To celebrate the third birthday of Blog.SpoonGraphics, I took the time to work on a special personal design project to create a limited edition poster design to mark the occasion. Here’s a detailed walkthrough of the design process, showing how the design of “3” was conceptualised as a sketch, constructed in Illustrator and given some digital polishing with a range of final touches in Photoshop.
Adobe Illustrator is my favourite tool for creating fun and cute character designs. With just a few simple shapes, a mix of gradient colours and a few shadows here and there you can build some great looking illustrations. Here’s a step by step walkthrough of the process used to create a cool Panda character, from the basic outlines through to the detailed final design.
Learn how to put together a sweet candy inspired design in Illustrator by cutting, splitting and joining vector paths to produce an intricate weave of shapes. We’ll then add some finishing touches with subtle shading and a cool striped overlay to add depth to the design. The final concept will them be ready for being mocked up as a custom snowboard design.
There’s nothing more unique to your creative talent than a series of your own doodles and sketches. Let’s use the good old doodle to represent our design services by combining quick and fun doodles with a print ready business card design. We’ll be drawing our doodles directly in Illustrator, and using the application’s print abilities to set up our business card document with the correct margins and bleed to build a complete print-ready PDF document.
If you’re looking to develop your Illustrator skills, here’s a tutorial for you! Follow this walkthrough to see the how adding layer after layer of vector shapes, along with a range of gradients and a spot of texture can quickly create a great looking icon-style clock graphic.
If you’re confident with your CSS and HTML, it’s not hard at all to step up to the challenge of building a custom WordPress theme. This overview shows the process of how my latest custom WordPress theme was built from design concept through to completed theme. See how the static design is split up into the various WordPress theme files, and discover how the simple PHP snippets can add that dynamic functionality of a blog.