Vector Graphics Tutorial Blog

MM2E03 Fall 2011 Devin Lindsay McMaster University

[lindsda]

I have started working on some letterform abstractions for the extra credit assignment. My favourites are the “S” and the “G” if you can find them ;) 

Typeface used is called Liberator.

[lindsda]

DONE!

I got my book printed today and tried to fold it very carefully. I am happy with the results.

Pretty common song that I used for the text, but here it is anyway.

O Holy Night! The stars are brightly shining,  It is the night of the dear Saviour's birth.  Long lay the world in sin and error pining.  Till He appeared and the Spirit felt its worth.  A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,  For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.  Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angel voices!  O night divine, the night when Christ was born;  O night, O Holy Night , O night divine!  O night, O Holy Night , O night divine!  Led by the light of faith serenely beaming,  With glowing hearts by His cradle we stand.  O'er the world a star is sweetly gleaming,  Now come the wisemen from out of the Orient land.  The King of kings lay thus lowly manger;  In all our trials born to be our friends.  He knows our need, our weakness is no stranger,  Behold your King! Before him lowly bend!  Behold your King! Before him lowly bend!  Truly He taught us to love one another,  His law is love and His gospel is peace.  Chains he shall break, for the slave is our brother.  And in his name all oppression shall cease.  Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,  With all our hearts we praise His holy name.  Christ is the Lord! Then ever, ever praise we,  His power and glory ever more proclaim!  His power and glory ever more proclaim!

 

[lindsda]

P.S.

There's nothing wrong with Palace Script. Somehow illustrator defaulted to +10 tracking, so all I did was manually kern each letter back into place.

[lindsda]

Ready for Print!

I wanted to finish assignment 2 early because I am paranoid of printing problems. I went to talk to media services today, who said that they would be able to crop the poster for me, but that printing takes 48 hours. So I'm pretty glad I should be getting it back by Thursday. Anyway, here is a preview, click the image to see the whole thing!

[lindsda]

So I encountered a problem when laying out my text for my accordion book.

The typeface I chose to use, Palace Script MT, looks fine at a smaller point size, but when it's larger, the calligraphic letters NOTICEABLY do not line up...

Unacceptable for high resolution print, but realizing this after fitting in half the text, I found it would be easier to manually kern each letter to line up to the one before it.

[lindsda]

Since I have only been posting project related things so far, I thought maybe I should show something else I have been working on. This is from a personal project I am working on based on the 12 Days of Christmas. I've only started the partridge, and it still needs pears in the tree.

[lindsda]

My first few layout drafts of Project 2 from the in class review last week. The text I will be using is the lyrics to O Holy Night.

[lindsda]

Today's lecture consisted of an eye-opening tour of Media Production Services to learn about offset printing (and its many challenges!). For the rest of class, we were to choose one of two illustrator exercises. I was drawn toward the pattern tutorial, so I followed it pretty close to the instructions but with my own modifications here and there.

[lindsda]

And after cutting!

It broke my heart a little bit to cut apart this gorgeous magazine, but I ended up with some really great images.

Cutting it was harder and more time consuming than I expected however, I tried measuring each page, but they got shifted down and to the right each time somehow.

[lindsda]

My magazine before cutting out squares for the second project. (Of course I got a Christmas magazine)

[lindsda]

Today in tutorial we learned how to use the pathfinder tools. The assignment was to re-create an image using only the shape tools and the pathfinders. 

At first this task proved pretty difficult, as I needed a lot of curves, triangles and obtuse angles. Eventually I became more comfortable with the tools and was able to create what I think is a fairly successful image of a key. I started on the left side, so it is a bit choppier, but I think it gets a lot better toward the right.

As for the colours, I started out using pink and orange just so I could easily differentiate between shapes, but I ended up liking how it looked so I stuck with it.

[lindsda]

Tutorial Nov 3rd - Random cd cover assignment

Band: (random Wikipedia Article) Cape Cod Regional Transit Authority

Album Title: (random quote) Only the prepared mind.

This is what I came up with.

[lindsda]

Today in class we did this typesetting exercise. These are my results for the following settings:

A. Use a measure of 4-inches; justified text; obtain a black or dark typographic colour. Take care to avoid rivers and ladders.

B. Use a measure of 4-inches; flush left alignment with a right ragged edge; obtain a gray typographic colour

C. Your choice. Break as many typographic rules as possible.

Edit: Please click images to view.

[lindsda]

Trying it again with slightly different colouring and without exporting the bleed area.

[lindsda]

Tutorial Activity II: In today's tutorial we learned how to create duotone photos in Photoshop, and then how to use Pantone colours in Photoshop and Illustrator. For this assignment we had to take an existing .ai file and recolour it with a different palette of complimentary and analogous colours. I ended up using all Pantone Process Coated colours.

[lindsda]

Finished reductions of the letter D

[lindsda]

This is our finished poster! It went through many re-designs, originally we had a small airplane flying upward with the numerals trailing behind it ascending in size. Below we had the essay in the shape of a runway from a perspective that the angle matches with the number trail. It had the road lines in the center of the text and each line of text increased in size to add to the perspective. The problem with this design was that we could not find room at the top of the page to fit in a title, and have it not look wrong against the angular grid we had set up. Another problem was the readability of the essay, which was not great considering Frutiger was designed for easy readability.

The new design is based more upon airport signage rather than actual airplanes. This ends up relating more to the purpose of the typeface and gives a much cleaner layout. It took some playing around with the alignment and line tracking, but we were happy with the final result. This time we were also able to incorporate the airplane image using the text.