How to design sound waves in Illustrator

sound-waves

This is a nice little trick using Illustrator’s Blend option. To create perfect sine-waves – or something very close – first of all, draw a line. Then go Filter > Distort > Zig Zag… and choose the number and height of waves you want (remembering to click the smooth radio button, otherwise you’ll get a [...]

How to make PowerPoint presentations and Word documents look beautiful

word-pp-cs2

If your client hands you a .PPT from MS PowerPoint or and .DOC Word and says: “The presentation/print deadline is tomorrow, make this look nice”, what are you going to do? The answer is to use other programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Quark, Premiere or Keynote and get creative! Here are a few tips [...]

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 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 [...]

How to turn a photo into an illustration

sunflower

Remember Adobe Streamline? Adobe stopped upgrading its vector conversion application some time ago. But with the advent of CS2, Illustrator’s old Trace Tool became the new super Live Trace and opened up a new world of possibilities! As soon as you place or paste a photo into Illustrator a button on the Control Palette offers [...]

Graphic design an eye

eye-450

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 [...]

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