colours - Rob Cubbon | Design and Marketing -

How to design a 3D crystal ball in Illustrator

This starts, as most tutorials start, with something very easy: draw a circle. So, select your circle tool and drag diagonally to preferred size, not forgetting to hold down the shift key. Fill the circle white, with no stroke. Next, select the Gradient Mesh Tool (U) and click four points diagonally across the circle. Make [...]

Improving photos with Photoshop by a Graphic Designer

The above picture is one of my snaps taken very quickly at the end of clearish autumn day. I have improved this picture with Photoshop by selecting certain areas and altering the colour, brightness and contrast. I first thing I did was to copy the photo to a new layer (Cmd/Cntl-J) I then use my [...]

Designing different vector logo options

I was asked to come up with a logo for Toby Beresford an application developer that specialises in third party apps for Facebook. The client wanted something neat, simple and modern that could have a shiny web 2.0 effect put on at a later date. I find it better to start off with Adobe Illustrator [...]

Pop art effect turns photos into icons

I used a slightly different technique for the above picture of David Beckham than my earlier pop art example. This time I put the Threshold layer (Image > Adjustments > Threshold) on the top and set it’s Layer Style to Multiply. Some of the underlying image was coloured in, some was Posterized (Image > Adjustments [...]

How to do distressed, grunge or rubber stamp designs in Photoshop

Put type or whatever you want distressed, grunged or “rubber stamped” on one layer in Photoshop with a white background layer beneath it. The create a blank layer above it (Cmd/Ctl-Opt-Shift-N). Then you need to create some clouds. Very easy. First of all make sure your background and foreground colours in the Tools palette are [...]

Graphic design an eye

This is one way of reproducing a striking image without having to pay for it! The logical way of doing an image made of dots would be like this: Make sure that your image’s width and height are divisible by 10 pixels (the above is 450 by 300 pixels). Nice round numbers make the following [...]

Many people have asked me this question and, in the absence of a Wikipedia entry, here’s my definition. The term pre-dates desktop publishing when “artwork” or “mechanical art” meant the material (photography, bromide, film, tranparency) or completed, camera-ready pages that could be photographed with a stat camera to make a same-size film that would be [...]