This is bad and good news as you have probably guessed. The best things about the new Starter Edition in my opinion are;

1. The new interface. It’s a lot less clunky and Windows 95 looking than the previous free version! The docked tabs seem more sensible in their layout. They are very very much like Adobe’s tabbed palettes. Some have more options and flexibility than Adobe’s, others less. The balance is good though.
2. DrawPlus’s fills, transparency and brushes. All seem to have better, more accessible and immediate use than in Illustrator. Immediate because there’s so many more useful presets and when you drag the mouse you see the fill or transparency transform in real time. In Illustrator and older versions of Drawplus you could only see the reault after you let go of the mouse, so it was a guessing game with any kind of gradient.
3. Effects. They work really nicely, like Adobe’s Styles but I like having material thickness and fathering right there on the palette itself. The Starter Edition has just a few of a massive range of materials and textures that is included in the full X4 version. Enough to test, quite a crafty ploy to make you feel like buying the full version!
4. Tablet support. The brushes are highly configurable, and look great. I didn’t use a tablet in my test though, just the mouse.

Brush editing dialogue

The not so good things are of course the things that are unavailable to Starter Edition users. As well as having less fills, brushes etc available, some portions of the program are ghosted out so the options/facilities are unavailable. Notably these are;

• Export/publishing options
• Envelopes
• 3D projections and planes
• Blends
• Colour palette designer
• Flash animation

There are still lots of things available to make the program fully functional in many ways, it might be all you need! If you’ve never tried Drawplus yet love working with vector graphics it’s definately worth trying this new Starter Edition. I am really quite tempted to upgrade it to the full X4 version because other than the interface there are lots of other things in this new version of the program I would like to try out. I only own full version 6, which came out in 2001 according to Wikipedia! Also for work, it has CMYK and Pantone fill palettes now available. Mostly I’d like to try the 3D planes feature which could help create some great isometric designs and logos.

I’ll update you with my findings if I buy the X4 upgrade.

Here are the four album/CD covers I designed, one includes a sound clip to go with it, recorded about 3 years ago.

We control the horizontal, click to play clip!

Ebbs; We control the horizontal (Clip)

The following don’t have sound clips attached at the moment. Quagmire was mixed down at half speed for the first few seconds by accident, but I liked it so kept that in

Quagmire (unsightly return)

A BBC theme inspired piece of music follows, made on a Yamaha keyboard in 1992

Sherlock foams

Finally back to some distorted “space rock”;

Space Sponge

inspired by Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, which I had just got for Christmas a year or two before in the late 1980s!

If I get some comments about this I might put up more samples other than just for “We control the horizontal”, the other three CD covers are associated with tracks from around 1990. All the CD covers are designed and illustrated in Adobe Illustrator. I used photoshop a little on the Space Sponge CD above for inserting the sponge into the helmet and making the moon into a green sponge!

You might notice the first of the 4 CD covers has a different logo, this new logo is for new stuff since 2006, just things recorded by myself. Also I’ve found out there’s some band in the US of A called “The Ebbs” so the name’s gone already. I wonder if the name was gone in 1990 when we made the first recordings…

Wabi-Sabi is a Japanese aesthetic which embraces objects of art with imperfections, roughness and asymmetry. It’s a kind of art I liked without even knowing there was a name for it, until now… More than once the Design Reviews blog has discussed eroded, aged, worn, halftoned and other ‘lo-fi’ effects in illustrator and vector graphics in general.

distressed, worn and reliced vs brand spanking new

Guitar enthusiasts have been buying into hand-made and artificially aged or ‘reliced’ guitars for quite a while now, look at the picture above. A relic will have quite a premium on the price tag! Just think of how many years you would have to own and play a guitar to make it look that used. Quote: “Fender’s Relic line accounts for more than 12% of its $5 million annual sales.” Another very popular market for aged and worn appearance is clothing; think of faded stonewashed jeans and distressed leather jackets. Of course don’t forget antiques either.

