Deke’s Techniques

Your weekly quick-fix of Deke, with ideas you may inspire or inform your own projects.

Creating Brushed Metal in Adobe Illustrator

Deke uses Adobe Illustrator to create a brushed metal effect out of nothing but pixels.

Drawing Organic Curves with Round Corners in Illustrator (Triceratops Edition)

Deke shows you how to use Adobe Illustrator's round corner widgets to drag curves and avoid having to shape them with the Pen tool.

Dynamic Round Corners in Adobe Illustrator

Deke shows you how (and why) to use the Round Corners feature in Adobe Illustrator to make drawing faster and easier.

Illustrator Pen Tool (Triceratops) Tricks

Deke shows you exactly where to put the anchor points and place the control handles for drawing his Triceratops logo.

Designing an Animal Logo in Illustrator

Deke begins the time-traveling journey of creating a triceratops-themed logo in Adobe Illustrator.

Very Large Artboards in Adobe Illustrator

Deke explores the possibilities of the extra large artboards you can now create in Adobe Illustrator 2021.

Drawing a Universal Power Symbol in Adobe Illustrator

Deke uses some handy shape features in Adobe Illustrator to draw the universal power symbol.

Tracing an Object with the Photoshop Pen Tool

Deke shows you how to trace a pixel-based heart with the Pen tool in Photoshop in order to make smooth, artifact-free scaleable shapes.

Rendering Your Name in Playing Cards in Photoshop

Deke uses the characters on playing cards to spell a very important word in Photoshop.

Tracing a Specific Letterform with a Shape Tool in Adobe Illustrator 2021

Deke uses the new Snap to Glyph option in Adobe Illustrator 2021 to fill in the counters of a few O's with a relative ease that was previously hard to come by.

Snapping to a Specific Letterform in Adobe Illustrator (Using Snap to Glyph)

Deke shows you the ups and downs and in-betweens of the Snap to Glyph feature in Illustrator, that allows you to align your object with a specific letterform (and a specific part thereof).

Snapping to Letterforms in Adobe Illustrator

Deke explores Adobe Illustrator 2021's ability to snap objects into alignment with different parts of letterforms, which Adobe calls Snap to Glyph