Hello everyone! Time flies so fast when you’re having fun or you’re doing something you enjoy so much. I am saying this because I am having such a great time doing designfreebies that I missed celebrating it’s one year anniversary February last month. Although I admit I’m also busy with my regular job and other things as well, but I missed it nonetheless and designfreebies is one year old exactly on February 17 last month (not counting a month or so when it initially started in Blogspot).

And in this regard, I would like to thank everyone who visited this blog and appreciated all the design freebies I shared. Special thanks also goes to thousands of our regular subscribers. And huge huge thanks goes to our sponsors and those who donated and helped keep designfreebies running. Thank you and hopefully I’ll be able to share more and better design freebies on its second year and beyond.

Now let’s talk about today’s article. Since I haven’t done any tutorials here in designfreebies for quite some time now, I decided to look around and gather some of the best and freshest Adobe Illustrator vector tutorials for 2010. Rounded them up and came with a dozen early 2010 best vector tutorials. Please take a moment to review and learn from some of these fantastic Adobe Illustrator design tutorial articles from around the web.

1. Creating a Les Paul Guitar in Illustrator

Craig of Madtuts showed us an in-depth tutorial on creating a highly detailed Les Paul guitar in Adobe Illustrator.

2. Create A Cute Vector Octopus in Illustrator with Simple Shapes

This is a very simple and straightforward tutorial about creating simple shapes and using the Pathfinder tools to manipulate them to create your very own cute vector octopus.

3. Illustrator tutorial: create a 6-egg box

An interesting tutorial about creating some eggs inside an egg box using simple 3D and lighting effects in Illustrator.

4. Create A Mouthwatering Chocolate Covered Strawberry

This is an intermediate level vector tutorial using Adobe Illustrator CS4 where you will learn how to use Ellipse tool, Pencil tool, Pathfinder panel, Gradient panel, and Custom Art Brushes to create a mouthwatering strawberry covered with chocolate.

5. Illustrator tutorial: create a yummy vector cupcake

After indulging yourself with the choco strawberry, here’s another one from Pehaa, creating a yummy vector cupcake in Adobe Illustrator CS4 with downloadable source file ai file.

6. Create An Editable Metal Type Treatment

Vectips shared with us this simple yet amazing tutorial that uses the Appearance panel to create a type treatment that is fully editable when it is done.

7. Create A Briefcase Icon

Another great vector tutorial from Vectips using basic shapes, gradient and other effects in Illustrator to create a cool briefcase icon that you can also apply similar techniques to other icons, logos and illustrations.

8. Create a Colorful, Vector Carnival Mask

A highly detailed vector tutorial from vector tuts+. This colorful mask was intricately drawn and every detail explained.

9. Create a Stylized First Aid Icon in Illustrator

This tutorial uses a combination of craft and Illustrator’s 3D tools to create a first aid icon. Techniques learned from this tutorial is also applicable to other realistic round edged vector icons and illustrations.

10. Creating a Toaster-Popping Illustration

Another great vector tutorial from Vector Tuts+. This tutorial demonstrated effectively the use of Illustrator 3D tools, gradients and the not so often used but absolutely useful Chrome effect.

11. Illustrator Tutorial: Vector Handphone

Check out this tutorial to learn how to create your own cool gadget like this vector handphone in Adobe Illustrator using simple shape tools and gradients.

12. Draw a beautiful female character

Aimonkey shows us how to create a beautiful female cartoon character in Adobe Illustrator using path tool and some basic shapes.

It seems like ages since I last shared a vector tutorial here. The last one was “Vector Tutorial: Creating Your Own Vector iPhone“, and with the quite busy schedule I’ve had these past few months I haven’t got much time to do another lengthy tutorial until this time. Luckily, I was able to find time to do one. Probably my last tutorial for the year. So I hope you’ll be able to get along with this one.

It’s December, and Christmas Season is in the air, so there’s nothing more appropriate than to show you how to create some shiny vector Christmas balls using Adobe Illustrator (CS4). So lets get it on.

Here’s a preview first of the Christmas balls that we will do with this tutorial.

Part 1 – The Christmas Ball

Step 1: Creating the basic shape

The Christmas ball shape consists of just two basic shapes, circle for the body and a small rectangle for the neck.

(1) Overlap both shapes as seen above.

(2) Open the “Pathfinder palette” and use the “Unite” tool to combine the two shapes into one.

(3) Cut the shape exactly in the middle to leave just one-half of the shape. To do that, you can overlap a rectangle big enough to cover half of the shape and use the “Minus Front” from the pathfinder palette (icon next to unite tool).

Step 2: Creating the 3D ball

Fill the whole shape with white and stroke to none. After that, go to Effect > 3D > Revolve. Set the parameters as shown in the 3D dialog box image below.

To set the “shading color” click “More Options” to reveal the additional options. Use “Custom” as the Shading Color and set the color to red (R-255, G-0, B-0). Click “Ok” to apply the 3D settings and produce the 3D ball shown below.

Step 3: Adding shade and highlights

Now let’s add some shade and highlights to our dull looking 3D ball. They consist of three shapes, one cresent moon shaped shade and two highlights in circle and droplet shape as shown in the image below.

After creating the 3 shapes, apply the following effects and settings to each of them.

Shade: Fill with “Gradient” using “Fade to black” with settings as shown below. After filling with gradient, apply “Gaussian blur” effect (Effect > Blur > Gaussian Blur) with radius set to “20″. Then set the “Transparency” (Window > Transparency) to “Multiply” with “70%” opacity.

Highlight 1: Select the circle shaped hightlight 1 and apply gradient fill using also “fafe to black” with similar settings shown below. Apply the same “Gaussian Blur” with radius set to 20. Set transparency to “Color Dodge” with 100% opacity.

Highlight 2: The second highlight is similar to the first in gradient fill settings and transparency (color dodge) but without the Gaussian blur effect.

So there you go. We have completed the first part of our tutorial where you should already have one shiny red ball similar to the image shown below.

