Adobe Illustrator

When You Have the Time, Create Something For Yourself.

Occasionally when I have a bit of downtime, I like to try and polish the design/art/lettering/software skills. This week has been rather slow on the work front, so yesterday I used the opportunity to flex my Illustrator muscle and create the image below. I know, it’s blatant self promotion but I don’t care. I rarely post any of my own work here, and frankly I think it turned out rather well. Everything but the background was created from scratch in Adobe Illustrator CS6. The background is vintage wallpaper that was color shifted in Photoshop.

Venus in Type.

Adobe, specifically Adobe Illustrator on Facebook is giving away posters of the iconic “Venus” that has symbolized the product since 1988. The poster features Venus rendered out of type, and was designed by Dylan Roscover. The only catch, and one that a lot of people won’t like, you have to “Like” it on Facebook to enter. Since that is something I refuse to do, I guess I’m out of the running. Other Adobe Illustrator fans toss your hat in the ring here.

Happy Birthday Adobe Illustrator!

Today at work I have been helping a colleague learn some of the fundamentals of Adobe Illustrator CS5. I use this program so much anymore it is in many ways second nature to me, much like Photoshop, Premier, and After Effects. It’s hard to believe that Adobe Illustrator was introduced 25 years ago this month.

Back in the day it seemed so revolutionary, and today when I watched this video, it proved just how far the design industry has come in the last decade and a half. There are two videos below. The second features John Warnock and is 35 minutes long. I’m going to be upfront, and I hope I don’t offend any die hard Adobe fans. The second video, while nostalgic, is pretty hard to watch. I made it about 5 minutes before I started skipping around.

Happy Birthday Adobe Illustrator.

“Adobe After Effects Quit Unexpectedly.” Hmmmm.

All afternoon I have been trying to render out a fairly complex animation from After Effects CS5. And all afternoon I have been crashing the application at various points in the render process. 21.15 seconds the first time, 30.05 and so on. Even when I try to render it in chunks I am crashing After Effects. I’m pretty sure it is a memory issue, or an issue with just to much complex compositing combined with animation going on. I’m not even rendering out audio with this, so I thought it was going to be fairly easy. What I do know is this, it’s Saturday and I don’t feel like working anymore, so it is time to call it quits. I have the same file rendering at work on my Mac Tower, so hopefully when I get in on Monday things will have worked out for the best. If not, it’s time to figure out a better way, because I’m tired of seeing this screen.