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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…

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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Cus­tomize Quick­Look for fonts

Quick­Look, the abil­ity to see a quick pre­view of files and fold­ers sim­ply by select­ing and then press­ing the Space bar has been avail­able for some time now.

This is a great time saver and gives access to infor­ma­tion that in many cases you would oth­er­wise have to install spe­cific soft­ware to get. Quick­Look can view was num­ber of for­mats but it is pos­si­ble to extent its use by adding plug-ins to it. Most of them are free. Some soft­ware devel­op­ers offer plug-ins for Quick­Look for their soft­ware if Quick­Look does not pre­view files made by their software.

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Grid Sys­tems – Easy Grid Calculator

Cal­cu­lat­ing a grid for a lay­out can be time con­sum­ing. It’s not only the cal­cu­la­tion itself but plan­ning and lay­ing out the whole thing is a task that even­tu­ally will take some time. How many columns is fairly easy to decide on but decid­ing the mar­gins, top and bot­tom may prove to be harder.

Spend­ing time on mak­ing the per­fect grid will save you time in the end and in most cases also make your design look bet­ter in a much eas­ier way. How­ever, try­ing to reduce the time spent on cal­cu­lat­ing the grid is worth while. Peo­ple often feel so pressed to start the job that they don’t think there is time to do the math.

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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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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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Grid Sys­tems – Mak­ing grids in Illus­tra­tor 2

There is hardly a one grid sys­tem that works for every­thing or every­body. Dif­fer­ent needs call for dif­fer­ent grids. Grids that involve cer­tain rules, like pro­por­tions being by the Golden Rule are very com­plex to cal­cu­late and really dif­fi­cult and time con­sum­ing to adapt to any page size. Con­tinue reading…

Grid Sys­tems – Mak­ing grids in Illustrator

Design­ing within a grid sys­tem involves defin­ing the mate­r­ial you are going to work with, defin­ing the page size, mak­ing a pro­por­tional grid onto the space and then fit­ting your design into the grid. Hav­ing a good grid sys­tem will speed up the work process so it’s always wise to spend a lit­tle time on the grid first.

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