Part 2 – The Crown

Step 1: Creating the crown shape

(1) Create a comb-liked shape similar to the one shown below. Add a middle node on top of the shape using the “Add anchor point tool” from the “Pen tool” then copy the shape.

(2) Move the node up a bit using the “Direct Selection tool” (white filled arrow from the toolbar) to create a similar curve shown below.

(3) Now paste the previously copied shape on front and do the same node shifting but this time moving it down to create a similar curve.

Applying color, shades and highlights to the crown are done in five easy steps shown below.

(1) Fill the bigger crown shape with R-187, G-135, B-50, then move inside just a little bit the two sides of the smaller crown shape on front (using direct selection tool on nodes to be moved).

(2) Select the front crown shape and copy it first (for the shadow), then apply “Fade to black” gradient again using settings shown above. Apply Gaussian blur with 2.0 radius and transparency set to 100% “screen”.

(3) Now paste the copied object at the back, fill it with black and apply Gaussian Blur with 2.0 radius and set transparency to “Multiply”.

(4) For the crown shade on top, create an oval shaped object on top, fill it again with “Fade to black” gradient with similar settings as seen on the 4th image above and set the transparency to 100% “Multiply”.

(5) Finally, create an irregularly shaped object (an oval shape will do) as our final crown highlight on the top rightmost part of the crown. Fill it with white and apply Gaussian blur with 5.0 radius.

Step 2: Adding the string hook and string

(1) Create two circles then subtract the inner from the outer circle using the “minus front tool” from the pathfinder palette to create a donut shaped object.

(2) Create a bigger circle similar to the image shown above, then subtract it again from the donut shaped object.

(3) Curve both ends of the hook by editing the nodes using the “direct selection tool” (white arrow on the toolbar).

(4) Fill the object with linear gradient with colors from dark (R-96, G-57, B-19) to light (R-187, G-135, B-50).

Next thing is to add a string on the hook. You simply create two oval shape loops and shape the string using the “Pen tool”. Fill all objects with gradient from ochre (R-187, G-135, B-50) to yellow (R-249, G-237, B-50) with angle set to 24 degrees and slider location at 80% near yellow.

Putting it all together, at this point, our Christmas ball is almost done. We just need to add some shadow later on.

Part 3 – Adding shadow, changing colors and decorative patterns

Step 1: Adding shadow

Adding shadow is very simple. I have covered much about this in past vector tutorials. So quickly, you just need to create an oval underneath the Christmas ball. Position it somewhere on the left against the light’s direction.

Fill the shape with “Radial Gradient” from black to white “Aspect Ratio” set to 50%. After that, apply Gaussian blur with 20 pixel radius.

Step 2: Changing Colors

Changing our Christmas ball color is easy. Select the 3D ball object, then go to “Window > Appearance” to open the “Appearance Palette”. From the “Apperance Palette”, click “3D Revolve” to open again the 3D dialog menu.

With the 3D dialog menu open, select “More options” button to display additional options. Click the “Shading Color” current color tab (red in our example). The “Color Picker” dialog menu will open where you can now mix and set your new color. Click “ok” for both the color picker and 3D revolve dialog box to apply the new color.

We can try “green” this time.

Step 3: Adding decorative patterns

Let’s add some snow flake pattern to compliment our Christmas theme and add a variety of Christmas balls to our collection. You can get your free snow flake vector graphics from our previous post, “Free Vectors: Early Winter Snow Flakes“.

First, you need to copy your vector pattern and convert it to symbol. Open the “Symbol” palette by simply going to “Window > Symbol”. Drag your pattern to the symbol palette to convert it to symbol.

Now select the 3D Christmas ball and open the 3D dialog box similar to what we did while changing color. In the 3D dialog box, click the “Map Art” button.

In the “Map Art” dialog box, you basically need to do 3 things. First, select the surface where you will apply the pattern to. In our case, it’s surface number 2. Then select the symbol you’d like to use, in our example, it’s the snow flake symbol. Then lastly, turn on the “preview” option so you can see how your pattern is positioned in your surface. You can adjust the pattern’s position and size inside the Map Art dialog box. Clik “ok” when done to apply.

And here’s our new Christmas ball with some cool snow flake patterns.

That’s it. Whew!

Finally, once more, here’s the collection of some colored and patterned vector Christmas ball that we did for this tutorial. Download link for the source Adobe Illustrator file after the break.

Heres’ a quick and easy tutorial on using Adobe OpenType fonts. I never knew how awesome these fonts are until I used them and discovered their features. OpenType® is a cross-platform font file format developed jointly by Adobe and Microsoft. They are superset of the existing TrueType and Adobe PostScript Type 1 font formats. Aside from their cross-platform portability feature, they also provide rich linguistic support, powerful typographic capabilities, and simplified font-management requirements.

Ok, enough of those claptrap, let’s get on with the show. They say that typography is as sophisticated as the finest bottle of wine. So we will try to demonstrate OpenType by starting off with a bottle of wine and wrap some text around it using one of my favorite font, the Bickham Script Pro, which incidentally is an Adobe OpenType font. We will work on our text and enhance it using some of the typographic features of OpenType to produce our final image shown below.

Let’s start it off with a regular looking bottle of wine shown below.

We open it up in Adobe Photoshop. Then we type our sample text using our OpenType font, the Bickham Script Pro. Let me also tell you that Adobe OpenType fonts can be distinguished by the word “Pro” which normally appears as part of the font name. The bottle text in normal Bickham Script Pro appears similarly like the one shown below.

From within Photoshop, you can use all these OpenType special characters by selecting your text and opening the “Character Palette” and clicking the fly-out arrow to open the fly-out menu. From the fly-out menu, click “OpenType” to reveal the OpenType settings as shown below..

The problem with using OpenType in Photoshop is that we cannot preview what characters are available for a particular font. So it’s going to be a hit and miss thing. What we are going to do is switch to Adobe Illustrator so that we can use the “Glyphs” palette of Illustrator which is not available in Photoshop.

