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Quick Look 14: Illustrator rotate tool

Craig Baldwin — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:00:01 +0000

So this one is a real quick look, taking the rotation tool in Illustrator and looking at a quick and simple way of changing the centre of rotation.

So this is what I’ve got, a simple triangle shape.

Hit R to quickly bring up the rotate tool. Doing so brings up an aqua cross hair to show where the centre of rotation is, this isn’t like Photoshop where you can drag it to where you want it. Instead hit Shift + R where you want the centre to be, if you want to reset it you can just pick another tool and bring up the rotate tool again.

You can press Alt + R to bring up this rotate tool dialog box and change the centre of rotation.

Make sure you check Preview to see what you’re doing. And that’s about it really.

Quick and easy.

Be inspired! (By everything) 028

Craig Baldwin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:00:56 +0000

Pedigree dogs ad shot 1000 fps using the Phantom camera

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The week in links 08/03/10

Craig Baldwin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:00:13 +0000

The future of CSS typography

Once you get past the horde of adverts (sigh) this article is pretty amazing surmise of what’s going on in the world of CSS based typography. Looking at not just font-face but all the styling you can achieve as well.

How to kill the design community

To be honest I was a little confused as what was happening to begin with, offering tips such as not using your real name, but by the time I was being told that I should be yelling first in the comments section I figured that this was written with just a bit of tongue-in-cheek. Good (reversed) tips.

To sketch or not to sketch?

Well I think the simple answer is yes. I find sketching to be infinitely useful, it’s a great way of quickly throwing your ideas onto the page where you can’t forget them, especially as most my ideas seem to come to me as I’m trying to fall asleep.

Animated shorts at the Academy awards

Loving these short animations, personal favourites include Logorama and Wallace and Gromit (quality British export right there). Be sure to watch them all!

Pure CSS speech bubbles

What more is there to say? Simple, no-image speech bubbles that render in any good browser. Plenty of variations beyond what you see in the thumbnail above. Source file provided for happy modding and use.

Quick Look 13: Illustrator stroke weight

Craig Baldwin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:00:11 +0000

Do you ever draw something in Illustrator, whether it’s a shape or a freehand illustration, set all the stroke weights then resize it and find that the stroke weight is the same as it was before resizing? Then this week’s quick look has a handy hint for you.

I came across how to set it so that the stroke weight scales with the paths when I was working on my Fashion brief. Thought it might be handy if you don’t want to manually change each stroke weight.

Above I have three circles with different stroke weights (5pt, 7pt & 10pt) when you go to resize them their stroke widths remain the same, which when they’re really small isn’t very suitable.

To stop this simply right click > Transform > Scale… to bring up the following dialog box.

You’ve probably guessed it by the highlighted check box that you need to enable Scale Strokes & Effects, this applies to free hand scaling (when you’re dragging the frame corner handles) as well as the effects of this dialog box. Now when I go to scale it the stroke weights have scaled as well (to 2.032pt, 2.845pt & 4.064pt).

Well that was quick and easy.

Be inspired! (By everything) 027

Craig Baldwin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:00:19 +0000

Procrastination

Pivot

And then there was Salsa

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The week in links 01/03/10

Craig Baldwin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:00:13 +0000

Content is effective web design

An interesting look at web design, you should just be making things look pretty but consider the text as a key part of the user interface, say things succinctly and consider the needs of your users.

World wide web for dummies, not us

In a similar vein as the last post, you shouldn’t be designing a website you’d like to use, you should be designing it for the rest of the Internet, and after the Facebook login fiasco on Read/Write web you shouldn’t have high expectations of them.

This post about the iPad and how it simplifies computing further is a good read.

The comprehensive guide to saving images for the web

Well if ever there’s a good use for the word comprehensive then this post is it. All about really digging deep into Photoshop’s save for web functionality and squeezing every last kilobyte out of your image to save on bandwidth whilst retaining image quality.

Life below 600px

A visually arresting look at breaking the pre-conceived notion that ‘the fold’ must be obeyed when it comes to web design, sure you should entice the viewer in but don’t stick everything in the top 600 pixels or you’ll very quickly lose their attention as they get lost.

Improve your portfolio with pro bono design

I’m very much in this situation, a portfolio devoid of live briefs, and this advice, whilst aimed at logo designing, was very useful, find a local non-profit and redesign their image and do it for free to have a happy client and a great piece of work.

No one cares about your website

A harsh reality check this week for web designs it seems, we’re not the average user of a website and it doesn’t really matter how pretty your website is, it doesn’t matter, people on your site generally just want to get to the information they’re after. Make sure Google doesn’t do your job better than you.

