piece as some of the letters need a little tweaking, but it’s surely getting there. Go on, try and make a font yourself!
Many people were skeptical at first about the Flash VS html5 war, but it seems like HTML5 has already won, as after 6 months from apple’s decision to ban flash, HTML5 has now over half of the online video. Which leads to a simple conclusion, that in a year we won’t be seeing flash all that often. Maybe it’s start to learn some new tools?
Sure we now have a content aware fill in photoshop and it works well for removing small elements from a surface, like wrinkles on the skin and such. But it’s still good to use the Clone Stamp tool (S key) to retouch some things by hand. We all know that, but some people recently asked me – why is this a good way if you can’t really undo it after you save the psd ? Well that’s not entirely true and this info is mostly for those people. It’s such a big piece of software that sometimes there are options that are easily overlooked. If you’re retouching a photograph you can create a layer on top of it, and in the Clone Stamp tool’s options change the sampling mode to current layer and below, so the changes will appear only on the new layer. That makes it easier to revert to the original if you ever choose so.
If you own a mac you’ve probably already spent a lot of cash on it. So digging deep in your pockets you might not find another hundreds of dollars for photoshop and illustrator right off the bat. But fear not as there are alternatives that are getting closer to the moment in which they can become substitutes. Sure they lack a lot of functions of the big brothers, but for most tasks they do just fine and are both around 60 dollars. So you can get a whole package for a little over a hundred. Which wouldn’t get you even the cardboard box for photoshop CS5.
Limited functionality is being worked on constantly so if something’s missing that you need in these apps it’ll probably come up pretty soon in the next version anyway. Of course if you need Adobe you’ll have to go with adobe. But it’s good to know that there are alternatives, maybe not for all tasks but still alternatives.
For raster graphics you have the beautifully designed Pixelmator and for vectors there’s Vector Designer . Both cheap but pretty capable. Abduzeedo promotes pixelmator and have quite a lot of tutorials for it, but there’s also a “Learn” section on their website that you can check out to see for yourself if the app is good enough for you.
Well it also works on iPhones and iPods, but on the iPad it truly shows it’s potential. Now imagine that as a VJ app with a couple more elements and mixing techniques and you get yourself something truly remarkable. It’s also pretty cool for making backgrounds / website elements that are a little bit random. And it’s 100% free! Screens below:
In graphic design the hardest things are actually the simple ones. Sure it sounds a bit stupid, but when you think about the rule of “Less is more” and then look at the big letter “a”, written in helvetica on a white background you can see that it’s not actually all peaches and cream.
Simplicity in webdesign is often refferred to as “minimalism”, which basically says it all. Something “minimalist” (-ic) is something simple, an expression of content/function with very little form.
This form can of course has it’s saturation levels – we can have a nicely designed website with just the text. Various typefaces, paddings and margins working together to create something that’s nice to the eye.
But that would probably be considered ultra-minimalism, so let’s move on.
Another step is adding a couple of elements like a background here, a divider line there, but still keeping it simple with as little colors, gradients, photography as possible. And this is where the hard part starts.
We all know that graphically rich and intense websites can hide their content flaws in a lot of flashes and eyecandy. With minimalism we don’t have that comfort, so everything has to be in place. Considering typefaces, font-sizes for different elements is crucial for the whole thing to look good while still being minimalist. If you want to make minimal websites it’s best to look around first and get some inspiration (that doesn’t mean copy+paste! ;))
I think every designer should have at least a couple of those minimal sites in his/hers portfolio among all those beloved graphically intense sites that we’re all so proud of.
There are many ways for achieving “BIG formats” in graphics. One is using very high resolution images. Another one is using vector graphics which is scaleable without artifacts and is great for logos and simple elements. But what if we have a pretty small photo and we’d like it to be big anyway? For a while there weren’t many options but a couple of years ago I found something that I want to share with you.
Rasterbator is a tool that you can use to make large prints from small graphic files such as posters, photos etc. How large can it be? Well let’s quote their website:
The Rasterbator creates huge, rasterized images from any picture. Upload an image, print the resulting multi-page pdf file and assemble the pages into extremely cool looking poster up to 20 meters in size.
20 meters is quite large, isn’t it? And it’s all done by creating lots of little (and bigger) circles of many colors that when viewed from a distance create the image we want. It’s actually quite simple, a technique that was known before and used in print (old newspapers) in a slightly different way. Here it’s an algorithm that enables you to convert your photos from simple pixel x pixel ratio to something much, much bigger using dots. And many of them. What’s great about it is that it’s free to use for commercial purposes as well, so another good thing coming from the so called “community” for the fun and usage by the masses. And it’s pretty easy too.
It even can divide the image into smaller portions (let’s say A4 page format) and export a PDF with a4 pages that you can print on your home printer and then hang in the proper order to have the whole big image. Now that’s creative!
You can check out rasterbator at http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator. Don’t forget to see the amazing photo gallery!
I downloaded the trial version of CS5 today and of course the first thing I wanted to see is how well does it really handle the hyped content aware fill. Below are my results.
Note that sometimes I had to use the content aware fill a couple of times to fix little mistakes previous fills had done. But overall it’s a very powerfull tool. The results are not as perfect as their promotional video but jaw-dropping nonetheless.
Test 1 – removing me and my snowboard from a cellphone picture. So there’s dirt and heavy jpg compression at the start.
The before picture you can see above, the after just below.
Or are they? So content aware fill, puppet tweaking and many more things that seem to make very hard and complicated tasks oh so easy. So now anyone can retouch a photo easily or remove a person from a photograph while preserving the background. So is it the end of designers? Will the clients do their work themselves now with all those “easy to use” automatic tools?
Do you bake your own bread? Even though it’s not that hard now is it? Do you print your own business cards? Nah, I didn’t think so. The tools are still for us designers to use and abuse (because the abuse is actually the path to using the new tools creatively and not just as automatic gizmos). It is still up to us, maybe until apple starts to attack Adobe even more and buys Pixelmator or something to create a competition ;)
Don’t be evil, right?
New, easier tools will make our lives easier but they won’t make us disappear. So don’t worry fellow designer! You’ll keep your job. Better worry about paying Adobe their share and as usual it ain’t cheap…
Today I’ll show you how to create those ubiquitous light trails or as I think of them “curved beams of light” that can either go around a character or be just in the front looking like “light painting”. We will create the image above and it will take about 10 minutes to do so because it’s all about the PEN tool in photoshop. If you don’t really know how to use the pen tool then find a tutorial that shows you the basics of the tool before you proceed.