Access All Areas members have a fun pack of pattern resources to download this week, courtesy of Irene Demetri from Youandigraphics. These Dots & Spots patterns contains 40 doodled pattern designs that repeat seamlessly to cover infinite areas, making them ideal for use as backgrounds for branding projects, packaging, fashion apparel, posters, leaflets or website designs.
One of my latest free downloads is a set of Abstract Stripes Backgrounds, featuring a series of distorted lines in a variety of wavy layouts. One of the commenters on the post was curious to know how they were made, so I figured I’d use the topic for this week’s video tutorial. Follow along with this quick and easy process using Illustrator and Photoshop to produce these abstract creations yourself, which can then be used to make artistic posters or to add visually backgrounds to your design work.
Skulls have been used for artistic decoration right from early primitive civilisations. Whether they’re used to embellish your battle gear or the latest heavy metal album cover design, skulls are a symbol of death and evil that makes them the perfect imagery for certain aesthetics. In today’s design inspiration showcase I present 40 magnificently morbid art and illustration pieces featuring skulls, ranging from dark and distressing depictions with a horror theme to bright and colourful creations with more of a witty vibe.
Access All Areas members have a fantastic set of mockups to download this week, courtesy of New Tropical Design. These vintage film photo mockups give your modern images the vintage feel as if they were taken with old analogue photography gear. The download contains 7 scanned film slide mockup files that place your images within antique filmstrips, plus 4 photo effect Actions that give your photographs a nostalgic appearance.
Font bundles always provide a great opportunity to expand your library with fresh new typefaces, but every so often an extra special collection appears that contains some extremely popular fonts. The Designer’s Essential Font Selection is a new 99% off deal that features 16 top class font families, headlined by the classic Eurostile and Clarendon typefaces. The regular price is $2236, but for a limited time you can get them all for just $29!
Cursive type, whether a script font or hand-lettered, often features elegant swashes and overlapping strokes. One way artists emphasise the curvature of their type is to apply shading, which adds an illusion of depth to the lettering piece. In today’s tutorial I’ll show you how to produce a shaded type effect in Adobe Illustrator. We’ll use a script font as the basis of our typography, then apply a series of gradients to give the impression that the letter strokes interweave and overlap.