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HomePosts Tagged "graphic design" (Page 17)

graphic design Tag

Hand Drawn, Illustrator, Patterns, Tutorials

A few months ago, I shared how anyone with any version of Adobe Illustrator can create a seamless pattern. Once Adobe created CS6 a few years back, they included the pattern tool and it was a giant game changer for anyone who loves to create vector patterns. Not only did it make the entire pattern creation process faster, it eliminated Illustrator’s tendency to get glitchy with those white hairlines that would sometimes appear in our patterns.

In this week’s tutorial, we’ll go over everything the pattern tool can do, all the different pattern styles you can create using the same elements, and we’ll do it all by using the same menu. Head’s up, this tutorial only applies to CS6 or newer versions (CC) Illustrator users. Let’s make some patterns!

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Branding, Business, Illustrator, Tutorials

Happy Tuesday! I’ve gotten quite a few requests lately on layout design for a business card, so this week I wanted to share some design friendly layouts that could be used for different types of businesses, and also make each one print-ready using Illustrator. At the end of this tutorial, you’ll have 3 business card design layouts (front and back!) you can print at home using the bulk print method, or send off to a professional printer. Read on to see how – links to the fonts and resources used included below!

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Tutorials, Typography

Happy Tuesday! This week’s tutorial comes courtesy of Brittany, who shared this photo with me, which I agreed would make a great quick tip tutorial! As a bonus, I’m sharing how to create multi-colored long shadow typography, in case you’d like to use more than one color for your shadows 🙂 We’ll create every version quickly in Illustrator using one simple tool and a couple of extra time saving options. This is perfect for gig posters, MTV-esque retro designs, greeting cards, or paired with simple icons. Read on to see it all!

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Roundups, Textures

With the launch of my recent Skillshare class, Metallic Magic, and the Glitz + Glam Digital Foil and Glitter Kit, I wanted to dedicate a post to some inspiration on how you can use your new digital foil and glitter making skills. While I had a blast creating those sparkly textures, I’ve had even more fun applying them to designs, hand lettering, stamp effects and more. Today I want to share some digital foil and glitter inspiration to get you excited about all the opportunities out there to get your logos noticed, enhance your portfolio, make your website shine, etc. Have a look below and get ready to take your designs further 😉

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Hand Lettering, Holiday, Photoshop, Textures, Tutorials

I pulled some pretty long hours getting the Glitz + Glam Kit ready for the holidays because I knew it was exactly what I needed this year to push my designs further…plus, who doesn’t like a little extra sparkle + shine in their work ? 🙂 This week – whether you’ve picked up the kit yet or not (here’s the freebie texture from last week you can use!), we’ll create a holiday wreath in Photoshop with foil accents. We’ll go over creating and applying a custom brush to a path, adding a foil texture to it and even changing the color of the foil! I also share how I set up my Instagram files in Photoshop 🙂 Read on to see it all!

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Holiday, Photoshop, Textures, Tutorials

Happy Tuesday! This week’s tutorial comes to you courtesy of Lauren, who emailed me last week asking how to create a realistic paper cut out effect. With winter well on its way (my family in upstate NY has already had their first snowfall!), I thought a winter theme would work well with the effect. Do you remember these free hand drawn vector snowflakes from wayyy back? I thought it would be a good time to bring them back for this week’s tutorial and pair them with a more intricate snowflake to really show off the handmade look of this effect. I also happen to have a digital recycled paper pack and handmade paper pack which I thought would bring some nice authenticity to finish off the whole piece (pick up some free ones here). Read on to create your own!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Typography

Happy Friday! I’m so excited to announce the conclusion of the Font Project this week! It’s been a great 6 weeks learning how to really take a font from some doodled letters on paper, to typing on screen. I know I still have a ways to go with learning the ins and outs of Glyphs Mini (as with any kind of software), but it’s a challenge I’m looking forward to take on. I have a few final tips I wanted to share from this week’s work, and I also want to announce that my new font has a name and it’s available for download! Read on for it all!

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Photoshop, Tutorials, Typography

A while back, I shared how to create dimensional typography in Illustrator, which is perfect for artwork that needs to be rescaled to different dimensions. But what if you already know the biggest your type needs to be seen at and you’d like to use Photoshop instead? In this week’s tutorial, I share how to create that dimensional typography quickly and easily in Photoshop using the rectangular marquee + pen tool to create selections and a soft brush to create those dimensional shadows. And! Since it’s Thanksgiving month and all, we’ll finish everything off with a small fall detail 🍃 😉Feel free to use these ideas for Thanksgiving invitations or greeting cards! Let’s get started!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Illustrator, Typography

Happy Friday and welcome to Week 5 of the Every-Tuesday Font Project! I can’t believe next week is our last week! This past week was such a HUGE week of learning for me. Taking your letters from Illustrator and putting them into Glyphs Mini is definitely not as simple as copy/paste – but it isn’t hard, I promise! Just a *little* tedious. You shall see 😉 Below I have a full video on how I set up Glyphs Mini and how I set up my Illustrator file to bring everything in at the right sizes and finished the video off with kerning in Glyphs Mini and exporting the font, then typing with it in Illustrator. As tedious as this week was with a learning curve and just the steps in general, it was so incredibly satisfying. Read on to see these letters become a font!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Illustrator, Typography

Welcome to week #4 of the Every-Tuesday Font Project! See the previous 3 weeks here. This past week was spent vectorizing the lowercase portion of the alphabet in Illustrator in the same manner the uppercase was vectorized last week. Since the uppercase portion has a pretty smooth/clean aesthetic compared to the original live trace, I worked to maintain that same cleanliness with similar weight contrasts throughout the lowercase. One of the biggest lessons this week was that creating consistency throughout the lowercase is definitely more challenging than with the uppercase. There are far more details in the lowercase letterforms that you don’t really realize until you get into it. For example: the weight contrasts and curvature of the ‘c’ should be the same as in the lowercase ‘o’ should be the same in the lowercase ‘e’, etc. This created quite a few differences in the original drawn letters to the cleaned versions, but when placed together to form simple words, the font really started to come to life! The personality I had intended is coming through and it has me really excited about getting this into Glyphs Mini. As with last week, I took a bunch of timelapse videos of my Illustrator work where you can see me pulling portions of other letterforms to define new ones. Read on to see it all!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Illustrator, Typography

Welcome to week #3 of the Every-Tuesday Font Project! See Week 1 here and Week 2 here. This past week was spent vectorizing the uppercase portion of the alphabet in Illustrator, which was created last week. I followed the same methods of vectorizing + cleaning paths as seen in this tutorial and this one. I found my pen tool and occasionally using my Wacom tablet to be the most helpful when it came to cleaning up lines (here are my Wacom recommendations if interested), but anyone handy with a mouse could do a very similar job. I tweaked my initial live trace slightly (exact settings I used are below) to create rougher outlines to start with, which gave me more room to decide how ‘hand drawn’ each letter could feel. Read on for more of my process and some time lapse videos!

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Holiday, Illustration, Illustrator, Tutorials

Spence doodled out this adorable Frankenstein the other day and I just had to bring it to life in Illustrator! Since flat illustrations/icons are still very popular these days, I decided to draw it out in a flat illustration style with a half face shade and a long shadow. This would work great on a party invite, perched atop toothpicks on Halloween themed cupcakes, printed out life sized on a front door, or tied around candy goodie bags. This same style could be adapted for a ghost, witch, pumpkin and/or skeleton to create a full set. Video tutorial below along with the template sketch used in the tutorial!

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