Last night I finished the design for a brochure promoting a missions trip to Africa that we plan to take in September. Along the way, I found myself against a few odd problems in Illustrator and thought it worth while to share their solutions.

Large-scale Texture Backgrounds

For the backgrounds of both the inside and outside of the brochure, I wanted solid colors that were accented by subtle textures. Initially, I created full size raster graphics in Photoshop, using textures from the always lovely CGTextures and simply linked to them from Illustrator. This wasn't too cumbersome to deal with, but as the brochure is 8.5" by 11", the file size for each raster was unnecessarily large.

After trying a few things, I found a nice replacement in Illustrator's Swatch Patterns (Window > Swatch Libraries > Patterns). There are only so many that come bundled with the application, but with the right layer blending and opacity, they'll do nicely. Plus, since each is made up of vector shapes, they tile to large physical sizes but maintain an overall low file size.

Bordered Images

I knew from the start of this project that I wanted to drop in the photos with each having a border of consistent look and assumed that I could directly apply a border (e.g. typical Illustrator shapes) or use the Appearance panel to apply a border (e.g. a nice trick to get gradients and borders on live text). Unfortunately, neither option works on linked photos.

I did, however, find success by first placing the photo, applying a shape mask (in this case, it was a simple rectangle) and then adding a border. You won't get access to the Stroke Alignment options (among many other options), but it did make it a lot easier to get consistent borders without having to switch to a page layout application like InDesign or Pages.

Patterned Strokes

My preliminary sketch had these patterned lines that I was immediately fond of excited to see in color. Unfortunately, the pattern used wouldn't separate with the "Expand" command and didn't result in what I wanted with different blending modes.

What did work was recreating the pattern by applying three new Strokes to the line via the Appearance panel (one thick solid for the middle, one white for the space and the last one dotted for the outside) and then using the Graphic Styles panel to apply it to the rest of the border lines. In retrospect, I might have tried using the Symbol Sprayer Tool, as it has done solved similar problems before.

And Done!

The rest of the hard stuff was easy enough to get around, thanks to CS4/CS5's new features ... Artboard Tool, Key Object Selection and Magic Wand options. That last one isn't really too new, but I don't think as many people use it as should. Oh and the last piece of goodness was that this is another design project that I kept versions of using git. Commits at the major changes and if I needed to roll back, I just ran a checkout. Easy peasy.

My submission for this week's Illustration Friday theme of "journey". Simple weaving fun as a little bit of vector laid over the top of some plaster wall.

Texture courtesy of cgtextures.com

It has been about a year since I read Chris Noessel's article on one free interaction and was immediately filled with an excited tingle-y feeling. You know the one ... it's usually reserved for when you find an extra $10 bucks or when you're the guy to remember a song title that's eluding everyone else. It's actually the same feeling I got my first time reading William Lidwell's amazing Universal Principles of Design. He was putting names and principles to things that had only every just been common sense and "who doesn't do that" in my designs ... and it was awesome! That feeling.

Well, from the time I read about one free interaction and then subtly started dropping it into my curriculum conversations and project critiques to now, it is really interesting to see how the idea has evolved. Specifically, how the iPhone page snapback "freebie" is now being used to handle the activity stream refresh for both the Twitter (a.k.a. Tweetie 1) and Gowalla applications.

I'm not sure which applications starting doing it first (or even if there is another application that did), but I love it! Download either app (both are free) and give it a try. It has all of the joy and restlessness that make up o.f.i. and yet, it actually does something useful. Now, obviously, not every free interaction needs to accomplish an action or it would make the whole point moot. It is, however, great to see an otherwise fancy-free and empty action married to such a common and necessary function.

A new icon, just finished today after the DFP lecture. It should be available for purchase from GraphicRiver in a few days. The idea for it was to create something simple and bright, that could be used generally for an application ... from an app launcher to a Biology desk reference or anything in between.

It does feel like there is some sci-fi connection to it ... but that might just be me, considering I just finished watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture (the original 70's version) and it is all about color, light and geometric shapes. The movie was decent enough and I am especially fond of the color bar poster art.

