Design Inspiration : Illustration Class and Von Glitschka
Posted by Jennifer Farley | July 11, 2008 | 2 Comments
Illustration Class is a superb site for anyone interested in illustration and design. It’s written by Von Glitschka, a very experienced designer and illustrator and includes tutorials, tips and pdf downloads.
Von spoke at the HOW Design Conference about his design process and gave many tips and pointers about things to do and things to avoid. Even if you’re not interested specifically in illustration, I think this talk is invaluable for anyone who works or is interested in any creative field. You can download the entire session as an mp3 and also the presentation, so it’s almost like being there!
Illustrative Design Session - HOW Design Conference with Von Glitschka.
Von also has a blog called Artbackwash.
Photoshop Tutorial: Easy Arrowheads
Posted by Jennifer Farley | July 10, 2008 | 3 Comments
Photoshop has tools that allows you to quickly create an arrowhead, you just use the line tool and some options from the Options Bar. Here’s how to make an arrow;
- On the toolbar, select the the line tool. It’s may be hidden under the rectangle tool.
- Up in the Options Bar, select either a shape layer, a path or “fill pixels”. In this case, I chose fill pixels.
- Farther along the Options Bar, you’ll see icons for the six shape tools. Click on the down facing triangle beside the “gooey” star shape.
- The drop down box gives you options to click a checkbox to add arrowheads to either the beginning or end of your line, and you can choose the Width, Length, the Concavity (fancy!).
- To vary the chunky-ness of your arrow, you can set a value for the weight on the Options Bar. For this example I set the weight to 20. Then you simply click and drag out to draw whatever size arrow you need.
All of the shapes below were created using this method and by varying the width, length and concavity values. Because you’re drawing with vector tools you get lovely clean, smooth edges.
Photoshop and Bridge : Part Deux
Posted by Jennifer Farley | July 7, 2008 | 2 Comments
When you have a large number of images to work with, it can be quite time-consuming to have to browse through them. In part 2 of this series on Adobe Bridge, I’m taking a look at how to rank and sort files.
Ranking and sorting image files
Adobe Bridge has a star-ranking feature that you can use to group and sort image thumbnails. This gives you an alternative way to organize images in the thumbnail preview area. In this example, I’m using five stars to rank the best images, three stars for medium-quality images, and one star for rubbish. Star rankings are entirely up to yourself, it’s just a tool to help you sort through images you might be using for a project or a folder of photographs.
1. With Bridge open, make sure you have large, clear thumbnail previews, and then click to select one that’s of particularly good quality.
2. Click one of the dots that appear below the image thumbnail. When you click, the dot turns into a star. Click again on the fifth star to turn all five dots into stars.
3. Hold down Ctrl and click to Select a few more high-quality files.
4. Choose Label > ***** to apply the five-star ranking to all selected images at once.
5. Choose View > Sort > By Rating to rearrange the thumbnails so that the best images are grouped together. Toggle off View > Sort > Ascending Order to have the five-starred images appear at the top of the thumbnail preview area.
6. Continue to assign five-, three-, and one-star rankings to all the files in the folder, either by ranking them individually (as in Steps 1 and 2) or in multiples (as in Steps 3 and 4).
You can delete stars at any time by selecting the thumbnail, moving the cursor over the stars, and clicking the gray circle with a slash through it that appears to the left. 
7. Choose View > Sort > By Rating again to arrange the files in reverse alphabetical order of their rankings.
In addition to sorting your view by star rankings, you can filter the view to see only those thumbnails of a specific ranking.
8. Choose Show 5 Stars from the Unfiltered pop-up menu to show thumbnails of only those thumbnails with a five-star ranking.
9. Choose Filtered > Show All Items so that you can see all of your image files.
This sort of ranking is easy to apply and easy to understand. It only takes a little bit of time to do but can be helpful when dealing with folders of images. I’ve used it in the past to show clients my recommendations for pictures for their projects. The important thing to remember is that Bridge deals not only with jpegs and gifs but Photoshop files, Illustrator files, EPS, Flash files, InDesign files and PDFs, and more, all of which can be ranked using this method.
Design Contest: Collar Free and San Diego Fashion Week
Posted by Jennifer Farley | July 2, 2008 | 1 Comment
Collar Free is a company building a collaborative clothing company around graphic designers and trendy consumers. They are currently sponsoring a competition to design a t-shirt for San Diego Fashion week. There’s a lovely first prize of 500 US Dollars, not to mention the fame, glory and delight of having your t-shirt chosen as No.1 .
It’s a good opportunity to do a bit of designing and perhaps win a nice prize. The main rules of the contest are that your design includes Fashion Week logo and that the design works on a white or grey shirt. You can find out more about the rules of the competition and download a template for the t-shirt here.
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About
Hi, my name is Jennifer Farley and I am a designer and design instructor based in Ireland. Read more about Laughing Lion Design .
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