Mindfock » Computer Graphics

Learning Illustrator

John del Rosario — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 12:33:45 +0000

I’ve decided to give Illustrator a second chance since I’ve found that the Flash drawing environment was just not cutting it for me. I tried Inkscape, but it just didn’t feel right. I’ve always steered clear of Illustrator before because I hated how complicated it was compared to Flash, but it appears I am forced to just suck it in.

After a few hours of searching, I found this nice introductory tutorial. I think the “30 days” thing is just a gimmick, but, I do need to learn it in 5 days if I am to finish a project I’m working on. And since I’m familiar on how vector graphics work, and all I really need to do is adjust and learn the more advanced stuff, 5 days seems plausible.

I’ve also gathered some nice links regarding Illustrator/vector stuff.

Vectips

AIburn

VectorTuts

And the most awesome site I’ve found so far: GoMediaZine

Aviary beta testing

John del Rosario — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 15:24:36 +0000

I recently got an invite from someone at the kirupa.com forums to some Aviary tools. I only have access to two tools at the moment (Phoenix and Peacock), and only tested Phoenix (Peacock was a bit too complicated to test).

All I’ve got to say is, wow. This toolset is quite impressive. It has some very nice basic features, a few filter effects, hotkeys (!), and it is very smooth (it’s slow at times, but that’s because of my limited CPU). The interface is very nice, although the icons and panels are a little too big and take a lot of real estate IMO.

Still, it’s a little buggy, and there a Feedback menu on the toolbar for easy, well, feedback. I’m going to play more with Phoenix and try to make something cool. I really want to test Hummingbird (the 3D editor), but I don’t know how to sign up for the beta or even if it’s available.

I have a few invites remaining, so if you want to try them, just post.

FontStruct

John del Rosario — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 04:48:17 +0000

Here’s a cool site. It’s main feature is an RIA that allows you to create fonts and share it with the community. That’s right, creating fonts online for free. I am so impressed with what people can do with the web these days.
You could create any font you could imagine. From simple pixel fonts, to dingbat style fonts.
The gallery is very impressive. There’s some really nice fonts there, all created with FontStruct and free to download and use. You could even “clone” someone else’s work. To download a font, click on the font name or double-click on the preview.

The application itself is a work of art. Its interface is very intuitive, its tools adequate, and it’s just so comfortable playing/working with it. You could save your work, it even has hotkeys for undo, redo, tool selection, etc. Although you are limited to the “bricks” provided, they are more than enough to create a wide variety of fonts.
Go to http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/ to get started in creating your own fonts. You need to register for free though to use the fontstructor and download fonts.

I <3 Type

John del Rosario — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:22:51 +0000

I’m a huge typography/font fan. I just can’t stop looking at nice typography. It’s like looking at a woman’s fine bosom (notice the italicised ‘like’) for me. I tried
to be good at it, practiced creating some abrigrams for friends, and
designing stuff using free fonts, but I failed at it. So I decided to
just drool over some of the work other people have done.

Here are links to some of the galleries, blogs and images of type that I just needed to share.

http://ilovetypography.com

Awesome title and awesome posts. A blog about typography (duh!). I check it out everyday.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

Another blog. But not just for typography. But their “Free Fonts of
the Month” posts are worth having a look at. And so are their other
posts.

http://www.typographykicksass.com/

Flash experimental site where you type in text, and it gathers type
images from Flickr and displays the text using those images. Really
kicks ass.

And now for a some images:

Comic Sans town map by denzmixed from deviantart.

That’s Comic Sans by the way.. COMIC SANS! There are more nice typography images in his deviantart page.

Spam one-liners Flickr gallery

Awesome idea about using spam email titles for art. Genius!

Ambigrams

Back in highschool, I was addicted to ambigrams. I lost all my links
to galleries of it though, but I still remember two of my favorites.

John Langdon’s gallery

Punya Mishra’s wordplay gallery

Trivia: The main character from “The Da Vinci Code” was ‘based’ on
John Langdon. He made all the ambigrams of the other not-so-famous
book, “Angels and Demons” by the same author. Check out his gallery for
those ambigrams. They will fock your mind.

And last but not least, kinetic typography. My favorite of the bunch.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syf8olcM0z4&hl=en]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7WQGrZUdb0]

Just search for ‘typography’ on YouTube and you will be in Kinetic Type heaven.

Well, that’s it for this post. I have a LOT more to show you guys,
especially in the kinetic typography front, but I need to sleep. Hope
you enjoy this post.

EDIT: I almost forgot! Dropclock. Free screensaver for Windows and Mac OSX.

Check out this demo video.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoZmBjaFWto&hl=ja]

[Learn] How to batch resize several images on Mac OSX with iPhoto

John del Rosario — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 05:33:28 +0000

Have you ever need or have been asked to resize several images and had to resort to a photo editing software to individually resize those images? Well, it is an effective way of doing that, but what if you had to resize a hundred of them?

Well, today I had to resize 40 photos, and thought that doing it in Photoshop would be crazy, so I did a little research.

Turns out iPhoto has this function. It is indeed very nice and useful.

First you need to import your photos into iPhoto by going [ File > Import to Library... ], then just select your photos or the folder you have your photos in.

After importing, your photos will be in the “Library” folder of iPhoto, so you have to search for it and sort them into different sub-folders if you want to. Unfortunately, you cant specify a sub-folder while importing. You have to do it afterwards.

Select the photos you want to resize, then go [ File > Export... ]. You will be presented with a dialog box. Choose a format you want to export to (not Original), and click the “Scale images no larger than: ” radio button. Specify the width or height you want, the aspect ratio will be preserved(!). Then click “OK”. Select the directory you want, wait for a few seconds, and voila! Instant resized images, with preserved ratios, at the specified maximum width or height.

Tip: When your images have different aspect ratios (some of them are much longer than others, or wider), select the ones with similar ratios first, export them, and export the longer/wider ones later.