Gradient Text in Illustrator

My WiApps client asked me to change the text on her business card to a gradient text. I thought, “sure no problem,” but little did I know applying gradient to text in Illustrator wasn’t as straightforward as I thought. After trying many different ways to get the gradient onto the text it was time to search the internet for help. I came across this nifty little video, sure its for Illustrator CS2, but obviously the instructions on the video can be applied to Illustrator CS4. Enjoy..:) http://www.bestechvideos.com/2008/07/27/adobe-cs-create-gradient-editable-text-in-illustrator-cs2

Home Page | Evil Dead The Musical

Home Page | Evil Dead The Musical

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Another Gem

Love it!

Thanks Biance….I’m hooked:]

I’mmm Back

Since I’m back I should probably write something….Term two was a doozy. But unlike many predictions our class hang in there and not one student couldn’t hack it.

Let’s see…Term two….

Still can’t achieve average volume in Pro Tools, Rocked Illustrator, very shaky on Flash CS4, don’t remember a single thing about Javascript, and am really tired of making posters. Found out I love Final Cut Pro and taught myself the basics of Motion and I still have a love affair with photoshop. So term two hasn’t been without growing pains but growing is what its all about.

Term three….

Is all mostly night classes, so that means I get to see the kids when I take them to school, take them to school… and… take them to school. But its only three months.

So far, After Effects is very cool and a ton of fun, Industry Operations… I was very confused about at first, but, I think it will be a great resource for learning the industry and meeting people. There are a few courses we haven’t gotten into yet.

While on the break I started a job for a friend of mine starting her own Wireless Applications business called WiApps. We worked on her corporate branding together and when I have her business card finalized I’ll be sure to post a copy. I also took on another friends business logo-all she wanted was a logo- for a Tutoring business she calls PG Tutor (as she’s in Prince George). The color of font was her choice as it matched her website, I drew the image in Illustrator, applied brushes to the strokes, and a drop shadow to the text to make it stand out from the image.

I’ll also post a couple of the posters I did in Illustrator. Gone Zombie Gone was made from scratch-photos and all

and the catching stars poster was made by using a photo from Deviant Art, and using almost nothing but gradient mesh in Illustrator.

A Very Busy Time

"say what?"

Since term 2 has started the whirlwind of new projects and assignments in knew programs has been very intense. One of the first assignments I completed for class is one of my son Desmond. The photo was taken when he was about four years old at the Parade of the Lost Souls, our first Halloween in Vancouver. I would still like to do some more work with the background of the image, but I wanted to share my first experience in Illustrator, live trace with ONLY the pen tool (not the automatic live trace option).

Wrapping-UpTerm 1

Term 1 has almost successfully been completed, one more final exam and a presentation to go. The first 3 months have been like orientation or probation if you’d rather, like at at job. Learning all the new systems and habits, adjusting schedules and routines and getting to know all your co-workers and collegues. My family has adjusted well, or maybe its me who needed to adjust, they all seemed to carry on as normal…..It’s not easy to let go of being there 24/7.

I wanted to write one more environmental blog and pose the question, why hasn’t every city in the world adopted a form of this solar power.

Andalusia is a region of Spain, which has a solar energy plant that gives the entire village all the electricity they need, for homes, street lights, businesses, etc. This is Europe’s first commercial solar power plant being operated by a company called Solucar. It works by sunlight reflecting off 600 mirrors called heliostats, which are movable on an axis to maximize energy produced. The reflected light is directed towards a tower which convertst the sunlight into steam. The rays of sunlight reflected by a field of 600 huge mirrors are so intense they illuminate the water vapour and dust hanging in the air producing the eerie beams of light. The steam is stored in tanks and used to drive turbines, and before you know it you’re powering 6,000 homes. Sunlight seems to be one thing we have ample amounts of, maybe its time to give mother nature an chance to replienish her water and oil and use some clean sources of energy like sun and wind. Our children will thank us for it.

Netiquette

netiquette site

The Core Rules of Netiquette by Virginia Shea

A Guide Through the World of Cyberspace Etiquette

The 10 Core Rules

1. Remember the Human
2. Adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life.
3. Know where you are in cyberspace
4. Respect other people’s time and bandwidth
5. Make yourself look good online
6. Share expert knowledge
7. Help keep flame wars under control
8. Respect other people’s privacy
9. Don’t abuse your power
10. Be forgiving of other people’s mistakes

Two of the Rules that stood out for me are:

Rule 4:Respect other people’s time and bandwidth

“In the old days, people made copies with carbon paper. You could only make about five legible copies. So you thought good and hard about whom you wanted to send those five copies to.”

