Two ways to a Starburst

posted by Liz

I'm embarrassed to say that I never explored the custom shapes tool until a few weeks ago because I assumed it was mostly clipart. So, if you're like me, you may not know that there is a default starburst shape in there.

Go to the Custom Shape Tool (under the Rectangle Tool) and then look at the top menu bar to see what shape is currently selected. If you're at the default shape, it's an arrow. Click on it to open the box of shapes and click again on the arrow to the right inside the box for more options. Select the "symbols" group and scroll down just a bit to see this shape (selected in red):



Choose it and then click and drag it past the edges of your document so the lines appear to extend forever.



However, doing it this way, while easy, means that yours looks the same as everyone else's. So if you're not in a rush, here's how to make a custom version:

1. Create a slightly bigger document than the one you are working in. (To ensure that the outer edges of your starburst extend past the border of your current workspace.)

2. Draw a series of rectangles from top to bottom, spacing them evenly. Here, my background is black and I've draw white rectangles. (Generally with starbursts, you'll draw them in white or black and lower the opacity to blend it into your file.)

Make sure you start all the way to either the left or right with the first one and leave a space on the opposite side. Otherwise, your two outside pieces will end up touching once you apply the filter. Play with the width and number of rectangles to achieve different looks.



3. Select all of your rectangle layers and press Command+E or go to either the Layer menu or the flyaway menu in the layers palette and select Merge Layers.

4. Go to Filter>Distort>Polar Coordinates. It should be set at 100% and Rectangular to Polar. You've got a starburst!

5. Drag it back onto your file (don't forget to lower the opacity - mine's at 10%) and see how you've made a starburst that caters to your design needs. In my opinion, this second one looks a little less vintage. It's all in the fine tuning.

Fini

posted by Adam

We recently completed a custom icon design project for a client, Fini, and thought we would showoff a couple of those icons. This was one of those projects that was just flat out fun to work on, and we think it shows in the designs. Click on the icons below to see a large version. Trust me, it is worth it.





Fini is a finisher. A finisher you ask? I did too, at first, but Patrick explained it all to me simply: He does video post-production work. Color correction, audio layback, recapture and conform and a lot of other things I cannot possibly fathom. He has done so for companies such as: HBO, NBC, Oxygen, AMC, Lifetime, TNT, TBS, National Geographic Channel, and many more. His company does excellent work so pop by his site and have a look.

Illustrator Flower with Live Paint

posted by Liz

Growing flowers in Illustrator CS2/CS3
I made some new desktop wallpapers for elixir on Friday and decided to share my technique in making one of them.



This tutorial is labeled CS2 and up because it requires using the Live Paint tool and I believe that the first version of Illustrator to implement Live Paint was CS2. Just so you're aware.

To practice making this flower, try copying mine using these directions:

1. Draw any shape/size circle. Set the fill to none. With the circle selected, go to Effect>Warp>Shell Upper. You can see my settings below.



2. Go to Object>Expand Appearance to re-fit the shape guides. Now copy and paste the shape. Rotate and move the new petal a little so that it starts to form the flower.



3. Do this a few more times, like so, until you have a whole flower. Mine has five petals.



4. Now the fun part! Select all the petals, go to your toolbar and click on the Live Paint tool.



5. Move the paint can over the illustration to highlight each segment in red as you pass over it. Choose a color and click inside a segment to apply it.



6. You can choose a stroke color at any point. My stroke is the same on every petal and is simply the same color as my lightest green, so that the outside petals do not appear to have a stroke. Here are the five greens I used, from lightest to darkest, via their hex codes. You can see that I moved from lightest to darkest as I worked from the outside of the flower to the center.

D2E298 (same for stroke)
C2D37D
B3C15F
A5AF48
949933

7. Download this wallpaper (and two other versions of it) full size from the desktops page.

Growing up

posted by Adam

We're happy to announce that we've finished the upgrade of our Organic theme to make it compatible with RapidWeaver 3.6. The upgrade adds RapidWeaver 3.6 features such as EXIF data tags for photos, updated blog features, tag cloud support and much more.

We have also included a series of Blocks library items.

When you receive your download it will contain two versions of the Organic theme. Inside you'll find a version for RapidWeaver 3.6+. We have also included a ZIPed version for RapidWeaver 3.5 for those who have not, or do not want to, upgrade to RapidWeaver 3.6.

