Vector Magic

I just added Vector Magic to my links under Resources.  I can’t say enough about this site.  Maybe I don’t know how to use Illustrator’s LiveTrace correctly but I never get the results I get with Vector Magic.  Unfortunately for me (but good for them!), it’s no longer in the beta stage and there is now a charge to use their service.  Still, it’s reasonable and I will continue to use them.  They offer a desktop version of the program but it’s a little pricey.  I just converted this drawing for Kristin’s Reach the Beach team.  It was a high-res scanned tif file to begin with.  I cleaned it up a bit in Photoshop, then uploaded it to Vector Magic.  It did its thing and I downloaded the resulting eps file.  I did have to do a little work in Illustrator, mostly smoothing lines and pulling points but I think it turned out great!

 

Drop-Down Menus

I love our Shrinking Global Village! Earlier this week, I was asked to create a mock-up of a website for the “Nexus for Oil and Chemical Spill Research.”  The only way that it made sense to lay out the (sparse and sketchy) content was to use drop-down menus.  Since I neither like nor use drop-downs, I haven’t created them in years.  I found a short tutorial on YouTube by ZeforceTutorials in Australia that shows quickly and succintly how to create drop-downs with Spry in CS3.  The “instructor” sounds like he’s about 14. I imagine him as a well-meaning, earnest LOTR fanboy.  Anyway, it was exactly what I needed.  Thanks Zeforce!

Skinny Lines

To make the skinny skinny lines in Dreamweaver (which are table cells), put a tiny spacer gif in, fiddle with the alignment and make sure that it’s all one merged cell!

Stormwater One-Pager

So, this is the new design for the Stormwater Center’s one-pager.  It’s an InDesign file.  Funny thing is that the background blue looked just like this on my monitor but printed out a deep, vibrant teal.  Weird! But center section is actually a transparent white layer and it was fine. So, I made a whole-sheet white layer and made it about 5% transparency. Seemed to do the trick. Makes it a little more challenging to move things around, i.e., the water rings, but at least it prints correctly. Still, I wonder why. WHY?!