Archive for January, 2009
How to Rip a Phonebook in Half
I just posted my first Youtube video, a commercial for this blog… sort of.
Inspired by simple sayings like how do you eat an elephant? And A Journey of 1000 miles begins with… watch it and you’ll see.
How To Use The Photoshop Pen Tool
(Fig A)
A good way to learn to use the pen tool is to try this “follow the circle” exercise.
Drag this circle image (Fig A) to your desktop or right-click/save to desktop.
Open the image up in Photoshop and blow it up to 300%. Select the pen tool by hitting the (P) key. Follow around the edge of the circle by clicking with the mouse and setting “anchor points”.
Put your anchor points close together (almost touching each other). When you’re comfortable placing the anchor points, try spacing them out a little farther. (Fig B) If necessary, use the arrow keys to nudge each one into place along the edge of the gray circle.
(Fig B)
Follow the outline of the circle until you’re near the point at which you started. When you’re almost finished, hover your curser over the first anchor point that you created. You’ll see your cursor turn from a pen tool to a pen tool with an open circle next to it, this means you are about to close your path. (Fig 1)
(Fig 1)
When you’ve closed your path, zoom out to 100% and see what you’ve got. Click on your paths tab (by default it’s next to the layers tab in the layers palette). Save your new path by double clicking the layer that says “work path” and name it Path 1.
With Path 1 selected, click on the icon at the bottom of the paths palette that looks like a circle composed of tiny dots. (Fig 2)
(Fig 2)
This will load a selection from your path. With the “marching ants” selection activated, Go into edit in the main menu and select stroke. Choose a color, put 1 pixel, center.
Now you see you have a pretty flawless circle drawn out. This circle was created by nothing more than straight lines. This method works, but now we’re going to try a much faster method.
Deselect Path 1 by clicking in the negative space on the paths palette (below path 1). With the pen tool Create a new path and start following the circle again, only this time try to drag each anchor point a little.
When you click and drag, you’ll notice your anchor points don’t move, instead they have “handles” that come out. Try and line these handles up with the edge of your circle as you trace. Put more and more space between each anchor point when you drag and keep lining them up with the edge of your circle.
Play around a bit and notice how the line reacts. If you get something you don’t like, hit delete and click your last anchor point to pick up the path again. Notice it’s a lot quicker to trace the circle when you can drag out the handles.
When you’re finished, try to trace around the edge with fewer and fewer anchor points. Just for fun, see if you can eventually do it with only 4 anchor points (Fig D) or even two!
Photoshop Pen Tool Exercise
The Tao Te Ching – Translated by Stephen Mitchell
I’ve been listening to Dr. Wayne Dyer a lot lately and this is one of the translations for the Tao Te Ching that he recommends. He also recommends to start reading a section a day and thinking throughout the day about each one of the 81 sections.
Each section of the Tao is short and should be simple to read and think about. I’m going to give it a shot, but will likely read 2-3 sections or so a day.
I like to read these sections until something resonates, then I let those words echo in my mind through out the day. It will often take several sections before something resonates like with me. Some would say that I’m not reading it “correctly” but at least I’m reading it.
I think it’s important to find your own way to be inspired by things like this.
5 Awesome lists with hundreds of useful items for Graphic Designers
I found these 5 articles on the web recently and found myself returning to them several times, so I decided to make a post about them.
- Graphic Elements – 27 Indespensible Resources for Graphic Designers
- Design Trends and Predictions 2009 – Web Design Trends in 2009
- Cheat Sheets - Cheat Sheets for Web Designers
- Older list, but still some great posts - The 50 Most Popular Web Design Blog Posts, Resources & Cheat Sheets of 2007
- Online Design Handbooks – 4 Online Handbooks for web designers and developers
Where is Democracy Designs?
Here’s a blog post that lists 17 people who changed the Internet forever. It’s good to see the photos of the people who are affiliated with these companies. My only problem is that it’s missing the guy from democracydesigns.com.
I guess it’s because it hasn’t yet launched so that must be where the problem is. Democracy Designs is going to be one of those sites that changes the Internet forever. Well… okay maybe it’s not quite that profound but it will be unique and useful, especially for designers. The site’s planned to launch in Feb. 2009 so stay tuned.
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