Doing eye-catching designs in Illustrator

Eye-catching-swirl-spiral

I’m always on the look out for simple eye-catching ways to communicate a message. I think this is a great example of a visually appealing background that could be used when there are no images, graphics or other ways to improve the typography. This is especially useful in direct marketing (email or mail shot). How [...]

How to make CDs and DVDs in Illustrator

cd-dvd-illustration

This took me a while to figure out! The object is to get the gradient mesh to radiate out of the centre of a circle and that’s not as straightforward as you might expect. Anyway, this is a good one. To start with something easy – draw a circle. Select the circle tool and drag [...]

How to design a 3D crystal ball in Illustrator

crystal-ball-illustrator-square

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

city-south-bank-s

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 [...]

How to design a montage in Photoshop

montage-girl-s

Here, as promised, is a short tutorial about creating montages. Here is a montage of three different images which gel together without having to laboriously cut anything out. Layer masking with a brush I sized the cityscape image over the picture of the girl and played around with layer blend modes until I chanced upon [...]

Creating a country’s flag inside its map outline

australia-map-flag

Quite often I’m looking for a simple iconic device to represent a country without having to just reproduce the flag alone. So, as you can see above, why not put the flag inside the country’s shape. Also, it’s free! It’s relatively easy to find a country’s flag and shape on the internet and tracing the [...]

How to create paper, receipts or newspaper with torn edges

receipt

I was asked by a client to present their final figures in a pitch they were doing in the form of a receipt. I thought it was quite a nice little Photoshop trick and a nice idea. Here’s how. Draw the outline of the receipt, or piece of paper, with the Pen Tool (P), and [...]

How to design shiny interface buttons in Illustrator

go-icon-button

These little buttons take a few seconds to make in Illustrator and give a nice polished, “web 2.0″ feel to a website or interactive environment. Firstly, when creating this shiny effect in Illustrator remember to make the document RGB. Go File > Document Color Mode > RGB. It won’t work otherwise. Many thanks to Simon [...]

How to design a cool web 2.0 button in Illustrator and Photoshop

button-ai

An earlier tutorial on how to make a shiny button in Illustrator using the Opacity Mask feature can be improved upon greatly by adding a sexy brushed steel surrounding ring to your amber jelly button! As previously explained, the shiny “web 2.0″ button look can be made by placing a circle with a linear black-to-white [...]

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