Category Archives: Illustration

Kim Jong Phil

Illustration

“I’ve concluded that to be effective–to be functional–I must guzzle an eye-popping cocktail of delusion and narcissism.
It occurred to me that being an artist* is a great deal like being a dictator.
Just like a dictator, I must live in a closed loop of self-delusion…”

This is now easily one of my favorite things ever. [Via]
* For “artist” also swap in “great product manager” (says the guy with 3D-printed busts of himself) ;-)). And no, I don’t *really* believe this, though sometimes you’ve gotta fight for your vision, and “all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

An epic 750,000-layer PSD is done

Illustration

Bert Monroy eats your wimpy little 50-layer files for breakfast!
After four years and more than three quarters of a million Photoshop layers (spread across several docs), his monster Times Square file is online & zoomable. According to his site,

  • The image size is 60 inches by 300 inches.
  • The flattened file weighs in at 6.52 Gigabytes.
  • It took four years to create.
  • The painting is comprised of almost three thousand individual Photoshop and Illustrator files.

Faces in the crowd include the Knoll brothers, numerous Photoshop experts & authors, and even, somewhere in the lower-rigth quadrant, me. Amazing work, Bert; congrats!

Awesome app o' the day: Toontastic

Illustration, Tablets

The other day I said that creation on tablets would be more about fun, about speed, and about the unbridled pleasure of creation than what we know today. Toontastic is the sort of thing I have in mind:

I just spent half an hour creating cartoons with our 2- and 1-year-old sons, quitting only when I had to go to work. We had a pirate-loaded ball.
I’m reminded of my own childhood, when I tried animation with flipbooks and even an Etch-a-Sketch Animator. Apple IIgs apps were similarly promising but frustrating. It wasn’t ’til college that I found Director & Flash, but of course those are complex pro tools. I love seeing the creation experience taken to the next level.
Thanks to reader Hendrik for pointing out the app.

Illustrations: Fun logos, social commentary, & more

Illustration

Painting with lasers & Photoshop (seriously!)

CS5, Illustration, Pixel Bender

Honest to God, I kind of live for seeing inventive people like Russell Brown combine the tools we make in really novel, unintended ways. Here Russell uses Pixel Bender CS5, a laser etching machine, a printer, and some old-school artistic media to create digital paintings with real depth:

Russell’s also giving away ten copies of his book on the subject, From Reality to Renaissance; see more info if you’re interested.
[Via]

A tiny tip on Illustrator anti-aliasing

CS5, Illustration

A reader today wrote, “Can anyone tell me if it’s possible to drag a one-pixel-width diagonal line in Illustrator without it forcing anti-aliasing?”

My suggestion: Try choosing Effect->Rasterize, then choosing 72PPI and no anti-aliasing.  If you often need this technique, you can create a graphical style & then easily apply the look to multiple paths.  You can also get some funky lo-fi pixel-art looks by cranking the PPI setting way down.

Fortunately it’s largely unnecessary to think about this stuff now that Illustrator CS5 has excellent pixel chops (at last).

Microsoft enables Illustrator->HTML5 Canvas

HTML5, Illustration

How cool: Microsoft’s Mike Swanson has enabled Illustrator (CS3-CS5, Mac & Win) to export vector graphics as HTML5 Canvas elements. As former Illustrator PM Mordy Golding puts it,

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could generate great-looking and useful HTML5 content (with interactivity, motion, interaction, etc) DIRECTLY from Illustrator? Now you can — with a new FREE plugin for Illustrator.

Here’s a great 90-second demo (no embedding option I can discover, unfortunately). Now Illustrator can create SVG, CSS, and Canvas content, thanks to this plug-in plus the recently released Illustrator CS5 HTML5 pack. Way to go, Mike & Microsoft.
[Semi-pointless historical footnote: the plug-in brings back memories of Macromedia’s ancient Flash Writer plug-in for Illustrator (the system requirements for which still list Windows NT!). Here, I’ll make that same part of your brain twinge again: “DeBabelizer!”]

Adobe Ideas adds iOS4 support, layers, more

Illustration, Mobile, Tablets

I’m really pleased to say that the Adobe Ideas team has released version 1.1, offering a range of free enhancements plus the app’s first optional paid feature.

Free features:

  • Support for iPhone 4 retina display
  • Support for iOS4 Multi-tasking
  • Support for Redo
  • Available in French, German and Japanese
  • Sketches save much faster, avoiding loss of data when you close the app or you need to answer a phone call.
  • Save drawing to “saved photos” album on iPad and iPhone (no longer a need to create a screenshot)

In-app purchase (optional):

  • Layers: Available for in-app purchase. Create up to 10 drawing layers plus a photo layer for each sketch; control order and opacity for each layer.

