Border Patrol: Framing your artwork

My buddy David Blatner recently blogged about creating interesting frames and mattes in InDesign (mainly using the Custom Stroke Style feature). Naturally, someone also pointed out that Illustrator, with its ability to add multiple strokes, can also create some interesting frames as well. In reality though, when it comes to frames or borders, there's something even more powerful in Illustrator: Pattern Brushes.

But before we get there, let's first explore a few ways to easily add some interesting border effects to placed images in Illustrator. Yes, we'll use the Appearance panel to do so, and naturally, we'll save our appearances as Graphic Styles, so that we can easily apply them to photos and artwork at will.

As you may know, Illustrator can apply fill and stroke attributes to vector paths, but an image in Illustrator isn't a vector path at all. As such, we'll need to employ a few "tricks" to allow us to accomplish our goal. I've actually covered parts of this concept in a previous post, but in this technique, we'll take things a step further. To make this tutorial even better, I'm going to use images of David Blatner that somehow ended up in my iPhoto library :)



1. Place an image into your document.

2. First, we'll add the inner glow that appears within the border. With the image selected, click the Add New Fill button in the Appearance panel. Specify a fill of White.

3. At this point, we don't see anything happening because we've applied a fill to an image object. We need to generate a path so that Illustrator has somewhere to apply the fill. With the white fill highlighted in the Appearance panel, click on the Add New Effect button at the bottom of the Appearance panel and choose Path > Outline Object. Now, the white fill, which appears above the pixels in the object's stacking order, should be visible.

4. Obviously, the white fill hides the photo, so in this step, we'll fix that. With the white fill still targeted, click once again on the Add New Effect button and choose Stylize > Inner Glow. Specify Multiply for the Mode, change the color to Black, set the Opacity to 50% and the Blur to 3 pt. Use the Edge method and click OK to apply the effect. You should now see the lovely inner glow, but the white fill still obscures the view of the image. Click on the word Opacity that is listed in the white fill and change its Blend Mode to Multiply. At this point, the white disappears, leaving the photo and the inner glow intact.

5. Add a new fill to the image, once again specifying a color of white. This will be the white matte that appears between the frame and the photograph. With the new fill targeted, click on the Add New Effect button and choose Convert To Shape > Rectangle. Use the Relative option and specify both Extra Width and Height to 12 pt. At this point, the fill appears ABOVE the image pixels, so drag the fill down so that it appears beneath the Image Pixels in the Appearance panel.

6. With the bottom fill targeted (the one we just created in step 5), click on the Duplicate Selected Item button at the bottom of the Appearance panel. You now have two white fills that have a Convert To Shape effect applied to them. Target the bottom-most fill and change its color to a gradient. I loaded Illustrator's Metals collection of gradients and chose Polished Brass, but you're free to choose whatever works best for you. With the fill still targeted, click on the word Rectangle to edit the Convert to Shape effect. Change the Extra Width and Height values both to 24 pt and click OK.

7. Because I wanted a beveled edge to my frame, I added a 3D effect as well. With the bottom-most fill still targeted, click the Add New Effect button and choose 3D > Extrude & Bevel. From the Position popup menu, choose Front to view your fill head on. Specify Rounded for the Bevel and click OK. Your Appearance panel should match the screenshot above.

8. With the image selected, click the New Graphic Style button in the Graphic Styles panel. You've now defined a complex border that you can apply to any artwork, and any placed image. Joy!

EXPLORING THE PATTERN BRUSH

OK, adding fills and strokes and changing their appearances may be great, but they are obviously limited. Customized borders are certainly more complex and have to incorporate intricate artwork. This process is usually a tedious one and requires a lot of work, especially considering that each time you change the size of your frame, you need to adjust your artwork. That is, if you don't use Pattern Brushes. And don't get caught up in the name "brush" -- because you can apply a pattern brush to any path.

Admittedly, defining a pattern brush isn't a piece of cake. A pattern brush is made up of anywhere from 1 to 5 different pattern swatches. But if built right, you can end up with a border or a frame that can be scaled or adjusted to any size or shape instantly. If you need some help, Illustrator does its part by providing you with a few you can use. NINETY of them, actually. You can access these directly from the Brushes panel -- just click on the Brush Libraries Menu button at the bottom of the Brushes panel and choose Borders.



