What are /r/AdobeIllustrator's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

The only thing that doesn't mesh well with me, and would have felt more fun was if you had used a more rounded typeface to compliment the rounded illustrations.

This one comes to mind. https://typekit.com/fonts/houschka-rounded

If you have photoshop, you can use a brush to create this effect as well. Illustrator has that too.

Here’s a link to purchase some.

https://creativemarket.com/Side-Project/990208-AI-grain-and-texture-brushes

Hopefully that can help you.

Answer A: Typically as a packaging designer, you hire guys like this to do that key art for you because it's not just something the average person is going to easily pick up.

Source: am a packaging designer.

Answer B: you take drawing classes or watch courses online and practice a lot until you can draw that well. Then you likely do the base sketchy by hand and either ink that and digitize it or your ink it with a Wacom tablet.

There is an extension for Illustrator/Photoshop called Fontself Maker. https://www.fontself.com/

Or you can use free trial apps if you're only making one font. Here's a helpful tutorial https://www.hellobrio.com/blog/font-tutorial

You can export as SVG, then use the icomoon app to manually bundle them, then download that bundle. I made an open source panel specifically for this with screencasts of batches, but it's still in dev context and not available in a production build like .zxp. You can use it if you place this repo inside of .../appData/Roaming/Adobe/CEP/extensions.

A few caveats of icomoon -- can't have strokes, all appearances must be expanded. The panel above skips that by duplicating and expanding, hiding the original and saving the duplicate then deleting the dupe. You also need to understand how to import a font through CSS with @font-face, though they do all this for you it won't be much help if you don't understand how to use it. Also results are best when you add a manual viewBox, like an empty rectangle to keep proportions, and when you export isolated glyphs. Can't have multi-color and compound paths (depending on complexity) sometimes will not work, otherwise it's easy and free.

Sweet! also something to help you with color if you want AdobeCC Wheel

I use this a lot when trying to figure out how to make colors work well with each other.

Also for the top of your trees. you should use the direct selection tool (keyboard shortcut A) the points and Convert -> "selected anchor points to corner". This will get rid of the little twirl at the top.

https://pixabay.com/en/deer-night-moon-shadow-3165176/

This is the original. I’ve seen it around for a while. It’s nice that you’re getting used to illustrator but you need to make sure that you don’t take credit for someone else’s work.

The .ai and the .pdf files can be opened and edited with a free software called Inkscape. I believe this is your best alternative.

After downloading and installing, run it and open the .ai file. Select an object of which you want to change the color, and click on the color bar. It should be really simple, as this is probably the most basic thing you can do with it.

When you select the object, if it looks like you're selecting more items than the one you wanted, it is probably grouped with other objects. I have never used Inkscape, but I'm sure you'll find the ungroup option in the menus. Ungrouping them will not change the appearance of anything, but if he does then just ctrl+Z out of it.

The website has tutorials for all different levels, and though I'm sure you can do what you need, it may also be a good idea to create a new document/file and try drawing shapes by yourself, just to test it, like you were playing with MS Paint :) good luck!

Probably the most complex piece I've attempted in Adobe Illustrator. Based off a superb work by Matt Carlson called, "Lookout" and featured at Dribbble.com here: <a href="https://dribbble.com/shots/2571898-Lookout" rel="noreferrer nofollow">dribbble.com/shots/2571898-Lookout</a>

This is my first attempt at employing "stipple brushes."

So, some friends told me I should get back into illustration, since it would both benefit me and it would be cool to make some logos and icons for our websites, since we work at a web dev agency.

So, hey, I'm studying vector art again! You can folllow my work at my art instagram or my Dribbble profile. I promise to post stuff often haha

No whats that brown spotty thing!? I have no idea what that is!

&#x200B;

There are far better ways to design things. https://dribbble.com/search?q=tongue Look there for inspiration!

&#x200B;

&#x200B;

It'd be nice if you atleast gave credit to the original artist, instead of blatantly copying their work and passing it off as your own.