I wish my stepmother Laurie could only use carbon paper to send me messages. She is addicted to wasting other people’s time and “bandwidth” by sending jokes, chain letters and silly posters to all her friends and family. Maybe I should send her a copy of Virginia Shea’s book, but I would hate to waste her time, after all, it’s your responsibility to ensure that the time they spend reading your post isn’t wasted and I’m not sure she’s that interested.

Rule 10:Be Forgiving of Other People’s Mistakes

I’m a network newbie and am destined to make many mistakes. I can appreciate people that can give constructive criticism to actually help me learn. As opposed to those who are self righteous and arrogant, out there to make me or others feel bad. I’m sure you were all naturals and made no mistakes right? All I can say is do unto other’s as you would have them do unto you.

Equality through Saving the Environment:Reboot

I have always had an interest in helping young people break away from being victim to their circumstance. Since starting this program at BCIT I’ve been trying to merge the two, what better way than through technology. Helping people help themselves.

Reboot Vancouver is a social purpose enterprise, active in the field of recycling, repair, and redistribution of redundant or discarded computers. Reboot starts a rigorous process of assuring that all the computers are screened to see if it can actually be repaired and re-used by another person. If it cannot be re-deployed then the parts will be separated and re-streamed to be re-used in an industrial process that continues to support the idea that nothing ends up in the landfill.

To date Reboot Vancouver has secured a growing list of committed Not for Profit agency partners in areas of economic distress within Vancouver and the GVRD.  These include:

Hastings Community Centre
Mount Pleasant Community Centre
Frog Hollow Neighbourhood House
Kiwassa Neighbourhood House
RayCam Cooperative Centre
Broadway Youth Resource Centre
Britannia Community Centre
Vancouver Native Health Society
The Carnegie Centre
Strathcona Community Centre
Thunderbird Community Centre
Watari
Vancouver Eastside Educational Enrichment Society

These agencies all support and recognize the benefit of equalizing opportunities to lower income families, children, youth and seniors within their community service areas. For example children of low-income families have limited access to computers usually accessing them through a curriculum directed school program. Often that means children have very restricted hours in which to access the computer. To add salt to the wound parents all to often cannot support their children because they are financially unable to afford the technology. This is where a program like Reboot will enhance the ability of individuals to participate and compete more equally in society.

Tsunami of Communication:Google Wave

What would email look like if it was invented today,

Lars and Jens Rasmussen have pushed the limits of what’s possible in a browser and developed Google Wave. The wave is a hosted object shared on a service that starts out as a conversation and instead of being sent back and forth like email,  users can open the wave,  leave replies and grow the wave. You know how in IM you have to wait for so and so to finish typing before you can see the message, well, wave is transmitted between users live, character by character dramatically speeding up the conversation. No need to worry if your added to a wave later you can simply use playback to see how the whole conversation got started, step by step.

You can maintain structure of the converstaion by splitting the wave and leaving comments and answering questions anywhere in the conversation and if the other person has their browser open looking at that same wave they can see this all happen. There is also a private reply option so you can type your message in your wave and select who sees it by clicking and dragging that person into the wave, whoever isn’t in that private message wave does not see what was written. You can add attachments by clicking and dragging from the browser and adding them into that wave where you want them to be seen, you can share images and edit them interactively.

One demonstration Google had was a group vacation and everyone shared their photos together, and used live concurrent editing to created a group photo album and by simply clicking and dragging it they could share it with anyone with a wave account.

Tools like Bloggy can publish waves on a APP engine, like a blog, if the user was on the blog page and another in Google Wave they could both see the conversation in real time, the same is true for your mobile devices.

Editing and sharing documents or meeting minutes and notes for content collaboration. When documents have been edited accountability is recorded and the part that has mark ups is returned highlighted to the author, this agian is all real time and anyone on that wave is a part of it. These documents can become quite long and if your added to the wave later in the collaboration you may want to use playback more specificly by choosing to playback any part of the wave you need or select whos playback you need to see.

Google Wave of course supports many languages and also can translate 40 different languages to the language of your choice all live in real time. The spellchecker is amazing, it not only checks the spelling of the word but its context, ie, ” I want some been soup,” wave will prompt you to type “bean.” and so on. Links are automatically created when you type addresses ending in .com, .au, .net etc and wave does recognize when its not a correct link address and will not highlight and underline it as a link. You can do a search right in the middle of your wave and add it as a link, image, url etc.

Creating a “twave of tweets” meaning you an use wave collaboratly with twitter and the real time remains. Google Wave will be an open source line share of code so that organizations can build their systems quickly and give accounts, even though it will be a different system it will still act the way wave does and communicate with wave. I have added the presentation video, it’s quite long, but to qoute Grant Bailey “This is really cool.”

Google Wave is not available to general public, just those developers who were lucky enough to get there hands on it, please keep in mind that everything I wrote about are things I found interesting, there is so much more Google Wave can do.

Cheers