Using a few of the sample pattern brushes that Illustrator ships with, I was able to create a few interesting frames for my collection of David Blatner photos.



Of course, the reason why Illustrator ships with so many sample brushes is so that you can reverse engineer them, learn how they were created, and make your own. It's easy to reverse engineer a pattern brush. Once you've added a pattern brush to your Brushes panel, drag the brush out to a blank area on your artboard. Illustrator will create all of the pattern tiles that were used to define that brush. You can then see the pattern tiles, mess with them on your own, and create your own.

To modify the settings of a pattern brush, simply double click on the brush in the Brushes panel to open the Pattern Brush Options dialog box. What makes a pattern brush special is the fact that it can be made up of up to 5 different pattern tiles, which are used automatically, depending on the geometry of the path (inside corners, start, end, etc), and that it can automatically adjust itself to fit your path. You'll even find that pattern brushes automatically bend to fit the contours of curved paths (try them on circles and ovals!).



I've personally used pattern brushes to help apparel designers create lace trimmings, zippers, and other elements. Remember that you can use pattern brushes on both open and closed paths.

There is one thing to note. It isn't easy to apply pattern brushes to images. You can technically apply them by adding a stroke and then choosing the Outline Object effect for that stroke, but the borders don't "clip" to the image. An apparent bug in Illustrator also make it impossible to add a pattern brush to a mask, so if your image is masked, that won't work either (as you soon as you apply the brush, the mask contents are revealed). In my examples above, I actually created a separate rectangle shape and applied the pattern brush to the rectangle, not to the image itself.

10 Illustrator Resolutions for 2009

A while back, I started putting together a list of the features I thought that Illustrator users didn't use enough. When Illustrator CS4 came out, that list was somewhat modified, and this list is one that I've built from what I've seen out in the field. Whether it's doing onsite training at a company, reading emails that folks send to me, comments from users on forums, from attendees at conferences or seminars, or what I see being passed around on Twitter (follow me!), i've noticed certain questions that always come up -- ones that can easily be solved by learning a little bit more about the application you already know and use.

I had originally built this list under the title "10 features most people don't use in Illustrator, but should", but in the spirit of the new year, I've modified it to instead reference 10 possible resolutions for the new year. In other words, you don't have to do them all -- just pick one! That's right, pick one! I guarantee you'll be a happier Illustrator user for it.

1. USE THE APPEARANCE PANEL

You knew this one was coming, right? The Appearance panel is "the source" of all things about modern Illustrator usage. IT is the path to righteousness. If you aren't using it yet, you need to get with the program. Especially now in Illustrator CS4, the Appearance panel is even more central to your Illustrator experience, with its ability to apply attributes and effects directly from the panel. In fact, the Appearance panel's new functionality has opened more screen real estate for me, as I no longer need the Color, Swatches, Stroke, or Transparency panels on my screen anymore.

2. CREATE YOUR OWN NEW DOCUMENT PROFILES

Illustrator comes with four NDPs (New Document Profiles) plus two generic ones (Basic CMYK and Basic RGB), but those profiles are really all generic. Do you need all the color swatches that the Illustrator team put into each of the profiles? Are you always creating documents with just one artboard? How about symbols and graphic styles? You need to create your own New Document Profiles, with YOUR custom settings, colors, and content. I have NDPs set up for specific clients, for specific jobs (preset ad banners or ad sizes, etc.) and more.

3. CREATE YOUR OWN CUSTOM WORKSPACE

Adobe Illustrator CS4 ships with several wonderful workspaces already preset - such as "Like InDesign" and "Like FreeHand". There are also ones like "Web" and "Printing and Proofing". But again, these are general settings that aren't optimized for the way that YOU work. The point of Adobe including these workspaces isn't so that you should actually use them. It's so that you should be inspired to create your own. For example, I've created my own "Web 2.0" workspace for the way I like to work with web graphics in Illustrator. The Web workspace that Adobe made simply puts every single web panel on my screen. Make Illustrator your own by making your own workspace.