So what we do is select all our text, open Adobe Illustrator, create a new document, and paste our text from Photoshop. Now this is where our creativity begins. From Illustrator, go over “Window” menu, select “Type” > “Glyphs” to open the Glyphs palette.

Now let’s select our first character “S” of the word “Special”. While selected, click the “Entire Font” from the Glyphs drop down menu and select “Alternates for Current Selection“.

Now you will see from the Glyphs palette all available alternates for the currently selected glyph (S). All we have to do is double-click the glyph that we want to replace the current selection. Selecting the middle one for the letter S will make our word “Special” looking really special (see below).

Select the other letters (C, h, L, F, A, O) and repeat the entire process. After changing all those letters, we will have something like the one shown below. You can select and try with as many characters as you want until you are satisfied and created a more balanced design.

Another cool feature aside from Alternate Character is the “Discretionary Ligatures”. These are alternate special characters for a group of glyphs. Let us select “st” from the word “August”. While selected, scroll down again the Glyphs drop down menu and select “Discretionary Ligatures” and select something similar to the alternate “st” of the word August shown below.

Cool. Now we can go back to Photoshop and wrap those text around our bottle. Simply select the new text from Illustrator and replace the old text in Photoshop.

We will add a little distortion effect on our text so that it will look like wrapping around our bottle. Go to the “Layer Palette“, right click on the text layer and select “Warp Text“. The Warp Text menu will pop-up. Click the “Style” drop down menu to select “Arc Upper” because we want the curvatures more on the upper part and straight towards the middle of the bottle.

Adjust the curvature settings so it will appear accurately wrapped around the bottle’s contour. My settings were 15% Bend, O% Horizontal Distortion, and 10% Vertical Distortion.

As a final touch, copy the bottle highlight color shown below as the text color using the “Eye Dropper” tool to realistically match the white text with the white highlight of the entire photo.

That’s it. Once more shown below is our final wine bottle with text wrapped around using and harnessing the cool features of Adobe OpenType fonts. Please be reminded that you’ll also find OpenType support in Adobe InDesign, so everything that you’ve learned here will also work and apply across the entire Adobe Creative Suite.

Here’s something for everyone to learn more about Adobe OpenType:
Adobe OpenType resource page

I haven’t done another vector tutorial for quite some time now. Our last vector tutorial here was “Creating Your Own Vector iPhone” which I did almost two months ago. And I work on it for around two or three days I think. It’s really not that easy to create a graphic design tutorial and I admire those who come up with very detailed and easy to follow tutorials. There are also design tutorials that are too mind boggling or overwhelming even for graphic designers like me. Much more for newbies and non-designers who just want to learn some basic and easy design tricks. Some of these tutorials may have great results but sometimes they just don’t have the knack in doing well-written, easy to understand graphic design tutorials.

Today I thought about rounding up ten (10) of the best, well-written, easy-to-follow Adobe Illustrator vector tutorials offered by some of the best design blogs and websites around. These tutorials are featured primarily not because they produce outstanding and visually compelling results but simply because they’re straigthforward, well-defined and most of all, ideal for beginners and non-designers alike.

1. Design with Flair from Start to Finish in Illustrator CS4 – by Corey Barker of Layers Magazine

A very clear step-by-step guide in transforming a photo into a vector posterize style artwork.

2. How to Draw A Realistic Vector Light Bulb From Scratch – By Kamen of VectorTuts

This one will teach you some basic techniques in technical illustrations like creating shapes, proper shades and rendering of materials to create a more detailed and realistic illustration.

3. The Basics of Clipping Paths and Opacity Masks – by Daniel Swartz of VectorTuts

Another one from VectorTuts. This tutorial cover the benefits, some uses, and the ‘how-to’ of two powerful methods to hide or show areas of an Illustrator document without deleting objects using “Clipping Paths” and “Opacity Masks”.

4. How to Create Shiny, Vector Dice in Illustrator – by Joshua Bader of VectorTuts

More from VectorTuts. Here’s another way to create a 3D object in Adobe Illustrator effectively using the “Gradient Mesh Tool”.

5. Creating vector characters in Illustrator – from Computer Arts

This tutorial doesn’t just show you the step-by-step process on how to draw a character in Adobe Illustrator but also interestingly explained the basics of character design. The tutorial is downloadble in pdf format plus a bonus download of all supporting files.

6. Adding perspective to maps – by Mark Mayers of Computer Arts

Here’s another one from Computer Arts. This tutorial will show you how to give flat Illustrator maps a third dimension by using the “Free Transform tool” and a custom perspective grid. Tutorial and all supporting files are downloadable.

7. How to create a television icon – by Ryan Putnam of Vectips for aiVault

This easy step by step tutorial contributed by Ryan of Vectips to aiVault will show you how to create a a retro television icon just with some basic shapes and gradients. These technique are easily applicable to other icons, illustration, and logos.

8. How to Create a Smokin’ Western Type Treatment in Illustrator – By Ryan Putnam for VectorTuts

Here’s another one from Ryan Putnam and last from VectorTuts. A lengthy but easy to follow tutorial that shows you how to create a western type treatment using Adobe Illustrator’s effects.

9. Turn Any Font Into a Sketch Font – from Vectips

We know that there are available sketchy type of fonts but I never thought it could be easy to create the same kind of effect in Adobe Illustrator using the “Scribble” effect.

10. Illustrator Tutorial: Create a Gang of Vector Ninjas – by Chris Spooner of Blog.SpoonGraphics

Lastly, this one was featured in the same vector tutorial roundup made by Speckyboy (30 Amazing Vector Tutorials from 2009, so far anyway…) where two of our very own vector tutorials (Creating a Realistic 3D Beverage Can and Another Political (Obama) Poster Vector Tutorial) made the list. This tutorial will teach you how to create cool and cute vector ninja characters using just the basic shapes and a variety of simple tools. Perfect for Illustrator beginners.

