Illustrator Paths : II

Posted on April 30, 2012 by macgrunt

this is a continuation of a discussion started in Illustrator Paths : I, which covered two important facts about drawing vectors. this post will touch on how to anticipate the shape of a curve and drawing economically.

when drawing with the pen tool it can be handy to use a driving analogy — the direction you pull the control point equals the direction of the vehicle (that’s pretty obvious), the distance you pull that control point equals your speed. the three curves below use the same two anchor points and only one control point. the direction of travel is the same for all three, but the speed varies. the first is traveling faster and has to travel further before turning sharply to get to where it’s going. the last one is traveling slower, so can make a more gentle turn :

direction and speed — you are controlling only two things every time you pull out a control point. but what a lot of variation you can get between two anchors with just one control point :

you might prefer the rubber band analogy — direction and stretch — same thing :

now, these are the simplest curves possible — two anchor points and one control point. but any one curve can have two control points — that’s two directions and two speeds interacting with each other — giving us quite complex curves from just two anchors :

join those two anchor points together and you get quite complex shapes :

and that’s the main lesson for this post — you can get quite complex curves and shapes from very few anchor points. and fewer anchors generally means more beautiful curves.

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Illustrator Paths : I

Posted on April 23, 2012 by macgrunt

this is the first of a few posts dealing with drawing vectors in Adobe Creative Suite — which really isn’t as difficult as some appear to find it.

these posts are more about understanding the mechanics of vectors — for the very basics on drawing with the pen tool see Adobe’s site.

let’s start with some observations about curved paths : when you draw a circle with the ellipse tool (holding down shift constrains the dimensions to a circle) you get four anchor points. each anchor point has a pair of equi-distant control points :

delete two of those points and you’ll get an ellipse with anchor points at either end. again the control points are equi-distant from their anchor points — that’s what makes the ellipse symmetrical. with a bit of experimenting you’ll find that you can make exactly the same shape with anchor points on either side instead. what does this show? … that there is generally more than one way to create any given curved shape (note: this is important fact number one).

a seriously under-utilised feature of vectors in CS is that you are not restricted to just adjusting anchor and control points — you can also drag the path segments themselves. take that first ellipse and drag the sides out and you’ll find you can create a circle (maybe not exactly perfect, but so close to perfect that it doesn’t matter). this demonstrates important fact number two : any one anchor point can describe a curve up to 180 degrees :

fully understanding the implications of these two important facts will lead to more efficient curve drawing (fewer anchor points equals more beautiful curves), and a greater love of vector drawing generally :

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InDesign tip : #19

Posted on March 21, 2012 by macgrunt

ok, here’s another follow-up post to cover stuff you weren’t told the first time around. InDesign tip : #12 showed how to place multiple images — a really brilliant feature we’ve had since CS4. that tip showed how to load a bunch of images into the cursor and place them one at a time throughout your document.

this tip is about the other cool trick — placing all images on the page in one hit. the images are arranged in a nice, neat grid which makes it a perfect technique for creating contact sheets.

first, grab all your images :

as usual, your cursor will show a counter and a ghosted version of the first image. click and drag to begin making a frame (this will be in the proportions of your first image) before letting go of the mouse button, use your up and right arrows to add rows and columns to make a grid :

now you can drag the grid to whatever proportions you like. if you need to remove rows or columns, just use your down and left arrows. when you’re happy with the way your grid looks, let go of the mouse button and your images will all be placed, in order, in the new grid :

what you end up with is a whole bunch of individual frames (not a grouped grid). only enough frames are created for the number of images you are placing — so, if you draw a 12-frame grid but only have 10 images loaded, only ten frames are created. if your grid isn’t big enough to hold all your images, the remaining images remain loaded in the cursor ready to be placed elsewhere.

but that’s not all…
if you find the grid you’ve drawn isn’t quite right, just undo (command-z) — all the frames disappear and all the images are reloaded into the cursor — ready to try again. you can change the spaces between the frames while you’re drawing the grid by using the command key with your arrows. and if you hold command-shift before you start drawing your grid — you’ll get a grid with the same columns, rows and spaces as the last grid you drew.
cool, eh?

but wait, that’s (still) not all…
this isn’t just for when you’re placing images. you can use the same technique if you just want a grid of rectangles, ovals, polygons, text frames or even graphic lines. some of you will have noticed that this new ‘gridify’ functionality stuffs the ability to adjust polygons (arrows) and stars (command-arrows) on the fly like in the old days. but, if you hit the space bar while drawing a polygon you’ll deactivate the grid thing and get the old functionality back. hit the space bar again to reactivate gridify.

can you believe that’s still not all?…
you could use the same technique to create text frames and add live captions to include name labels for your images, but the next scripting lesson will show you an easier way to label all images in a file in one sweep. making contact sheets is easy as.

incidentally, if you like those funky little icons, you can find them over at shutterstock — an excellent source of good value stock images. just search in the contributor field for ‘samer’.

• related post : InDesign scripting : lesson 21 : label all images in document quickly.

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InDesign tip : #18

Posted on March 17, 2012 by macgrunt

InDesign tip : #14 talked about different ways of zooming about an InDesign document. but it missed one really cool little trick which has, apparently, been with us since CS4 — when the navigator panel was dropped — and it’s called, impressively, power zoom.

you start with the hand tool. as always, you do not have to select the hand tool from the tool panel — you activate it temporarily in one of three ways :
• if you have one of the selection tools active — hold down the space bar;
• if the text tool is active but no text frame is selected — use option-space;
• if the text tool is active in a text frame — use option only.
why the developers insisted on making it this complicated is a mystery.

anyway, once you have the hand tool up, click and hold the mouse button. after a couple of seconds the screen will zoom out a little and present you with a red outline (and you can let go of whichever keys you’re holding down). drag the red outline to wherever you want in the document — scroll up or down (or use your arrows) to resize the red outline — let the mouse button go and you’ll zoom into the new outlined area. now THAT’S cool :

incidentally, if you like that groovy little image by dek wid, you can find a tutorial showing how it’s done over at photoshop tutorials.

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InDesign tip : #17

Posted on March 6, 2012 by macgrunt

lovers of typography love a well designed ligature. those who are indifferent to typography generally say “what’s a ligature?”. and those who are entirely ignorant don’t even notice a ligature even when they are looking straight at one. although, that’s actually the point of the ligature in the first place — you’re not supposed to notice the typographic trick, because the ligature is intended to make reading easier.

just to make clear the foregoing blather — here are some standard ligatures in well-known fonts. you’ll notice that not all fonts have been designed with a full complement of ligatures :

that’s right, ligatures are those little joined-together thingies that are generated by default in InDesign. unfortunately, ligatures do not always lead to improved readability and sometimes you’re better off just using the standard letterforms.

you can turn ligatures off in the dropdown menu in the character panel. if you’re doing the right thing and using styles for your text formatting, you’ll find ligatures as one of the options under basic character formats. you can set no-ligatures as your default for all future documents by unchecking it in the character panel when you have no documents open.

the only way to turn ligatures off for an entire document in one hit is with a script something like this one :

tell application "Adobe InDesign CS4"
  tell active document
    tell every story
      set ligatures to false
    end tell
  end tell
end tell

of course, the Adobe CS being what it is, you do NOT turn ligatures off in Illustrator the same way you do in InDesign. for Illustrator you have to go to the opentype panel instead.

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macgrunt

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Tag Archives: illustrator

Illustrator Paths : II

Illustrator Paths : I

InDesign tip : #19

InDesign tip : #18

InDesign tip : #17

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