I was playing around with some tools in Illustrator CS3 today, and found myself making some fun & interesting brush sets. So, naturally I decided to keep making more and offer them for download here!

The set comes with 10 unique brushes, each one ready for color and your creative ideas. Use the spiral tool, use the brush tool, set the fill to blank, and the stroke to any color you like. Load my brush set and start playing around!

Here’s a quick preview:

Installation:

1. Download the brush set after the jump
2. Unzip the .ai file
3. Browse to your Illustrator Presets/Brushes folder
4. Copy Orkron_brush-set-01.ai to this folder
5. Reload Illustrator if already open
6. Click Window->Brush Libraries->Orkron_brush-set-01
7. Enjoy!

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I spend a large percentage of each day creating Newspaper and Magazine Advertisements through the design firm I work for. I’d say a good 70% of each day is focused primarily on that.

If you’re familiar with doing these types of ads, you’ll know that you get some of the weirdest dimensions to work with; forget the difference between picas and pixel, or inches vs. points: I’m talking when the work order slides onto my desk with a 3-column inch by 4.997 inch height…

Okay, so you get the specs and you’re looking at something like: 4.265″ wide x 4.997″ high (or whatever). The thing about Illustrator is that when you create a new document, it only goes two decimal places out and that’s just not okay to lob off your client’s ad-space (even if it is virtually nothing).

I’m writing this article to explain the best practice method I’ve come up with over the years; hopefully it will help you streamline your workflow by removing the struggle you might face if you happen to set up your document wrong in the beginning.

I’m writing this for Illustrator CS3, but CS4 works the same. Other versions of Illustrator have these option but they may be placed a little different.
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I, like some of you, recently upgraded to the Adobe CS4 family.  The new interface is very nice; I especially like the tabbing between open windows function.

There are some frustrating differences between CS3 (and older) and the new CS4 version.

I wanted to go over the two differences that caused me the most headaches; I’m hoping this article will help some of you get past a couple obstacles that are not so obvious to figure out otherwise.

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Hi Folks,
I have for you today an Illustrator (CS, CS2, and CS3) template for a postage stamp.
These are great for designing fun, printable portraits, or being used for interesting frames for artwork.  The images here are for web-size, however the stamp file is scalable to any size (even for posters, or lol a billboard!).
I have these available in EPS format, after the jump.

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I know I’ve had to, many times create original music CD or video DVD cover art for one project or another.  Every time it seemed to be a different set of circumstances and I never had a template ready to go when I was laying in the shapes/graphics for the art.

Inevitably I would always whip out some music CD that was handy and grab a trust(worth)y ruler (picas, pixels, points and  inches oh my!) and measure out the size of the CD, then go into Illustrator and start laying in my guides, creating my ellipses (it’s a circle, stupid tool) and 10 minutes later I was finally ready to get to work!

Eventually I decided to save my template (wisely) to my always-with-me, never-leaves-my-side USB drive.  So no matter where I am, on which machine I’m on I have it ready to go – which has actually helped once when I was at the park with the ol’ laptop and my friend found me out of nowhere and wanted to talk “New Band Single” and just HAD to see a quick “idea” in the flesh so-to-speak.

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