trace - Rob Cubbon | Design and Marketing -

Using vector illustrations in designs to deliver your message

Do you ever wish you didn’t use stock photography so much? Recently I’ve found myself trawling through pages of stock images from sites such as Shutterstock, iStock and Fotolia, usually looking for a well-presented young professional smiling to camera. These sites contain some good photography but I’m always worried that the stock approach lacks creativity [...]

August 15, 2008 54 Comments Filed Under: Design, Illustrator
Tagged With: client, colouring, design, email, Illustrator, illustrators, images, Marketing, message, photography, Photoshop, simple, trace, vector, vectors

Turn your client’s photos into beautiful images

A-client's-portrait-as-a-beautiful-photoshop-image-example-1

The problem Err, sorry, the challenge. How many times does this happen? You have an otherwise beautiful design and your client insists on including pictures of people who’s images weren’t taken by one of the world’s best photographers. This is a reoccurring hitch; we have to include pictures of the CEO, the MD, the whoever, [...]

July 8, 2008 26 Comments Filed Under: Illustrator, Photoshop
Tagged With: photo, Photoshop, pixel dimensions, psd, trace

Creating a country’s flag inside its map outline

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 [...]

October 15, 2007 31 Comments Filed Under: Illustrator
Tagged With: adobe illustrator, australia, australian flag, cmd, diagonals, flag, gradient, highlight, Illustrator, images, inside, Internet, live trace, map, mask, object clipping, objective, opacities, opacity, outlines, overlay, palette, rectangle, reflection, shape, shiny, shiny surface, simple, trace, transparencies, transparency

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 [...]

October 6, 2007 7 Comments Filed Under: Photoshop
Tagged With: art, art effect, clothes, colours, david beckham, face, image adjustments, images, layer image, lewis hamilton, logo, Logos, osama bin laden, photo, photograph, photos, Photoshop, pop art, size photo, sponsorship logos, technique, threshold, trace, turban, underlying image

Using illustrators to help with designs

Finding a graphic element to illustrate an abstract or dry subject is a creative challenge. You find yourself being pulled in one direction to beautify your work and in the other to explain the subject in hand. I am continually searching around for images, illustrations or graphics that will compliment articles with heavy corporate or [...]