It’s been a while since I last did a tutorial here in Graphic Design Free Resources. Few weeks ago while doing a short piece about Apple’s iPhone on my technology and gadget blog. I was looking for a clean generic iPhone mock-up to superimpose different screen displays but couldn’t find one. I ended up using something else. So I thought about creating my own iPhone mockup and feature its tutorial here as well.

This tutorial requires intermediate level skill in Adobe Illustrator. You should already have working knowledge of paths using Pen Tool, creating and manipulating shapes using Pathfinder, gradients, symbols, swatches, and the Mesh Tool. Sorry for newbie Illustrator users. But even if you don’t know much about Illustrator, this tutorial will at least give you an idea how this is done. I’ve seen some basic vector Illustrator tutorial like this around (I saw one from vector tutsplus) but the result is not very impressive, but still gets the job done.

Let’s get it on. Before we get started, let’s take a look at the final image we’ll be creating.

Step 1: The basic frame.

Let’s create the outer frame using the Rounded Rectangle tool. I initially created three rounded rectangles 2mm apart on both sides and 2 points difference on rounded corners. Outer rectangle is 60mm x 113mm 25pt rounded corner, next one is 58mm x 111mm 23pt, third and inner one is 56mm x 109mm 21pt. You can have your own dimensions as long as the proportions are similar to what I’ve done.

Next we need to create a compound path by subtracting the middle panel from the outer one. Select the two rectangles and use the “Minus Front” button from the Pathfinder palette.

Now we need to extract/separate the top and bottom part of the compound path we created. We need to do this to create our chrome shine effect. Create another rectangle similar to the one in the image below (the red one). Using the Pathfinder tool again, separate the top and bottom from the sides of the compound path using the “Divide” button.

You will have a similarly shaped top portion of the frame below.

Now we create mesh gradient as indicated below using the Mesh Tool. You can also use other methods in creating a chrome-like gradient like the blend tool but I prefer the Mesh Tool as you can have more control over your gradient to create a more realistic effect.

For convenience, you can also create a set of swatches ahead which you can just select as needed. For this project, I made a bunch of gray swatches from light to black. For the mesh gradient, you may apply colors on the gradient nodes as indicated in the images above.

Step 2: Buttons, switches and symbols

After we’re done with the chrome frame, let’s move on with the other details of our iPhone. Draw the side controls and the top sleep/wake button using the Pen Tool and apply gray color similar to the adjacent chrome frame. You can use gradient or flat color. I use a subtle gradient as I don’t want to make these buttons too shiny.

Next we create the home button with the shape tool using circles and rectangular oval shapes. The crescent shaped gradation was created using a copy of the outer circle subtracted with a larger circle. Apply the home button colors as indicated in the image below.

Here’s how our home button looks like.

I make it a habit to convert most nitty-gritty elements of my projects to symbols, especially if you see plenty of usage for some elements in your document. Converting to symbols and using them will dramatically reduce file size. So I converted my home button and other iPhone icons like the battery level, signal strength, and lock icon to Illustrator symbols. Again I will not elaborate anymore how to create these icons as they are normally created using various path creation tools available in Illustrator.

To convert to symbols, simply select the graphic element you wish to convert and click the new button from the Symbols palette, and you will be prompted with Symbol Options. Type a name for your symbol, select Graphic and click ok. Your symbol is now added in the symbols palette.

Step 3: Creating the face/front panel

We need to create three elements for the front panel. Let’s create the first two, the inner black strip and the inner panel. The third one is the display window.

You create the inner black strip the same way we created the outer frame. Two rectangular oval shapes joined to create a compound path using Pathfinder tools.

The inner panel’s gradient is illustrated in the image below. Gradient is angled at 45 degrees, with two inner black colors positioned near halfway at 45 and 55. Both sides fade to 80% black.

Part of the front panel is the iPhone speaker. You may do a simpler one since its relatively small, but I like to do everything in good details.

Create 3 rectangular ovals similar to the figure below.

The first and the third oval are measured 11.3mm x 2.5mm with 1.5mm round corners and 9.8mm x 1.2mm with 0.8mm round corners respectively. The middle one need not be measured accurately as long as it covers the third oval. The middle one will be meshed speaker part.

As usual, combine 1^st and 3^rd oval by subtracting the inner from the outer. While the compound path is selected, select “Flatten Transparency” from the Object Menu to convert the compound path to a whole and flatten shape. Make sure the compound path solid filled and doesn’t have an outline. Please refer to the image on settings applied using this tool.

Now we need to divide the thick oval shape to apply shading and reflection. Create a similar path as illustrated in the image below. Make sure you create a mirror copy of the cutting path then position it symmetrically on the lower right part below. While the cutting path and the oval shape are selected, apply the “Pathfinder Divide” tool. Do the same with the cutting path below.

Select the oval shape, right click and select ungroup to separate the divided shapes. When outlined, you will have a similar shape like the one below.

Now let’s fill up those speaker shapes. The top part of the oval we divided will be solid black. The lower part will be filled with gradient from gray to white angled at 45 degrees with similar positions indicated in the image below. To fill the middle part or the speaker mesh with the dotted pattern, we need to create a pattern similar to the one shown below. Then drag that pattern to the “Swatches Palette” to create a pattern swatch. Then apply that pattern to the middle part to create a speaker mesh look.

Step 4: Display window

Now this is getting long. I hope I’m not getting you bored. Don’t worry, we’re almost there. Let’s create the front display window by creating another rectangular shape object. Create a rectangle measuring 148px by 220px with slightly rounded corners of around 2 pixels. Create another rectangle this time measuring 144px by 216px but this time no rounded corners. Subtract the inner from the outer. Fill it up with 80 to 90% black.

Let’s fill our screen display with some wallpaper. I don’t want to make this tutorial the longest vector tutorial ever, so I’m cutting it short by just grabbing an image from our previous Photoshop tutorial, Creating a Cool Fabric Background Using Reflected Gradient Tool.