4. TRULY UNDERSTAND LIVE PAINT

Ever since Live Paint was introduced back in Illustrator CS2, I've been praising the feature. The problem? It's a horrible name to give a feature, considering that painting is only the least of what it does. Live Paint changes the way you THINK about Illustrator, and when you truly understand what it does and how it works, you'll find yourself in a whole new world, where vector artwork is pain-free. I even got Deke McClelland hooked on the feature a while ago.

5. LEARN LIVE COLOR

Much like Live Paint, Transparency, and the Appearance panel, the Live Color feature in Illustrator is a game-changer. It allows you to completely control color in your document, no matter how that document was created. If you are in prepress or are in art production, where you handle other people's files all day, you have GOT to learn to use it. I've always said that Live Color wasn't a specific feature, but more of a color "engine" that enables color editing in a whole new dimension in Illustrator. It seems Adobe listened because in CS4, the word Live Color appears nowhere at all. In fact, Adobe renamed the Live Color dialog to the Recolor Artwork dialog. Now THAT's a descriptive name. Now, if they could only make that dialog easier to use...

6. EXPLORE ILLUSTRATOR'S FREE CONTENT

Many Illustrator users are aware of the "annoying" standard swatches and symbols that appear in every document. Remember that Adobe provides these to help others learn how to reverse engineer them and create their own. But Adobe DOES ship with plenty of cool content that you CAN use. For example, Adobe includes some pretty cool brush and symbols libraries, features some great graphic styles, and comes with some really great templates (choose File > New From Template). And before you start rambling about how you're a real designer and you don't need templates, Adobe also includes a collection of helpful blank templates that make pretty good use of the multiple artboards feature.

7. USE ISOLATION MODE

There was a time (back in Illustrator CS2), when I hated the isolation mode feature in Illustrator. However, that's changed. Now, Isolation mode is a beautiful thing. Most Illustrator users are familiar with the whole "lock, unlock, lock, unlock" game that you play constantly when editing artwork. It isn't easy working on art when you've got tons of paths and objects all overlapping each other. In Illustrator CS4, you can even isolate individual paths. It's too powerful a feature to ignore.

8. TRY SMART GUIDES

With the updates in CS4, Smart Guides has a lot going for it. If you find the feature annoying, that doesn't mean your only course of action is to turn it off. Rather, learn how to control it. Smart Guides bring a new snapping behavior to CS4, and I suspect you'll like it.

9. GET ORGANIZED WITH LAYERS

I've always said that there are two kinds of people in this world: people who use layers, and people who don't. It's not much different than the clean desk/messy desk thing. But in reality, while using layers was just a "nice" thing in the past, there are just too many benefits to working with layers now to overlook the feature. Especially when you consider that now more than ever, we're repurposing art for so many different needs. In addition, so many other applications now recognize Illustrator's layers, including Photoshop, InDesign, Flash, Fireworks, Acrobat, the new Adobe Flash Catalyst, etc. That list will only continue to grow. Getting comfortable with creating layered documents now will only make things better for you now and in the years to come.

10. THINK ABOUT WEB SLICING

OK, I'll admit it, this one took me by surprise. Are you kidding me? Web slicing in Illustrator? But the truth is, I just finished recording a new Lynda.com title covering using Illustrator for the Web and as I was messing around with a few concepts, I realized just how useful slicing can be. I'll plan do write up a blog post on this specifically, but unlike multiple artboards, you can create multiple-sized slices in a single document and name them all, and export them to a web format all in one step. And I've found that Illustrator is most useful for those one-off web graphics -- the banners, the buttons, the art elements, etc. Generating lots of those, if you use slices right, is not only easy, it's been there for so many years. And we've never used it. It's worth another look.

TECHNIQUE: Emboss Text Effect

One of my dear friends, Bert Monroy, has a wonderful podcast on Revision3 called Pixel Perfect. Some of you may remember that I've appeared as a guest on Bert's show in the past, where I've spoken about using Illustrator and symbols, 3D, animation, and the awesome Live Paint feature.

Recently, Bert did an episode on how to create a license plate in Photoshop. As always, the techniques that Bert teaches on his show are great. But I couldn't help myself in thinking that creating a license plate in Illustrator would not only be possible, it would end up looking better, and it would be scalable to boot.

