font.is

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…

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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New look, not just for the looks

This site was just moved between servers at my host provider. The rea­son for this was that the SQL data­base on the old server was out­dated and pre­vented me from updat­ing Word­Press. Why not just update the data­base? Well, there was some del­i­cate stuff on the old server and it was too risky to update the server just for me. So I was offered to move over to a new machine. Con­tinue reading…

Diode lamp shows dark­ness and daylight

This is a con­cept for a diode light unit which I sent in for a com­pe­ti­tion held by The Illu­mi­nat­ing Engi­neer­ing Soci­ety of Ice­land and Orku­veita Reyk­javíkur (The Munic­i­pal Energy Grid). The final results of the jury are in and this con­cept got an hon­orary men­tion as being both tech­ni­cally and aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing. Although I didn’t win the main price I just wanted to show you the piece.

I will soon present few other things related to this basic idea. And also a kind of a sis­ter piece which I am design­ing too. The pic­tures here are made in Illus­tra­tor and Photoshop.

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Self­por­traits in Illustrator

In the spring semes­ter of 2009 I taught sev­eral stu­dents of the Ice­land Acad­emy of the Arts , the basics of Adobe Illus­tra­tor. The time for each group was rel­a­tively short, five after­noons per group.

The stu­dents of graphic designs was a very mixed group. Many had never opened Illus­tra­tor but a few had some expe­ri­ence. Hardly any­one had used the Pen Tool of Illus­tra­tor. In the fourth ses­sion I had them use what ever they had learned to make a self por­trait. I was quite happy with the result. Some of the por­traits are excel­lent, but most of them are very descrip­tive of the characters.

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Wall­pa­per : Geigy Chemicals

A chem­i­cal can shown with this arti­cle on AisleOne inspired me to make this wall­pa­per which is free for you to down­load and use on your com­puter. Size is 1920x1200 px.

Wall­pa­per download.

Wall­pa­per : Font Anatomy

For some time I have tried to get a reli­able infor­ma­tion about the indi­vid­ual parts of the char­ac­ters of the alpha­bet. The anatomy of type if you like. It was not so easy to find online. Still I found some and then some in var­i­ous books.

The prob­lem how­ever is I did not find any one source I was fully sat­is­fied with. Each one had some names miss­ing which the oth­ers had and so on.. Con­tinue reading…

Mósaik úr myndum

Það er skemmti­legt tilrau­naverkefni sem má skoða á þes­sari slóð. Valinn er litur af litaskala og kallaðar eru fram myn­dir af flickr sem eru í sama litatón.

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