Best of the Web – September

Sep 30th in Web Roundups by Grant Friedman

The month of September was an exciting month for the design community. In addition to the announcement of Adobe CS4, a lot of great content and resources were featured across the web. This article features some of the best vector content and resources this month, as well as loads information and videos about Adobe Illustrator CS4.

Author: Grant Friedman

Grant Friedman is the creative mind behind Colorburned Studios, a freelance graphic and web design firm. Grant got his start as a designer in 1999 when he began drafting electronic newsletters for organizations he was involved with. Over the years he has worked for a number of businesses, organizations, and individuals. His primary design tools are Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Fireworks, and InDesign.

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  Veerle Reveals a Phantasmic Secret

  Veerle shows off Phantasm CS a wonderful Illustrator plugin that allows you to create dotted patterns and recolor your artwork without using Illustrator’s Live Color feature. She also demonstrates how the plugin can be used for halftone pattern creation.

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  14 Free Scatter Brushes & How-to

  To demonstrate the power of Illustrator’s Scatter Brush, Adam from Go Media delivers a set of 14 free brushes, shows us how to use them and then shows us how to create our own. He covers each setting option when creating a Scatter Brush and gives some best practices tips to get started.

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  Fireworks 101

  Our friends at Abduzeedo show us the basics of Adobe Fireworks and then how to design a “kewl” logo. This tutorial reveals the fundamental abilities and how to use the Combine Path object in Fireworks. The tools have some similar functionality to Illustrator's Pathfinder palette. If your new to Fireworks, then this is a useful beginner tutorial.

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  Create a Wire Fence

  Learn how to create a wire fence from scratch using the Line tool in Illustrator. Get crazy with the not often used Zig Zag tool. Combine these unique shapes into an interesting pattern that looks like a wire fence.

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  Design a Sleek Pencil Icon

  Eli from DesignBlurb walks us through a tutorial on how to design this sleek pencil icon. This tutorial offers detailed instructions, plenty of screenshots, and a free source download. The use of layers, colors, and gradient placement basics is explained well.

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  Experimental Text Effects

  Digital Arts shows us how to twist words out of recognition to create an unusual illustration. It's a simple technique that yields a creative and super colorful result. This is a fun tutorial that you have to check out this month.

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(FREE!) Download Picks

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  Free Illustrated Vector Sneaker Graphics

  Chris from Spoon Graphics kicks it through the uprights with a free set of Illustrated sneaker graphics. The sneakers have a rough hand-drawn appearance that have a cool feel when mixed with your personal illustrative work. Go ahead and download them to get mixing.

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  4 Sets of Nature Vectors

  Qvectors offers four sets of beautiful nature vectors by John from DragonArtz. This site is a great place to find listings of freebie vector resources. Now their making their offerings more appealing with artwork released exclusively through their site.

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  Icon Eden: 3 Sets of Free Icons

  Icon Eden delivers three sets of crisp, beautiful, and free icons available in EPS and PNG formats. These a super crisp and friendly icons that could be used in your Web 2.0 styles client web design work. This is a must download based on the professionalism of these icons. It's worth taking the time to download and reviewing how they were made.

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  106 Delicious Water Color Illustrator Brushes

  Colorburned Studios wows us with a huge collection of realistic-looking water color Illustrator brushes. Alright you've caught me, that's my blog and I made those brushes. I've been cranking out ton's of vector freebies over there lately. This is a big set and professional quality designs.

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  Logo Design With Apparel in Mind

  MyInkBlog shows us some tips and tricks for designing logos for clothing and apparel. The article gives some practical advice on the subject, such as limiting your color selection to keep maintain the project budget, as more colors equals a higher cost when screen printing.

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  6 Design Tips for Large Format Printing

  Designing images for large format printing presents us with some unique challenges. Creative Curio gives us 6 handy tips to smooth out this process. And of course some of the tips are vector specific, such as taking advantage of the scalability of vector graphics in both the creation process of the design and for final output.

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  10 Free and Extremely Useful Illustrator Scripts

  Ryan from Vectips lists 10 free Illustrator scripts. Some are extremely useful, such as a script to close paths of objects. Others are novelty and you can have fun creating interesting star designs from simple shapes, or connected meatball designs from multiple shapes.

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Adobe Illustrator CS4 Announcement Articles

There are quite a few Adobe Illustrator CS4 articles that analyze aspects of the new program. First off, here is the official announcement site for Adobe Illustrator CS4. We announced this released and summarized the new features in this post It’s Going to Be Brilliant: Adobe Illustrator CS4. Layers Magazine offers a comprehensive look into the new features in Adobe Creative Suite four with tons of video tutorials.

Go Media provides an in-depth look into Adobe Illustrator CS4 including videos and screenshots of the new version. Lynda.com offers an exclusive sneak peak to the features available in Adobe Illustrator CS4. While most of the videos here are only available to subscribers there are a couple videos available for free to the public. Also, visit the article Illustrator CS4: The Facts, which provides a detailed analysis of the new features available in Illustrator CS4.