Keiser Graphics

Recently at my day job we have been trying to hire a Jr. Graphic Designer. We had one applicant that looked promising and it was my job to get an understanding of his technical knowledge, with a focus on InDesign as we use that program for all of our layouts of any document more than a single page. He seemed to have a general understanding of how master pages work. So then I asked him what he thought of InDesign styles. He then acted as though I didn’t know what I was talking about and asked if I meant fonts. I said no, I meant InDesign styles. It was clear that he didn’t know what InDesign styles were, nor how to fully utilize them.

I discussed this with a friend and fellow graphic designer. I see styles as the lazy way to work in InDesign (I really hate having to do anything time consuming and tedious), but she had a much better term. They are efficient. They make design and further tweaks and changes easy and time efficient. I have to agree that she is right on this. Even though to me it lets me be lazy, it also makes me have much more time to create other design jobs.

So here is the Tutorial on how and why you should always use InDesign styles when working on any document more than a page long.

To begin open up a new InDesign Document. Go ahead and use the default settings: Letter size paper, Portrait layout, .5 equal margins on all sides, Facing pages. Now you will need some text. First use the text tool to draw a text box that fits in all of the margins. I just copied and pasted several previous blog posts texts to the document. Any text will work as long as you have various paragraphs and such. Don’t worry if the text is longer than your current text box (we can fix that later). If your text is not longer than your current text box, just hit control+v or option+v a bunch of times within the text box (this will make it much longer than the current text box).

Now open up the various style windows.

I like to put them all into their own pallet. Everything you paste in will have the default paragraph style. Go into the paragraph style select basic paragraph, right click on it and choose edit style.

A dialog box opens up with various parameters to choose from, you can get more parameters from the tabs on the left. Turn on the preview button in the lower right hand corner and start changing the parameters. You will then see the text change as you change the paragraph style. I changed my basic paragraph style to have Helvetica Neue 10 pt font with normal leading, left justified alignment with no hyphenation.

Now there are several ways to create new paragraph styles (these steps can be the same for creating any type of new style.) First I’ll create a new Paragraph style for the headers. I’ll select the first header and change the font to the way I want it with the character window.

With that text still selected I will hit the drop down menu in the Paragraph style window and choose New Paragraph Style. The Style already has all of the the attributes of the selected text. I just need to give it a name and hit o.k. I can now choose the headers character style for the text I have selected. Now I can go and select the text for any header and in the paragraph style window just change it to headers and the text will format to my header settings.

Now I need a new style for the dates. I want this to have all the same attributes as my paragraph with the exception of being italicized and have grey font. I will unselect any text and hit the drop down menu and choose create new paragraph style.

In the general menu page I named the style dates and based it on basic paragraph, in the basic character formats I changed the font style to italic, and under character color I changed the tint to 40%. I then select the text that I want to be in the dates and in the paragraph style window I choose dates.

Now lets make that text span across several pages. On the bottom right of the current text box you can see a little red box with a plus sign in it (the plus sign indicates there is more text that past the boundaries of the current text box). Add 2 pages to the current layout by going Layout->Pages->insert page or through the page pallet drop down menu. With the direct selection tool (the one that looks like a black arrow) click on the little red box with a plus sign in it. You will see that the icon changes from an arrow to a tiny text box.

Go to the next page and with the mouse click and drag to create a text box that automatically fills with the text from the last page. Now if you are like me you have another text box with a little red box with a plus sign in it on the second page. Click on it again. Once again your icon has changed to a little mini text box. See how the icon changes when you hold down the shift key. Hold the shift key and then click on the upper right hand corner of the margins on the next page. All of the rest of the type has now autofilled as many pages as needed in order to show all the type. (If this didn’t work for you make sure you had enough text to fill up several pages before trying this.) This also works to auto fill text into text boxes on document pages that are linked in master pages.

