Illustrator offers some very powerful tools for doing damage to your designs. In this tutorial, I want to show you how to quickly create a grassy hill using the Crystallize tool.
1) Start with a new document (Cmd/Ctrl + N), and give it a name. In a fit of originality, I called mine ‘Quick Grassy Hill’. Set the dimensions to 600px wide and 400px high.
WordPress is an amazing publishing platform. Part of its greatness is how user friendly it is, with Revisions being a particular case in point. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve had to load up a previous version of a post to reclaim some literary nugget that I accidentally deleted in a fit of writer’s angst.
Unfortunately, in order to save me from myself, it has to use quite a lot of database space. Each revision means one more row in the Posts table, on top of the canonical version that you create every time you hit the Update or Draft versions. If you are like me and painfully obsessive about every single word, or you write epic 5,000 word posts, then that one post could have 20 or 30 revisions saved in addition to your working copy.
Multiply that by the number of posts on your blog, and it could quickly run up to the hundreds or thousands of rows.
You know the feeling. You open your email and there are 8 messages from your client, with the last one having a subject of ‘One other thing…’. It’s going to take an hour of your morning just to respond to them all. You open the first and it’s yet another change to the layout – the eighth one this week.
You ask yourself: Why do they have to be so unreasonable/difficult/demanding?
The client for this site contacted me again after I had finished his business website and asked if I could redesign his entertainment site. This site was a homage to Sherlock Holmes, but with a very creative twist – it was written as if the writer were Dr Watson living in the present day.
I love having the opportunity to do sites like these because they offer a lot of creative freedom. The brief was bashed out over a few late night dinners – my favourite kinds of meetings because they are always a bit of a creative free-for-all (and generally involve copious amounts of wine). Plenty of great ideas were thrown around and we both left very excited about the possibilites.
Did you just tweet about posting a status update to Facebook? Oh my.
Hi! I'm Simon Fairbairn and I am very fortunate because I love what I do!
I spend my days designing and building websites and teaching people about Search Engine Optimisation, traffic analysis and conversion rates.
In other words, I help people create beautiful websites and then I help make those websites perform.