Veerle's blog

A few days back I created a simple Valentine card for a client’s project. I thought it would be ideal for an Illustrator tutorial as it is created using simple shapes and involved only a tiny bit of Pen tool drawing. In this tutorial it’s all about finding the right composition.

One of the questions I often get from readers is if I could write a tutorial on how to create a certain logo. It’s something that I think is not very good material for a tutorial because it’s so very specific. The hard part is not the execution in Illustrator, it’s the design itself, the creative process. Then again I think certain parts are explanatory e.g. a logo made of letters you draw yourself using circles, simple shapes and lines of equal thickness. The technique I have in mind is something that only works for logo’s that contain only a few characters, ideally not more than 5. It also stands or falls with the characters at hand e.g. if o’s and other circular shapes are involved, than it can get interesting to try this technique out…

One of the requests I received lately was how you can flow text into a compound shape. To flow text into a shape you use the Area Type tool, but this doesn’t work for compound shapes. In this screencast I show you a workaround to this problem.

A reader asked me if I could explain to him how to create the Bavarian flag in Illustrator. Instead of explaining this with text and images I decided to capture another screencast tutorial instead.

It is weekend so the ideal time to have some extra fun in Illustrator and learn something along the way. I’ve talked about writing a tutorial for Vectortuts+ a few days ago. The article has now been published as part of the Graphic Design week that was going on.