Illustrator

Hide Your Tracks? Trash Your Preferences

Submitted by colleen on 27 August 2008 - 10:07am.

The other day, Deke called asking if I knew how to erase the contents of the "Open a Recent Item" list that appears on the Welcome Screen of InDesign. Here's how my thought process unfolded:

Thought 1) Basking in the dubious glory of the master thinking I know something he doesn't.

Thought 2) Supressing speculation on what exactly he was doing in InDesign that he wants to hide. (What, you were writing detailed stories to go with your pictures?)

Thought 3) Noticing that the only questionable thing my Welcome Screen reveals is that I've been working on things other than dekeBooks.

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dekeOnline dominates the name Deke

Submitted by deke on 20 August 2008 - 3:18am.

That's right. Google the word "deke," and guess which site comes out on top? deke.com. What are the odds of that? We even beat out that ice hockey term that I've never actually heard anyone actually say.

Okay, so apparently, they bandy that term in Canada. Which brings me to this week's topic: International interest in deke.com. See the map below? The more green you are, the more folks from your country who have visited dekeOnline. It might be the only map where the U.S. is more green than, say, everywhere.

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Stretching a Photo in Illustrator

Submitted by deke on 20 August 2008 - 12:57am.
Literally jumping with energy

Episode 004: Photoshop, Photoshop, Photoshop. Don't you sometimes get sick of Photoshop? Me neither, but still, it's time for a change. In this episode, we stop obsessing about Photoshop (uh, kinda) and start obsessing about Illustrator. Why Illustrator? Well, first, the program rocks. Second, it provides something Photoshop doesn't: An expertly rendered envelope-style distortion function that lets you--get this--transform a horizontal photograph into a vertical one without harming the foreground image. Here's the official marketing description: Read more » 

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Mordy's Embossed Text Effect in Illustrator

Submitted by colleen on 25 July 2008 - 11:12am.

Our good friend Mordy Golding, over at Real World Illustrator, has come up with a technique for creating a license plate in Illustrator, sucessfully thwarting Illustrator's lack of an explicit embossed text effect. License plates, hmmm? Perhaps Mordy is anticipating that hanging out with the likes of Deke will inevitably lead him to a life of petty crime. (Actually, he was apparently inspired by another beloved rapscallion, the incomperable Bert Monroy, who originally did the project in Photoshop on his Pixel Perfect show.) Check out Mordy's results:

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Illustrator Transparency + Photoshop Resolve, Part 1

Submitted by deke on 29 June 2008 - 1:50am.

In this two-part article, we’ll take a low-quality digital photo of my youngest son, Sammy, banging on a hopelessly busted piano:

And transform it into a work of otherworldly vector-based weirdness (below bottom). The primary instrument of this transformation will be Adobe Illustrator’s Transparency palette. But while Illustrator can belt out a medley, can it carry a tune? The answer is, yes, so long as Photoshop oversees the final production.

Here's the idea: Illustrator allows you to assign varying levels of transparency to vector-based objects. That’s great because, as we’ll see, it makes for a remarkably versatile drawing environment. The problem is, Adobe's original vector-based technology, PostScript, doesn’t accommodate transparency. And given that PostScript has long been and continues to be the professional-level commercial reproduction standard, this conflict seems to raise a red flag: How can Illustrator make art that PostScript can't print? Read more » 

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