April 2009 Archives

Contributed by David Macy, Illustrator Sr. Product Manager

Do you sketch digitally? Is your working style in Illustrator tight or loose? Do you plan everything before creating a new .ai file or do you make it up as you go?

Here are a couple of almost diametrically opposed approaches that both lead to very impressive results.

Well known Salem, Oregon Illustrator Von Glitschka shared with us not only his beautiful, inspirational and technically pristine artwork, but also a lot of fantastic detail into the technique itself. Von is a great artist and also a very good teacher, so his tutorials are well worth checking out.

Contributed by Brenda Sutherland, Illustrator Team Rowing Captain

In my last post, I talked about Pathfinder and how Illustrator uses the Pathfinder engine to power other great features as well. One of those features is the Eraser Tool, which erases away parts of an object as if were a vector Art Gum.

You might wonder how this could be tied to Pathfinder, and more importantly, how an understanding of it’s underlying technology will benefit you. Let me explain it this way; the tool can’t read your mind, although it might sometimes seem that way as it erases some objects and not others. I for one love a great mystery, but I think this tool will be even more useful to you if I demystified it by sharing how it works, what it’s limitations are, and the best ways around those limitations.

If you have used the tool, you have probably noticed that it’s very similar to a calligraphic brush. In fact, it can even be used with a pressure sensitive tablet to vary it’s size, angle and roundness. Double clicking on the tool opens up its Option dialog, where you can customize it’s settings.

The options dialog isn’t the only place were settings can be changed. Just like the Calligraphic Brush, the diameter can be changed by using the bracket keys, ] and [ respectively to increase and decrease the size.

Contributed by Brenda Sutherland, Illustrator Team Rowing Captain
Several years ago I used to teach Beginning Illustrator at a local Jr. College. When we would get to the section on Pathfinder my students would look at the following diagram and and experience two very strong emotions. First was excitement as they realized with a single click of a button they could combine or divide objects into new shapes. The second was immediate intimidation over the number of buttons, the mysterious icons, and the fear that they would never master them all.

“Relax” I’d tell them. “You don’t need to memorize them all. Just remember that it’s possible! As long as you know there is a way, you can experiment until you get it right. That’s what Undo is for!"

So why is this tool so important? What’s the big deal? Let me explain. You know that Illustrator provides a lot of shape tools. You have your basic circles and squares, which can also create ovals and rectangles, then there’s the star tool and the polygon tool which can create objects with various points and sides, there’s even a rounded rectangle tool, line tool and a grid tool. But it doesn’t matter how many tools we provide. There will always be shapes that you need to create that won’t be possible with any single tool. For example, if you wanted to create a key. There’s no “Key Tool” in illustrator, and even if there was, it probably wouldn’t create exactly the right key for you anyway.

Contributed by Anubhav Rohatgi, Group Program manager

In 1987 John Warnock, co-founder and chairman of the board at Adobe Systems, demonstrated Adobe Illustrator 1.0. I saw this video for the first time, yesterday on YouTube. It was very inspiring.

Meet Adobe Illustrator, John Warnock Demonstrates AI 1.0 in 1987

I am not sure that I have the clarity of thought and vision to think of something like Illustrator in 1987.

There is some historical information on Illustrator on wikipedia also. The current Illustrator team is standing on the shoulders of giants and we are committed to carrying on the torch set alight by the remarkably talented folks who came before us. Our team is on the hook to make Illustrator more and more relevant to designers today and make their job easier and fun.

The names of these titans on the Illustrator team are listed in all Illustrator releases. Have you seen this yet? On the Mac, select Illustrator>About Illustrator. A dialog will come up. Click on the credits button. We list everyone who has contributed to Illustrator since Illustrator 1.0 in this dialog. Corresponding steps can be followed on Windows by selecting Help>About Adobe Illustrator.

--Anubhav

The Design and Illustration Muscle Collection should keep you busy for a while. Not everyone can contribute though, this flickr collection is curated, so you need to apply.

Contributed by Terry Hemphill, Illustrator Marketing Manger

Until I became assimilated into the language of Illustrator at Adobe, the term “appearance” didn’t mean much to me, despite the fact that I’d used Illustrator for years. The Appearance panel? Nice for basic object info, I guess. Terms like “expand to basic appearance?" Huh? Wouldn’t one “reduce” or “diminish” to basic?

Was I ever missing the boat! It took watching in-house Adobe pros and in-the-know customers who really grasped the power of Appearances and the Appearance panel to wake me up. Now I can’t understand how I ever used Illustrator without the Appearance panel, and in Illustrator CS4, it’s truly one of my favorite features.

I’m going to let the pros on the team give you the real skinny info on Appearances and the Appearance panel in posts to follow, but let me share with you my “a ha!” moment and (hopefully) inspire you to check it out.

