Eugene Artsebasov from the TurboMilk Blog has made a nice tutorial on creating an icon.

There is earlier part to the tutorial about the drawing process and metaphors which you can have a look at here.

The part I liked was making the globe. Using the Map Art tool in 3D Revolve from Illustrator you can put an image of a globe onto an object and then just use Illustrator to do what you need to do from there. For the perspectively challenged (me) this is handy.

Adobe are putting on a CS3 Roadshow called Create + Assemble + Deliver. You can find some more information on the web site, Adobe CS3 Roadshow.

It’s going to be held at the Parmelia Hilton on Tuesday 11 September. 9:00 - 17:00.

This is the schedule for the event;

9.00-10.30am - CREATE
During the opening session our team of Adobe creative guru’s will show you how they tackle the design issue. Highlighting the features of the creative tools in CS3 such as Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects to answer the needs of the client brief. The Adobe Design team will create the look and feel for a new sporting brand across multiple design mediums including motion graphics.

1.00-12.30pm - ASSEMBLE
The client wants to take their new sporting brand out to their customer across multiple mediums. Using the new features of CS3 in Dreamweaver, InDesign, Acrobat and Premier what will the Adobe Design team do? Well rise to the challenge of course by producing a mix media campaign including print and web, with a smattering of video. Now the projects are all underway you will see them engage again with the client during the review process for final amends, making sure that the project is kept to deadline.

1.30-3.00pm - DELIVER
So the design and media have been approved, now it’s time to deliver the final results. Here under the weight of the looming deadline the Adobe Design gurus will show you how to deliver the job. Whether it is to DVD, Web, Print or even Mobile, the Adobe team will show you how CS3 has an answer for it all. You will see how Encore, Premier, Flash, Acrobat and Device Central can deliver the final product that YOUR customers will love.

3.30-5.00pm -TOP FEATURES COUNT DOWN & ASK THE EXPERTS
Quick fire round – this is where the Adobe team will show you what they love about the new products. This a quick glimpse at the features they love and they think you will love.
This is rounded of by your chance to ask them ‘how to’. An Adobe panel of experts will answer YOUR questions that you can submit during the day.

Was going to write about the new Qantas kangaroo but ate something funny and have been rather ill since then. Feeling up to being on the interwebs again though.

I think Rosemary made a good blog post about it though and Qantas didn’t do a great job of keeping it a secret anyway.

Not a great deal has changed with the logo, but when your logo is so iconic it’s hard to re-brand. The official press release from Qantas can be found on their web site newsroom.

Personally I think it is looking good, the feet maybe a little excessive but they say it’s to fit in with the tail of the new A380’s so who am I to question it.

If you are interested in checking out the company who made the new logo you can go to the Hulsbosch Communications web site. The Qantas info is on the first page at the moment, gives you a look at how the different planes will look and also how the print material looks. You’ll notice a few big names in their portfolio, and a few kangaroo logos. No wonder Qantas choose them!

JPB have a humorous post entitled 10 Steps for Boosting Creativity. Some of the 10 seem just jokes really but there are some gems in there too.

For example:

Brainstorm. If properly carried out, brainstorming can help you not only come up with sacks full of new ideas, but can help you decide which is best…

Then the more joke items on the list include:

Don’t do drugs. People on drugs think they are creative. To everyone else, they seem like people on drugs.

Although I guess they have a point.

Originally saw this on the Iconfactory Links, which took me to lifehack.org.

My monitor at work was in desperate need of a new wallpaper. So after playing around in Illustrator for a little while we have the following result.

Thought it would be a good idea to upload the wallpapers here and included some different colours. Those colours being blue, green, purple, silver, pink and red. The various zip files below have those colours, and the wallpapers themselves are in 800×600, 1024×768 and 1280×1024 sizes.

Leave some comments below if you would like different sizes or even colours and I’ll see what I can do.

Would like to do some more complex and interesting wallpapers later down the track. Depends on interest really.

• Blue Wallpaper
• Green Wallpaper
• Pink Wallpaper
• Purple Wallpaper
• Red Wallpaper
• Silver Wallpaper

Al recently asked me how to make a glossy header image, similar to what you would see in Vista. Figured that I would share this with everyone.

Step 1

Start off with a new Photoshop document (ctrl+n), I used dimensions of 480px - 150px. You can use whatever size you want, we are, for the most part here, using layer styles. This means you can resize your object at any time and with minimal changes you should have the same effects.

Step 2

Using the rounded rectangle tool with a radius of 15px, again the shape can be anything you want. This is just if you’re following along at home.

