In today’s Adobe Illustrator tutorial we’re going to play around with Illustrator’s type effects to build a vintage style logo design. Modern logo designs tend to be quite minimalist with a single icon graphic or wordmark, but this classic style is still popular when used for t-shirt designs or certain hipster brands.
It’s always fun to play around in Adobe Illustrator creating stylised illustrations of random objects. It’s also great practise, which helps you experiment with new tools and techniques that you could draw upon in your future projects. Follow along with today’s tutorial to create a series of tasty vector popsicle graphics in Illustrator. We’ll use a range of handy tools to create the first colourful lollipop, then build upon each subsequent illustration with new techniques that help to further customise the artwork further.
I spent some time the other day experimenting with colorizing a black and white photograph. The image I worked on is a photo of my Grandad during WW2. The original has that washed out sepia look to it, as you would expect from a snapshot from the 1940s. But after scanning and processing it in Photoshop, it’s brought to life in full colour and much better contrast, which really helps you imagine the scene for real.
This week I posted a showcase of Day of the Dead inspired designs and artworks, which gave me the inspiration to experiment with a sugar skull illustration of my own. In real life, these are little sweet treats that are decorated with various floral patterns and shapes, but they’ve also become a popular subject for vector designers. In today’s tutorial I’ll take you through the process of creating your own vector sugar skull illustration in Adobe Illustrator. It will be entirely created out of basic shapes, which are customised and layered up to produce intricate embellishments.
‘Large Letter’ was the name of a popular style of postcard design throughout mid-20th century. Often accompanied by the words “Greetings from…”, these postcards presented the name of a place with faux 3D type effects and featured a variety of pictures of that locale clipped within the text face of each letter. The style has become iconic and is referenced by designers who want to create artwork with a nostalgic or retro theme. In today’s tutorial I show how to create a vintage style large letter postcard design, using the tools available in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop to replicate the visual traits of those original souvenirs.
In today’s Adobe Photoshop tutorial I’ll show you how to create a great looking retro text effect. It’s made using a mix of layer styles and some clever Photoshop techniques, but the best part is it also makes use of Smart Objects to non-destructively create the effect, meaning the original type element can still be updated to change the wording.