Unravelling fashion

idsgn is like the perfect design blog to me, it has a brilliant layout, well considered typography and colour and its articles are always interesting and top notch. This post I found particularly interesting, turning old sweaters into new items of clothing, brilliant concept and a nice website as well.

Quick Look 12: InDesign underline

Craig Baldwin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:00:21 +0000

So I thought I’d do a little quick look at InDesign as I found this little trick quite useful. InDesign’s underline has a lot more depth than a simple button so I’m going to go into the options InDesign has built into it, you can even achieve a dynamically updating box behind the type.

So just clicking underline normally does a pretty standard underline, however if you Alt + Click then you bring up a whole new dialog box which has plenty more options to it.

Obviously to make things easy (and for it to work) you should check Underline on and Preview so you can see what you’re doing in real time. The options are pretty basic and are as follows:

Weight: Thickness of the line in point size.
Offset: The gap between line and the bottom of the text.
Type: A variety of presets are available such as dotted and dashed.
Colour: The colour of the line, by default it’s text colour but it can be changed in which case the Tint becomes available, this is simply the strength of the colour, but this isn’t the same as the opacity.
Gap Colour: This never seems available but I guess it’s pretty explanatory.

To achieve a dynamic black box behind the text you simply need to change the text colour to white, the colour to black (for example), set a really heavy weight and a negative offset to bring the underline closer to the text, like so, the text in this example is 72pt Helvetica.

You can of course change the colour of the underline to imitate a yellow highlighter look like below useful if you need to highlight some notes that were given to you on the computer.

Update

Just a quick update, I forgot to say you can use Character Styles to make this a one click job. With the text selected go to the Character Styles palette (Window > Type & Tables > Character Styles or Shift + F11) click the New icon and it’s saved it, you can rename it by right clicking and selecting Edit “Character Style 1″. When creating a character style it saves every property related to the text including the font, point size, kerning etc.

Well that was nice and quick.

Be inspired! (By everything) 026

Craig Baldwin — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:00:01 +0000

Curious displays

Skyskraper

Line- movie

Mouse vs Mouse Trap

Heather: Flavors.me

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The week in links 22/02/10

Craig Baldwin — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 11:00:55 +0000

Change of format this week, instead of having a long list of links that might not be entirely useful, so I thought I’d raise the bar and have fewer links with a bit more about why I reckon you should give them a read. Very much inspired by Chris Spooners “This week’s favourites” I decided that a impersonal list of links wasn’t helping anyone. I’m not going to set a minimum or a maximum, whatever feels right, some weeks will be great for posts, other might only have a few, or even none at all. So I present to you this week’s “week in links”.

The myth of DPI

Well it’s a bit difficult to wrap your head around the idea of pixels and dots per inch and how they transition to the screen, well I find it a bit confusing anyway, I’ll admit I’ve gone in Photoshop and reduced the DPI to 72 ‘just in case’ but this article on Web designer depot helps clear things up amicably.

You can use CSS3 right now

I love the new functions in CSS3, I use the columns property on the rest of my website and although it doesn’t degrade very gracefully (long lists don’t look that nice) it makes things so much easier for me, and it’s not like long lists aren’t usable. Rounded corners are equally useful. So this article from Design informer (a new member of the Smashing Network) helps you use it right now.

This handy check list shows you what browser support what.

A new global visual language for the BBC's digital services

A fascinating insight into the design process behind the in progress redesign of all BBC websites, it’s amazing to see how much depth there is to creating a unified approach across hundreds of individual services. The BBC internet blog goes into plenty of detail.

Why Flash doesn't suck

Pixelbourne puts forward a good case why we shouldn’t be waving goodbye to Flash just yet, from reasons such as Porn sites and games to why perhaps people hate it so; “as with any powerful tool in world, Flash can be used for good and…evil”. Sadly when Flash is put in the hands of an amateur the results are painful.

Web designers who can't code

I feel this is an entirely valid point, learning how to code (well HTML and CSS, and not much beyond that) was hugely beneficial to my web designs, I realised what I could do and what I couldn’t. It was also nice to read that other people design in the browser, I thought that was just me not being good at planning it all out beforehand.

What is a 21st century career?

It seems a pretty terrifying way of looking at things; your 9-to-5 is a job, your career is the sum of all your professional endeavours and you need to keep it healthy, work hard and expand your skills to keep up-to-date with the rapidly changing times.

Be inspired! (By everything) 025

Craig Baldwin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:00:20 +0000