A good, informative post over at TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) comparing low-cost vector software applications for Mac OS X by indepedent developers. The review is specifically comparing tools and techniques available in Adobe Illustrator CS3.
The comparison covers four applications: DrawBerry, EazyDraw, Lineform, and VectorDesigner. I have demoed all of these at one point or another, and found each to have their stregths and weaknesses.
Continue reading 'Mac Vector App Showdown'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
After an engaging exchange on Twitter with illustrators: Garth Bruner and Von “Vonster” Glitschka, who are constantly Twittering about their frustrations with being forced to switch from Freehand to Illustrator after Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia, things reached the point where all involved thought that we need a way to band together and get some feature requests implemented in the next version of Adobe Illustrator.
Continue reading 'The Beziér Artist’s Liberation Front: Adobe Illustrator Feature Requests'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
James Demsey over at design blog The Creative Mac (formerly The Creative Guy) posted some additional issues with Adobe Creative Suite 3 and Mac OS X 10.5. Seems in addition to the Open/Save/Place issues I mentioned earlier, copying vector art from InDesign to Illustrator has issues, as does hiding InDesign.
Continue reading 'More CS3 Problems On Leopard'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
James Dempsey’s illustration & design software tips and tricks blog The Creative Guy has been retired, and rising from the digital ashes is The Graphic Mac. Looks like all the previous GC content has been migrated the TGM. James mentions that the big reason for the big change was to switch from WordPress to Drupal so he could implement more community features like message boards and the like.
Continue reading 'The Creative Guy Is Now The Graphic Mac'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
Although not yet even an actual product, the Alien Abduction UFO lamp is quite possibly the coolest lamp of all time, at least for geeks.
Artist Lasse Klein created the concept art for the UFO lamp with computer graphics software.
The artist mentions on her website/blog that the more people who sign up for the flying saucer lamp mailing list, the more likely she will be able to turn this into an actual product.
via Laughing Squid on Twitter
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
Just stumbled across these handy Mac OS X software applications to help designers and artists simulate the effects of color blindness on-screen: Sim Daltonism and Color Oracle.
Sim Daltonism works as a floating palette which converts an area under your mouse cursor to the selected type of color blindness — it works similar to the Apple Digital Color Meter sampling utility. There are 8 different types of color blindness to test. Color Oracle works as a menubar item which converts the entire monitor to the selected mode of color blindness, but only offers the three most common forms.
Continue reading 'Color Blindness Software Tools for Artists'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
A quick overview comparing the two new image editors Pixelmator and Acorn by designer John Whipple. I would have to agree with most of his points. The one thing I really, really like about Acorn is the handy resizing & cropping keyboard modifiers: hold Option and drag to resize, hold Control and drag to crop. It’s a very clever and very handy way to do things quickly. The zoom slider at the bottom of the window is nice as well. Oh, and the integrated screenshot tool.
Continue reading 'Pixelmator & Acorn: Quick Comparison Review'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
I stumbled across Design Float recently, can’t recall where. The title says it all: it’s a Digg.com type site for designers. For those of you not familiar with Digg (or Reddit), it’s a social news site, where content is submitted and then voted up or down by users. The idea is that only good content makes it to the top.
The site seems pretty new — you don’t see votes in the hundreds (or thousands) yet, as you do on Digg. I’ve already found a few cool resources on there, it’s definitely worth checking out.
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
A great quick tip, from the excellent design blog BittBox, to create a color group of all the colors in an Illustrator document: Select all the art in your document, go to the Swatches fly-out menu and choose “New color group” - you now have a color group folder of all the colors in the artwork. Very cool!
Since color groups are a CS3 feature, this tip is Illustrator CS3 only.
via BittBox
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
I just posted this SCUBA dive flag t-shirt design up on Zazzle. I was going through some of my archives and had forgotten about this one. I came up with this after taking a camping trip to the Florida Keys (the Bahia Honda Key in particular) a few years ago.
The campsites are right on the beach (with electricity even!), and it’s one of the few areas in the world where snorkeling can be done right from the shore. The entire group brought snorkeling gear “just in case”, but we all found ourselves instant snorkeling enthusiasts from day one. From the outside, it seems kinda boring. When you are actually doing it, it’s inexplicably awesome. Since the creative gears are always crankin’, I ended up working up some sketches for t-shirt ideas and when this one popped up, I knew I had a winner. And then I promptly filed it away and lost track of it for three years!
Continue reading 'SCUBA & Snorkeling Fins Dive Flag T-Shirt'SCUBA & Snorkeling Fins Dive Flag T-Shirt’
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
Social Stuff