Original art : https://dribbble.com/shots/4505485-Mario Original artist : https://www.zcool.com.cn/u/2497801

Images in the album are ordered chronologically starting with the first (Disney Movie Character) to the most recent (Sunglasses). It's been fun to try different techniques, although I've learned that 30 minutes is not long enough to do much experimenting, which is why I usually end up with the same style that I'm comfortable with. It's still a fun way to shake off the 3pm cobwebs and stretch your creative muscles.

If you'd like to join the fun and do your own version of any of the prompts, or just see what other people have done for them, one of us always posts on Dribbble and we all rebound the original shot. You can find all of them through my profile - https://dribbble.com/JeffChester

Can you create a new file with something random and save it as eps? No? I would reinstall Illustrator. Yes? something's wrong with your file. I would install Inkscape and open the AI and save as EPS and see if that works. Or if you want i could PM you my mailadress, if you send me the file i can try what it does here.

Getting the pixel effect in Illustrator, while labor intensive, is lots of fun. You can make a grid using black outlines, select it, and use the Live Paint tool (hotkey K) to color the squares.

When you're done, you can expand the illustration and get rid of the outlines by using the magic wand and your backspace key. I used this technique to make these sprites for an animation. Good luck and have fun!

Edit: Creating typography like in your image can be achieved by typing or illustrating it, then putting it on a locked layer and 'tracing' it using the method described above.

Aside from whatever you did or did not do, I think you could've made it look way better and personalized then what you have now. If you made all those paths one by one which I would find an accomplishment on its own because that takes a shitton of time, even though you said you didn't want to put too much time into it(?) it certainly wasn't worth the effort of just using some filters/image trace/whatever and ta-da... for example if you were going to vectorize it anyways why not make it nice like this for example: https://dribbble.com/shots/2893327-I-Really-Need-a-Cafe .

How many hours did you put into this?

Hey guys,

I dm'd kermit for some help with a technique I was trying to duplicate, and while I figured it out he was nice enough to create a tutorial laying it out step by step. This guy is the bees knees. Hope you guys enjoy it as much as I did, make sure to send /u/Kermitdude some internet high-5s.

As is proper, here is the link to the artist's original. Give him some love for a great lettermark.

Really good solid start!

I would defiantly play with the line weight on the face. maybe have it thinning out near the edges being bolder in the center.

Also, I feel like the text placement could be improved. I like how favorite is placed but it leaves "human" feeling a bit to center? dunno that could be personal opionon

As for colors, I feel like if your marketing to kids you could make them more "kid friendly" pallet? Definitely, want something that will grab your attention from afar. AdobeCC Triad Colors

find a sugar daddy/mommy

use whatever talents you have to come up with $20/month to pay for the subscription to just illustrator, or $50/mo for a whole creative cloud subscription

take a class and get the student rate

get affinity designer (US$40) or inkscape (free) instead

When pasting into PS, paste it as a shape, then zoom in and try to get them on the exact pixel grid manually. Slightly move some anchor points to align them to the pixel grid as well. It's called pixel hinting.

The technique is used here: https://teamtreehouse.com/library/how-to-achieve-pixel-hinting-perfection-in-photoshop

https://www.amazon.com/Acantha-Century-Modern-Contour-Footstool/dp/B01M4R0KER/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&amp;keywords=Knight+Home+Hariata&amp;qid=1605302985&amp;sr=8-2

I almost forgot! This a great reference for the math to do isometric perspective. And you can download pre-made actions here.

A few more examples from Joe White on Dribbble:

Earth

Letterpress Calender

I love the way these look, but I've always been a bit mystified by how professionals create them and the construction/method involved. I've looked all over for tutorials and there's nothing on sites like SkillShare for anything in depth on halftones that aren't grungy textures or dots, are there any sites, tutorials, or books about this style that any one would recommend?

I can recreate them pretty decently but I'm not intuiting the rules for spacing or the aesthetics, and I usually create a path then blend, separate all paths, and cut them to get what I want. Are there easier or better ways that any one knows of, or any other resources?

