Written by Lourance | 18 June 2010

One of the requests I received lately was how you can flow text into a compound shape. To flow text into a shape you use the Area Type tool, but this doesn’t work for compound shapes. In this screencast I show you a workaround to this problem.

What we will create

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Written by Lourance | 18 June 2010

Today I have a very easy to follow step-by-step tutorial for people who just started out with Illustrator. This is another request from a reader who asked if I could explain how to draw this ring shape (see image on the left). Looking at this shape I can see it’s made of 2 overlapping crescents which are then rotated at 45 degrees. There is also this interesting overlapping effect which adds a bit of unrealistic depth effect which makes me think of the work of M.C. Escher. This time I thought it would be a good idea to work with screenshots again…

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Written by Lourance | 17 June 2010

One of the questions I often get from readers is if I could write a tutorial on how to create a certain logo. It’s something that I think is not very good material for a tutorial because it’s so very specific. The hard part is not the execution in Illustrator, it’s the design itself, the creative process. Then again I think certain parts are explanatory e.g. a logo made of letters you draw yourself using circles, simple shapes and lines of equal thickness. The technique I have in mind is something that only works for logo’s that contain only a few characters, ideally not more than 5. It also stands or falls with the characters at hand e.g. if o’s and other circular shapes are involved, than it can get interesting to try this technique out…

Here is what we'll be creating:

As you can see, 4 letters, 2 o's, a lot of roundness, ... First thing I often do for a type design is analyzing the letters I have to work with, try to find certain patterns. If there are double letters (2 o's, 2 t's , 2 l's etc.) can I create something fun with that? Can I create a ligature? Can I transform one of the letters a bit an integrate it with a symbol etc. There are many more ways than only this, but the typographic part is often one of the mayor routes you want to try out. The word 'loca' seems ideal for this type of execution. Lets get started :)

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Written by Lourance | 17 June 2010

Blue part of the flag

We'll be building the flag starting with the blue part, secondly the red part and last the white part with a 'ribbon' effect.

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Written by Lourance | 17 June 2010

A few days back I created a simple Valentine card for a client’s project. I thought it would be ideal for an Illustrator tutorial as it is created using simple shapes and involved only a tiny bit of Pen tool drawing. In this tutorial it’s all about finding the right composition.

For this tutorial I'm using a document of 600 by 400 px. You might also wonder why I use pink instead of red. Well, here is the thing. Have you ever tried to use red with an opacity of 25% ? You get this weird shade that isn't really appealing to work with and so I with pink on the other hand you start with a way more interesting shade. Overlaying transparent pink shapes gives you this nice vibrant color effect. I know some of you might now like pink, but this is for Valentine.

Create diamond

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Written by Lourance | 17 June 2010

Today I’ll talk about how you can recolor your artwork in Illustrator CS3 using the LiveColor feature. I’ve always wanted to talk about this feature, but somehow I never got to actually doing it. I believe this is a rather powerful feature that might be a bit daunting at first sight. It definitely needs some getting used to before you actually see or understands its power.

Some people might find other methods better, easier or faster, but here are the steps I usually take when I use this feature:

Add your swatches in a Color Group

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Written by Lourance | 17 June 2010

The original tutorial was here before. But as some of you followers know, it’s been air in the catastrophy of my server aftermath.

So here it is, revised and even more detailed, the making of a 3d isometric vector icon with Illustrator.

I will try explaining this in the longest way.

So this one will not only be just a 3d shiny box icon tutorial, but also an article to give an idea about how to design isometric scale icons.

What is Isometric Anyways?

Isometric projection is a 3d method, being a form of ortographic projection; representing a 3 dimensional object in 2 dimensions.

In a bit simpler english; we can make 2d objects easily converted to 3d objects by adding equally measured perspectives. That’s what we will do to create our 3d vector icon =)

Here is what we will try to achieve:

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Written by Lourance | 17 June 2010

Have you ever wondered what those 9 tiny small squares are all about on your Transform palette?!! Well, those tiny squares are called 9-Point Proxy which corresponds to the 8 points of an object's bounding box and its center.

If you click on any one point of this 9 points, your selected point is highlighted by black color and the x, y coordinates also changes depending on the point you have selected, that is: clicking a different point reveals the coordinates for that point of the selection.