Designing with Illustrator: Session 1

Features Walkthrough

At this point I have already used illustrator on several occasions for college-related work, so this wasn't too difficult to go through. Still though, there were still many things I learned more about this session which I hadn't seen before.

Some of these features I was surprised that I hadn't found out before, and at the end I was left wondering how I had managed to get by in the past without using them.

Espresso Machine Graphics Exercise

This task involved me vectorizing an image of an espresso maker. Which I did by tracing over different sections with the pen and curvature tools. Since I was already pretty familiar with these tools, this was a pretty quick and simple process. 

I even tried to add a couple of things that other people didn't. The main thing I did was to use the make and expand feature on the original image and overlay the black parts over the top of the vector I had created.

I used the Bauhaus font to make the text.

David Bowie Poster Re-creation

Constructing the connecting shapes at the top was pretty easy, as the ellipse tool was pretty much all I needed to make them. Comparatively, the text was a lot more difficult to do.

Using the source that they gave us, I was able to find that the name of the font that was used in the original poster was called Akzidenz-Grotesk Bold. Unfortunately it was not available in the adobe font library, so I had to look online to find it. I eventually did find it here: https://www.bertholdtypes.com/font/akzidenz-grotesk/proplus/

I couldn't find a way to directly add it to illustrator. To make up for this, I ended up using preview editor to change how the preview looked, so I ended up copying it into photoshop, deleting the white background, and copying that into illustrator.

I only did this to the ziggy stardust text before deciding that i'd just use arial font for the rest of the text, as it would take too much time to do this same process to the rest of it.

 

Making sure each block of text were in the correct positions also took me a long time to do.