gdenby

Plagiarism only occurs when someone attempts to pass off some else's work as their own for profit. Essentially, its an act of fraud, or forgery. Working in a similar manners just makes the work derivative. The person doing it is a "wannabe," or worse, a "hack." Everyone emulates their teachers. Teachers are happy when the pupil surpasses their work, or at least proceeds from it to something new innovative. Everyone copies works they admire. Its understood that it is just the way one acquires skill and an understanding of the fundamentals.

Nice. Can't think of any other ways. In fact, I didn't know about a couple of the methods.

Its simple. Types some text. While still selected, use the fill tool, and select bitmap as the type. Navigate to where you have the pattern, and open. The pattern will then fill the letters, and can be resized to tile as needed. Once that is done, open the styles panel, and use the menu selection "Add style from selection," which will then create an AD "style" that can be applied to any other items.

Using a Huion tablet, no problem. See:

If you just want to recolor what they gave you, its doable, tho' the results aren't great. Using the .eps file, here's what I was able to do using level adjustments: 2 variations on the black/white threshold. As you can see, looks like a poorly drawn 1 bit graphic circa 1985. Going thru the fuss of converting the .eps to other bitmap formats that I could tweak slightly improved the results. Still, nothing that was even mediocre. In most respects, the image is almost useless. It looks like it started as an 8-bit painting, was resized and .jpg compressed, then up-sampled again. I tried various methods tho get it to where I could see shape edges, and nothing worked for more than 50% of what was there. Everything else just remained noise. As MikeW said, ask the clients for something better. Or, if they are willing, to pay you for your best transcription of what they provided. Be sure to quote high, because there is quite a lot of work if you do that.

Here's an approach. The image took maybe 12 minutes. Create a framework. Use the polygon shape tool, select the number of facets you need, such as 20 in your sample. No fill, default stroke. With snapping on, draw out from the page center. Draw another w. a larger or smaller radius as you like. Next, define the section for the first shape. Using the pen tool in straight line mode, draw a line from the top most point of on poly to the other. Draw another separate line from the 1st angle to the left of on poly to the 1st angle of the other. The 2 poly perimeters and the lines define a trapezoid drawing space. Using the pen tool in polygon mode, rough out the shape you want, and refine it by tweaking node positions, and changing some to smooth to get the curves you need. Hint: At this step, select the inner poly and make the curve parameter 100%. That way, there will be a smooth curve to help refine the hand drawn shape. At this point there is 1 "tooth" or "cog". While selected, move the center of rotation to the page center. Use the duplicate command and rotate the hand drawn form the appropriate amount. 18 degrees for the 20 toothed form in your example. Then repeat the duplication till you have a complete ring. I was inclined at 1st to use the circle tool, and make it into a donut_pie section that would then be modified to get a shape. That doesn't work if the number of desired sections requires and arc that is not a whole degree. Ex.: 16 "teeth" require an arc of 22.5 degrees, and the pie tool will only do whole degrees. Then I tried using the cog tool, and modifying the individual cogs. It gave precise spacing, but requires dozens of node additions and manipulations. So, I ended up doing a hand draw, replicating and adding the dupes together. Much faster. Note. I'm slowing down quite a bit w. age. My elder son moves about 2 - 3 times faster than I, so you might get this done in a bit over 3 minutes.

I can give a partial answer to the portion"So what is the effect of using the golden ratio..." Humans tend to prefer images that can be broken Into simple proportions. Simple and borIng would be tiles all of the same size. A = B. A little more subtle would be B = 1/2 A. C = 1/2 B. More subtle, B = sqr root 2A. Golden section is still simple, but very subtle. A + B is to A as A is to B. This and other ratios are found frequently in natural forms, and a lot of art has been built with sizes & shapes. In the example vid, there are a series of circles whose size is related to a simple golden ratio construction. But after that, there isn't much related to golden section construction. The designer had in mind a whale silhouette, and formed it by using only arc made from circles. It is sort of harmonic, in that every portion of the outline is made from chords from the few basic circles. But there is no clear rule for the construction.

It was something I stumbled across, and it was a little surprising. When a number of objects are joined by a boolean combine, the fill tool will act on all the once separate shapes. For instance, a row of rectangles could have a gradient or bit map added. The surprising thing (to me) is if the combine is self divided, the fill portions of the fill that were in them when combined stay with the discreet parts. For instance, make an array of rectangles, combine, and fill w. a bitmap picture. The divide, and the image will be broken into the rectangles, and moved around as you like. And yes, many people would like a full blend tool.

I'm glad your client is satisfied. The logo really does look pretty good. Logos are part commodity. I personally would like less "flat" designs, but I can think of an economic necessity. Assume a company is widely accessible. What if there are a half billion hits on the website? In some places, viewers may have plenty of bandwidth, tho' the cost may be high. In other places, the bandwidth is small, and the cost is even higher. And the company/institution would like to keep its costs down too. The aggregate savings could be significant. I've mentioned I worked in an art museum. There were pieces I viewed w. wonder every work day for 40 years. Alas, the average view time by a visitor for a work was 15 seconds. If the display didn't engage in less than 3 seconds, the average viewer would pass over the item(s). What was worse was that most people in the US, where I worked, wanted learn about art. They would spend 10 seconds of viewing time reading the historical description, and more on information panels. The artwork was secondary. Essentially, one must design for economy, but create for delight, and hope there are some who will go for the later. (historical note. Look up the illustrator/painter Maxfield Parish. Compare the work he was paid to do, and what he did on for himself.All exquisite, but some beyond words.)

