Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghillustration

Layers Magazine has a hefty selection of videos showcasing the new tools and features of all the Adobe Creative Suite CS4. Each video is a short demo/tutorial,walkthough/how-to of all the new stuff you can expect in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and the rest of the software in CS4.

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Although technically these tips apply to any graphics software, this particular tutorial over at Spoon Graphics focuses on the exact steps to set up bleeds for print design in your document within Adobe Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop. The method to do so in other graphics application might be slightly different, but these walkthroughs should give you enough info to apply it to non-Adobe software.

Continue reading 'Setting Up Bleeds For Print Design In Creative Suite'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

I recently completed a concert poster design featuring a fez-wearing cartoon genie mascot character for Nashville, Tennessee roots-rock jam band Vinyl Soup.

I have been working with guitarist Andrew Hooker for some time now with t-shirt designs, a logo redesign, concert posters and other promotional materials for the band.

Recent gig poster design work for Vinyl Soup had started to go down a path of design-only work. Andrew initially contacted me for a t-shirt design for the band, and his initial interest was in my cartooning/illustration work.

Starting out on concepts for this poster, I was again working on a solely design-oriented approach, and before I got too far along I dropped Andrew an email to see if going back to an illustrative style would be cool with him. It most certainly was, so I set about to work up a theme for the poster.

Continue reading 'Cartoon Genie Concert Poster'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

SneakPeek Pro is a QuickLook plugin fro Mac OS X 10.5 (”Leopard”). In a nutshell, it extends file previews in both QuickLook and the Finder to previously unsupported file types such as Adobe Illustrator .ai files and EPS files.

If you aren’t familiar with QuickLook, it’s a pretty awesome new feature of 10.5 which allows you to quickly preview a good number of core file types — PDF, JPG, PSD, Word docs, movies, text files and more — without actually opening an application. One just needs to tap the spacebar with a file highlighted in the Finder, and a floating bezel-type window opens up with the full image, document or movie. Even works with multi-page documents as well. It’s just plain awesome.

Continue reading 'Illustrator File Previews: SneakPeek Pro QuickLook Plugin For Mac OS X'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

A while back I was ranting about the myriad issues I had been reading about concerning Adobe InDesign CS3 and Apple’s (then) new operating system Mac OSX 10.5 “Leopard”. I am happy to report that upon upgrading to 10.5, and using InDesign CS3, everything has been working (for the most part) just great.

Continue reading 'InDesign CS3 & Mac OSX 10.5 “Leopard”: The Good, The Bad & The Not-Too-Shabby'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Handy list of all ‘Hidden Characters’ used in InDesign text blocks: http://twurl.nl/sl7py8

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Adobe just released an incremental update to InDesign CS3 (5.02), and it’s so new it seems to not be in the auto-update as of yet. Per the Read Me file:

 This update fixes known issues with Anchored Objects, Character Alignment, Step and Repeat, Indexing and Table of Contents, Text and Fonts, Dictionaries, Color, Scripting, Graphics Import/Export, InDesign Interchange files (INX), XML, Library files, and Printing, as well as other miscellaneous issues. 

Continue reading 'Adobe InDesign CS3 5.02 Update Released – 10.5 Fixes On Apple’s Shoulders'

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.

Yikes, just read over at MacMerc.com that one of Adobe’s guys posted a blog entry recently regarding some serious issues with InDesign, basically in all the dialog boxes. That means crashes for Save, Place, Open — doesn’t sound like something I would want to deal with. They did say this seems to be primarily with PowerPC based Macs, but that affects those of us still on a G4. These new InDesign bugs Adobe says they need Apple’s help to squash.

Continue reading 'Serious Issues With InDesign CS3 & Mac OSX 10.5'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

It’s been about a few months since I upgraded to Adobe’s Creative Suite CS3 suite of graphic & design applications, and am running them all on a PowerMac G4 (dual 1.25 processors, 2 Gb RAM). I thought I would share my experiences with anyone out there contemplating upgrading to CS3 with an older Macintosh. I also have one of the original MacBooks, so there’s a decent comparison with CS3 running on an Intel processor Mac.

In short, I would recommend waiting to upgrade your Mac to at least a G5 or an Intel based Mac before going to CS3, but that said it’s still usable.

Continue reading 'CS3 + G4: Using Adobe Creative Suite CS3 on a PowerMac G4'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.