Position the image exactly in the middle or you may use a “Clipping Mask” to the exact boundaries of your image by creating or copying the inner rectangle and placing it on top of the image. While both the image and the clipping shape are selected, right click and select “Make Clipping Mask” to clip the wallpaper image. I have slightly lowered the transparency to 75% to give our wallpaper the right blend on the display panel.

Now we will place all the icons from the symbols palette and some text on our display. But before we do that, let us create two rectangular bars as placeholders for our icons and time/date display. The following are measured 144px by 9px and 144px by 43px. The top bar is filled with 80% black while the bottom one is filled with gradient fill of various gradient points.

Gradient settings for the bigger bar below are illustrated in the image below.

Place these bars on top of the display as shown in the image below. Set the top bar transparency blending mode to “Multiply”. Set the bottom bar blending mode also to “Multiply” but give it 80% transparency.

Now we are ready to place all icons and text on our display. Icons and text are filled with 30% black. Also place a copy of the time/date gradient bar at the bottom part of the display area (this should hold the “slide to unlock” button which I’m sure you’ll be able to create once you fully understood everything in this tutorial). See our almost done image below.

One final piece before we do the last step is the reflective triangular part on top of the iPhone to add some highlight to our piece. Draw a triangular shaped object similar to the one shown below, fill it with white and set transparency to 10%.

Step 5: Mirror reflection

Finally, our iPhone piece is done. Let’s do a quick one for mirror reflection. Before we do that, let’s add some shadow below our iPhone by creating two shapes, inner one is dark gray (or black) and outer part is white. Select both objects, go to Objects > Blend > Make. Presto, we have our shadow.

Create a mirror copy of the iPhone and place it underneath. The Mirror Tool is located right below the Rotation Tool in the Tools palette.

Now create a rectangle enough to cover the mirrored image. Fill it with gradient similar to the one in the image below.

The magic trick to make the reflection appear is done by using the “Make Opacity” option inside the Transparency Palette.

While the mask and our mirrored image are selected, click the “Make Opacity” option. Make sure the “New Opacity Masks are Clipping” and “New Opacity Masks are Inverted” are both checked.

Lastly, add some blur to the reflection by applying “Gaussian Blur” from the Effect Menu, and set blur effect radius at 5.0. Then set the reflection image transparency to 50%. DONE!!! I hate doing tutorials. =). Let’s go back to doing more freebie downloads next time, ok?

Once again… the final image of our very own vector iPhone.

Vector source file download link:
GDFR Vector iPhone vector source files (Illustrator ai, EPS and PDF) – 9.47MB

I was doing some 3D charts for a project when I thought about sharing a similar tutorial here in Graphic Design Free Resources.

In this tutorial we will create visually compelling 3D pie chart from raw data and explore several techniques in enriching graph design and presentation.

Is Adobe Illustrator the best tool for this job? Sometimes. If you only create the occasional graph or you need to build highly creative graphs, Illustrator is absolutely the best tool for the job.

If, however, you need to create and update graphs often, or your creative needs don’t extend much further than flat charts or rudimentary 3D-style graphs, consider using a dedicated graphing application or Microsoft Excel. Illustrator enables levels of freedom, control, and presentation enhancement for graphs that Excel cannot even approach.

As always, prepare your data in advance. Although graphs, more so than any other type of project, typically require changes throughout the workflow, try to hold off on graph creation until the figures and dataset are as close to final as possible.

In four easy steps we’ll enter data, build a 3D pie graph, and add some enhancements to make it more visually appealing:

1. Manually entering data
2. Coloring a pie chart
3. Making the pie chart 3D
4. Labelling 3D graph slices

Graph scenario

GDFR conducted an online survey (we gave away a couple of iPhones as incentive! haha-you wish) and, among other things, asked loyal readers what categories they like most and would like us to put in more freebies. We’ve been provided with the collected responses from that question and asked to create a pie chart so that we understand more our readers’ pulse.

The Tutorial

Before we begin, here’s a look at our final 3D pie chart.

1. Manually entering data

Before making it look pretty, let’s get the data into Illustrator.

a. Begin a new RGB document. Unless you have a specific size in mind, set the size to web default (800 x 600 pixels).

b. On the Toolbox, click and hold on the Column Graph Tool to reveal the other graph tools behind it. We want the Pie Graph tool (see first figure below). With the Pie Graph tool, click and drag out a rectangular area to contain the graph and its legend. When you release, the Graph Data window will appear (see second figure below).

The Graph Data window looks (pretty much) like any spreadsheet application. This is the brain of your charts, where all data, labels, and categories are entered and modified. The cells may hold values (numbers) or labels and categories (text and numbers). Data may be entered many levels deep to create fiendishly complex graphs, but we’re going to keep it simple with just one row of labels and one row of data.

c. Click in the top-left cell, which will load that cell into the cell entry box above, and type “Fonts”, our first data label. Press the Tab key after typing to commit the change and advance to the next cell along the top row. Enter the remaining labels the same way: “Vectors”, “Tutorials”, “Images”, “Brushes”, “Textures”, and “3d Models”. In the end, you should have seven labeled columns along the top row (see figure below).

Naturally, if you’re working on your own graph project, replace my labels (and later data) with your own.

d. Now that the labels are done, let’s enter the actual data from which our pie and its pieces will be drawn. Click each cell under each label and enter their numbers. After all data has been entered, click the Apply button. Behind the Graph Data window you should see something akin to the figure below. Go ahead and close the Graph Data window and save your document.

2. Coloring the Pie Chart

If you’re content with a graph as boring as the chart above, go ahead and stop working now. In this Step we’ll add some color before giving the graph some depth in the next Step (“Making the Pie Graph 3D”).

a. Grab the Group Selection tool from behind the Direct Selection tool. Click twice on one of the pie sections to select both the slice and its legend. Cool, huh?

b. Now, using the Swatches or Color palette, give it a fill—a solid color, gradient, or pattern—and/or a stroke. If you plan to make your pie three-dimensional in the next Step, don’t give it a stroke. Because of the blessed Group Selection tool, both the slice and the legend can be styled at once without breaking the graph’s link to its data—you can go back and change the dataset at any time.

c. Using the same technique, move around the pie coloring each slice and its legend to your tastes. My colored pie is in shown below.

