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Draw a Braun watch in Illustrator

At the minimalismo.com site, I came across an arti­cle show­ing re-issued line of Braun watches from the sev­en­ties, designed by Dieter Rams and Diet­rich Lubs. At the same time I was try­ing to solve a long time issue I have been deal­ing with in Illus­tra­tor, where I was try­ing to find a for­mula to use with Illus­tra­tors Trans­form Effect. I used a por­tion of this draw­ing to explain that issue solv­ing. So I when I was show­ing this prob­lem to oth­ers I kept get­ting ques­tions about the draw­ing itself and in the end I decided to make a tuto­r­ial for every­one to play with.

There are sev­eral ways one could make a vec­tor draw­ing of this watch but the way I am show­ing here aims at mak­ing some major ele­ments of the draw­ing reusable. This may seem to make it more com­pli­cated but I am hop­ing that this will open some­ones eyes for meth­ods they might not have been using until now.

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Cal­cu­late mul­ti­ple objects in a cir­cle in Illustrator

When you are draw­ing or design­ing in Illus­tra­tor you prob­a­bly at one time or another need to put mul­ti­ple objects in a cir­cle. This is basi­cally very easy by using the rotated tool, click some­where you want the cen­ter of rota­tion to be and drag the object while you hold the mouse. Repeat this process over and over or sim­ply do Object > Trans­form > Trans­form Again or even Com­mand + D.

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Mak­ing seam­less pat­terns in Illustrator

Mak­ing a pat­tern in Illus­tra­tor can be as sim­ple as drag­ging any object or objects to the Swatch panel and you have got a pat­tern so to speak. But that is not what is called a seam­less pat­tern where the pat­tern repeats itself in all directions.

To make a seam­less pat­tern in Illus­tra­tor one needs to make the base pat­tern with in a square of any size. Con­tinue reading…

Con­tact Sheets in PDF in Bridge replace the older InDe­sign plug-in

Bridge CS3 has a very nice fea­ture that makes it easy to make con­tact sheets of pic­tures directly to InDe­sign. This fea­ture was removed as of Bridge CS4 and is sorely missed by many.

If you are still get­ting pissed try­ing to find this fea­ture under Tools in Bridge, you should know that there are at least two great options you have.

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Illus­tra­tor Key­board Short­cuts for For­eign Languages

One of the very best ways to make work­ing on a com­puter effi­cient is to use key­board short­cuts. You know, Cmd + C to copy and Cmd + V to paste. I am see­ing peo­ple who have used com­put­ers for over fif­teen years still using the mouse to do these com­mands from the menus. Con­tinue reading…

Grid Sys­tems : Cal­cu­late grids for lay­outs in InDe­sign with the help of the Easy Grid Calculator

One of the tools I have used while cal­cu­lat­ing a grid for a lay­out was an Excel file I had used to exper­i­ment with dif­fer­ent kinds of cal­cu­la­tion meth­ods. A col­lec­tion of over a dozen dif­fer­ent cal­cu­la­tors for find­ing out dif­fer­ent ele­ments of the grid. I finally glued the dif­fer­ent parts together and placed online as the Easy Grid Cal­cu­la­tor, free for every­one to use (dona­tions wel­comed of course). The Easy Grid Cal­cu­la­tor should save you a lot of time con­sum­ing cal­cu­la­tions and allow more time exper­i­ment­ing. Now it is time to dive into what this cal­cu­la­tor is all about.

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Love rela­tion­ship between Illus­tra­tor and Font­Lab bro­ken with CS5

In the arti­cle Using Illus­tra­tor to draw fonts for import­ing into Font­Lab, which I wrote sev­eral years ago, I describe how nice it is to use Illus­tra­tor and Font­Lab together. This is espe­cially nice for those who have made sketches for a font in Illus­tra­tor and need to move it into Font­Lab. For oth­ers it’s help­ful to be able to move one or more glyphs from Font­Lab for easy fix­ing and then paste it back to the exact position.

This beau­ti­ful rela­tion­ship has come to an end in Illus­tra­tor CS5. Con­tinue reading…

How to make a cir­cle color spec­trum in Illustrator

So you want to make a color spec­trum like this, using Illus­tra­tor? Here is how you can do it.

Start by mak­ing a new doc­u­ment in Illus­tra­tor. The size does not really mat­ter because Illus­tra­tor is res­o­lu­tion inde­pen­dent. I pre­fer to have my doc­u­ment in RGB col­ors because it gives me the free­dom to move it over to diver­sity of dif­fer­ent color pro­files later on. Besides RGB has wider color spec­trum and thus brighter colors.

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Close your fonts to fix Illus­tra­tor freeze, crash and sluggishness

It can hap­pen to any­one using Illus­tra­tor: One day it starts behav­ing oddly, slug­gish, freez­ing or in worst case it doesn’t launch at all.

As I fol­low the forums of Adobe and also have a search going on in Twit­ter for Illus­tra­tor OR InDe­sign I see com­plaints about this almost every day.

The rea­sons for this behav­ior can be many and if you are hav­ing it you should check out Adobe’s Tech­Note for CS3-4 or CS-CS2

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Con­vert CMYK swatches to Pan­tone num­bers in Illustrator

Con­vert­ing col­ors between color sys­tems is a never end­ing story for design­ers. Much of the con­vert­ing can be done by the method described in a pre­vi­ous arti­cle on this site. There is one con­ver­sion not pos­si­ble there, one that most design­ers are not aware of how to do eas­ily: How to find what Pan­tone color best matches their CMYK matches.

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