Seems your argument is self defeating. You say the book will be outdated. But, some one will digitize it and others d-load a 400+ page document that will be outdated, as if network connection is free. Repeat. Repeat. "I think they should increase the price of AD by $10 ou $20 and include the ebook with it. That way, the mass effect that every licence sold is purchasing the book will covers the difference in price and you have more chance to convert ppl to your product." This makes some sense, but are you sure that is enough to compensate the people who made the content? They not only know how to use the 'ware, but obviously have lots of previous practice. It may seem silly, but actually having a physical item that is intact and has one's name on the credit is remarkably valuable.

"Cmd click the shape's icon in the layers palette to load its selection and then delete the shape" I'm not understanding this. Can you clarify? What is the selection? Is it the ellipse that will create the mask? What shape is being deleted? A layer and a layer mask must both be present. What would there be to delete?

I haven't upgraded to Sierra, still in El Capitan, but w. AD 1.5.5, using files of similar size, I have no problems.

Clever

Ah! I missed the little orange symbol indicators. Thought the question was about connecting objects, not objects connected as symbols.

Nice work. I have to suppose you are only an AP newb, cause the work is quite subtle and featureful.

The default setting for the stroke segment joins is round. Open up the stroke panel, and switch to mitre join instead.

FWIW, Illustrator was in its 9th version before it had an acceptable auto trace. Corel Draw was in its 3rd version before it added the trace module. If my memory serves, it only handled 1 bit graphics, and only later had a threshold option for greyscale.

AD allows one to draw open vector lines. These can various have stroke properties. But if they are joined, the stroke properties of the item lowest in the layer hierarchy are transferred to the rest. If you want to manipulate several lines by scaling, rotating or moving, they need to be grouped. If the lines are not straight, and have an implied enclosed area, they may be manipulated w. the boolean operators (add, subtract, etc) but they will then be transformed into closed shapes. Closed objects can have lines that appear to extend from nodes, but what has to be done is split the shape at a node, separate the nodes stacked on top of one another, and then draw a line out from one, and then a line back to the other. Finally, the 2 split nodes can be placed back on top of each other, so the extending line has no width, but is part of a perimeter. Hope this helps.

Serif's in-house quick demo is at vimeo.com/110124748

I'm curious about what is happening when AI is exporting the .svg files. If you have a text editor, you should be able to open the .svg, and see the text that defines the picture. When I export from AD, if I've exported the file as a flattened .svg, or export a rasterized image as .svg, the results are a very large image file, and not a concise vector description. As in flattened .svg: <image id="_Image1" width="868px" height="868px" xlink:href="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAA2QAAANkCAYAAADY6OnIAAAACXBIWXMAAA7EAAAOxAGVKw4bAAATMElEQVR4nO3dQWoiYRRG0VfdEiGuwIFzh0Jv3S1k4AqykHYomBUklYbGC/Gc8Ufxphd+qGVmXmfmzwAAAPBIb8vMHGfmvb4EAADgybz8qi8AAAB4VoIMAAAgIsgAAAAiggwAACAiyAAAACKCDAAAILJZG2y32zmdTo+4BQAA4Me4XC6rm9UgOxwOcz6f/8tBAAAAz2K/38/.... (and on for about 7000 characters) vs. for export style="fill-rule:evenodd;clip-rule:evenodd;stroke-linecap:square;stroke-miterlimit:2;"> <g transform="matrix(1,0,0,1,-607,-890)"> <rect x="613.843" y="895.762" width="858.175" height="858.175" style="fill:rgb(235,235,235);stroke:black;stroke-width:8px;"/> </g> Perhaps there is a different way to export from AI that will give a more compact and hopefully accurate file to open. This assumes that the work done in AI was all vector.

I see in my above post the I write "hand" where I should have written "handle." Each node in a closed shape has 2 control handles attached to it. If a node is "sharp," the control handle will point straight at the next adjacent node, and have a length of zero. If you place the cursor on a straight line and push it into a curve, you will see the control handles extend. If the line is already curved, when you click on the nodes, you should see the control handles length and the direction they bend the connecting line. If you select "smooth" nodes, and want the lines between to be straight, click on the "convert: sharp" button on the tool context bar. The line between then goes directly between the 2 points.

Sorry, was not implying anything about you. Just reminiscing on a rather painful event in my past.

Sigh. I knew a lady who ended up quitting a job in part because while she was an award winning designer, the boss would insist that she do things she knew were just wrong. I filled in for awhile on some of her tasks because I knew how to use Illustrator a little. I would get instructions like "make all the colors like chocolate," and then have to come up w. a dozen variations till I happened on matches that met expectations. You have my sympathy.

AD does not do 2D to 3D. AD does not have a shape blend command at this point. It does have a "power duplicated" that will repeatedly move, scale and rotate vector objects. If the objects are combined, a gradient of image can be used to fill all of them.

Do what you described, move the point til it is directly above the red colored node. Then select and delete the other 4 nodes. The 1st node you moved is a "sharp" node, and there will be a straight line left to the red node. The red node may need to have its upper hand adjusted. If the node at the bottom of the "i" is also sharp, just delete the red node.