3. Making the pie chart 3D

Colors are great, but a little dimensionality can often (not always!) give a pie chart more impact, making the data easier to stare at going into that third hour of a 20-minute meeting.

a. The very first thing we need to do is separate the legend-otherwise it too will become 3D (no, it’s not as cool as you’re thinking). So, grab the Direct Selection tool and drag a selection rectangle around just the legend (labels and colored boxes). Copy them with (Cmd-C) [Ctrl+C].

b. Make a new layer, and paste (in front) the copied legend to it with (Cmd-F) [Ctrl+F]. Rename the layer to Legend. This legend is totally disconnected from the graph, so if you intend to make changes to the number of slices in your graph or even to the colors, stop now and come back when your data or colors are finalized. Hide the Legend layer.

c. Back on your first layer, select the graph with the Selection tool, and choose Object > Graph > Data, which will get you back to the Graph Data window.

d. In the Graph Data window, click the first cell in the top row and press Delete on your keyboard to wipe it out. Repeat until you’ve emptied the top row.

e. Select your second row by clicking in the first cell and dragging to the last. Instead of deleting, however, press (Cmd-X) [Ctrl+X] to cut the information. Click once in the leftmost cell of the top row and paste the data in with (Cmd-V) [Ctrl+V].

Click the Apply button and close the Graph Data window. If your graph gets significantly smaller, it’s because there’s still something—maybe just a space—in the second row. Highlight the cells and delete again.

f. Select the graph with the Selection tool. If your graph has a stroke, remove it. Now, choose Effect > 3D > Extrude & Bevel.

g. In the 3D Extrude & Bevel Options dialog below, turn on Preview and begin by choosing a Position preset from the drop-down menu at the top. For most graphs, I would suggest beginning with Off-Axis Bottom and working from there.

Click and drag any face, side, or corner of the track cube to change the graph’s rotation in three-dimensional space, or adjust the values in the X-, Y-, and Z-axis measurement fields. The measurement fields accept angles from negative 180° through positive 180°. Changing either the track cube or the axis fields will update the other. The blue face of the track cube is the front surface of your graph.

Changing the Perspective measurement field will distort your graph to create the impression of distance-use this sparingly as it will introduce distortion of your pie that may render the relative size of the pieces difficult to ascertain.

If you’re happy with the thickness of your graph and its lighting, just click OK (see figure below). Otherwise, play with the Extrude Depth to get the thickness you’d like. Changing the Bevel can give you rounded, beveled, or scalloped edges. After rotating the X-, Y-, and Z-axes to 31°, -19°, and 4°, respectively, and leaving all other options at their defaults, my pie graph looks much more interesting than it did flat.

Clicking the More Options button will reveal advanced lighting options where you may choose a shading type and modify the light(s) and shadows created from the extrusion and rotation. When you’ve finished setting the options for 3D Extrude & Bevel, click OK (for additional tutorial on 3D Extrude & Bevel, see our previous post on “Creating a Realistic 3D Beverage Can“.

h. Turn on your Legend layer. Look at those color key swatches. Are they too big? They were for mine (see below), so I resized them in one swift motion. Unless you’re making a pie chart for the elderly, you may want to do the same. With the Selection tool, select all the colored rectangles. Then choose Object > Transform > Transform Each.

i. In the Transform Each dialog, turn on Preview in the bottom right, then change the Horizontal and/or Vertical scale to suit your graph. Unlike scaling via the Transform palette, Transform Each will scale each object within its own space rather than treating the individual paths as a group and transforming them relative to one another-which would force you to manually realign each block to its text label after scaling.

j. Style the type of your labels (if desired), and save your document. It now looks good. Figure below shows my final pie graph. How did I get the labels on the side? Keep reading; we’re almost there.

4. Labelling 3D graph slices

For a little extra clarity of data presentation, try applying labels directly to your pie pieces-or columns, rows, or whatever in other chart types-in addition to your legend.

a. Off on the pasteboard or on a new layer, click with the Type tool to create a point type object. Now type in your first legend label. With the pie graph we built, the first item would be “Font”. Style the type as you like, but make it a color that contrasts with the color of the pie pieces.

b. Hold the Cmd/Ctrl key and click away from the point type object to deselect it. Now click again with the Type tool and make your second label. Repeat this until you have separate point type objects for each of your pie pieces.

c. One at a time, drag your type labels into the Symbols palette to create new symbols from each of them. I heartily recommend you rename the new symbols to something meaningful like Label – Fonts, Label – 3D Models, and so on. After creating symbols, delete the original path type objects.

d. Select the 3D graph with the Selection tool, and, on the Appearance palette, double-click the 3D Extrude & Bevel attribute to reopen the 3D Extrude & Bevel Options.

e. Turn Preview back on (annoying, isn’t it, that Preview turns off every time you come back?), then click on the Map Art button. In the Map Art dialog, the Symbol drop-down contains the label symbols we just made. Top right is the surface to which they will be applied. The arrows allow you to navigate between all the faces created by 3D Extrude & Bevel. Dominating the dialog is a preview of the object’s surface. A light surface in the current view indicates a face that is visible with the current rotation of the graph; a dark rectangle denotes a surface that is not currently visible.

f. If you peer around the Map Art dialog, you will see on the 3D graph a red outline revealing which surface is currently shown in the Map Art dialog. Using the arrows, move through the surfaces of your graph until you reach a visible side (see figure below).

g. From the Symbol drop-down, choose the correct label for that slice. It will instantly appear in the main part of the Map Art dialog, and, if you remembered to check Preview in the 3D Extrude & Bevel Options prior to entering Map Art, your graph should update as well to show the placement of the label.

h. Is the label where and how you want it? Note that the symbol instance in the Map Art dialog has a bounding box. Use the bounding box to move, resize, and/or rotate the label until it fits your graph where and how you’d like. To rotate, hover your cursor just beyond a corner control point. When the cursor becomes a curved, double-headed arrow, click and drag to rotate (Shift-drag to constrain to increments of 45°).

i. Again using the arrows, move through the 3D graph’s surfaces, applying the labels where needed. If you may at some point rotate your graph, go ahead and apply the labels to surfaces hidden now that may become exposed during a rotation. Doing it now will save on accidental omissions later. Just before you click OK, turn on Shade Artwork-or don’t, as you prefer. Labels add an extra touch to my pie chart, as you can see in our final 3D pie chart below. Incidentally, the pie chart shadow I created is a blend, not the Drop Shadow live effect.