So now you should have a document several pages long with paragraphs with their own style, headers with another style, dates with another style, ect. Here is where the real strength of styles comes into play. Say your creative art director comes to you and says, The Client hates Helvetica font, I need you to go in and change everything to Times New Roman. Go to your style window select the basic paragraph style then hit the drop down menu and choose style options (edit style if your right click the selected style) and from there go into basic character formats and change the font to Times New Roman. Turn on the preview and see what happens. All of your paragraphs with that style have changed! Now the dates have a little orange box around them as they have inherited the Times New Roman, but it doesn’t know what to do with the italicization from the last font. From the paragraph style window choose the dates style and edit it like the last to fix it. Wow this tutorial is getting long. I should end it here for today, but I will definitely come back and expand on this further. I’m sure you can see there are more than just paragraph styles, there are character styles, object styles, table styles, and cell styles. All of these allow you to change and update entire documents in a matter of seconds. Heck don’t wait for my next tutorial, start playing around and I’m sure you will see why you should always use styles, then you will have more time to be lazy and surf the web like me.

Many times in the life of a graphic designer it is necessary to scan a large image and then piece it back together in Photoshop.

Begin by making multiple overlapping scans of your image; try to make them along a horizontal and vertical axis. Now if your image has a round or organic edge, adhere it to a squared edge piece of board for scanning purposes. Depending on the size of your image you may have any number of scans.

Take a minute to look at all your scans, look to see if any of them are not at 90 degree angles. Select the ruler tool. Now click and drag a line with the ruler tool along an edge that is supposed to be horizontal.
Go through Image->rotate canvas-> arbitrary->.
The rotate arbitrary dialog box opens up and begins with the angle created by the ruler tool.

 Hit OK. Now your scan is ready for combining with others. Repeat this process for all of your scans.

Now you need to get all of your images facing the same direction, so you may have to rotate them 90cw (clock wise), 90ccw (counter clock wise), or 180 degrees. Take a scan that needs to be rotated.
Go to Image Rotate Canvas and pick the corrosponding degree and direction.

Now your image is facing the correct way.

Repeat this process until all of your scans are facing the same direction.

You are now ready to combine them all! Start with a scan that is on one far corner of your image, if your image is round start on any edge. Increase the canvas size to a little bit larger than your final artwork through Image->Canvas Size.

 The Canvas Size dialog box opens up.

Here you can put in your new size, the area on the bottom lets you control from which sides the canvas will grow. If you choose center your scan will be centered in the page with excess area on every side. I am choosing the lower right edge as my current scan is also on the lower right edge of the artwork

Take a scan that is adjacent to your first scan and drag it into your original scan. This will make a new layer in your first scan image.

Adjust the opacity of the second scan layer to roughly 50% (this does not have to be exact, so don’t spend too much time trying to make it so, just somewhere close so you can see both the original scan and the new scan layer clearly).

Zoom in close and use the move tool  to move the second scan around (make sure the second scan layer is selected). Use the mouse/pen to get the second scan close to lining up with the first.

Then use the arrow keys to make minute adjustments until the image becomes one clear solid image.

Zoom back out and increase the opacity of the second scan layer to %100.

Pick the paint brush tool, from the bar at the top choose a soft edge brush and from the mode drop down pick clear, and opacity of 15%.

Use this paint brush on the second layer to clear off the hard edge of the layer where it overlaps the first layer.

When done if one scan is darker than the other or slightly different color, use Image->Adjustments->Levels to make it match the first image. You may also need other Image Adjustments tools to make slight adjustments to make it match the first scan.

Now repeat this process with all of your scans. Then flatten the image by Layer->Flatten Image or using the drop down menu from the layers palette.

Use the crop tool  to crop to your final combined image. And finally you are done; here is a screen shot of my image that is 22” x 30” scanned with a scanner that has an 8.5” x 11” scan bed. This particular piece is called Pig Baby and is part of a series of drawings and hopefully paintings inspired by Alice in Wonderland.