** Update: You can now purchase the Starcon icon for use on your projects from GraphicRiver.

Staying out with "the boys" the last couple of nights has made my alarms (I had to set three ... my watch, my iPhone and the nightstand one) sound so loud and seem so early lately. At some point, I need to find some sleep ... but for now, I am definitely enjoying playing catch up with work and spending so much time out with people I really enjoy.

This is a simple vector piece made in ye ole Illustrator during the lab session today. All of the repeating elements were made using Transform effects, just cuz it's cool to not have to repeat yourself.

My entry for this past Illustration Friday topic of "ahead" actually comes in a couple of parts. I initially started out with idea of creating a typeface to demonstrate the word, but ended up being distracted by the minutia of the lowercase letters not matching up to what I liked about the uppercase letters. I eventually took the letters I did like and worked up the vector illustration you see here.

If you are interested, you can download the vector letters in the current incomplete form in their Font section of the site. Overall, I liked their look and might go back and finish building the whole font later ... but probably not. The main illustration piece is all vector (really just me getting more comfortable with Illustrator's Gradient and Blend tools) and initially consisted of just the main colored piece. I only added the background text areas because it felt like it was trying to escape from somewhere.

On a fun side note, each of the three text sections also matches the "ahead" topic, in some fun way. The first is an excerpt from the Farmer's Almanac for the 2010 Winter forecast, the second is the article about Henry VIII's wives, and the last is about the future of space exploration and the status of the current "Space Race".

**You might have noticed that the enlarged images don't link out to Flickr, but instead enlarge right here. I still use Flickr for lots of stuff, but I noticed that if you are using the Illustration Friday Link Viewer (which I frequently do), it takes far too many clicks to get to the big size . This is my way of trying to make your life easier. You are welcome.

Even though I have no plans of releasing these to the public, I thought you might enjoy seeing this fun little cross-platform project I have been working on. It is really just a fancy list for me to keep handy and remind me of what to work on most days. Not only does it come with a spiffy iPhone version (including a custom iPhone icon, of course), it now has an Adobe AIR version that can be run on a Mac, Windows or Linux system.

The best part? Each deployment pulls from the same HTML source and will a little bit of RegEx magic and JavaScript conditionals, each gets its own look and feel. If you haven't already looked into working with AIR through HTML and JavaScript, it is definitely a lot o' fun. I wasn't really in the mood to set up a site in Dreamweaver or dive into Aptana while working on this, so I took the super nerdy route and did all the AIR debugging and compiling right out of Terminal. Definitely good times.

Thanks to an equally relaxing and productive morning, I managed to wrangled up my earlier drawing into this fun vector. It's sized just perfect for your iPhone, but I am thinking it would make for a great poster print. What do you think? Anyone got recommendations on a place to print them at? I've only ever used Cafepress, which is slightly pricey.

Although it doesn't directly relate to the drawing, this is what I read today to start my morning:

"For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse." - Romans 1:20

After a yummy Thanksgiving lunch and hanging with the co-workers, I spent some time updating a few graphics for the DFP course's Project 3 example.

Despite the fact that these pieces will end up in Flash as part of an AIR deployment, I still created the vectors in Illustrator and did a copy-import. Not because I am lazy, but because I still prefer working with AI's interface and color selectors over the Flash IDE.

And, of course, I had some Battlestar Galactica : Season 1 playing in the background. Just another day at the office ...

The lovely geometric type icon I made during the DFP Lecture today. Simple and customizable, but after continually seeing all of the pretty things that James White keeps putting out, I really just wanted to make something colorful. The icon is entirely vector, which was really difficult to achieve with the color blending of the radial shape and the necessary drop shadow ... had to delve into that cumbersome Illustrator Transparency panel masking interface, which is not typically any fun.

As usual, the icon should be available for purchase from GraphicRiver later on this week ... once it gets approved, of course. Feel free to head over to GR and pick up a couple of my other icons too . My new XBOX 360 will thank you for the spending money. :)