The "a ha:" it happened watching Matthew Richmond of the Chopping Block at FITC several years ago, where he was presenting from his bag of Illustrator tricks (he has many) to a packed room. It was his Appearance panel tips that rocked the house. He’s much more lively in person, but he does a great intro to Appearances and Live Effects here, for Illustrator CS3.
The Block has a beautiful new blog with lots of cool posts. Here’s yet another Matthew tip that uses the Appearance panel to let you “design/draw your asterisk off.”

Oh yeah, all this has been in Illustrator for some time. Wait till you see what’s new for the Appearance panel in CS4…

Contributed by David Macy, Illustrator Sr. Product Manager Manager

... when I see artwork that I haven't seen before. It may be the skill, the subject matter, or the medium. I especially love when I see artists using a tool or medium in ways that seem to defy common notions of the how it should behave. A beautiful example is multi-disciplinary artist Greg Geisler.
You may have seen his vector style animation work in A Scanner Darkly, but check out some of the Illustrator work in the Art section on raytracer.com - yes, those incredible and sometimes haunting watercolor, pen & ink and pastel style drawings are done in Illustrator. Looking at some of Greg's paintings, it was no surprise to find out that he shared my love of Francis Bacon.

Contributed by Terry Hemphill, Illustrator Marketing Manager

Spectacular spring weather here in San Francisco and the urge to be outdoors is my excuse for this "Weekly Wrap" being more of a kick off for the new week, but some things, like reading printed material, can be done anywhere: the park, the beach, or the sofa. So even when dissolute, there are still thoughtful items to be gleaned from the venerable, and very portable, mass medium called print.

The much-heralded collapse of the newspaper industry is a a bit disconcerting to me. Yes, I'm old school, and still enjoy the idea of the New York Times and a cup of coffee on a lazy Sunday morning. But despite all the thrashing and gnashing over a dying business, there's very little put forth in the way of what's needed to overhaul the system.

Jacek Utko, an astonishingly talented Polish newspaper designer, asks, "Could good design save the newspaper--at least for now?" His approach, and success, suggests that he's on to something. Check out his presentation from this February's TED conference:

In the same vein, an article in GOOD magazine provides a fascinating comparison of the changes that took place 200 years ago with the situation today, and gives us a peek at a new revenue model for journalism to replace the failing one we have now.

And while we're on GOOD, their latest issue, which I did cart with me to the park this weekend, has some wonderful graphics to support the theme of Reinventing Our Wheels, created by the New York design studio Open.

Alas, the cover above, while still designed by Open, is not from issue 15 on transportation, and while I couldn't find the cover graphic from GOOD's latest issue, check it out on a newsstand near you. Just updated--GOOD has posted their transportation issue online. The looped and knotted highways would make a great "how-to" for Illustrator. But in the meantime, this tutorial from abduzeedo.com gives a good warm up for creating more intricate designs. Big thanks to Scott Stowell from Open on the GOOD update.

For a deeper look at some of Open's work for GOOD, download a PDF (3.1 MB) of their Transparency section from GOOD issue 006.

Contributed by Ian Giblin, Illustrator Team Torch Bearer
If you work extensively with color swatches in Illustrator organizing, finding, and sharing them becomes really important. Many users need to be able to share palettes with a large team and they need to be able to find colors based on their naming conventions, locally, or on a server.

Customers have told us,
• I need to search for specific colors or swatches within palettes (or files) without having to open them.
• I need to make palettes of colors and share them with other Adobe apps and I want to preview them easily.

Enhancements to Bridge and Illustrator make this possible.

Contributed by Brenda Sutherland, Illustrator Team Rowing Captain
It’s so easy to take color for granted. Sure, we all have our favorites, and who among us doesn’t spend a ridiculous amount of time choosing the perfect color when the choice is in our hands.

When I was in London last year I had no problem finding my way around thanks to my handy underground and bus maps. All routes beautifully color-coded. Even the paper money in Britian uses multiple colors to help distinguish denominations. Back home, reading the paper, I notice how many info graphics, especially maps, use color to convey everything from falling home prices to earthquake hazard zones. And think about when you go to the grocery store. If you’re like me, you don’t even read the package. I know the brand I like has a yellow box, I know the variety I like has a green stripe, done!

And that’s why I say it’s easy to take color for granted, at least it is when you have full color vision. But did you know that 200 million people globally are colorblind? The numbers are interesting when it comes to gender; about 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women are estimated to have some type of color vision impairment. As a designer, think about what this means. If your design is dependent on color for either conveying information or pure visual impact, wouldn’t you like to be sure that your design accomplished these goals for everyone? How do you do that?

Thanks to a few new features in CS4, it’s easier than you think. We’ve implemented a couple new view modes that preview your art in the same way that a colorblind individual would see it. When used in combination with the new 2-up layout option, I can adjust colors in my regular color view while at the same time, seeing how the changes impact the color blindness view.