THE EXPERIMENT:

• A  slightly “wrong” isometric cube symbol was created and given three different hue sets using the “Garden” swatch sample set
• This was stacked in various ways to create a basic unit of three columns.
• This unit was was repeated at varying sizes before a black background to create the image you see here.

VR LINK OF THE DAY: 3d Illustrator Tutorials

THE EXPERIMENT:

• A series of nested shapes were creating by using the “~” key while drawing each shape, which leaves a trail of multiple copies. In this case, hexagons and 20-pointed stars.
• These shapes were all given black–>white gradients, and put on a gradient background.
• Transparency of each shape cluster set to “Lighten”.
• Viola… instant hauntology. This looks like something H.P. Lovecraft would see under an electron microscope.

VR LINK OF THE DAY: You The Designer, another great resource. See especially “25 Bad Habits of Graphic Designers”.

(Note: Animation can be stopped in Firefox by pushing “esc”.)

THE EXPERIMENT:

•  A series of seven swatches with curved lines were created in Illustrator. These were “additive”, meaning each swatch added a colored line to the previous swatch.
• A basic image of a background box and outlined text was created, then repeated on seven layers, each using one of the swatches as a fill color for both text and background (the text’s pattern was offset a few pixels in order to appear over the background).
• The file was exported as a .psd file, then opened in ImageReady.
• A seven-cell animation was created in ImageReady, each cell displaying just one of the layers.

VR LINK OF THE DAY: Doodlage — brand new doodle blog!

THE EXPERIMENT:

• Using the grid in Illustrator, I created a simple, faux-raster “star” image using pixels of varying transparencies in the same color.
• I made four in total: green, blue, red, and yellow.
• These were then converted into Scatter Brushes, set to default.
• I then applied the brushes to multiple copies of the outlined words “TEXT BOMB”, varied the stroke weights, and removed letters to taste.

The result: instant 80s arcade carnival carnage!

VR LINK OF THE DAY: Graphic Design Blog — generic name, interesting resource

THE EXPERIMENT: The idea here is to stand back from the screen or to squint: once performed, the three primary colors of any pixel — red, green, and blue — disappear into each other to form nothing but white. To create this image, I first created a number of “bursts” of curved lines by holding the “~” key while drawing them. I then applied a simple Art Brush pattern consisting of a small red, green, and blue square. It is important to use pure colors here: each one should be some combination of 255, 0, and 0 in the RGB slider palette.

VR LINK OF THE DAY: Veerle’s Blog

THE EXPERIMENT: The text reads, “The Dance of the Pirates Was Brutal and Short”, but there was nothing short about creating this beastie. I typed the words in Futura Medium, outlined them, and repeated them in layers. Certain repetitions were colored with certain custom pattern swatches, and offset just a bit. The black patterns were created by grabbing sections of a photo of a statue I had broken up using Live Trace. The colored patterns are simple geometry. This, I must say, was a lot of fun to build.

VR LINK OF THE DAY: Typographica

THE EXPERIMENT: I created a basic “explosion”symbol by applying an extreme “Roughen” tool to a series of concentric circles (going from white to yellow to orange to dark red). I then spread this around the page, along with the black/white house-looking icon, then applied the “Transform” tool to all of them. I won’t tell you what my business partner thought of the resulting fireworks.VR LINK OF THE DAY: “Destroy the Web 2.0 Look”!

THE EXPERIMENT: A digital remix of a photo I took of the outside of a grocery in northeastern Berlin. The store is all but vanished, and the bordering trees seem to dominate. This makes liberal use of the Photoshop “wand” tool, used to single out parts of the photo, which are then copied and pasted in sequence. I also used the “Direct Select Layer” function a lot, and I have mastered the key commands for moving a layer up or down in the stack. Highly recommended.

VR BLOG OF THE DAY: Real World Illustrator