Step 3

Let’s start adding some layer effects. Firstly Gradient Overlay. Use the standard settings, but change the angle to 90 degrees. The following colours are what I used:

Step 4

Let’s add a stroke and an inner glow next. Firstly, the settings for the stroke

If you don’t have images on, I’ll just list the settings here:

• Size - 1px
• Position - Outside
• Blend Mode - Normal
• Opacity - 100%
• Colour - #000000.

Now the settings for the inner glow:

Again if your not using images, here are the settings:

• Opacity - 60%
• Colour - #FFFFFF
• Technique - Precise
• Choke - 0
• Size - 1.

This is what you should be seeing by now if your following along with me

Step 5

Last steps now. This will make our title bar sparkle. Add an Inner Shadow to your other Layer Effects.

The settings:

• Blend Mode - Overlay
• Colour - #C3C3C3
• Opacity - 45%
• Angle - 90
• Distance - 69
• Choke - 0
• Size - 0.

The Distance is the one you’ll have to change if your header isn’t the same height as mine.

Step 6

Last step now. This step is a little more manual then the others, also if you change the size of the graphics this one will have to be done again. So ctrl click on the shape layer we made first. This will outline the object.

Then using the Rectangle Marquee Tool, and holding down alt, drag the marquee tool up from the bottom of the object, so that you now only select half of the rounded rectangle. Here is an image to compensate my terrible explanation.

Now using the gradient tool, with white as the colour (#FFFFFF), with foreground to transparent selected as the gradient style, which for those who don’t know, looks like this:

Drag the gradient from the top of the selection, to the bottom.

That’s it folks. As I’ve mentioned using layer styles you get good control over everything, and can change it later. Apart from the last step. So you can apply this to as many objects as you want.

Final Product

Try playing around with the colours and effects. For a closer match to vista, add a blue colour into the gradient near the bottom.

• Download the PSD

How’s this for late posting?

As I’m sure we all know Saturday the 17^th of March was St Patrick’s Day.

At my workplace we decided to throw our own Irish inspired celebration, a day earlier on the 16^th, seeing as we don’t work on Saturday and all.

There were many activities planned, including best dressed competition, Pin the Shamrock on the Leprechaun, Lob the Leprechaun and Best Food.

My Irish inspired civvies were gathered after a late night target adventure, where I was lucky to find this shirt, for $6, bargain!. Do I look like an Irish rugby player?

Original Flickr Link - Photo by Adolfo

During the week my task, if I choose to accept it, oh dear, was to make some graphics for each of our games. So without further ado here are said graphics.

Lob the Leprechaun

Pin the Leprechaun

We had printed out some clovers to stick on the target. Didn’t actually see this one played as I was out buying more alcohol to fuel the festivities.

Kiss the Blarney

Best Food

There was no graphic for the best food competition, or best dressed. I did however manage to take away best food honours with this Irish inspired jelly number, with a touch of M&M’s in the centre.

This is a camera phone photo, no quality.

That about does it for my St Patrick’s Day post, given it is so freaking late an all. Other surprising things that happened on St Patrick’s Day though, were the fact their cricket team knocked out Pakistan from the World Cup. Who’d have thunk that would happen ?

No Leprechauns were hurt in the making, or celebrating of St Patrick’s Day.

Over the past couple of days I’ve been updating my design portfolio. There has been a lot of work done since leaving my previous company and starting Clever Starfish and I thought it was time to show some of it off.

Design wise the web site is still the same, there are just some new additions to the various sections. Hopefully over the next few weeks some more client work will be signed off an I can update a couple of the Starfishes other projects.

Here are the updates:

Icon

• Horizon
• Christmas Icons

Web

• Clever Starfish Web Site

Print

• Clever Starfish Logo
• Clever Icons Logo

There was a whole lot of hype around the Mac community and even more viral marketing techniques for Disco. If you are not familiar with Disco, have a read. In short it is a CD burning application for Mac that is cheaper then the likes of Toast, and chock full of visual candy.

I haven’t used Disco, and I don’t really use Toast either, burning CD’s is not something I do very often (which reminds me to start doing some back ups…). Anyway what really struck out at me was the application icon. The creator of the icon, Jasper Hauser, who I linked to in design inspiration, has been kind enough to give a run down on the icon, so if your interested - check it out.

What I found interesting in this post was the use of 3D for the disco ball, and also that most of the work on the flames looks to have been done inside Photoshop. For the upcoming Vista icons using 3D is something I really want to look into so that the realism that is needed can be achieved. At the moment Illustrator is all I have been using when designing icons, including the old XP icons, which Illustrator is great for but may not be enough with what I have seen in Vista. The problem with 3D is the steep learning curve, having to render everything before you get a true idea of what it looks like, and you can’t really resize on the fly like you can in Illustrator.
The same goes for Photoshop, you can achieve really nice effects in the program but depending on how they’ve been done resizing can be a real issue. I’ll have to play around with making some icons in 3D and see what I can come up with.