Well the great news is my design is a finalist in the final run; now it’s up for a public vote and I need your help in making mine the winner! What’s in it for me you ask? well unfortunately I’m just a poor graphic designer… I can’t offer monetary compensation – but you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you are part of why I won! That should be enough to hold you over with excellent karma for at least half a year! What a deal!

But in all seriousness: I put a lot of time and love into that design (even found a way to help others learn from it) and would really love to have it published and printed (nationwide too!).

Please take a moment and vote for my design here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ICAW_2011_Poster_Poll

I really appreciate it!

Say hello to Chubbs!

Chubbs can be a lovable little boy, an officer of the law, a 1970′s prom date, or a ghetto-fabulous teenager! All Chubbs’ costumes are available in transparent PNG files at 512 x 512

Get Chubbs 01 (182)	Get Chubbs 02 (187)	Get Chubbs 03 (185)	Get Chubbs 04 (177)

If you like Chubbs, please ReTweet this – Thanks!

Recently, with the help of Media Militia, I put out a call for your questions to be answered here. I’d like to personally thank everyone who sent in an email with questions. If you have a question that you’d like me to answer then send me a note; I’m happy to add you to the list for Round Two in the future

Illustrator CS4 Questions/Answers Round One

Question One:

What are the most common keyboard shortcuts to know in Illustrator?

Answer:

I probably don’t know all the keyboard shortcuts that there are as there are so many; but I can give you a list of the ones I use the most often, or that I believe are the most important:

This is of course only a small list of shortcuts; if you have a favorite you use often that’s not in my list, please add it to the comments!

Question Two:

This is actually two questions, but they both have the same answer so I’m combining them here.

• My cursor looks like a funny “X” after I select the Pen Tool
• My cursor looks like a “bullsey” or “crosshair” when I select the Eyedropper Tool

Answer:

Check your CAPSLOCK key! Quite a few of the Tools have different “versions” of their cursor icon when the CAPS key is selected. If you’re on a keyboard like mine, there is no indicator light showing you the CAPS key is active so you may be confused if the Tool you selected has a different cursor than expected. Always check to see if your CAPS key is selected first.

Question Three:

How do you make a perfect circle with the pen tool?

Answer:

Well the unfortunate answer is you can’t make a “perfect” circle using the pen tool. It is possible to make a passable circle which though your eye sees as a little “off” is technically a circle.

However, the only method worth using to make a perfect circle is by using the ellipse tool in the Tools panel in Illustrator. It is fast and easy to use. But, I’ll go over how to make a technical circle using the Pen Tool here.

Step 1:
Make a document 800×600.

Step 2:
First off, you’ll need a grid to work on, so with Adobe Illustrator open, click on “Edit -> Preferences -> Guides & Grid…” a dialog box will open that looks like this (click the image to enlarge):

The second set is for the the Grid; these are the settings I chose. Click “OK” and your artboard should resemble this (click the image to enlarge):

Step 3:
Click “View -> Snap to Grid” (the keyboard shortcut is Shift + CTRL + “ )

Step 4:
Select the Pen Tool in the Tools palette. Click on one of the Grid dots -> without letting go of the mouse, hold shift and drag the mouse down the Grid as shown in the diagram (click the image to enlarge):

Step 5:
Let go of the Shift key and the mouse. Hold Shift again and click once with the mouse as shown in the next diagram -> release the mouse after clicking:

Step 6:
Hold Shift and click the mouse where indicated in the diagram -> while still holding Shift and the mouse button, drag up as indicated in the diagram:

Step 7:
Release both the mouse and the shift key again -> Hold Shift once again and click once and release the mouse button where indicated in the diagram:

Step 8:
Hold Shift and Click the mouse where indicated -> keep mouse button and Shift button pressed and drag down as indicated in the diagram:

And there’s your circle; its technically a circle, but it doesn’t look quite right to the human eye… The image below shows the difference between our circle (left) and an Ellipse circle (right):

Thanks again to Media Militia for help in promoting the concept; You rock Jeya!

Thanks FreeIconsDownload.com for the people icons

Step one:

Before exporting your Illustrator file to another more universal format (such as EPS), or even if you are sharing the .ai file you can remove unused swatches, brushes etc from your document; these unused components add to the size of your document!

