book

I'm sure a couple of you are aware of this, but the Internet is an amazing thing. (Wait a sec, I think I might be the first one to come up with that. Damn, I'm insightful!) And what makes me say that is this:

Yesterday, Chuck Joiner of MacVoices fame interviewed me over this primitive thing called the Telephone. And already our conversation is up on his site. In the old days, you might hear that interview broadcast over the Radio live, as it was actually happening. But now, thanks to the miracle of the Internet, you can hear that very same interview within 24 hours of us recording it. Damn, that's progress.

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Hey, gang. Just a brief note to let you all know that I and my team have finished work on the project that has recently consumed our every waking moments, the forthcoming book Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One. Believe it or not, all 512 pages of it went to the printer today, with all 6 hours of companion video edited and ready to go. While I slept like a baby, my designer David Futato and lead editor Carol Person were up until the wee hours generating the final PDF documents. (Thanks to them both!) And while no one is going to accuse me of being overly timely---Illustrator CS5 started shipping about the same time as Columbus---I'm convinced that we've managed to create the best book that we could, as well as the best title in the One-on-One series.

The book should be available for purchase in about three weeks. For real. I'm no longer the boy who cried "Illustrator book!" I'll actually have one. Read more » 

Well, gang. As many of you know, I've been remiss on the site lately. But only because I'm fulfilling my contractual obligations. Including this, check it out: I figured out how to create a Celtic knot in Illustrator. If that sounds like ho hum, big ole deal---I politely beg to differ. The illustration below contains not only paths that flow in and out of each other---meaning that one path can be simultaneously in front and in back of another, which is fundamentally not even sorta something you can do---but also paths that weave in and out of themselves. Themselves, I say! Which is not only currently impossible, but theoretically improbable within the construct of a vector-driver computer graphics application. And yet, it can happen---not in the future but right-this-second-now---thanks to the near-limitless depths of Live Paint combined with the seemingly infinite obsession of yours truly. (Let me make it clear: These are three shapes, filled with gradients, interacting with each other. And nothing---but much, much, much---more.)

My sidekick Colleen is the one who put me up to this challenge, so blame her for my lack of posting as of late. (Ha! I love blaming stuff on Colleen!) Incidentally, this will be part of "Chapter 17, Live Paint" in my forthcoming Illustrator CS5 One-on-One: Advanced video course for lynda.com, which will be available in November.

I'll come back to that topic in a moment. In the meantime, the final leg of my video bible on Photoshop CS5, Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Mastery, is live and ready for viewing on the lynda.com Online Training Library. Read more »