gdenby

I prefer the 1st ALA in the diamond. Its black on white, which isn't the highest contrast, but it is immediately recognizable. Like pxls2prnt, I find the text is irritating visually. If the client needs the words, and I suppose that would be something good for promotion, make them smaller. If the "LOGO" part of the logo grabs the eye, people will pay attention to the company name. What if you got the clients to sit down and look at some of the logo sites, and have them point out ones they like? They may be awful in your and most designer's opinions, but they are paying the bills. Just don't put the work in your portfolio.

Visited your site. Many good works. You may not be working by commission, but you are certainly a gifted amateur. You have a clear talent, and the pictures do justice to the beauty of the plants. As far as selling goes, it will depend a lot on where you are, or if you can manage to ship items which are purchased on the web. Art sales galleries in the city I live in are almost non-existent. Those that appear sometimes are only in business a few months. There are a few groups of artists who share studio space, and once or twice a year they will mount exhibitions. There are art fair, but few artists make much if any money participating. Bigger cities tend to have more galleries, but the competition for space is still intense. Typically a gallery might host 30 shows a year, but have 500 applications for representation. There are also art fairs, but typically the booth rentals are high enough that if you can't sell $1000/day, you won't break even. Cities that get lots of tourist travel tend to have good sales opportunities, particularly if there are seasonal peaks in visits. I've spoken w. several people who have made more money selling thru websites. The down side is that they have to be able to ship works quickly and cheaply. That limits what they can offer.

Thank you for being so generous sharing your techniques.

Yes, that was the portion of the study files I looked at earlier. Upon thinking it thru a bit farther, I'm inclined to think the hole curves were not added, but either subtracted or combined with the larger leaf shape. Notice the red node dots. That is an indicator of a closed outline. Or, I suppose in this case, and in-line. Attached is a screen cap of the area with a number of nodes selected so you can see the control handles.

Having not used PS much for years, and then not much for brush work, I have to guess some about your problems. AD vector brushes are very different from pixel brushes. The textured ones are made from pixel samples that a painted along the vector path. There are several members who have made their own, and I recall a few youtube tutes about the process. I've made a few not very good ones. So, you can have other vector brushes, not just those supplied w. the program. I've downloaded PS pixel sample brushes, and they work fine in the Pixel Persona. Not sure it they are the same as in PS, but they can be resized, either from the brush tool context bar, or dynamically. They can be erased, and reshaped, rotated etc. As far as I know, that's pretty much the same for PS, Pixel persona brushes are not by themselves attached to adjustable vectors. They can be placed within vector shapes, including those made w. the vector brush, and reshaped along w. the vector's boundary if so desired. Or the vector brush shape can be used as a mask within the pixel layer, and be reshaped to reveal various portions of the pixels, and apply transparency to them.

Graphics or other files can be added by selecting the "more reply options" button while making the post. Mr. Limoncelli's work is well known and admired on the forum. Its not surprising you find the economy and skill remarkable. That is something that comes with lots of practice. In general, when doing vector drawing, it is best to lay down as few nodes as possible. For example, a circle can be made w. just 3 nodes forming an equilateral triangle, and then turned to a circle by carefully adjusting the nodes' control handles. It is easier to use 4 nodes, and most times that is more convenient. But if the illustration becomes quite large, thousands of nodes, a bit of economy can be desirable. The leaf holes appear to have been made by drawing separate "hole" curves over the leaf mass, and then added to the leaf curves, and given the same grey color as the underlying layer. Here's a small exercise you might want to try. Use the pen or pencil tool, and draw some simple shape, say the outline of a bird, or a tree. Don't bother much w. accuracy. Make as many nodes as you like. When the outline is almost complete, with the last node close to the 1st. switch to the node tool, and click on the close curve widget in the tool context bar. Now there is a closed shape. The nodes can be moved around to get a better approximation of the desired shape. If certain details can't be made, add a few nodes. There may be long portions of line where there are extra nodes that can be removed because the control handles for the outlying nodes are sufficient lo bring the line back to the curve it should have. Study the way the various layers are stacked in the tutorial files. The standard is that the bottom is covered by any of the next layer above it that overlaps. And so on.

