You know… it’s prob­a­bly a silly real­iza­tion… but I’ve always copy & pasted vec­tor shape from Illus­tra­tor to Pho­to­shop, never the other way around. Today, I had to con­vert a shape that I wanted to use from Pho­to­shop to Illus­tra­tor (CS4 by the way), I was so sick of trac­ing it. I mean what’s the worst thing could hap­pened if I pasted some­thing a vec­tor shape from Pho­to­shop to Illus­tra­tor, right? Get an error some­thing, but to my sur­prise, it gives me a dia­logue ask­ing me whether I want to con­vert it to an Com­pound Shape or Path…

…son of a… learn some­thing new every­day, don’t we now…? A lit­tle less deprived

I finally gath­ered my brain­cells and launched my new port­fo­lio: Designloper.com today:

I was try­ing to “brand” myself in a way, what’s bet­ter than a made-up word that describes per­fectly of what I do, right?  I love the lime green col­ors, but I thought it was get­ting too bor­ing with the light gray and white.

So I spiced things up this time with dark brown and hot pink.  I was lov­ing the fun col­ors as I was design­ing, it looked almost “hippy” which fits my per­son­al­i­ties – I never did drugs in my life, but I seem so… (more…)

Keep­ing a jour­nal is a great tool to learn and con­tin­u­ous improve­ments.  So, I need to start jog­ging down my thought process when doing things and hope­fully improve more in the future.

Before I came up with this theme, I was mess­ing with one of the Woo Themes called Irre­sistible.  In a mat­ter of fact, I was so zoned into mod­i­fy­ing that theme, that I was com­pletely stuck.  My boyfriend also told me that isn’t “me” that the theme was too dark and grungy.  He said I need some­thing “happy”.  Got a few ideas of “happy grunge” and things like that, but just couldn’t incor­po­rated the idea.  After a while, I just decided to scrap the entire thing and started off some­where else.

I started to work on the logo first, and I had a good idea what I want.  I really like the + signs embed­ded inside the logo that because that trans­late my idea of “learn­ing” – also inspired by video games such as The Sims.  When a Sim learns some­thing new, it gets a ++ sign over their heads as in gain­ing level.  After work­ing on the logo for a while and picked two col­ors I really like, Orange and Dark Gray – I took a break:

Then I ran­domly grabbed a photo book lying around on my desk – which was by Getty Images – titled Infin­ity.  Flipped a few pages, and there I had it:

Then I drew the lay­out on a piece of paper, along with the logo I already had to glue the ideas together.  I’ve always been a sucker for sim­ple designs, and flat col­ors.  So it is ended up as what it is right now.  A few peo­ple sug­gested, actu­ally 5 of 3 peo­ple sug­gested that it is bet­ter cen­tered.  Up till yes­ter­day, the lay­out was still left aligned.  So there, I’ve taken other people’s advice and made it cen­tered.  I am still fix­ing minor things here and there, but the site looks 90% the same across most major browsers – espe­cially IE6.  There are a few plu­g­ins seem to be bro­ken, because it is scream­ing when you open the site in IE – need to sort that out.  Even­tu­ally, I’ll have to fix up Socia­ble because it has a lot of invalid HTML/CSS, even though my theme is validated.

One last note, if you are using WP-Spamfree‘s con­tact form, the Sub­mit but­ton align­ment will prob­a­bly drove a lot of you crazy.  That because the author add a <label> before each <input> field excepted the Sub­mit but­ton.  If you dig inside the plu­gin and find the “con­tact form” and insert <label></label> before the sub­mit but­ton, you will able to adjust the align­ment a lot easier.

Quick object dupli­ca­tions in Illustrator:

This allow you to dupli­cate the same object with pre­cise dis­tance, fast and easy.

I ran into an inter­est­ing error this morn­ing when I tried to open an Illus­tra­tor file from home to work.  When I opened it up, I got this error:

If that hap­pens, use Task Man­ager to “End Task” for Illus­tra­tor – then hit the “Can­cel” but­ton on the error popup.  Did 2 min­utes of google, this arti­cle came up.  Even though it was for Flex, it seems to apply here.  (more…)

I was tak­ing pic­ture of my phone to prac­tice turn­ing it into an icon, then I acci­den­tally zoomed into my watch too close, and snapped the pic­ture.  It was a happy acci­dent.  I did a bit of color bal­ance and added some fil­ters, but hmmm… I’m lik­ing it!  Might use it for a near future project.

If you want to use it, you may down­load for per­sonal or com­mer­cial use. May not redis­trib­ute and or sell in any type of media with­out my per­mis­sion.  Just as long as I don’t rec­og­nize it, you’re good to go.

Did I say I can’t draw?  Well, I can’t.  Any­ways, this is my first attempt of “trac­ing” an icon off a photo I took.  No, I don’t mean using the Bitmap Trace in either Flash or Illus­tra­tor, I hand traced this using a com­bi­na­tion of tech­niques I know using the Pen Tool, Gra­di­ents, and Gauss­ian Blur.  I’m hav­ing a hard time with Gra­di­ent Mesh, I’m going to try my hands on them again later.  Below are: 256×256, 96×96, and 48×48 PNG.  You may down­load the fol­low­ing PNG for per­sonal use only.  Feed­back are appre­ci­ated. (more…)