The challenge though is quite apparent -- license plates feature text that is embossed into the metal -- and Illustrator, with all of the wonderful effects it offers, doesn't have an emboss effect. I know, kinda silly, right? Is that an oversight? Not exactly. An emboss effect a la Photoshop's Layer Style and now InDesign CS3's emboss effect, has been a pretty popular feature request over the years. There were some Illustrator plugins that created a simulated emboss effect that have come and gone over the years, but they were vector and never looked realistic enough.

In reality, Illustrator DOES have an emboss "effect" via the 3D effect. One could, in theory, apply a 3D Extrude, specify a Rounded bevel, and set the position of the rotation to Front. However, even with complex lighting settings, the emboss never looked good enough for me. Especially when you consider that depending on the typeface, you'll always get really odd self-intersecting errors, which don't help either.

So I spent a few minutes with Illustrator with this challenge, and came up with the following:



Not bad, eh? I think the emboss effect on the text looks realistic enough. In fact, if you zoom in close, you'll find that I've also applied a texture effect to the plate itself, in trying to simulate that metallic look. In the end, I was able to achieve the emboss effect using a single text object that is editable, meaning you can change the text to read whatever you like. I also created a Graphic Style of the effect, making it possible to apply that exact same appearance to anything else with a single click.



What was that? Oh, you want me to tell you how I did it? Ha -- you know me -- I wouldn't make mention of something here if I wasn't intent on sharing the knowledge. Well then, let's begin...

DISCLAIMER: I don't specify exact values for the techniques here, just the steps you need to take. The values will vary depending of size, font, and desired effect, so the point here is to encourage you to play and experiment.

1. The obvious point of this tutorial is the emboss effect, so I won't spend much time on the license plate itself. But it's pretty simple to create one anyway. A license plate is 12" wide by 6" tall. I used a CMYK document and set my Document Raster Effects Resolution to 150 (which would be enough for what we'll need in this technique). I rounded the corners (a license plate has a radius of .5"), drew out the holes for the screws and created a compound path so that the holes were punched out of the overall shape.

2. I filled the shape with a gradient and then applied a slight drop shadow for that realistic touch. To add the texture, I choose Effect > Effect Gallery and applied the Grain Texture effect. I then added the remainder of the graphics -- the background at the top and the New York State text. Finally, I added the text of the license plate itself. I hope you like my custom plate (no, it's not my real license plate -- I'm not the type to get "vanity" plates -- besides I'm sure they would look AWESOME on my "hey I'm a dad!" minivan). I should also point out that I chose Helvetica Rounded Bold Condensed for the typeface -- besides for the fact that license plates have a pretty "soft" emboss, I wanted to get that rounded look. You can experiment with different fonts on your own, but I would suggest that you avoid using a serif typeface.

3. As a reminder, the key here for me was to have everything included as a single appearance, which would allow us to keep the text editable and to apply it with a single click as a style to other objects, as needed. In the end, I accomplished the emboss effect using 3 fills, and built it in such a way that would work over any color background. So to begin, we need to wipe the type object clean. Select the type object with your Selection tool and set your fill and stroke to None.

4. In the Appearance panel, choose Add New Fill, and specify 50K for it. With the Fill still highlighted in the Appearance panel, use the Effect > Distort and Transform > Transform effect to offset the fill up and to the left. Then, duplicate that fill and change its Transform effect so that it is offset down and to the right. Your text should look something like this:



5. In the Appearance panel, select the fill that is offset to the bottom right and apply the Multiply blend mode. This will ensure that the color on this side of the text will always appear darker.Select the fill that is offset to the top left and apply the Screen blend mode. This will ensure that the color on this side of the text will always appear lighter.



6. In the Appearance panel, select one of the fills and choose Effect > Blur > Gaussian Blur. I chose 10 pixels but as I said earlier, you should experiment to see what works best. Don't worry -- as it's a live effect, you can always go back and tweak this to perfection later. Once you've applied the effect, select the other fill and apply the exact same Blur effect.