If you'd like to see some more of my illustration and design work, feel free to head on over to either my website or my dribbble. Thanks!

Yeah or maybe you mean a tool that creates straight lines in a pattern. You could look into the blend tool, maybe even in combination with clipping masks.

Example of blend tool with lines: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/blend-design-illustrator-animal-4878103/ randomly taken off google images, its not my work, but I expect it to be made with this tool.

What I usually do and what I'd suggest you to do is to go to this site : https://www.openstreetmap.org and find your location and scale the map the size you want, then click on share and download SVG format of the map which is vector base, then open the .svg file with illustrator and erase unwanted parts of the map and extract the island you want to your main document, there you have very accurate and well-trimed vector of you islands that you can edit in any way you want.

You can also get some of his Ps & Ai mockups on creative market.

I totally don't work for him, I swear, I just like his stuff.

https://creativemarket.com/search?q=Dreadlabs

paletton.com and color.adobe.com both have basic color wheel palette generators that should help you out.

In paletton enter your base color where it says "Base RBG" in the bottom left. In adobe enter your base color in the middle swatch.

It's looking great, good job!

It must be a fun project to create a whole collection of memorable cameras, you should definitely try it out :)

Here is some inspiration if you ever want to try your hand at animating.

That technique I learned from an illustrator named Ben Stafford. He uses it alot in his work, here is an example: https://dribbble.com/shots/2361852-Tin-Can-Conversations. It's a really cool way of creating unique textures without leaving illustrator. Basically, its setting a grayscale gradient, mezzotinting it, rasterizing it, then live tracing it. That is a super parred down version of the process and there are alot of variables and directions you could go with it.

Few days ago I found that neon style gif, and wanted to try something smiliar. That's what I made. I know it's a little messed up, but I'm just a beginner, and tried to made something not ultra minimalistic but still simple, hope you like it

Maybe your not interested in this but to avoid ever having to deal with this, I would just manually download and install fonts from websites such as FontSpace.com or dafont.com. I never use TypeKit or any similar applications.

You can't. That's a one-way street.

If you need assistance figuring out the font, best shot is to ask the original designer. Second option is to use a font identifying service, like whatthefont or the SquirrelFont Matcherator.

Note that while there are probably millions of fonts available, these services only cover a few hundred thousand of them at best, so you might get lucky, you might not.

Third option is to post a screenshot of the text in question and see if someone on here can identify.

Good luck!

-[odmg]

There arnt really colors that are better than any other. Each has specific uses. Id say you should first learn about the color wheel this link has alot of great information.

If I want to make my own color scheme I will usually pick two colors and fill in two boxes with said colors. I then go to Object>Blend>Make blend ( make sure specific step is on and not smooth color, can be checked in blend option menu) this will give you colors that have similar values to the two you have chosen.

If I am feeling particularly lazy or simply want a quick color scheme there are tons of website online that can help. I find that color mind works the best.

Color is a pretty complex subject and entire classes can be taught about it, but just some simple online reading can help you understand it better.

I was thinking the same about the colors. Maybe you can look into complimentary colors and play around with the tint of the colors you decide on. Here's a helpful site I reference to you may consider:

Color Palette

Good luck!

There are a lot of color tools to help with color palettes out there. Lynda.com has some resources to help with thinking about and using various color palette tools (this is also one of my weaknesses).

https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/ is one, formerly Kuler but there are many others. There are some plugins too that can help with this. I forget the popular ones but they are often paid ones.

Just use the eyedropper. Shift-clicking with it will pick up the color from the bitmap.

You could also try uploading an image to Adobe Color CC (formerly 'Kuler') and bringing the resulting palette into AI; I dunno the ins and outs of doing that.

vegan food distributer concept product.
i was try get better at design brand and stuff, Midway dining is fictional company provided by https://goodbrief.io
the mockup is created by
href='https://www.freepik.com/psd/mockup'&gt;Mockup psd created by jcomp - www.freepik.com&amp;lt;/a>

Looks pretty good!