As I noted earlier the Wabi-Sabi idea can be put into your illustration and logo work quite easily now with the modern versions of illustrator which are less about pure lines and shapes than before. There’s a lot of vector tools that can cross over into areas that were once Photoshop only avenues.

I have a couple of other articles planned about Wabi-Sabi style graphics, beauty and design coming up which I think will be very interesting. And I hope to put up some polls for feedback too. Come back next week!

I wanted a great cup symbol or shape within my logo so I thought I’d take a look around the web for some simple graphical representations of cups. Looking at these I thought I would spot some shapes to complement the letter forms in the logo. But I didn’t really. I did come across a great resource site though.

Pop Art Machine is the place, I’d never been to this site before. To quote the site’s description “…collects, curates and creates pop art. Our focus is painting and printmaking using public image sources as inspiration. Here you will find over one million free source images and finished pop art posters & prints.”

Sounds good and it is good. The image on the left below is my interpretation of one of the cup images on the site. Using a not too far removed technique I drew the image on the right from an actual photograph. The technique I’m talking about it that once you’ve drawn a clear crisp precise vector shape to your liking you then use the pencil tool to ‘lasso’ the shape roughly. Then you make it the same color as the surface, changed with the HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) sliders in lightness/darkness only. Also on the cup on the right I sliced up the saucer with Beziers and the ‘divide objects below’ command. Of course anyone who’s used illustrator knows I’ve finished it off by using one of the ink brushes for the strokes around the shapes. It’s quite pleasing to the eye but would only work as a simple icon sized graphic I think.

two cups yesterday

Above is the result of this work and inspiration. The illustrator source file is here for anyone to download and use as they wish. The logo didn’t really work though…

Technorati Profile

What has that got to do with Design Reviews? Well the huge robot Gort is a very cool robot design and I was sidetracked last night while designing a logo to do a version of Gort in Adobe Illustrator. I think it’s pretty nice and you can see it below.

Gort

Also out of huge generosity and Christmas spirit I have uploaded some ‘Gort wallpaper’ for your desktop. It’s available in lots of sizes to match your screen 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024 and a big one at 1365×1024. Also even more incredibly I’ve uploaded the Adobe Illustrator (v8 for compatibility) file for you to download, to see how it’s drawn or so you can modify it, such as move the ‘klaatu barada nikto’ text around to suit your own desktop. Please if you do anything like that write a little comment on my page, or DIGG it or something!

Have you ever heard of or tried Serif Drawplus? Don’t worry, you can get a couple of earlier than current versions for FREE. But why would you look at it if you Adobe Illustrator on your machine? There are a number of reasons but the biggest reason for me is in roughing out an idea, putting your first ideas onto the screen. DrawPlus can do this very very quickly because of the number of basic shapes in it’s fly-out menu, and then also because these basic ‘primitives’ are intuitively customisable using the ‘node’ editing method. These aren’t like regular vector nodes at all (though you can edit in that way too). Just check out the screen cam video below to see how shapes are created and modified. Many of these shapes would take many many stages to make in Illustrator using the transform and pathfinder tools…

Now you can get these versions of Drawplus for FREE v4. and v6. v4 is free on the website and v6 is very frequently included on Magazine cover CDs here in the UK.

Other advantages of Serif DrawPlus; font selection/preview, colour schemes, gradient types & presets, interactive fill, transparency & perspective tools.

Then why choose Illustrator at all? For me, compared to these free versions of DrawPlus, Illustrator has;

1. Dependable/predictable output files. I’ve worked in the printing industry for years and no-glitch postscript output is a must, Illustrator has always proved to be most compliant/reliable.
2. Pantone colours. And correctly producing one or two colour and spot colour artwork.
3. Accuracy. (and the smart guides)
4. I like the pen tool better (long-term experience).
5. Other tools not available in DrawPlus; scatter brushes, symbol sprayer, plugin filters

Looking at things another way; For me Illustrator is the best but that doesn’t mean other tools are not useful. A new art program can provide a little bit of inspiration in itself. In music it’s the same: So I have a selection of guitars!  Specifically I have two electrics and two acoustics. All of them are great in their own way. (Les Paul, Strat, Acoustic & Spanish style). Picking up one or another gets your fingers working in a different way and, with the electric, using the amplifier in a different way.

