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There’s nothing more unique to your creative talent than a series of your own doodles and sketches. Let’s use the good old doodle to represent our design services by combining quick and fun doodles with a print ready business card design. We’ll be drawing our doodles directly in Illustrator, and using the application’s print abilities to set up our business card document with the correct margins and bleed to build a complete print-ready PDF document.
The design we’ll be building calls upon some random ideas for the topic of your doodles. How about a stick-man battle or a cow abducting UFO for the focal point of your business card?
Start work by opening up Adobe Illustrator. Version CS4 took a step forward with its ability to easily create print documents, with new In-Design esque features for setting up bleed automatically. The business card size I’m familiar with is 88×55mm, but this may vary depending on your printer of choice. Enter 3mm into the Bleed options to allow Illustrator to set up your document. Also remember to ensure you’re using the CMYK colour mode for print. It’s also worth noting that folks from the USA will more than likely want to switch to the more common metrics of inches, as opposed to Millimeters.
Illustrator has kindly positioned a red guide to let you know where your bleed boundaries are, as well as the black outline showing where the final card boundaries will be. You’ll also want to add your own ’safe margin’, so that none of the important elements of your design appear too close to the edge. Drag four guides onto the artboard and line them up with the document boundaries.
Right click and unlock the guides. Select the left and bottom guides and hit enter. Input 5mm into the Horizontal and Vertical options then press OK. This will move the guides 5mm into the document, leaving a margin to work towards.
Repeat the process for the top and right guides, but this time enter -5mm so they are moved negatively. Right click and lock the guides to avoid accidentally adjusting them
A typical background you might find behind a doodle would be the ruled pattern from a notepad. We’ll recreate that pattern recreate a similar lined background to our business card. Draw a square with a white fill, then select the upper most edge with the Direct Selection tool. Press CMD+C to copy and CMD+F to paste in place, then move the path downwards towards the center of the square. Add a blue stroke at 0.5pt with the colour c35,m20,y0,k0.
Select the two objects and group together, then drag them into the swatches palette to create a new pattern swatch. This swatch will repeat when it’s added as a fill.
Draw a rectangle onto the artboard and align it exactly with the bleed margins. Add the pattern swatch as its fill colour.
No business card would be complete without contact details, so we’ll add these first. Type out your name in your favourite font (mine is DIN). Align the text up with both the ruled background pattern and the left guide that identifies the safe-area.
Finish off entering your contact details and adjust the line-height to match the height of the ruled lines. You might want to use a variation of type sizes, but remember to avoid point sizes less than 6 to maintain legibility on the printed card.
Now let’s get creative and decorate this boring business card! Use the Paintbrush tool and select a small round brush from the Brushes palette. Choose a typical ink-like colour such as c45,m35,y0,k0 for the stroke colour and begin doodling on your card design. Make sure any sketch lines that extend beyond the edges of the card also span across the bleed area.
There are no rules when it comes to doodling. Draw whatever comes to mind, for me it was a stick-man battle scene.
Don’t worry if your lines aren’t overly accurate, it’s only a quick and fun doodle after all. Just remember to extend your lines beyond the bleed edges.
Fill up any empty space with a random doodle, soon you’ll be left with the coolest business card design on the planet.
Press CMD+A to select all your objects, then go to Object > Expand Appearance. This will convert all those strokes into solid shapes.
Draw a temporary rectangle that fits into the bleed area. Leave the rectangle without a fill or stroke. Select all the doodle lines that extend beyond the edges of the bleed area along with the temporary rectangle. Click the Crop option from within the Pathfinder palette.
All the elements should now have been clipped down to size and fit neatly within the business card bleed dimensions.
Select all your text elements then go to Type > Create Outlines. Just like the Expand Appearance menu converted strokes to shapes, Create Outlines converts text to solid shapes, this will prevent any font related issues with your print file.
Go to File > Print to bring up the print options. Select Adobe PDF from the Print drop down, select Custom for the Media Size, then select the Marks and Bleed option and add all printer’s marks.
Illustrator will then export a print ready PDF file that’s ready to send off to your printer of choice.
Before sending off your file, you might want to double check your ink coverage and number of plates your design will use. In Adobe Acrobat Pro, go to Advanced > Print Production > Output Preview. In the following options panel you can toggle each of the CMYK plates to ensure your colours have exported as expected. Your text and linework will look their best with just one or two colour plates being used. The more plates a colour swatch uses, the higher the risk of mis-registration and blurred lines. In the screenshot notice how all the doodles use the Cyan plate, but the text is invisible, this is because the text only uses the Black (K) plate.
A few days later your freshly printed cards will be in your hands and you’ll be the coolest designer on the planet.
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Adobe Illustrator is a powerful software for illustrating that allows users to produce beautiful artwork, technical illustrations, and even graphics for both print and the web. Adobe Illustrator is a multipurpose vector illustration tool and its versatility makes it the most preferred choice among many professional artists and designers.