A couple pieces of constructive criticism (these are strictly my opinion - I am not a professional graphic designer):

• The skeleton looks a little cross-eyed - It may help to make the pupils bigger or move them around a bit to see what helps
• You've added depth to the skull with shadowing, but the dark parts of the skull (eye sockets, nostrils, and mouth/inside jaw area) could use one more layer of depth to make it a little more unified - I would add a darker shadow inside them each
• I agree with /u/shenanigansokeefe about the shield - even if it isn't intended to be a shield it may be interesting to try giving it a little depth as well. I'm thinking something like just splitting it down the middle and making the right side lighter like this kind of thing. It may work, it may not!

Anyways, nice job for a first logo!

No. That's the simple answer. Any other answer would get me banned from the forum. And rightly so.

You might check out Affinity Designer. It's a one time payment. The way it should be. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/

It's a great program. They are always making improvements. Check out some instructional youtube videos if you're curious about it.

I don't know if it has .dxf output.

Here's the .AI file I've been using to illustrate... Have a look and hopefully will help you get a handle on what's going on here.

https://www.filemail.com/d/tqnznmzonpfmskb

blackwolf, use whatever screen recorder you already have + Pyhook ^^link.

Pyhook is a free key-press display, with plenty of configuration options. This is what I've used in the past; hope this is of value.

Rather than the .ai format the .eps format is far more widely used since .eps files can be opened by most every vector graphics (and most 3d modeling) programs.

Bing does a good job of image search like this:

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=car+.eps&amp;FORM=HDRSC2

searching for vector or svg also works but eps is most common. GL

This poster is modeled heavily after a piece by the artist Brian Edward Miller over at the Orlin Culture Shop.

He has his art posted at dribbble: <a href="https://dribbble.com/shots/6220354-Geneseo-Magazine" rel="noreferrer nofollow">dribbble.com/shots/6220354-Geneseo-Magazine</a>

and here: <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BvRVhDqBcMk/" rel="noreferrer nofollow">www.instagram.com/p/BvRVhDqBcMk/&amp;lt;/a>

My replica took about four hours to produce in Adobe Illustrator.

If you want a free option, go get OpenBroadcasterSoftware - https://obsproject.com/. It takes a bit of setting up, but works really well, and it's completely free. Once you've got your video recorded, you can easily upload it to Youtube.

PM me if you need assistance - I'd like to see your process, as well!

P.S. It looks like one of those scratch art pictures

https://www.amazon.de/Scratch-Picture-Children-Paper-Rainbow-Coloured/dp/B07MW46NM1/ref=mp_s_a_1_4?crid=2U52I7K2V59SP&amp;keywords=kratzbild&amp;qid=1669163065&amp;sprefix=scratch+picture%2Caps%2C137&amp;sr=8-4

My choice would be: 1. 50 Best Logos Ever 2. The Anatomy of Design - Mirko Ilić 3. In Progress - Jessica Hische

...and the rest is here!

I am not sure what the tutorial’s techniques are. Anyways, the easiest way to achieve this and still have accessibility to text options (keening, leading, etc). Is by having the spiral as a path with no stoke or shape added. Then use the Type on a Path Tool by click on where you want the type to start (center). Then adjust its slides. Also use downsize your font (it is gigantic) and turn on the all caps option or just right in all cups to achieve the same look. Once you get the same result of the tutorial and build that confidence then start experimenting with different sizes. If you’re confused on how to use the tool that I mentioned just google a YT tutorial, it needs a little bit of fiddling around to get used to. Good luck mate!

I tend to forget to come back to saved videos, or just don't know what I don't know, so Adobe's Classroom in a Book series has been helpful reference material.

Very interesting! The closest thing to a working vector mobile app that I have tried is this one and it certainly isn't a walk in the park. Would be happy to see if your app could outgrow it.

I get that the app is nowhere near complete, but I'd love to see layers, blending modes, stroke positioning, alignment, and pen tool be implemented as it develops. If you want to stick out from other vector mobile apps, I suggest having the option to precisely input coordinates and values for sizing for when imprecise finger dragging just won't cut it!