If you are upgrading from a previous version of this theme, be sure to first delete the original theme. To do so, right-click (or crtl-click) on the theme in RapidWeaver's theme drawer and select 'Delete' from the popup menu. Please note: Upgrading this theme will remove any modifications you made to the theme previously. So, please be sure to backup your data if necessary.

If you have purchased Organic in the past and do not receive an updated download link, please drop us an e-mail via the contact form on our site here and we will get back to you as soon as possible. If requesting an updated download link for the upgrade please cut and paste your original e-junkie e-mail into the contact form message field as well. This will make the process much quicker. If you have any questions, let us know, we're glad to help out.

Also, since Organic was the only theme left to be upgraded in our Bundle package, we will be sending out upgrades for the Bundle alongside the Organic upgrade.

This leaves just two themes in our lineup that have not been upgraded — Light and Milky. We will be upgrading Light next. We are however contemplating not upgrading Milky, and perhaps retiring it.

Logos, logos everywhere

posted by Liz

I stopped by the grocery store this morning on the way to work for some breakfast stuff and saw a small group of bottles of açai juice.



Now, I'm not one for gimmicks. I'm always cynical of the new IT fruit or some newly evangelized holy grail of vegetables. With all the hype hailing the açai berry as some miraculous superfruit from the rainforests of Brazil, I've basically avoided consuming it for the same snobby reason I shun most other fad products.

But I am a sucker for good design, so I picked up one of the bottles. I'm really glad I did. The design captured me and I ended up buying it. Still, it took me until I finished the whole bottle to more closely examine the logo near the base and I thought it was rather ingenious.




It looks like a berry splashing into the juice, but the change in color also creates an exclamation point in the middle. Whenever I need logo inspiration, I usually hop over to logopond, but sometimes just keeping my eyes open does wonders. Visit Bossa Nova.

More customizations

Posted by Adam

We've recently completed another custom theme for Todd Albertson. This time for his main site: toddalbertson.com.

We wanted to create something fresh, from scratch. What we came up with is clean and classy yet unique. You should stop by his site and check it out. Be sure to drop by the BOOKS and NEWS sections of the site.You can also have a look at some screenshots here, here and here.

Practical Halftone Dot Application

posted by Liz

I know the tutorial on halftone dots is a little ways down the page now, but I just remembered a photo I took in Mexico City earlier this summer. (Leave it to me to go to another country and take pictures of advertising.) I was just showing a friend my pictures last night when I saw it again and thought it would be nice to share.

A closeup of the halftone dots



It's cut off in the top left corner, but this is an ad for Cartoon Network.



Learning little tricks like this one means you're just as good as the pros. Occasionally I see graphics techniques that put me to shame, but the truth is that sometimes just knowing is half the battle.

Tutorial: Custom Photoshop Brushes

posted by Liz

You can make many types of Photoshop brushes and achieve lots of different effects depending on what you make a brush out of. I'm going to go over making a brush from a shape in a photo.

Tulip Brush
I chose a flower because this week, the free image at iStockphoto is a bunch of red tulips. Create a login for a free hi-res download to practice with.



1. Choose the flower you want and zoom in to make a selection. You can do this countless ways: erase the surrounding image, use the magic wand, etc. My favorite tool for this is the pen tool. If you're not accustomed to using the pen tool, the bezier curves can be tricky, but I consider this method to be the most exact. If you go this route, make sure you set it to Paths before starting, as shown below. If you use a different selection method, skip to step 3.



Tip: You can convert the pen tool into the direct select tool and adjust your selection quickly as you work by holding down the command button.



2. Once you've drawn a complete path around your flower, go to the Paths palette (which is grouped with the layers palette by default) and click on the Load Path as a Selection button at the bottom.



3. With your flower selected, go to Edit>Define Brush Preset and name your brush. You can now see it listed in the brushes menu.



4. Select it and choose the color you want to use. Click on a new layer to place the flower stroke. You'll notice it paints in all the depth and light from the photo and isn't just an outline of the shape. This makes portions of it more transparent than others.