As promised here is the Corel Painter tutorial on how to create repeating patterns. I think after this I will show how to incorporate all of the repeating patterns tutorials and various programs to create something really special. Though I may just do a quick tutorial next week on how to take various scans of a large image and piece them together in Photoshop as I have a painting right now that has been drawn out and is right at that step in my process. I figure I might as well get some of my own work done while I am sharing various tips and strategies in the digital art world.

Anyways let’s start with a piece of artwork that we want to turn into a pattern. Here is a piece that I created a long time ago with some Dover clip art and some painting.

First let’s open up the patterns window, to do this go to Window, Library Palettes, and Show Patterns.

Now use the selection marquee tool to select the image, it looks & works exactly the same as Photoshop’s selection marquee tool.

From the pattern window click the little triangle to the right and select capture pattern.

A dialog box opens up with several options for your pattern and a preview.

By adjusting the horizontal or vertical shift you can see how it changes your pattern.

You can adjust your patterns the same way in Photoshop by opening the cloned source window and changing the horizontal or vertical offset.

Now in Corel from the patterns window you can scale your pattern down or up and control the horizontal or vertical offset. I scaled it down.

From the brushes dropdown menu, choose cloners. So now that you have any cloner brush picked (and you can adjust the settings of your brush however you like), and your pattern picked in the pattern window you are ready to paint with your new pattern.

Now I felt that this pattern should have been a tiny bit bigger, so I adjusted the scale in the patterns window and then painted this.

By now you should all be pros at making repeating patterns in Photoshop and are probably wondering why should I ever learn to make patterns in Illustrator. There are several reasons you might want to make a repeating pattern in Illustrator instead of Photoshop. First you can make your patterns from vector images, (which I know I still need to go over that, maybe I’ll do that next week and then the following week show you how to make repeating patterns in Corel Painter) instead of raster images. Next you can make very precise patterns quickly with less work then it is to make a precise pattern in Photoshop. Third you can utilize making a pattern swatch in Illustrator to use over and over again in various vector shapes that will never get pixilated or loose definition regardless of how big or small your final image may be.

So let’s get started.

First in illustrator draw a square with the rectangle shape tool. By holding the shift key while dragging the mouse you will create a perfect square. Now we are going to draw some guides to that square. Go to the menu and hit view rulers and snap to point.

Now from the rulers on your screen click and drag the mouse out to a point on your square, the icon will change when you are on a point. Release the mouse button and you will see a new guide perfectly lined up with your square. Do this for all four corners.

Next let’s scale down your original square while holding the shift key to make it smaller. Let’s turn it into a rhombus.

Rotate the square 45 degrees by either using the rotate tool and holding the shift key while rotating or going through the menu transform rotate and typing in 45 when the option dialog box opens up for you.

Now I know this is diamond and not really a rhombus. No problem first reset the bounding box.

Now select your diamond and scale it, hold the alt key while you scale from one of the sides. You can now make this a true rhombus.

To start making the pattern we will need to be able to select the individual corners on our rhombus so hide the bounding box for a little while.

When the mouse hovers over a corner the icon changes to look like this:

Select your rhombus by the left side corner while holding the alt key and move the object till the left side corner is right on top of the right side corner and release. You now have two rhombuses side by side.

Hit Cntl D (Option D for those of you using a Mac) and you will see more and more rhombuses starting to line up. (You can also perform this transform by going through the menu and object, transform, transform again.

Now select your row of rhombuses and grab from one top corner and put another row beneath it.

Here you have a repeating pattern! You can do this with any shape in any kind of fashion; now let me show you how to create a pattern swatch with it.

Delete some of your rhombuses till you have just a few within your guide lines from earlier.

Turn the bounding boxes back on, select all of your rhombuses and scale them till they fit perfectly within your guidelines.

Copy some of your rhombuses so that you have them overlapping each side of your guidelines and color them in a checkerboard pattern.

Create a box with no stroke and no fill that perfectly fits on your guidelines. Move this box to the back of the artwork.