I'll definitely be following this development closely!

Feature requests and bug reports will be very much appreciated! You can do so in r/vector_editor

Try it out here: Android / iOS

Thank you very much!

Ah ok. Yeah I have similar problems too. I do graphic design for signage. The accuracy in Illustrator isn’t the best for technical drawings unfortunately. I have to be careful when scaling something like large dimensional channel letters on the side of a building up and down. Because the small amount not being calculated in the scaling can really throw the size off. Glad you were able to get it a little better.

Are you creating these drawings to make an actual font, or just for Illustration? If you are creating and actual font, you might check out Glyphs or Glyphs Mini. I never created a font with it yet, but I’d like to some day. I mostly use Mini for converting PostScript to OTF. https://glyphsapp.com/buy

So they created outlines for all of the text there. You can delete the text but keep the graphics being them. Best place for comic fonts, some are paid, some are free

https://blambot.com/

If you need a good place for free fonts in general try

https://fonts.google.com/

https://dribbble.com/shots/5333951-Insurance-company-Isometric-Illustration
One of the illustration for Acrosure, the insurance gateway company.
I want to make it look like some kind of insurance company that have little tech feeling.

https://dribbble.com/shots/5326452-Api-data-gateway-isometric-illustration
The illustration for Acrosure, the insurance gateway company.

I want to make it look like some kind of data gateway, but from many feedbacks seems like it's does not look like gateway.

I think I have to re design this thing again.

Feels free to harsh critique.

In an unrelated note, I see you're using DUIK? - did you try battle axe overlord yet? I'm torn between using that- and my CC Library to throw vectors at AFX :)

EDIT: like my fishbowl here :)

In case anybody is wondering, it was all done in Adobe Illustrator. I had a picture of the Bose A20 in another tab to model after, but it's not too similar. I also just googled some aviators to model after.This guy was pretty inspirational to me, I ran with his aesthetic of having one simple focus item surrounded by a few fine details. Let me know how I did, and what I can do better!

It might help to enlarge your art some. Illustrator isn’t super accurate like a CAD app would be. So if your drawing is in the small scale, it can help to temporarily enlarge it.

If you do need super high accuracy, you could try FreeCAD. It can export to a lot of different formats. https://www.freecadweb.org

http://www.filedropper.com/buggy

Move the symbols around and try to undo. You shouldn't be able to.

Open your RAM monitor and see how the RAM just keeps going up.

This is on Win 10, newest Illustrator, both AMD and NVidia.

I second this, I have a G602 and use AutoHotKey to map on all additional buttons, lets me draw way faster and organically (bottom left for mouse visualizer). I don't like how most of AI's shortcuts are phonetic -- the Pen tool is 'P' because the word starts with that letter, but having to take my hand off the mouse, look at my keyboard, hit the key, look back at the screen and put my hand back on the mouse is a whole cycle. Custom mapping takes care of all that -- pen is the "forward" button on the mouse with no modifiers for me because I need my mouse to use the pen any way.

Walking would be really tedious if you had to watch your feet to move forward -- but that's how I feel most of the keyboard shortcuts for useful things (specifically anything right-handed or that you have to look to do) are.

So here is the issue, the line for some reason is not completing the shape and is instead going off into nowhere for some reason. The thing is, that line only appears that way at a certain zoom level. If I zoom out the line is curved to the end of the corner, if I zoom even further in it also is like that. However when I zoom in a certain amount this shows up. The direct selection tool is not doing anything for me other than select the image, and shift+c does nothing either.

Yep, you're probably right.

This also seems to work as a workaround, it's a bit tedious though:
Top: Normal gradient and duplicated gradient with blending mode set to saturation.
Bottom: Result when overlaying both.

All grays are neutral (same RGB).

Black with different opacity works but then it's hard to get the specific gray values (branding). Additionally it doesn't solve the issue when using multiple colors. E.g. gray with yellow and red creates green and blue.

How do I know if I create the gradient in HSV or CMYK?

