Illustrator Workshop [2]

In this session with Simon he showed us some more advanced techniques that we could use in Abobe Illustrator and also talked about how you have to pay for fonts that are already on your computer if you want to use them commercially, which came as a shock. Anyway, the first tool he showed to us was the  width tool [shift+w], upon creating a line with the pen or pencil tool you can then use the width tool to increase it's size in any part your want, it's stroke rather and with that you can easily create dimension to your typefaces if you were tracing them out perhaps in illustrator. I also found it's quite a fun tool to use to illustrate with, roughly anyway.

As well as this he also showed us the different strokes you can apply to your letters such as the stroke and custom brushes. Also changing the type of tool creating the lines, angled for example. With the dashed line we were shown how to increment the dots, preset at 12pt. As well as this, the different caps and the corners which can be seen below and the effects of aligning the stroke along the paths drawn. 

Centre - Inside - Outside. [Alignment]

On top of that on how to manipulate existing letter forms using the create outlines option [ Shift + command + O ], this then turns your type into a vector shape you can adjust the anchor points off to manipulate how you want too. Examples below. On top of that then how to add anchors and add to a letter not just adjusting it's paths. Doing this we then added serifs, using rulers to be precise to a B and I in my own time do my little T here to just have a go with, onto a sans serif typeface.

Last of the tools shown was the blend tool, the specified steps and smooth colour, two very cool tools. With specified steps you can set however many steps it is to blend a square into a circle and vice versa, or just to create a stack of shapes all the same. It's really cool to play about with once you've transformed it as well as that. Now a tool I absolutely loved here Is the smooth colour, setting two different shapes as two colours then clicking their anchors makes them twist and turn into weird blob like forms which are also shaded from the colours they're transforming in from. The outputs from this look rather retro I have to say, almost like a lava lamp.