Here’s a quick (sub-2-minute) demo:

You might also be interested in the Ideas Facebook page, Flickr Gallery, and team blog.  Congrats, guys!

Video: A Paul Rand retrospective

Illustration

Great work from Jeremy Cox:

For Paul Rand’s posthumous induction into The One Club Hall of Fame, Imaginary Forces created this short film, combining original animation with a videotaped interview of Rand himself, that encapsulated his unique and timeless contribution to the design community.


After I’d proposed to Margot, I sent her this graphic in an email simply titled “You.” She deciphered (and loved) the meaning, which is why she’s The One. 🙂

It’d be nice for Mad Men to give Rand a little shout-out, she notes. [Via]

Illustration: Soviets, Star Wars, & facial hair

Illustration

Feedback, please: Potential Web/drawing features in Photoshop

Illustration, User Interface

Photoshop’s vector shapes & layer effects (strokes, gradients, etc.) are mainstays of Web & mobile design work, but they haven’t gotten updated in a while.  If the Photoshop team were to improve this area of the app, what improvements would you find the most important?

The following list isn’t exhaustive, but it includes popular requests we’ve heard.  It would be great to get your feedback via this quick survey.  We can’t do everything (certainly all at once, anyway), so please let us know what matters most.

 

  1. Enable “real” vector shapes (stroke & fill directly editable, without reliance on layer effects or a dialog box)
  2. Support dashed- and dotted-line strokes
  3. Enable smart shapes:
    1. Preserve corner roundness when scaling rounded rectangles
    2. Support other parameterized shapes (e.g. stars with an adjustable number of points; lines with arrowheads)
  4. Make various layer effects enhancements:
    1. Apply effects at the layer group level
    2. Re-order effects
    3. Duplicate effects (e.g. apply multiple strokes per layer)
    4. Enable panel-based editing of effects (instead of relying on a dialog box)
    5. Add/edit effects on multiple selected layers at once
    6. Make graphical styles “live” (i.e. if edit the style definition, all styled objects update)
  5. Enable layer search (i.e. type to filter by layer name or attributes)
  6. Improve snap-to-pixel behavior
  7. Improve text rendering
  8. Export text & graphical styles as CSS
  9. Support guide sets (e.g. for grid layouts)
  10. Support linked files (i.e. edit one file to update buttons, icons, etc. across multiple PSDs)

 

Notes:

  • We want to know what’s more important than other things, so please bear that in mind when assigning relative ratings.  (That is, don’t make everything “extremely important” or “not important.”)
  • Please don’t tell me that Photoshop should never be improved vis-à-vis Web & mobile design, and that everyone should use Fireworks (or Illustrator or whatever).  You may be completely right about those apps, but it’s just not relevant to this survey.
  • Inevitably there’s some amount of overlap among these items (e.g. applying effects at the layer group level would offer an alternative to applying multiple copies of one effect on a layer; for example, you could stroke a layer, then add another stroke on a group containing that layer).

 

Many thanks in advance,
J.

Illustrator CS5 gains HTML5 chops

CS5, HTML5, Illustration

Double rainbow ‘cross the sky, oh my God, so intense... Wait, that’s something else–but this is pretty great, too: the Illustrator team has just released the Illustrator CS5 HTML5 Pack, downloadable from Adobe Labs.  Highlights include the ability to:

  • Export named character styles as CSS
  • Export artwork appearances as CSS
  • Include selected Graphic Styles as CSS in SVG
  • Create parameterized SVG (vector graphics tagged with variables)
  • Create multi-screen SVG (leveraging media queries to serve up design variations)

See the download page or Mordy Golding’s nice summary for more details. You can ask questions & provide feedback on the Labs user forum.

I’m curious to see whether this news makes it onto the Mac sites that’ve beaten Adobe up for a perceived lack of enthusiasm about HTML5 (tough, as it just doesn’t fit that sterile, stupid narrative).  The funny thing is that these changes build on the SVG support that Illustrator has been shipping for ten years.  Sometimes it just takes a while for the world to catch up.

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch wasn’t kidding when he said, “We’re going to make the best tools in the world for HTML5.” These Illustrator developments have been in the works for a while; Dreamweaver has just made its HTML5 Pack for CS5 official; and you’ll see more from Adobe going forward.

Update: Here’s a demo from evangelist Greg Rewis: