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Day 30: Designing a Logo
Designing a logo is a common task in Adobe Illustrator. In this final project, we will sum up what we have learnt so far in Illustrator to create your own custom logo. I will show you the process in drawing a logo and hopefully you have more confidence after this tutorial.
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Day 29: Saving & Printing
In this lesson, we will learn how to crop your artwork for exporting to JPG for website or printing. We will also cover about EPS file which is the universal format for saving vector graphics.
Savings Files Using Crop Area
When you try to export your file to a JPG, sometimes you may notice white areas around the image. This is due to the hidden images under the mask (see example below). Illustrator exports the bounding box of all the objects in the artboard regardless of whether it is masked away. To solve this problem, you will need to define a crop area to tell Illustrator this is the area to export rather than exporting the whole graphic.
Day 26: Masking using Clipping Path/ Opacity Mask
With Clipping Mask and Opacity Mask, you can quickly mask away any unwanted areas you wish to hide. Let’s take a look how it works…
Clipping Mask
In this illustration I have 3 layers. The background, sunburst effect and the sun. I will need to mask the sunburst to a square.
Day 25: Applying Live Paint
With Live Paint, you can freely paint your artwork. It is like painting a kid’s coloring book where you have the line art and you start filling them will different colors. In this lesson, you will see how to break a star into different segments using Live Paint.
Creating a Beveled Star using Live Paint
I will show you an example of using Live Paint to draw a beveled star. Let’s turn on Smart Guides to make snapping of points easier. Go View>Smart Guide to turn on Smart Guides.
Day 24: Distort using Warp Effects
Liquify Tools can add some wacky distortion to your photos or shapes easily using different distortion effects. Though it is not popular but we will still take a look at how it works.
Liquify Tools
You can have some wacky distortion using the Liquify Tools. Here is the list of liquify tools.
Day 23: Applying 3D Extrude & Bevel
With 3D Live Effects you can add dimension to your 2D drawings easily. Though the features are limited, you can still control the appearance of 3D objects with lighting, shading, rotation, and more. You can also easily map artwork onto the 3d surfaces. Let’s see how each 3D effects works…
3D Extrude & Bevel
3D Extrude adds depth to an object to make it 3D. Select your object and go Effect>3D>Extrude & Bevel. The options window pops up. Change the Extrude Depth to determine the amount of depth. The Bevel sets the type of edges for the 3D object. Click and drag the cube to define how the star rotate in 3d space. You can also change the surface shading to define the texture.
Day 22: Creating Special Effects
Using filters and live effects we can creates lots of special effects instantly. You can smooth out sharp corners, create warp text, add drop shadows and make textures with the live effects. There are many filters in Illustrator and you can have lots of creativity in experimenting all the filters.
Live Effects or Filters
To create special effects, we can use either use Live Effects of Filters. Most of the time I will be using live effects as I can continue making changes using the Appearance Palette. The choice is up to you.
Live Effects: When you apply live effects to objects you can still continue to modify the effects and objects. You will need to expand the object break it into paths again.
Filters: When you apply filters, you can’t make changes to the effect anymore. It is already expanded.
