Ramblings of a Failing Mind

Just a little taste of what’s to come with the new site design.  If you can’t figure it out yet it will be a 1950’s Sci-Fi / Thriller themed design that I was inspired by while browsing around the archives on CSS Zen Garden.  I’m planning on going down to a near by retro theater we have in the area (Grandin Theatre, anyone? anyone?) and taking photos from the inside to further plan my design out.  I really like the screening room they have, but the main theater is also very nice.  Will be hard to choose which one to model my site after.  I hope to get this image fully completed in the next week or so.  As you can tell this was the super super easy part (and yet it still made me curse Illustrator for being so GD complex).  For a look at the original movie poster take a trip here.  A few other things I plan to use here and here.  I’m very excited

After my post of the little illustrator monkey that I made, a friend of mine requested that I make a picture he could use as an avatar. We went over the details of what he would like to see so last night after raiding I wasn’t quite ready to go to bed yet and decided to pull up Illustrator and give it a go.

After a LOT of frustration @ midnight of trying to get a gradient to work exactly like I wanted over text, I finally decided to start fresh in a different program. Yes you guessed it… Photoshop. Very quickly I was able to churn out a “beta” of the picture and although I wasn’t as happy as I would like with it, he was. I made a point to revisit it in the morning when I woke up and start a new. I’m now retrying my work again in Illustrator and changing the look of the character a tad bit but here’s a copy of the one I made while blinking myself awake @ 1am.

I first learned what the “pen” tool was in Adobe Photoshop, I believe it was version 8… maybe 9. This was a good thing because it introduced me to what might be possible to create with such a tool. It’s also bad because I learned to love it in Photoshop instead of where it’s home is… in Illustrator.

Photoshop works with rasterized images and Illustrator works with vector images. What does this mean? Well, having spent a few months interning for a local design place I picked up a few things. A raster graphic or image is made up of pixels, much like the video images we watch on television. If you have ever taken a photo and tried to zoom in, you notice that it becomes blurry or pixelated. This is a result of working with a raster graphic. How does a vector image differ? Vector graphics work based off of math and geometry to create the visual results you see. Vector art uses geometric objects like curves and polygons to display an object. This is extremely important to create high definition work. Since vector imagery uses math the image will retain the same sharpness regardless of magnification level as it can recalculate to an infinite amount the angle, arc, swoop, etc of the pattern it was told to represent.

Why is all of that important? Because having learned how to use a vector based tool in a raster program (pen tool in photoshop), I’ve developed a love and unfortunately habits that need to be relearned in the proper home. With the creation of the image below, a copy of a graphic on a new t-shirt I purchased, I’m just beginning to create the groundwork for relearning how to use the tool properly. Here you’ll see a very basic yet amusing drawing that is my first attempt at the new process I’m working on. There’s 3 more images in this set that I’ll be uploading soon. Please leave feedback