Graphic & Web Design Archives

Like with any software, if you work in it for many years you develop certain habits and working methods. Sometimes because of this you tend to make the mistake to overlook, or simply neglect some of the new features, not realizing that certain actions can be done in less steps. To give you an example, the Eraser Tool in Illustrator is a tool I never used much, and so because of this, and because of this I never paid much attention to it. Big mistake! Here is why…

Not sure about you, but I have this habit of using shortcuts all the time when I work in Illustrator (or in Photoshop). I thought it could be interesting to share some of those, and then ask the question what your typical methods are or shortcuts you can't live without.

It's that time of the year again! While I was creating this Christmas card my mind was totally covered with star shapes and colors. Coincidentally, I received a request from someone who wondered how you create a snowflake in Illustrator. I thought to myself why not write a tutorial…

Whenever I post an Illustrator tutorial, I often receive the question how to do this in Photoshop, or vice versa. There is a lot of common ground in these two. Still some things are easier in Illustrator and others in Photoshop. You might remember the tutorial I wrote about how to create an inset effect on text in Photoshop in combination with a clipping mask. Jonas Neubert asked me kindly how to do this in Illustrator. Just like its Photoshop counterpart, this tutorial covers more than just creating this inset effect. I hope you enjoy this one too.

In my previous post I talked about how you can create a blend between 2 spot colors without having the various hues of the blend turn into CMYK values. Today I want to share with you how you can get rid of the grayness that appear in the centre cross-over colors.

Today I received an Illustrator related question from a reader that really stumped me. I didn't have an answer straight away, so I had to try certain things out to be able to offer some help. Here is the thing: If you're using the blend tool to create a blend between 2 spot colors, it seems that Illustrator turns the values in between these colors into CMYK values. Are there ways to circumvent this?

As most of you probably know, you can easily resize an object in Illustrator using the bounding box handles. It's a fast and effective way, but when you are resizing an object that has a stroke applied to it, the handles appear in the middle of the stroke. For precision work this can be annoying. A better way would be if they appear at the outside border of the stroke instead.

In my previous Illustrator tutorial, I showed you how easy it is to create a gradient ring, by creating a gradient Art Brush using the blend tool. Today, I'll show you my steps how I created the browser landscape graph, starting from a pie chart and a set of gradient Art Brushes.

I'm sure you've seen them around on the web, those rather complex looking infographics, showing statistics or other data. Some of them have a circular shape and use these cool gradient rings. I've received the question more than once from users asking how these are created in Illustrator. Today I'm showing the basis of how this is done, by sharing this very simple and easy to follow Illustrator tip. As always, my method is just one of the few on how to do this. I think it's worth checking and trying out...

A few months ago I received an e-mail from a friend with the question if I could help him out with an Illustrator problem. He created an illustration of a nucleus, based on a group of stacked circles, with a white fill, and a black stroke. He wants to use the illustration in Photoshop, but wants the background of his document shown through…