You'll likely want a combination of programs. You can create your assets in Illustrator and then import them into After Effects or Animate.

It’s a vector illustration

This is quite nice and could be simplified in illustrator:

https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/young-wedding-couple_720519.htm#query=bride%20and%20groom%20illustration&amp;position=0&amp;from_view=search

Nice dribble work :) here's mine: https://dribbble.com/nimbling

I am surprised at that performance!

That said, I believe it's a hygiene thing in amount of open documents, fonts etc. no?

I make big documents, and just open anything I come across in a frenzy when I'm looking for stuff. Using all apps at once. I melt computers ;)

This reminds me a lot of Razvan Vezeteu's work and a few other artists I follow on Dribbble. That site's an amazing resource for this kind of aesthetic style: Razvan Vezeteu, Tony Babel, Justas Galaburda, Aleksander Savic, DeeKay, Petr Had, etc.

If you're interested in seeing the rest of the stuff I've been working on, check out my website or my dribbble. Thanks!

Feel free to check out my illustration and design work here, if you're interested!

And heck, why not check out my dribbble for more stuff. You'll like it, hopefully!

In Acrobat, there are a number of security options you can enable that prevent opening in Illustrator. There's nothing you can do straight out of Illustrator itself, though.

Also, they are trivially easy to crack. Numerous websites provide it as a service:

https://smallpdf.com/unlock-pdf

Thanks -- I actually have that rotate on my mouse, the back and forward buttons rotate 45 or -45 when I hold ctrl+shift. Are you on Windows? If so, you can take things to a completely new level if you assign things as actions then use AutoHotKey to remap the corresponding key onto your mouse. The syntax for AHK can be very simple, like this:

XButton1::Send, {F12} XButton2::Send ^+F12

The above is how you'd assign it to a mouse, assuming there's an action linked to F12 in your panel (the second means "Send control + shift + F12). Mouse buttons like forward/backward are XButton1 and XButton2, you can do mouseclicks (left or right) and mouse moves or the wheel click or scrolling, even use a gaming mouse with 11 buttons (like myself).

AutoHotKey (open source and free, Windows/PC only) is easy to learn even if you don't have programming experience and has a native function similar to spell-checking (which is really hostring replacement) that can be used for this, but it wouldn't show errors when made, it would auto-correct them as you type. The downside is that errors must be explicitly stated within the script or you have to use a common misspellings library (which you can easily update and add to yourself over time).

AHK can be used for way more than just this too, can't recommend it enough. It's changed the way I use Adobe programs completely.

I think it's a good start but find it highly troublesome to read. This font is a bad choice for a lot of text, even more if it's aligned like this because you can't read it. It took me a long time until I saw the last word was supposed to be "complicated".

But don't feel encouraged, that's part of the process :) read up on typo principles and tutorials and you're going to whoop it soon!

See this for example: https://creativemarket.com/blog/typography-rules

My suggestion would be something like this to match the realism of the rocket.

https://www.shutterstock.com/th/image-vector/space-rocket-launch-3d-polygon-vector-214031059

Two suggestions for color palettes.

1. https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel Wealth of choices.
2. I personally use Japanese wood block prints to make my color palettes. Works like a charm.

What pinkknip says. Also to that end, emphasizing how to use layers for organization and effects. I don't know if I've ever seen any kind of graphics software, whether it be image editing, animation/video, 3D or whatever that didn't use some version of layers.

Also, getting a grip on digital color is something to get a start on. It's a huge topic, but a place to start might be creating and exploring color schemes on the Adobe color site: https://color.adobe.com

Hi, as far as this particular illustration goes, it's good enough for now. However, I want to do more photorealistic work like this guy.

Joe White Bull Badge

But I need to get my drawing skills more up to speed, which takes more time and dedication. Thanks for the appreciation

Ah alright, you probably already know, but dribbble has tonnes of this kind of work. For example: https://dribbble.com/search?q=city+street

Just scroll through there and its great inspiration for your future work :) and to learn from ofc

These too https://dribbble.com/shots/2326090-Faux-Movie-Posters

Process was to sketch the rough layouts on paper, scan into Illustrator, trace and make corrections and color the illustrations, then I brought them in the Photoshop to add some texturing and other tweaks (the glowing eyes under the bed for example were mostly done in PS).

