One of my best art teachers over the years told me once that she does one self portrait a year, and it’s a good way of staying in touch with where you’ve been/you are/you’re going. Wanting to explore Live Paint and the Blob Brush in Illustrator today yielded my first self-portrait in going on 5 years now… very interesting. Want to start another one now!
Had a lil fun at the end of my day today working through some tutorials on the tutsplus.com network, and decided to clean up my virtual desktop as countless hours of projects with no filing had caught up with me… nice to have a change. This site rocks most of the time for graphic design tutorials with an emphasis on quality and depth… I learn a lot whenever I dip in (and without tooting my own horn, I am in Photoshop and Illustrator more than I sleep on a daily basis). Kudos guys! It’s only 9 bones a month and you get access to a ton of high res files and step by step info for Illustrator, Photoshop, Web Design, Flash, Audio, etc. etc. I use PSDTUTS and VECTORTUTS the most.
Here’s one I had fun with in roughing out some wallpaper for my dual monitors at work, it deals with using the Average command in Illustrator, custom art brushes and multiple strokes on one object to get a hand drawn effect on type or any shape:
You won’t be cool, hip, or even effective until you understand design. When you made your rise to hegemonic ruler of the software world back in the 90’s, being ugly and ill-presented was ok as web-culture had not split presentation from data yet. Newsflash: Kerning matters. Don’t stop there: Tracking matters. Product honesty matters. To pretend as if Microsoft is advancing the web conversation by making browsers more robust is like saying GM was advancing the bar of how the public perceived fossil-fueled cars. It’s just not true. Most hacks that web developers have to implement are because IE is so behind the times.
There is no excuse for not having your tracking and kerning down… I mean at very least, your type should remain on a solid baseline, not jumbled up like some 2003 Macromedia Flash text rendering error. Get a clue, you can’t subvert the subversive: you are big brother, not the rebellion. D’uh.
For all the videos, visit idsgn, many thanks to them for enabling this rant.
Too good to keep to myself. Times New Roman is an awesome classical font, despite it being the bland, default font in MS Word; it’s ubiquity at the cost of quality. Seeing it tracked/kerned poorly at 12pt, subconsciously associating it with writing last minute term papers, and wishing Times had a larger x-height to squeeze an extra half page out of your study efforts can only form a negative hue in one’s mind.
When used well: Blam! Target acquired. Thanks to ffffound.
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