In the past, we’ve published a collection of Beautiful Photoshop Illustrations By Artists Around The World, and this is the latest post that will showcase the power of Adobe Illustrator. We present here hundreds of brilliant illustrations by artists from around the world that will surely mesmerize you and stir your imagination. Have a look, and feel the power of Illustrator!
We recognize that there are many more highly-talented illustrators that may not be mentioned here. We can’t cover them all, but with your help we can try to showcase them in future posts. Please feel free to comment on this article and mention the name of your favorite artist.
[By the way, did you know we have a brand new free Smashing Email Newsletter? Subscribe now and get fresh short tips and tricks on Tuesdays!]
Tom Whalen
Tom Whalen lives in McAdoo, a town in northeastern Pennsylvania, USA. He is a gifted and zealous designer come illustrator and he has skillfully amalgamated his passion in his idiosyncratically-designed posters.
Raiders of the lost ark poster
Christopher Lee
Christopher Lee is a multi-disciplinary designer and illustrator of sorts, born in Sacramento, California. He is a graduate from Sacramento State University and his formal education is in graphic design. His entire life, however, has revolved around drawing since he was old enough to hold a pencil.
Julian Dorado
Julian Dorado is an Argentina based illustrator and graphic designer who creates unique characters, cute animals, wild monsters, and various other font-inspired characters.
Chris Leavens
Chris Leavens was born and raised in Pennsylvania. He breezed through school and spent a good deal of time doodling, drawing robots, spaceships, and bizarre creatures. Currently, Chris is focusing on creating vector art using Adobe Illustrator. He produces most of his artwork — from start to finish — entirely in Illustrator, including textural elements. His work incorporates absurdity, anthropomorphisms, and a healthy dose of humor.
Zutto
Zutto is a Russian-based digital illustrator, artist and character designer, with a very unique style. Her illustrations are dreamy and full of vibrant colors and fantasy characters.
Matthew Skiff
Matthew Skiff is a vector illustrator living in Colorado. He is a well-known and trained graphic designer who has the ability to combine his graphic and illustration skills to create wonderful artwork. He makes illustrations for bands and creates professional t-shirt designs.
Yiying Lu
Yiying Lu is one of the most promising designers of Sydney, Australia. She was born in Shanghai, China, and is a confident artist with many attractive designs and illustrations in her portfolio. She runs her own design studio & teaches design at the University of Technology, Sydney. Her dream job is to furnish visual refreshment to the current Google logo.
Yukio Miyamoto
Yukio Miyamoto has been using and abusing Adobe Illustrator since the beginning of time (well, since the late ’80s at least). His artwork is showcased and sampled in a number of design books and he has trained thousands of people in all areas of graphics for both Mac and Windows. You won’t believe your eyes when you see Yukio’s work.
Nick La
Nick La is a freelance illustrator and web designer from Toronto. He is a well-known designer who has founded a number of projects including N.Design Studio, the popular blog Web Designer Wall, Design Jobs on the Wall, and Best Web Gallery. He has recently launched a new website called IconDock that’s completely dedicated to icons.
Helen Huang
Helen Huang is an illustrator born and raised in China and currently living in Los Angeles. She has a passion for illustration and is currently working as a full-time designer for an interactive ad agency.
Michael Heald
Micheal Heald is a passionate designer and diverse creative professional from the UK. His true passion and innovative outlet is his award-winning design studio Fully Illustrated where he offers creative services that include designing, branding, illustration, and 3-D motion graphics.
Susanne Paschke
Susanne Paschke is a German freelance designer and illustrator. Her passion is to accept the challenge of making something emotional out of digital vectors. She uses path tools and simple color selections to create photo-realistic illustrations.
Jonathan Ball
Jonathan Ball is an illustrator and designer from Cardiff, UK who has immersed himself in a number of creative fields. He is well-known for creating idiosyncratic and skillful artwork that’s regularly infused with original characters.
Ryan Putnam, aka Rype
Ryan Putnam is an illustrative designer living in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He runs Vectips, a blog dedicated to vector illustrations and he does client work under Rype Arts. He is an outstanding illustrator who has been drawing and doodling his whole life and received a graduation degree in fine arts with a concentration on graphic design from Colorado State University.
Rubens Cantuni
Rubens Cantuni is an Italian designer with a degree in industrial design currently working as an art director and supplementing his income with freelance illustration. He is truly passionate about his creative work and wants to make a full-time living from illustration in the future.
Sascha Preuß
Sascha Preuß is a German Illustrator who is working as a freelance Illustrator under the name Bubblefriends. He is known for creating cute characters and colorful vector illustrations.
Jeff Finley
Jeff Finley is an illustrator based in Cleveland, Ohio. He is co-owner of Go Media, a creative agency headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio and is an entrepreneur that specializes in illustration, graphic design, and 3-D.