Perhaps try Inkscape, a free open-source vector illustration program, before you pay for an old copy of unsupported CS6 or something that may not run on your machine. I've not personally used it, but it gets mentioned a lot as an Illustrator alternative, and seems to have good reviews.

Inkscape is the general go-to recommendation for freeware vector editing though I don't know that it's necessarily easier to use for beginners (likely my bias towards paid-for progam quality) and the UI can be a bit hard to grapple with at times.

Actually, if you're looking to do casual sketching, and don't want to pay for Adobe products, I'd also suggest Krita, which is much like photoshop but FREE. It's got most of the same capabilities, including making your own brushes, using layers, lots of tools, an animation mode, and more. Did I mention it's free? It's even hosted on a .org, not a .com. I've had it for over a year now, and it seems to update pretty regularly. I'd definitely suggest it as a starting place, if you mostly want to make casual (or even commission) art.

Read a book.

https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=House&amp;i=943960

This is a nice example: it looks kike it's made out of a bold contour line with 20px or something. But if you download it you will recognize, that this is no contourline, it is a complete surface without any compound paths. How can i create something like this?

Fiverr is awful race-to-the-bottom type stuff. Have a look at upwork.com

I've used it for some small bits and pieces. It seems to have everything from people looking for quick £10 jobs to companies hiring people for six-month contracts.

You can draw your characters in Illustrator but for making an actual working typeface you’ll need a font editor like Glyphs or FontLab (there are some free options as well like the legendary Font Forge).

You don't. Illustrator has absolutely no clue how to build a font file. Sorry.

You'll have to use some kind of other tool, whether it be PortablePawnShop's suggestion of a batch export script to make it easy to drop it into a font-making website, or a plugin like Fontself, or drawing the shapes in AI and cutting and pasting them into something like Glyphs.

Totally. I've used sites like this and this a few times. Not surprising that font brokers make these webapps return their fonts first. I would love this built-in to illustrator

The main problem here is the kind of gradient you are using. AFAIK SVG only works with linear gradients. To make it work the exact way you did, take the Skanda8 workaround. But to make this file fully vector you need some adjustments and for that you have a couple of options, here are 2:

• Expand each ripple to make it a shape and apply a linear gradient to it. See how it is
• Instead of a gradient, you can make each ripple diminish it's width. See how it is

Good luck!

Thanks! The brushes are from here: https://creativemarket.com/TheArtifexForge/1799465-Fine-Liner-Brushes-Patterns?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=ios_app. I feel like there are free brush collections that will produce the same effect but I got fed up of looking around so just bought these ones in the end. The texture is just using the built in sponge filter so nice and easy!

Thanks, that’s really kind and very much appreciated! I have no idea where you would even start with newspapers/magazines but let’s wait and see if I have another drawing in me...

The stippling effect was actually achieved using a custom brush set which I ended up paying for (https://creativemarket.com/TheArtifexForge/1799465-Fine-Liner-Brushes-Patterns). There are tons of free brushes out there though, so I am sure you’ll be able to find a free stipple/halftone effect brush/pattern that will create a similar pattern.

more resolution = more details in image tracing

maybe try to increase the resolution by at least 4x or 8x

this website uses AI and does a pretty good job in enhancing images without losing quality or details:

https://letsenhance.io/

No, there is no magic to perfectly improve image resolution. Increasing resolution requires creating something out of nothing, decreasing resolution involves throwing away detail. It's easy to throw away, not easy to make something from nothing. Converting to vector is an option with the significant tradeoff that it will look like a drawing and not like a photo.

Like I explained in my previous comment, you will need a certain number of pixels for it to look good. You will be able to print out JPGs that meet minimum size requirements.

Have you considered using some of the new techniques involving machine-learning resolution enhancement? Here's one random service that does it, google search will reveal additional services. May or may not work very well depending on your photo.