If I can get my hands on a newer or the newest version I will be updating this blog with a review. The newest version at the time of writing is Serif DrawPlus X2. DrawPlus X2 from Serif, the vector-drawing and graphics software that puts the power of a professional design studio on your PC

Have you tried DrawPlus, what do you think? Leave a comment or two.

Illustrating the shapes of the skidoo was no problem but it took three revisions to draw the helmet! The picture I was looking at had a guy with lots and lots of stickers on the helmet and I got too involved working close up and made something far too detailed, twice. This picture is of a guy speeding through the night in a snow storm so it’s not necessary at all to have that detail. Then when I finished I fired up Photoshop and used a combination of the motion blur and the wind tools. The snow wasn’t so tricky, inserting a new layer in Photoshop using the noise filter and distort filters to make it wavy, then altering the opacity of that layer.

The Ebbs (UK) - Russian Skidoo

I’m quite happy with the result, from the ingredients I started with. If I were to do it again I would focus on a detail of the skidoo, coming almost straight towards the viewer, perhaps looking like it’s about to run into the camera. Could do that for the back cover though… If it’s better it can be swapped with the front image! Sound clip here; The Ebbs (UK) – Russian Skidoo.

Cheers, Mark

It seems so, even clients have asked “no 3D effects”, not that I wanted to do any… So it seems like it’s a thing to avoid, a furry dice of the graphic design world now. In fact there has been a consciously flat movement for many years, flat colours, no gradients, no shadows and no 3D. However it seems perspective effects are still quite popular and isometric effects have been cool for a few years. What do you think, is 3D often used to put lipstick on a pig?

What to do? Illustrator has a couple of likely tools – roughen and scribble. They don’t really provide any kind of corrosion. In the old days this is what we would have done to age some text; print it on the laser and blow it up on the photocopier a few times at max magnification. Between copies you could rough up the sheets of paper a bit, crinkle it a bit, depends what you wanted.

3000 Recordings

Anyway that was a long time ago. Now it’s easier to use Photoshop and some spatter brushing, the photocopy and stamp and threshold controls, a bit of the dodge tool perhaps. Then you can bring that into Illustrator and vectorise it if you wish to use it in a logo. That’s what I did and I’m pleased with the subtle and realistic results.

What do you think? Do you know a better or faster way to make distressed effects?

]]> http://designreviews.co.uk/distressederoded-effects-in-illustrator/38/feed/ 0 http://designreviews.co.uk/jpegs-and-transparency/36/ http://designreviews.co.uk/jpegs-and-transparency/36/#comments Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:07:41 +0000 DRMark http://www.mtyson.co.uk/?p=18 Today I had to make a web banner, animated GIF, and it needed to be done in half an hour. That’s OK if you’ve got all the “ingredients” and know what you want to do, or have been told what the animation should do or say. I had a problem though, the client wanted a logo on a blue background but they only had a JPG of the logo, it was therefore in a white square because JPG doesn’t support transparent regions. The white background can be erased in photoshop but it’s not always a quick job. Anyway we settled on having the logo on the far left in it’s white space seperate from the rest of the blue backgrounded banner.

The best kind of logo for the studio to have is usually an “.EPS“, it can be scaled to any size and have transparent regions if necessary. Whoever created your logo originally should have supplied an “.EPS”, it’s also essential for print jobs where you might want to scale up the logo to fit the side of a bus, for example…

Various format images of logos placed on a background

In the example above you can see the nasty results in full of an inappropriate file format for a logo! If you work in the design industry you’ve probably been supplied a logo as a JPG someone has pulled off a webpage somewhere. Then the client requires it placing on a complex photo background or enlarging to be printed on the side of a skyscraper. Two other side-effects you can see; washed out colours and rough clipping in Quark (or most programs that can auto-clip images/backgrounds).