If you just want to check on what is pure black or white, use the levels adjustment, set to grays, and move the sliders so that black or white are just 1% apart at either end.

AP will do edge detection, but it does not create a vector. There are quite a few implementations of a PD software call potrace. I'm on a Mac, and currently use an app called Image Vectorizer which is a graphic front end which uses potrace, AFAIK. Cost $5. Quick, with quite a few parameter modifiers for both the bitmap and the vector out put. Inkscape also uses potrace as the bas for its tracing routines. It has to run under X-11 emulation on the Mac, which makes using it slower. It will do multiple grey level outlines at once. My experience over the past few months is that the program hung when I tred to do a trace. Pob'ly user error that I haven't cleared up yet.

I've been reading the .svg specs. It is possible to read the file in a text editor. I'm not clear enough w. the .svg terms, and I'm not nearly handy enough w. my text editor, but attached is a proof of concept. slice1d.afdesign Essentially did a find and replace. I'd moved a couple of nodes around in an earlier iteration. At least w. an .svg that has simple sytax, I'm pretty sure the breaking into separate segments should be 1 or 2 commands.

Yes, a tracing app is what you would want. AD doesn't have one of those at this point. There are several PD or very inexpensive apps just for that kind of work. I've done a lot of such work over the years, and will say that something as complex as the Burt's logo will take a ton of work even w. a good trace. Typically, it takes me several attempts w. the tracer to get close to accurate lines. Still, there may then be many hundreds of nodes to tweak or delete. On one file I working on right now, I'm just manually drawing in new lines, because the base image was just too blurry to get any good results in places.

As MEB noted, open paths are closed when the divide boolean is used. The same is true of the other booleans. Designer appears to have a default definition of a shape as being an area with its periphery as defined by a closed line. If you want to manipulate lines that do not enclose any area so they are either broken, or joined, use the node tool, and break or close curve.

Why not just use the pen tool in polygon mode, and w. shift held down to constrain the lines to horizontal, and vertical (or diagonal) directions? That way you can set up the shape w/o resorting to subtracting, breaking, etc. If you need more precision, set up a grid and turn on snapping.

Some perplexing stuff in the file. In the layer 5 object, add the 2 darker green shapes together. You will see that there are nodes that were made by the slight bug in the boolean. If the extra points that were at the center of the added objects are deleted, the thin ghost line goes away. But there are still transparency problems. I notice there are color swatches that are set to be partially transparent. Something I've never done. Don't know how that might affect the file. The stem and leaf items have me really puzzled. Everything seems to be set at 100 opaque. I messed around with the grouping, and the layer stacking w/o any results. I changed the items from pass-thru blend to normal.Eventually, I tried setting the stroke for the stem to none, and then bringing it back, and the stem became opaque as expected. Or, if I moved the objects and grouped objects outside the layer, and deleted the layer, they became opaque. Might be a bug. As mentioned above, transparency should let objects lower in the stack show thru. If you don't want that, but want a fainter color, change the color of the object.

Nice work,and without a "I want skratz my earz off sound trak."

If there is a grid w snapping, the guides will snap to the grid positions. But then the grid and grid snapping can be turned off, leaving only the guides for snapping. This can make some line manipulation and object positioning a little less fussy.

Pretty good. Well written. Point out things that are similar across several applications. I'd add a few statements like "Moving objects to the front or back of the layer structure is common among many vector illustration tools." Or, "Under the View menu are the usual command for zooming in or out." For people coming to AD from other apps, it will help them more quickly orient. But then mention the "View menu also allows access to control panels for grids, guildelines, etc." Mention some of studio panels, and that not all of them are turned on by default. I see that you mention the corner tool. I'd expand on that by mentioning that there are 4 different kinds of corner modifications, and that they are not just for the extensive built in shapes, but for any shape w. lines joining at an angle. I'd also mention that when starting a new project/document, the document layout panel gives option to aid various kinds of projects, such as for mobile devices, web pages, print, etc.