Once again here’s our final 3D pie chart.

When designing labels for packaging, it is most effective to present your design realistically rendered rather than just on a flat layout. Your client will appreciate it more and will probably save you more time doing additional design studies. We will employ Illustrator’s 3D effects tools to create 3-dimensional rendering of a beverage can,  built entirely from vectors, using the Symbols palette, the Extrude tool and Illustrator’s Image Mapping.

To start with, here’s a look at our final image.

And here’s the design of my wrap-around can label. This is also all vector and entirely done in Illustrator. If you’re going to follow this tutorial, you need to create your own label first.

Step 1: Converting the Label to Symbol

Now that we have our label,  we need to make the label available for applying to a 3D surface using image mapping later on. Open the symbols palette (Window > Symbols) and drag the label into the window.

You may also give the symbol a name. Double-click on it’s icon to open the Symbol Options. Then give the symbol a name, such as “label”. This will make it identifiable should you have a number of symbols in the list.

Step 2: Creating the 3D Can

Now on to the main or most interesting part of this tutorial, creating the 3D can. With the Pen tool, draw a single path that defines the shape of the right half of your can— use gray colored stroke to match the metal like color of the can. Use your label design as your guide, and leave the path opened, with unconnected points at the top and bottom (see figure below).

Then go to Effect > 3D > Extrude & Bevel (see also figure above). This opens up the 3D Extrude & Bevel Options dialogue. It’s very similar to the 3D Extrude & Bevel Options dialog, but with a few key differences.

Turn on the preview.  Set the X, Y, and Z axis rotations and the perspective as you like. I used: -15°, -5°, -15° and Perspective set to 100°. Revolve 360°, with a solid end cap and 0pt offset, and should rotate from “Left Edge”. You will see your new 3D can similar to the figure below.

Step 3: Applying the Label Using Map Art

If you have already closed the 3D Revolve Options dialog, you may open it again by selecting the 3D object and on the Appearance palette, double-click the 3D Revolve appearance attribute to edit it.

From the 3D dialog box, click on Map Art. Map Art allows you to cover your object’s surfaces with symbols from the Symbols palette. Search through the object’s surfaces using the arrows until you reach the Side of the Can which represents the visible area of your 3D can (surface number 9 for me).

Next we need to select our “Label” symbol from the drop-down, which will Map our label around the can. You may click on Scale to Fit if you want the image to match the dimensions of your object. Then select Shade Artwork (which results in even slower rendering) for that 3D feel. Make sure you have Preview selected. You may also adjust some lighting controls if you want to, by clicking “More Options” in the 3D Revolve Options dialog box. I simply use the default lighting values.

Here’s an image of our can after image mapping.

Good enough but still looks flat and need more realism. Let’s move on to the final step.

Step 4: Adding Photo-realistic Highlights

Lighting controls in the 3D Revolve and 3D Extrude & Bevel Options dialogs are an excellent start on realistic lighting and shadow, but achieving genuine realism requires hand-drawn reflections.

On a new layer, draw 2 groups of long, narrow rectangles the height of the can’s face (including some on the can lid on top). You will again need to use the Pen tool to match the shapes similar to the image below. Set the Transparencies, Gaussian blur and Gradient of the shadow and highlights as indicated in the image below.

That’s it. Once again, below is our finished photo-realistic JIVE beverage can. Fully scalable, pure vector 3D all done in Adobe Illustrator.

A lot of people downloaded the glossy web navigation templates I posted few days ago. What was really attractive on those templates are those colored glass balls as navigation buttons. In this tutorial, I will try to demonstrate how to create one using Adobe Illustrator CS4.

Here’s the final image of what we will try to create, the same colored glass ball we used in our glossy web navigation templates.

As usual, we need to create a new document. I created a 300 x 300 pixel sized artboard. “Artboard” is what you call your document area or page boundary in Illustrator. Create your black base layer by using the Rectangle Tool and create a black square covering the entire Artboard. Create another layer for the glass ball on top of the black base layer. Now use the Ellipse Tool to create a circle for the ball.

Click on the artboard and illustrator will prompt you to enter dimension for your circle or ellipse. Enter 175 px for both width and height or whatever ball size suits you as long as it is properly proportionate with your artboard.

Now let’s do two more ellipses. The secondary ellipse and the small circular glare using the same “Ellipse tool”. You may also copy or duplicate the big circle then adjust the size and position of the two new ellipses similar to the image below.

Now it’s time to apply some colors to our glass ball. I used 1 color tint and 2 color shades for our green color set. These three colors have the following RGB values which you can use to create new swatches:

Next, we apply some gradient colors using the new green color swatches we made. Select the big circle and apply gradient color by opening the “Gradient” palette and selecting “Radial” as gradient type.

By default you will only have two gradient colors left and right on the gradient palette. To create the middle gradient color, simply click in between the two gradient colors to create one. Adjust the middle gradient color to a location value of 60%.

To apply colors on the gradient palette, simply drag from your swatches towards each gradient palette color.

You gradient will look something like the above image. By default, the gradient midpoint is in the center of the object. Although previous versions of Illustrator have a Gradient tool, the Gradient tool in Illustrator CS4 has greatly expanded editing capabilities. You can adjust and control your gradient real time in CS4 by selecting your gradient object then selecting the “Gradient tool” on your toolbar. Doing so will display all your gradient control handles.