Halim Ghodbane
Halim Ghodbane is an amazing illustrator based in Algeria. You won’t believe your eyes when you see his work.
Rod Hunt
Rod Hunt is a London-based Illustrator and artist who has built a reputation for retro-tinged Illustrations and detailed character-filled landscapes for UK and international clients spanning publishing, design, advertising, and new media, and covering everything from book covers to advertising campaigns, theme park maps, and even the odd large-scale installation too! Rod is also the artist behind the best selling Top Gear book “Where’s Stig?” published by BBC Books.
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Post tags: illustrator, Inspiration
How To Build a Vector Clock Graphic in Illustrator
In: web resources
1 Mar 2010If you’re looking to develop your Illustrator skills, here’s a tutorial for you! Follow this walkthrough to see the how adding layer after layer of vector shapes, along with a range of gradients and a spot of texture can quickly create a great looking icon-style clock graphic.
The main ingredient we’ll be adding to this design, other than a bunch of circles to build up the overall shape, is a range of gradient fills. These gradients are what really adds that extra touch of depth, and combined with an extra shadow or two, results in a fairly realistic looking graphic.
Open up Adobe Illustrator and create a new document. I personally use the CMYK colour mode, simply because I find it easier to manage the level of black in each colour, but you may certainly use the RGB for a wider spectrum of colours. Draw a circle on the artboard. Hold Shift to maintain a perfect circle and fill with an angled linear gradient from dark to light blue.
Press CMD+C to copy the shape, and CMD+B to paste behind. Grab the corner with the Selection Tool and scale up very slightly. Remember to hold Shift to keep the shape proportional. Adjust the lightest swatch from the gradient to a lighter shade of blue.
Copy (CMD+C) the outer shape and press CMD+F to paste in front. Scale the shape down while holding both the Shift and Alt key. Adjust the angle of the gradient so that it flows diagonally in the opposite direction.
Press CMD+F once again to paste another copy of the large outer circle on top of the stack. Fill this shape with black, then go to Effect > Texture > Grain.
Change the blending mode of the grain-filled circle to Multiply, then reduce the opacity right down to around 15%.
This grain adds a little texture to the clock casing, which helps add a touch of realism. After all, things aren’t perfectly smooth in real life.
Paste in another circle and scale it down to fit in place as the clock face. Replace the fill with a radial gradient from grey to white. Adjust the sliders to ensure the gradient doesn’t creep too far towards the centre.
Elsewhere on the document, draw a small thin rectangle. Fill the rectangle with grey, then duplicate it by holding the Alt key and dragging the shape downwards. Hold the Shift key to keep the axis constrained vertically.
These two shapes will be the base of the clock face metrics, but we need to duplicate them accurately to fill the remaining space. Group the shapes together (CMD+G), then to go Object > Transform > Transform Each. 360 (degrees in a circle) divided by 12 (figures on the clock face) equals 30 degrees each, so enter 30 in the Angle option. Press Copy to initiate the first transformation, then simply press CMD+D to repeat the action.
When you have a complete set of metrics, group all the shapes together and position onto the clock face.
Copy and paste another duplicate of the clock face, then scale it right down to the centre. Adjust the gradient to flow vertically with a medium to light grey.
Grab the rounded rectangle tool and draw a few fingers of various sizes. Fill each one with a relevant colour, such as a darker grey for the ‘little hand’, a light grey for the ‘big hand’ and red for the seconds counter.
Rotate and position these shapes onto the clock face. Use the shortcut CMD+[ to alter the stacking order so that they appear below the centre circle.
Select all three circles and duplicate by pressing Alt and the downwards cursor key. Change the fill of all three shapes to black and change the blending mode to Multiply at 20%. This creates the impression of a little shadow underneath the fingers.
Use the Type tool to brand your clock. Remember the CMD+[ shortcut to adjust the order of the objects so the text is below the clock finger.
Copy and paste another copy of the clock face and fill with black. Use the Ellipse tool to draw a temporary shape across the black circle. The aim is to achieve a nice flowing curve that intersects the black object. With both shapes selected, use the Minus Front option from the Pathfinder palette to chop out the shape. Change to Multiply at just 3% to form a subtle shadow.
Let’s start on the background. Grab the rectangle tool and draw a large square then fill with a diagonal cyan gradient. Use the shortcut CMD+Shift+[ to send the object to the back.
Copy and paste in front the background square and fill the new object with a repeating pattern. This horrendous fish pattern is hidden away in the default Illustrator swatches collection. Change the blending mode to Overlay to merge the colours with the blue gradient.
Draw a slightly larger black circle behind the clock, change the blending mode to Multiply at 30% and offset towards the bottom right.
Keep the black circle selected, then go to Effect > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Enter a 30px radius in the options panel.
This pretty much renders our little clock complete… Just don’t rely on it for the correct time!
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