Try this. Select the expanded text, and use the boolean divide on it. All the little bits will become their own layers. In the layer panel, It should be pretty easy to select them, and delete large quantities quickly. Then, try combining what is left. I think you will get the outlines, as well as the holes in the letters.

Both AP and AD have a "pixel brush" that only paints squares w. no aliasing, so everything comes out nice and jaggy. Between that, and using the color swatches, its right back to 8-bit capabilities.

I will differ. Sudo gives one access to a lot, and you have to be admin status to use it. Tread w. care if you use it. I never knew about the system level stuff. Guys I worked with could. But it was way beyond what I needed to do. Boot into single user mode, and reconfig files, geez. They would ask me before "what's your back-up status?"

What permissions do the accounts have for the files you are trying to open or execute? I have no idea what damage was done before you got the "back up files" message, but that can be a a bad sign, or a really ba-a-a-d sign. Read, file system corruption or worse, random hardware failure. I have to suppose that your original account, which would likely have had admin permissions setting was damaged. The Mac OS will revert to the last stable config when there is a large failure and changes made after that are lost. I've maintained machines that rebooted as if the last 3 weeks haven't happened. Permissions to write to Affinity files, or even read ones you made could be gone. If you click on an icon, either an app or a data file, and use"get info," you will be able to see what rights you have. A machine and software owner should have read, write and execute permissions on everything. If not, using admin account password, reset the rights to what is needed.

In Designer, vector shapes are defined as possibly having a fill and stroke. This is pretty standard. If you look at the structure of publicly defined vector formats such as .svg and .eps, you would see that objects are described by a set of points, with certain rules applied on how they join. The stroke that would follow that line can be defined, as can the fill. Designer allows shapes to not be closed, but if a fill is specified, it will be created spanning the unclosed area. When there are several shapes that are made only from unclosed lines, if they are subject to any of the boolean operations, the program automatically closes them. So if you want just strokes, the program has a command called expand stroke. Sometimes there will be very large number of new nodes defined, which in turn can cause other problems with later manipulations. So when making images w. vectors, don't think of it like traditional line drawing, where getting the position and proportion correct is standard practice. Think instead of painting w. a broad brush, where large strokes need to be laid on on another, and perhaps refined w. a smaller brush later.

The problem for me was not just the diagonal line. In the file, the diagonal line is part of a a shape that is part of at least 2 unclosed shapes that were laid one on another. I could get rid of the diagonal, but then there was an incomplete shape that included what appeared to be a closed shape at the bottom. And the outline exends up to one of the rear view mirrors. When I did a divide, I got yet another diagonal. I supposed that the curve was originally composed of several lines that had end nodes snapped to ones already existing. It was a major fuss, but I was eventually able to break them apart. I had to isolate 2 different point lines that were on top of each. Then I could make a discrete shape at the bottom of the body silhouette, and complete the upper shape to 1 closed curve.

OK, Just d-loaded the file. OK, there is something I'm not understanding. The shape w. the diagonal appear to be made from 3 shapes, of which at least 1 was not closed. Affinity can't do geometric operations when there are unclosed shapes w/o repeatedly trying to close them. After a few tries, I'm not seeing how to break them up. I'm going to go and have some dinner. I'll look at it again after some refreshment.

Please do show the next round. Seems like the clients are a stage rigging company. How will the clients use the logo? Stationery banner? And/or bumper stickers. And/or labels to fix to their equipment? I'd be concerned that trying to illustrate all the services would end up w. something to complex for a logo.

If you were to go w. my suggestion of changing the direction of the gradient, you might continue w. a linear gradient, but add some stops to produce a darker band along one side of the length of the fuselage.