You can make brushes out of anything. One popular effect is to make brushes out of water rings or paint splatters to create grunge effects. Another thing that's fun to do is to play with the blending modes on your custom brush layers. Unless you're doing a specific project, like a photo retouch, the most important thing to remember when you're in Photoshop is to play around.

That wraps it up for...

Now we're stylin'

Nik Fletcher, the resident 'support ninja' over at Realmac Software, has done it again. What has he done, exactly? Well, he's released the third in a series of RapidWeaver based, tutorial screencasts.

This screencast walks you through the use and creation of theme styles, as well as what master page theme styles are and how to use them. It is a nice, informative look at the subject. Plus, if you watch it through you may notice a few discount codes here and there for elixir products.

Drop by our videos section and have a look. There are also a variety of other helpful tutorial videos available there as well.

Tutorial: Refining Illustrator Files

posted by Liz

I used to have difficulty defining the edges of my Illustrator files because my shapes hung over the lines of the artboard. So I used to import my vector files into Photoshop to set up final document sizes because I couldn't figure out how else to do it.

But clients don't like files that appear pristine and then function like a bad toupee. So here's how you do it.

Trimming the Fat

1. If you're creating an Illustrator design for a client (or yourself), here's the best way to clean up the overhang. Here's what I mean. See how my shapes overlap the artboard?



2. All you have to do is draw a square and line it up with one of the edges of the artboard. (Zooming increases precision; My box is black for contrast purposes, but any color or even a box with no fill will do.) Make sure it is the top shape. Select both the box and one of the shapes to be trimmed.



3. Go to your Pathfinder palette and click Subtract. You can then hit Expand to change the bounding box to fit your new shape.



4. Here is my blue box trimmed now on the right side. Each shape will have to be trimmed separately, so it is a bit of work, but better than leaving the dangling bits.



5. All my shapes have been trimmed up and now fit properly in the artboard.



6. One other use ... The real fun of the subtract button in the Pathfinder pallet is cutting one shape out of another. In this example, I drew a heart and placed it over the object I want to cut it out of.



7. The other option in my case would be to place an orange heart on top of the blue stripe, but I've drawn in some wires in the background so you can see the advantage of cutting it out: To see the shapes underneath it.



This may seem like a beginner's tutorial, but the number of messy files out there tells me this is still useful information. So let's keep it clean, folks!



Side note: The white vines I have growing out of the text are open shapes I drew with the pen tool. The only way I'm aware of to cut shapes like these is with the scissors tool. Just zoom in, snip once where you want to trim it and delete the excess.

And they're recyclable too!

posted by Liz

Things have been busy in the elixir factory lately, but in case you missed the newest Apple eye candy, I wanted to take a minute to suggest that you head over to their site and take a peek. They've released updated iMacs and sleek new keyboards, both too thin to be seen with the naked eye.



There are also some nifty software updates to apps in both the iLife and iWork packages, such as better organization in iPhoto and an entirely new app called Numbers for building spreadsheets the intuitive way. I know, right? I hope I never have a reason to use it either. Sounds suspiciously like work.

Personally, I'm mostly waiting for Leopard to come out in October, but it sure wouldn't hurt to have a shiny new toy to install it on.

Tutorial: Making halftone dots

posted by Liz

Dots are very simple shapes, but it's not obvious how to easily create a pattern or repetition of them in Photoshop. So here's one easy way to use dots as texture without drawing them each by hand.

1. Create a new document and select the Gradient tool. Switch the document to Quick Mask mode. (See circled tools.) Drag the Gradient tool across the document in whatever direction you'd like the dots to flow. Should look something like this:



2. In the Filter menu, go to Pixelate > Color Halftone to open a dialogue box. You can choose the max. radius of the dots by changing the pixel number at the top. A smaller number will make lots of little dots and vice versa. My example uses 15.





3. Click the Quick Mask tool again to switch back to standard mode. Now you can fill in the selection with a foreground color of your choice either by pressing Option+Delete or by going to Edit > Fill.





4. Before deselecting, if you would like to fill the white space with a second color, select the inverse either from the Select menu or with Command+Shift+I.



Here's an example. This is a thumbnail from one of the elixir desktops. I cut circles out of the halftone dot pattern instead of leaving it to fill the background, but you can see how they add to the illustration.



There are other ways to implement the color halftone filter, but I just thought I'd share one easy way to make a halftone pattern.