Recently, I gave a presentation at the Toastmasters District 66 Conference. I created it with Google Docs instead of Microsoft PowerPoint so you can also access it via this url: http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dc2j92wh_530pvmxq3hn.

My sinsuses really don’t like the dark room chemicals, but what are you going to do?

Black and White

From roll 2, negative 19 on October 1, 2005 at Sandy Bottom Nature Park in Hampton. Shot on 100 ASA Kodak Black and White film with a Canon EOS Rebel G And 35-80mm lens. Developed on Ilford 8×10 MGIV RC paper for 30 seconds, filter 2 and at f-stop 8. The scan isn’t as ‘rich’ as the print. Maybe because the print is glossy. I’ll get a negative scanner one of these days or a scanner that is better than a $2 special.

Color

And when I go out and do 35mm work, I try to take along the digital camera. I like the black and white version better.

In the Beginning

I wanted to do two fonts because I thought that was what was normal. But if they’re two fonts, one should be sans-serif and the other serif. Ok, we have this golf tournament in Williamsburg. How about something like Caslon for the bottom part? (Caslon is historic looking and Williamsburg is historic.)

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I like the little yellow-red dingbat. I like the text going along the hill. I like the sky. But the two fonts don’t do a darn thing for each other. The top font goes with the style of the piece but the font at the bottom doesn’t. Also there is more of the bottom font than the top. I think another reason I grew to really not like the difference is because it almost splits the page into two equal halves.

In the End

It doesn’t really need two fonts. I miss the dingbat but it has no place in this. I tried to find a home for it but it still sits on the outside of the crop marks. There is hand-kerning and tightening of the leading in a few spots to help with readability and proximity. The ‘header’ is left-aligned. The rest is centered. I figured this was ok since the flag element helps start the centering and the path to the flag gathers up the centered elements.

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The How

Since this was a quick project, there really isn’t too much complicated stuff here. It’s all in Illustrator CS2 and with heavy use of simple shapes and gradients. I did do a blending of two shapes in a spot just because but it really doesn’t need that. There’s a bit of transparency in there. And, as usual, there was a grid in there that I stuck to … mostly.

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Object Blending Refresher


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Take 1

The first is made of two images from photos.com. I deleted out the background of the knight in Photoshop. I placed both images in Illustrator and kept them so that they were linked. That way when I would change the image in Photoshop, it would automatically update in Illustrator. Very handy tool. I made a shadow with a gradient in Photoshop since Illustrator just wasn’t doing what I wanted.

The knight’s shape seemed to cry out for words to wrap around the horse’s body. Doesn’t that space just scream “text”? So I tried that. I also put the word “Chess” behind to create some depth. It’s at about the same angle as the horse. I also wanted to break the frame but not amputate.

Take 2

Too loose. Not enough punch. Not enough contrast. I switched to all Impact font. I also put a gradient on the background to make that more interesting instead of 100% washout look. The horse was also increased in saturation in Photoshop. I liked the yellow so picked out a few key words to season a path with yellow. Impact font.

Take Done

After some great feedback, I moved stuff around yet again, but kept with the yellow seasoning. Also a great tip I got was to either have really light gray or a light tint of yellow when next to pure yellow. If it’s white next to yellow, the yellow looks dirty. So I substituted out the white font color for the lightest yellow I could get. I also used Caslon as a different text to add variety. I used Caslon because it’s serif and I had a sanserif. I remember my Typography class lessons.

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PDF Too Big

To have our copy center print the fliers, I needed to make the file into PDF. And a small enough PDF file that could be uploaded through the web or emailed. But when I saved it as a PDF from Illustrator, the softness of the shadow was too harsh. Taught a neat trick: Export it to PSD, high quality and didn’t flatten. Open it in Photoshop. Save as JPG. Highest quality. Open that. Save as PDF ‘Smallest File Size’ setting. Weird thing is when I skip the JPG part, the text is too pixelated when I go from Photoshop -> PDF directly. Dunno. Interesting long path though but ended up with a small PDF with decent shadow fade and text. Not as crisp as directly from the Illustrator file though.

Project

Make a rebus.

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Can you guess what it says?

Method

She showed us the mesh tool in Illustrator, though I used the time to work on the poster project on Caslon. And I thought she said we had to use it but only two of us in class did.

At first I had the simple default mesh and was trying to figure out what point this was. I could do this with a radial gradient:

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And then I got inspiration (but ran out of time):

As you can see, you click the dot and make some color. It really was nice to get shading in Illustrator. And I think it has a smooth, painterly look and if I put in enough points and perhaps looked a real object, it could look like a photo of an olive.

The background is made of three copies of the same blob with different transparencies. One has a mesh on it. I then wanted to try breaking a frame again and put the box in.

And then…

I would have liked more time to make more mesh lines. I also think the font was a little thin. But I like that I stretched the tops to make it point like the tool you use to grab an olive.

I [heart] mesh!