Select all of the objects including all of the colored rhombuses and the clear box. Go edit define pattern and give a name for your pattern when the dialog box opens up.

Now open your swatches window and you will see your pattern swatch there, select it and try making a circle with your new pattern.

And that’s it; you can now make vector patterns with ease. There are plenty of great uses for it, remember that ziptone pattern we made with Photoshop, with Illustrator we can make a true precise ziptone with tiny little circles. Here is an example where I used that rhombus pattern with a brush pattern I made (I’ll show you how to do this at a later time as it is a little complicated) to make a pretty text box.

My husband suggested I put up a few tutorials on my blog. I’ve spent the last couple weeks thinking about what kind of tutorials to do and where I should start. I figured the first tutorials should be relatively simple and then later tutorials would build off the earlier simpler tutorials. I still wasn’t sold on the idea of doing tutorials as there are already a lot of great resources of tutorials out there, but my husband thinks that people will like this in my blog. I’m not one for not trying new things so here is my first tutorial. If you like it you can thank my husband.I figured a fun spot to start is with repeating patterns. They can be made in Illustrator, Photoshop, and Corel Painter. They have many wonderful uses, and I wish they could be used in InDesign (though I have up to Adobe CS3 so if they are used in CS4 disregard my last comment). For those of you who don’t have these products you can usually download trial versions for free. Now should you want them but not be able to pay full price, go enroll in some classes at your local community college. Then buy the software at the student price. Then fail the class (or pass it if you really care). You still end up paying substantially less than full price for the software this way.

Back to repeating patterns. Let’s start with Photoshop as this is the simplest way to create a repeating pattern, but take note this pattern will be in raster format. (Damn, I should have started with a tutorial on raster vs. vector format, I guess I’ll go back to that next week.) In Photo shop I wanted to create a halftone pattern that you might use for shading in a comic book the old fashioned way. At one time you used to be able to easily purchase all kinds of halftone patterns called ziptones on clear film that you would then transfer onto the paper like a rub on decal. Now days this is accomplished with a computer with much more ease. Note I am working on a PC, for any using a Mac replace any ctrl button with the option button.

1. Open a new document, make it the resolution that your final piece will be in with a transparent background. I made mine 72 dpi and 1 inch by 1 inch.

2. Create your pattern; here I am making a halftone pattern with little dots through out the image.

3. Select an area where the pattern repeats.

4. Go to the menu and pick edit>define pattern. You will be prompted to name your pattern.

Now you can close the new document, you don’t have to save it or anything. Now that you have your new Photoshop pattern you might be wondering what you can do with it.

5. Open up a new document, use what ever settings you feel like. Mine was 72 dpi and 3 inches by 3 inches with a white background.

6. Select the paint bucket tool. At the top of the window you will see a bunch of options for the paint bucket tool. Hit the dropdown menu for the option of foreground and pick pattern. From here you can pick the pattern you made earlier. By clicking on the drop down menu right next to the foreground drop down menu. Now use the paint bucket tool and you will see your pattern fill up the entire page area.

7. You might be thinking hey this is pretty nifty, but wait there is more. Select the pattern stamp tool, now if you don’t see it click on the tiny arrow at the bottom of the clone stamp tool in order to pick the pattern stamp tool. The icons for these tools are almost identical.

8. Now that you have this tool selected go to the top of the screen where you have all the different attributes of your tool. You will see that it has all the brush attributes and at the end there is a drop down menu to pick your pattern much like the paint bucket tool.

9. Now you can paint with your pattern that you made earlier. Why don’t you experiment here with your new pattern and possibly make a few more? No need to ever pay for a ziptone again, and now you are limitless on what kinds of patterns you can use. You can see in my example how I used the dot pattern on the edges of the little sprites wings.

Wow well this seems like a pretty complete tutorial by itself. Next week I’ll do another tutorial on repeating patterns in Illustrator. Repeating patterns in Illustrator are very versatile and they are easier to make them perfectly line up. I’ll show you how.