How to Draw in Perspective using Illustrator When creating an illustration or design using a perspective view, it is much easier to draw in perspective using Illustrator rather than Photoshop. You seem to have a lot more control, and the tools are quicker to use and...
Make Geometric Patterns in Illustrator Creating geometric patterns in Illustrator can be difficult to make in most design programs. If you want to make spiral patterns and geometric repeating patterns, it can take hours to align everything by hand. However, Adobe...
Opacity Masks in Illustrator When you are trying to learn new software, it can be difficult to find your way around. You may not know the terms to look for, or you may not know where to look to find what you are looking for. If you are transitioning from another...
Organic Shapes in Illustrator One of my absolute favorite tools in Illustrator is the Width Tool. If you want to make a free-flowing shape, the Width Tool can really make the creation of organic and rounded shapes much easier. Before, if you wanted to shape the size...
Being Aware of 3D in Illustrator Illustrator is the go-to place for most illustrators to do their work. Many artists do their 2D work inside of Illustrator, and they create amazing results. Many artists and designers are aware of the fact that you can create 3D in...
3D Objects in Illustrator? Yes, Illustrator will allow you to do a decent amount of 3D work, but working with 3d objects in Illustrator can be a pain if you don't know what you're doing. The other thing is that the controls for 3D objects in Illustrator aren't that...
Building Awesome Color Palettes Sometimes as designers and artists, we get a little stuck with choosing the right colors in our work. Sometimes we spend a lot of time trying to get colors just right, and it can be frustrating. Thankfully, Adobe has included some tools...
Perspective in Illustrator We all remember the days when we used to have to draw out tons of guides in order to create convincing perspective in Adobe Illustrator. It would take so much time to create convincing perspective artwork inside of Illustrator, that most of...
About Custom Fonts If you have a knack for it, creating your own custom fonts can generate a lot of money. Even if you have no desire to create custom fonts (because a lot of work and craftsmanship goes into it), you may still come across a project or two where you...
Creating Custom Shapes In Illustrator is Faster Photoshop is great for a lot of things, but some tasks I prefer to do in Illustrator, simply because I can do them much quicker there. One of those tasks is building complex and precise shapes. Honestly I feel like I can...
Switching From Photoshop to Illustrator Adjusting to new software always seems intimidating, especially when it is packed with so many features, as Adobe products are known to be. Well-designed programs like Photoshop and Illustrator are flexible enough to accommodate...
You can control the opacity of each individual color of a gradient inside of Adobe Illustrator. This is fantastic for flexibility with colors. Simply click on the color swatch of the gradient, and there is an opacity setting on the gradient panel. You can also double...
You can easily control the opacity of colors in Illustrator. You can Control the opacity of the stroke and the fill individually by using the appearance panel. Directly under each stroke and fill layer in the appearance panel, there is an opacity section, where you...
First off, I want to thank everyone that participated for their invaluable comments for this post. There are many aspects to branding and corporate identity, and I think each comment touched on a different aspect. Branding is a vital part of marketing and building a...
I got this question yesterday, and thought that it would be a good topic for the day. If you want to fit text to a certain shape, you have a couple of options. The first option is to do what is called an envelope distort. First, you make your shape, and then take the...
When creating type in Photoshop, and you are looking for just the right display face, it helps to use the key commands to get things just how you want them. If you double click your text icon next to the layer, it will highlight your text. Then, simply go up to the...
Opacity has a lot of uses for different types of effects. We like to see certain things bleed through in some areas, while in others we want a shape or text to be a certain color. Recently, I was playing around with opacity in the appearance panel in Illustrator, and...
Appearance Panel in Illustrator This is extremely handy when working in Illustrator. This effect can be placed on objects and text, and on clipping paths. You can arrange the stacking order and the size, as well as the colors. One great advantage is that you can add...
I recently posted a tutorial on the blob brush in Illustrator. Using this tool, you can create some nice hand written effects. First, open up Illustrator and grab the blob brush tool. Go into your brushes panel and create a new brush. I will note that this is much...