This step is super-easy too – open your Action pallet by clicking on Window -> Actions:

Now, in the actions panel, scroll down until you see an action for “Delete Unused Panel Items.” If you expand this option you can see it actually removes quite a lot!

Press the Play button and Illustrator will go through each step and remove (like it says) all the unused components in the list!

Step two:

When exporting your Illustrator file to EPS format for sharing purposes, there is one little option which makes all the difference in file size – turning this off can reduce the size of your exported file 50% or more!

So, the typical export: File -> Save As, choose EPS and then Illustrator is going to ask you some questions in the “EPS Options” dialog box; this is where you want to make your change. Under Preview Format, the default is “TIFF 8-bit Color” Click the dropdown and choose None instead – boom, you just drastically reduced your EPS’ file size!

This will really just cover how to add a pattern to the text, without much fuss or sweat; I did notice that the pattern I chose turned out to not work great in this instance, so be careful on the pattern you choose beforehand to make sure it will tile well (within text).

Okay, let’s get started: First off head over to a really kool site Patternwall.com to find a good tilable pattern.

Patternwall has a really neat system for picking a pattern, simply click on a swatch to see it tiled:

and click the download text to download the pattern you want; I chose to open this JPG file with Illustrator since that’s where we’re going to using it.

So this is your swatch opened in Illustrator – some swatches from Patternwall.com are bigger than others.

So at this point we want to convert this rasterized, 72 dpi image into a vector image with points/paths etc. We are going to use the Live Trace function to achieve this, but before you go hitting the “Live Trace” button on your toolbar there, we need to approach it from a better angle:
With the pattern image selected, click on Object -> Live Trace -> Tracing Options:

And you get a dialog box that pops up like so:

Choose “color” as the mode, and the default of 6 colors is fine; if you check the “preview” box you will see the output results on your screen – this is very handy when playing with something and not knowing the best results beforehand.

When you see the results you like, hit the “Trace” button in the box; the dialog box will disappear and you will be back on the main stage of Illy. Close to the upper-right of the toolbar has a button labeled “expand”. while the traced object is still selected, click on Expand.

Now open your Swatches palette by clicking on Window -> Swatches if it’s not already open.

Drag the expanded object from the stage into the Swatches pallet. This makes a swatch from the selected artwork.

Now start with a blank document – we’re going to type out some text.

Once you have your text, keep it selected and make sure the “fill” not the stroke is selected on the main toolbar. Then click on the pattern we created in the Swatches pallet.

The pattern is applied to the Fill of the text, but the first result isn’t ideal. We are going to transform the pattern inside the text to find a better fit.

Open the Transform dialog box by clicking on Window -> Transform.

For this step we want to make sure we transform only the pattern and not the object. In the upper-right corner of the Transform box there is an icon that looks like 3 lines and a downward-pointing triangle. Click this and choose from the dropdown menu “Transform Pattern Only”

You can play with the numbers until you get a result you like.

Adding a stroke to the outside of the text will help it stand out from any background you may be using.

I wasn’t too thrilled with the pattern at the very end so decided to try another pattern from Patternwall; here is the final result:

There is a lot you can do with this feature, and the text is completely editable so can be changed to read whatever you like. I hope you found this useful.

The included folder icons are: Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, After Effects, Contribute, Encore, Flash, InDesign, Adobe Media Player, OnLocation, Premiere, and Soundbooth.

Download Adobe CS4 Folder Icons here. (449)

The important thing is now we’re back and I can finally add more content!

So today I’ve got new Adobe CS4 icons in PNG format for you to download. The included icons are: Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, After Effects, Contribute, Encore, Flash, InDesign, Adobe Media Player, OnLocation, Premiere, and Soundbooth.

Download the PNG files here (611).

I’ve added a quick little fun “drawing” using the supplied brushes.

I hope you can find these useful.

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-02.ai to this folder
5. Reload Illustrator if already open
6. Click Window->Brush Libraries->Orkron_brush-set-02
7. Enjoy!

Download: Orkron Brush Set 02 (335) ZIP File (78 KB)

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!

Download: orkron_brush-set-01.zip (63 KB)