Now what we need to do is move the midpoint from center to the bottom and stretch the rightmost handle farther to the right. Simply drag both handles as instructed above to have a similar gradient position as illustrated below.

Next we apply another gradient to our secondary ellipse. Position the gradient settings similar to the image below. Colors will be bright green on both ends and mid-green on the middle.

Apply white color with no stroke on the smallest circle for the highlight. Then type the numbers and apply linear gradient of bright green to white.

We’re almost there. Let’s create the ball reflection by selecting the big circle, mirror it (Object > Transform > Reflect) below and flatten it to an oval shape. Set the object Transparency to 30% and apply Linear Gradient settings indicated below. Done!

Again, here’s our final colored glass ball image.

You may also try to experiment and apply different color hues, shades and tints.

Pardon me if you have already seen similar tutorials of Sheppard Fairey’s famous Obama Hope poster. But I just can’t help it, I need to do one for this blog. I have been wanting to do this for a very long time. Until the other day, I thought about creating one for my Twitter page. Instead of putting an ordinary photo, I’d put a posterize one instead. So after doing mine, I need to do one for GDFR tutorial. I chose to create one for a similarly noble person who 25 years ago died a hero fighting for a good cause. For Ninoy. By the way, there is also an “iamninoy” campaign launched last year tributing Ninoy Aquino’s 25th death anniversary as Philippine’s martyred national hero. You may visit their website at http://www.iamninoy.com. And for my own tribute to Ninoy, here’s the final image preview.

Let’s get it on!

For the color palette. We will be using four colors and a pattern.

• Red – #E7000A
• Light Blue – #4F919F
• Dark Blue – #01253D
• Beige – #FBDE8E
• Line Pattern – Alternate colors of “Beige” and “Light Blue”

Step 1: First, you need to find a portrait style photo. Looking around, I found this one rare photo of Ninoy to work on.

Step 2: Next step after finding your image is to open it in Photoshop. We will extract four threshold images from photoshop and work on it in Adobe Illustrator to vectorize and create our final vector poster.

Step 3: Before we can extract our thresholds, we need to “Posterize” our image. Go to Image > Adjustments > Posterize, then enter “5″ for levels, click “ok”.

Step 4: Now we’re ready to create our tresholds. These threshold images will serve as our pattern guide in Illustrator to create the vector layers. Go to Image > Adjustments > Threshold. We are going to create four patterns with the following threshold values: 195, 170, 125, and 60. Now these threshold values are not necessarily the same for all kinds of images. You just need to create four distinct patterns from darkest to lightest. Below are sample threshold previews for 195 and 170 values.

It’s up to you how you do all four thresholds. What I did was apply each threshold then save it as a separate psd file, and then undo the threshold applied, then apply the next threshold and save it again in psd. So you’ll end up with four psd files for each threshold value.

Step 5: Before we start working on our vectors, we need to create our own color palette in Illustrator. Open Illustrator and create a new document for the line pattern. Create a 4 px by 4 px size document. Color the upper half of the page light blue (#4F919F) and the lower half beige (#FBDE8E). You do this by creating two 2×4 rectangles similar to the image below. Then select the two reactangles or use Select All command (Crtl+A), and drag it to the Swatches Palette.

Create the rest of colors and you’ll have a Swatches Pallete similar to this:

Save your custom Swatches Palette by selecting the icon on the lower left portion of your Swatches window, then select Save Swatches and name your palette anything you want, I named mine “posterize-obama”. Close the line pattern document.

Step 6: Now it’s time to create our main document. Create a new document in Illustrator and size it appropriately. I used a 400px by 600px size document.

Step 7: Create four layers for the four threshold files. Import (Place) each threshold psd file placing them on each of the four layers. Start off from the darkest pattern (195) to the lightest (60).

Then you can now create four more layers on top of each pattern layer. These four new layers will be our outline or vector layers. You can also name each layers appropriately like I did.

You can also lock the pattern layers so they won’t be accidentally moved or misplaced while working on your vector layers.

Step 8: Before working on the outlines, we need to load our custom swatches file from the library. To do this, select “other library” from the Swatches Menu in the Swatches Window. Then locate and load the swatches file you previously saved.

Step 9: Now we can start tracing our patterns to create our vectors. You may temporarily use a colored stroke with no fill ( I use red stroke) so you could see your outline clearly against your pattern. Grab the “Pen Tool”. This is the most tedious part. If you are not yet familiar with using the pen tool, you may need some time to get used to it. The key here is to just average the outline, so don’t follow too closely on the edges of your pattern. Just roughly do your outline and smooth it out later. You can start of with the darkest layer working upwards.

Trace the main outline of threshold 195 first and then work on the white part inside.

Step 10: After outlining the first pattern (threshold 195). Apply the line pattern swatch to the main (outer) figure and beige color on the white (inner) figures. You beige-line-pattern layer should look something similar to the image below.

Step 11: Now work on the rest of the layers upward doing the same thing. Threshold 170 will be colored light blue, threshold 125 will be red, and lastly, threshold 60 will have dark blue.

Light blue layer:

Light blue and beige layer combined:

Red layer:

Beige, Light blue and Red layers combined:

Dark blue layer:

All color layers combined:

Step 12: Create another layer below all layers, this will be our background. Cover the layer with one whole beige rectangle, then put red and blue vertical halves on it. Create another layer on top of all layers, this will contain our text below. Create a dark blue rectangle on the bottom and type in your text using light blue color. I use ITC Avant Garde Gothic for the text font. On the original Obama Hope poster, they say Fairey used “Gotham” font. I think Avant Garde Gothic is close enough. Lastly, I made this vector button type of the Philippine flag similar to the Obama logo Fairey’s poster had.

Once more, here’s our final Ninoy Aquino “Obama-Fairey” inspired poster.