[Ask BB] Saving Brushes, Object-Expand, Raster Effects Settings and more

This is my first Question/Answer post here at BittBox, and I plan on doing this more often. All of these questions came in from twitter, so if you have a Photoshop or Illy question you need answered, you can leave a comment here, or send me a tweet. I’ll save all the questions that come in and try to answer as many as I can. To kick things off I have some answers below, just remember, I can’t answer every single question that comes in because of 2 fundamental reasons: 1) I may not know the answer, or 2) I may not understand what you were asking. Ok, lets try to de-mystify Illy and PS a little, shall we? Thanks for everyone who send in the tweets :)

[Ask BB] Masking, Object-Expand, Antialiasing and more

Read the rest of this entry »

Illustrator Tutorial: Dynamic Burberry Text (Guest Post)

Today we are going to go over Dynamic art, vector art that isn’t destructive to the vector paths. Basically this keeps things like text editable. Why would you do this? Well for example, if your designing a post card that has variable data and is going out to 10,000 people and you want it so the receiver gets their name printed on the card, but you want it to look designed and not just plain tex, then you need Dynamic text. Kodak, Epson, and Cannon either offer or are working on printers that support Variable data and Dynamic text. Today we will look at designing it so the printers can re-type the text on the fly.

Here is the goal of today’s tutorial.

Illustrator Tutorial: Dynamic Burberry Text

Read the rest of this entry »

BB Free Vectors: Birds in Flight

On Election Day, I asked everyone what kind of freebies you wanted the most, and the majority of you voted for vectors. So, naturally I made a free vector set for everyone, and here it is. Birds in Flight, 12 vectors available in EPS and SVG formats. Hope you like ‘em! Tweet Tweet :)

BB Free Vectors: Birds in Flight

Read the rest of this entry »

How to: Make a Hand-Drawn Font

Before I start, let me say that this is by no means the only way to make a hand drawn font. Ever since I began giving away fonts, I’ve had many requests for me to write a tutorial on my font making process, so here it is. This is how I do it, and depending on your responses, I can go deeper into a FontLab Studio tutorial. This tutorial, however, is designed to reveal my process from start to finish. A lot of you may not have FontLab Studio, so you may need to adapt the second half of the tutorial to whatever font software you may have access to. Here we go.

How to: Make a Hand-Drawn Font

Read the rest of this entry »

Illustrator 101: Reset Your Rulers (Video)

Hey everyone, before you blow up the comments about how you already knew this, let me say one thing. Not everyone is an avid user and these little tips are meant to help rid people that are learning Illustrator of some daily frustration with simple answers to simple problems. Today’s question was sent in by Morgan, and it has to do with rulers. Have a watch.


Illustrator 101: Reset Your Rulers from Jay Hilgert on Vimeo.

Read the rest of this entry »