Love the design, though u/VectorChef does have a point about the X. Anytime I see that I think it means a collaboration between two people, you can use the & like VectorChef mentioned or the "|" for a splitter.

The drop shadow idea works well, though I would look at some similar designs to make the shadows appear more realistic. Maybe just drop the opacity or at least blur the harder lines you have in there. The color scheme needs work. I would use Adobe Color or Color Box to find some nicely paired colors.

Lastly, I'm curious if you consider yourself a Marketer or Creative first. Personally I don't hear people calling themselves "Marketers" one because it sounds like telemarketer and two its usually presented like " Dennis Layden - Marketing and Creative" its what you do, not what you are. Anyway thats my feedback. Keep grinding man, you'll do great.

>If you are struggling with color schemes take a look at Adobe Color. There's tons of great pre made palettes to choose from and you can search by color or keyword. You can also build your own based on certain rules to get a balanced scheme. I always use it, it's a great tool really.

Colorhunt for inspiration and Adobe Color for making palettes when I already know what I want. Adobe color works very nice in combination with your Adobe software since you can save it in you CC Library

I would just borrow color schemes to start with, then you can tweak the colors individually as you want. The Color Guide window in Illustrator or the swatch libraries that come built in from the drop-down menu can help out. Here's a good website from adobe, too.

https://color.adobe.com/explore/

Great job drawing the dude and the pins!

Here is what I noted: Everything is centered. Colors seem to be randomly chosen. Copy-Paste is evident in the pins. Typography choices aren't adding to the design, and the font is too big.

The layout is not giving us enough, break some rules and maybe bring the movie title to the bottom, smaller actors names between your illustration and the title and you will end up with a pyramid layout that might give more sense of hierarchy and perhaps more ideas for the background.

I would try another typeface for the actors names and Coen Bros., tell us something about the movie there, The dude is pretty chill...perhaps getting some hand lettering could give it that feeling and it would contrast with your Western typeface choice for the title.

Colorwise, isn't doing the trick for me. Have fun there, your shapes are pretty well drawn and very recognizable...so coloring them differently than their natural color won't hurt, in fact this could help. check Adobe's Kuler (the color website...) and pick a palette there, have fun and get funky... what would the dude do about it?... (also, I would minimize the amount of colors to max 5)

Devil is on the details, go and fix your pins, they are obviously copy-pasted, that's ok, but now that you saved a lot of time doing that and scaling them perhaps you could invest some minutes fixing the rightside shadow on all of them, think about the light source and how that would change the shadow in respect of their position and perspective.

I hope this helps...

https://color.adobe.com/

http://losttype.com/

I would suggest looking at some color schemes. While I get that a parrot can be all kinds of colors, even nature has a typical range that a single animal will stay within.

Offhand I'd say the design struggles from color. Too many colors waters down the impact of a piece because it becomes visually overwhelming. Some of the colors here compete in a not so friendly way. Bright pinks and greens with dull blues, browns and oranges.

Play around with this site https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel ...and maybe dig up some color theory lessons or design theory lessons.

If yo're doing logos and 'design' work and asking for critiques here or any design subreddit, responses will center around why you chose the level of detail, the font, adjustments to the font, colors, whether you used white space / negative space, etc. What the company does, who the target market is, are they conservative, modern, traditional, etc. Without a lot of that info, a 'design' critique is going to be pretty subjective but with that information, there are 'right ways' to do things in order to communicate the goals of the client. That's the difference between a designer and a person who knows Illustrator.

As to your ability in Illustrator, you're lines look smooth and the overall shapes look clear - so good job. But in the end, software is the easy part (just time) and knowing how and why to do something for a client is infinitely more important.

Hope that helps.

Pretty neat stuff! Personally, I think it could do better without the outlines. And the painting on the easel could look better matching the style of your overall artwork. You could also untangle the stems of the love-shaped plant on the left so it'll look more tidy and neat.

If you need inspiration (or free stuff) you can try looking at freepik.

Good luck!