7. At this point, you can already see the embossed effect within the metal. Now all we need to do is add the inked letters themselves, which we'll do by adding yet another fill. In the Appearance panel, choose Add New Fill and make sure the fill is at the top of the object hierarchy. Apply a solid color. In my case, I chose a blue color.



8. There are two problems with the new blue fill we just added. First of all, the sharp edges "kill" the nice soft embossed look, making it look like the letters are sitting above the emboss instead of being part of it. Second, the text has no highlights or shading, making it look rather fake. We can solve both of these problems with one setting. In the Appearance panel, select the top-most blue fill and set its blend mode to Multiply. This will allow the inside of the blurred offset fills to act as shading for the blue fill.



At the end of the day, your Appearance panel should look like this:



Naturally, you can now simply drag the text object into the Graphic Styles panel to define a style. That way, you can apply this emboss effect to other text objects. As an added bonus, you can download my emboss graphic style right here. I'm sure you can tweak it to perfection for your own needs.

As long as you stay within Illustrator, or place native AI files or PDF files in InDesign, the license plate is infinitely scalable. Just make sure you have the Scale Strokes & Effects setting checked. I hope you have as much fun with this technique as I did putting it together -- and I want to give a special thanks to Bert Monroy who provided the inspiration for this technique. And now that I have the license plate, I'll have to find a Lamborghini to go with it... :)

TECHNIQUE: Stitching Lines for Apparel

One of the things that I really love about Illustrator is that it's used across such a diverse professional spectrum. One of the really exciting creative fields that has always drawn my attention is that of fashion and apparel design. Before I even joined Adobe, I spent several years training fashion designers in NYC. And since then, I've had the pleasure of working with folks at places like Cabelas, Reebok, Victoria's Secret, Hurley International, the GAP, and more. It's one thing to design a cool brochure and flip through the pages when it's printed. It's an entirely different experience when you design something and then when it's done, you actually put it on and wear it :)

I should probably write up more stuff on apparel design only because Illustrator has so much to offer in that field. So for now, we'll start with this one. A good friend of mine recently got a job at Nike in Europe and was lamenting how difficult it was to draw certain kinds of stitching lines. We all know that Illustrator's Stroke attribute can be used to simulate a stitching line by using the dash setting. I'm sure you're all familiar with it, but just in case, you can turn on the Dash setting for any stroke and then assign a Dash setting (the length of each dash segment) and a Gap setting (the length of the space that appears between each dash). There are actually 3 sets of dashes and gaps (meaning you can specify a long dash followed by a short dash, etc.) and you can also use Illustrator's various Cap and Join settings to further customize the appearance of your strokes. If you have the Real World Illustrator CS3 book, there's good information on all of these Stroke settings on pages 48-51.

The question that my friend at Nike was struggling with was creating double-stitching. Obviously, you want to be able to create stitching lines that are easy to create and easy to edit and manipulate. Knowing how often apparel designs change, and how newer designs evolve from existing designs, it becomes increasingly important to work with objects that can easily be edited. If one had to draw two paths to simulate a double-stitched line, that would make it twice as more difficult to make edits.

Anyone who knows me, can probably guess that my answer will involve the Appearance panel, right? Well, most people are probably smart enough to know that you can create a single path and add two stroke attributes to that path. If you were to create a heavy black stroke with a dash setting and then add a thinner white stroke with no dash setting on top of it, you'd get a perfect double-stitched line, correct?



One problem. If the apparel you're designing isn't colored white, you'll have a white area in between your two stitch lines.



You COULD set the entire path to the Multiply blend mode, which will make the white go away, but if your stitch lines aren't colored black (for example, you're using green or red thread), that color will also multiply. If your thread is white, the whole stitch will disappear altogether. What you REALLY want is a way to make the middle area between the two stitch lines become truly transparent. And the good news is, the steps are pretty much the same, and at the end of the day, you can define a Graphic Style so that you can apply double-stitched lines with a single click. In reality, if you are an apparel designer, you should have an entire Graphic Style library of stitching lines alone.

KNOCKOUT GROUP TO THE RESCUE

The secret to making this work is a teeny little checkbox in the Transparency panel called Knockout Group. It's a setting that most people ignore. Few people even know what it does. Let's first learn what it does, and then we'll see how it will allow us to create quick and perfect double-stitched lines (or really anything else for that matter).

We already know that you can adjust the opacity of an object, right? So if you have two objects, say a blue circle and a red bar running across it, you can set the opacity of the red bar to 50%. The result would be 50% of red on the parts of the bar that extend beyond the circle. But the part of the bar that appears directly over the blue circle would appear as purple – or more specifically, a mix of blue and 50% red, correct? After all, that’s what transparency does – it allows you to see “through” the top object and see the object beneath it.

If I were to the now group the two objects together, I’d be able to move them around the screen, and as expected, I’d see purple in the middle area, and whatever was beneath the logo would appear through the ends of the red bar. If you look at the Transparency panel (fully expanded), you’ll see that the Knockout Group option appears with a line through it. This indicates a “neutral” position, which allows transparent objects within a group to be visible through each other. That’s how we can see the purple area where both the red bar and the blue circle overlap. As expected. This is the default behavior.

Below, the Knockout Group setting in the Neutral setting, the On setting, and the Off setting.



But let’s say I wanted the red bar to be 50% transparent so that it would interact with objects beneath it, but NOT with objects that were in its own group. That would mean I’d want to see 50% red in the area where the red and blue overlapped, not purple. By selecting the group and checking Knockout Group, I’m instructing Illustrator to knockout (or remove) the parts of the group that appear beneath transparent effects.

In the illustration below, the group on the left is set to the default neutral knockout group setting, while the group on the right is set to knockout group turned on.



To really illustrate what’s happening here, I could use the same color for the objects in my group, and use the opacity settings alone to knockout the overlapping areas. Using the same example, I’ll color both the circle and bar black. And I’ll set the opacity of the bar to 0%. So my group, using the default “neutral” setting would appear as a solid black circle. As expected. But upon turning on the Knockout Group setting, the top object (which is colored black but is set to 0% opacity) will knockout the part of the circle that it overlaps. Since the bar has no opacity, the result is simply a knockout.

In the illustration below, the group on the left is set to the default neutral knockout group setting, while the group on the right is set to knockout group turned on.



USING KNOCKOUT GROUP – WITHOUT A GROUP

Now that we understand what Knockout Group does, we can use it to create our double-stitched lines. The beauty of this technique is that it uses the knockout group setting, but without creating a group. By applying multiple strokes within a single object, we’ll “simulate” a group within our one object.

1. Draw a path with a Fill set to none and a Stroke set to black. Set its weight to 6pt and apply a simple dash setting. I used a dash of 6 and a gap of 4.



2. From the Appearance panel flyout menu, choose Add New Stroke.

3. Keep the stroke black and change its weight to 4pt. Turn off the Dash setting for this stroke and choose the Projecting Cap option in the Stroke panel. This will ensure that the ends of the stroke appear without artifacts of the dash beneath it.



4. Change the opacity of the top-most stroke to 0%.

It’s important to remember that we can’t apply the knockout group to one attribute (as it won’t do anything), so we need to make sure that we apply it to the entire object. So the following step is important:

5. Click on the word “Path” in the Appearance panel. This ensures that you’ve targeted the entire path object and not just one of its stroke attributes.

6. Turn on Knockout Group in the Transparency panel. You’ll actually need to click on this option TWICE: the first time sets the object to the neutral setting, and the second time will turn the knockout setting on.

The result will be a stroke that appears to have a double stitch. The top-most stroke knocks out the bottom one, giving you true transparency in between.



At this point, I think you have all that you need. Now you can tweak the weights of the strokes, the dash settings, and the colors of the strokes as needed. Once you’ve finalized the look of your stitching, drag it to the Graphic Styles panel to save it as a style. Now you simply apply the style to any path and you get instant stitching! Create a variety of different stitching patterns and create styles for them all. Save them as a Graphic Styles library and you’ll suddenly become the most popular person in your design group.

NOTE: If you think I'm so smart that I know all this stuff on my own, think again. I was first "introduced" to the knockout group setting by Pierre Louveaux, and Teri Pettit expanded further upon that. Both Andrew Dashwood (the one who originally asked the question about the double-stitching) and Jean Claude "JC" Tremblay contributed to this article as well.