Soy Inks

You wanted to know things about inks made from soy? Here's a poster that explains that. You can click on it to enlarge the image and read it better, if that's your thing.

I'm not sure why I made this.

Pathfinder in PowerPoint

Okay. I've got sort of a love/hate relationship with Microsoft right now. I've not exactly kept it a secret that I use PowerPoint for vector drawings probably a lot more than I should.

But one of the major drawbacks to using PowerPoint over actual drawing programs like Illustrator is that PowerPoint isn't a drawing program, it's presentation software. There are some things you'd expect from a proper drawing program that PowerPoint just can't do, like pathfinder selections.

Except that PowerPoint 2010 totally has pathfinder selections. Microsoft just hid them.

I can't explain why. Honestly the whole thing is a little baffling to me. Both Illustrator and PowerPoint are vector drawing programs, and both deal with object outlines. It would make sense that they would both have pathfinder abilities, and it seemed odd to me that PowerPoint didn't. After a bit of digging, it turns out it does, but you wouldn't know unless you looked very, very closely.

For those unfamiliar, pathfinders are tools used to modify object outlines in a way that corresponds with other object outlines. With pathfinders, it's possible to combine multiple shapes into one based on their outline, like so:

In Adobe Illustrator, enabling pathfinders is as simple as going to Windows > Pathfinder. Here's the window. Very simple, very prominent.

Now let's devote a few paragraphs and a long string of visual aides to show you how to get to pathfinders in PowerPoint.

First, open PowerPoint. Right-click on an empty portion of the toolbar. Select Customize the Ribbon. That's right. Not only is this feature hidden, but the feature to unlock the feature is hidden.

Clicking Customize the Ribbon will open the PowerPoint Options dialogue box. Here you can change the contents of your existing toolbars, or, in this case, create a new one.

This next bit is my personal preference. You can create your toolbar anywhere you'd like, but I prefer to put it under the drawing tools menu, so it shows up when shapes are selected. In order to do that, you'll need to open the right drop-down menu and select All Tabs.

Navigate down to the Drawing Tools and select Format. Clicking the New Group button (highlighted in blue at the bottom) will add a new group, which can hold commands like those seen in the left list. So now we can put the pathfinder commands in that group, right? Surely there isn't another level of needless obscurity on top of all this to prevent you from unlocking this basic drawing feature, right? Surely not.

To get through the next level of needless obscurity, change the Popular Commands dropdown to Commands Not in the Ribbon. There is a section specifically devoted to the things being kept hidden. There are a lot of baffling things to look past with this whole process, but take an extra moment to let this particular bit of nonsense sink in.

This menu is mostly filled with options that exist elsewhere in the program, but not necessarily on toolbars. Menus that show up when particular objects are right-clicked, dropdown options, subpanels, and the like. There is a set of commands, however, that doesn't appear anywhere else in the program. These are the Shape Combine, Shape Intersect, Shape Subtract, and Shape Union commands. These four options compose the basic abilities of any pathfinder set. Highlight them one by one and - with the new group selected - click the Add button between the two menus.

And there we have it. Now you've got your own pathfinder panel. Let's name it and get out of here. Click Rename down below the right-hand menu next to the New Group button.

This is the rename menu. Because everything else made so much sense. You'd think with the giant array of icons, icon selection would be an important part of this process. As far as I can tell the icon you select doesn't show up anywhere. The important thing here is the Display Name box. Again a matter of preference, I call it Pathfinder, you can call it Applefritter, I'd just recommend that you not leave it as "New Group," because this customization actually shows up on your screen when you access the group.

Exit the PowerPoint Options menu, and test out your new PowerPoint pathfinders. The options will stay grayed out until you select at least two shapes.

These options work pretty much the same as in Illustrator. I've already made a poster in PowerPoint utilizing this feature. PowerPoint's pathfinders are functional. They're useful. And yet they're still very much hidden. When I went to see if there were any other tutorials on this topic, I couldn't find any other reference to these features other than a German YouTube video from 2011 with 300 views. (credit to dipanteratuts).

If anyone knows why this feature was hidden, leave a comment. I'd love to hear some explanation. Like I said, I'm pretty love/hate with Microsoft over this whole thing right now. On the one hand, it's really exciting to learn that my most familiar drawing tool is even more powerful than I thought. On the other hand, this feature has been here for at least three years and Microsoft seems to have gone well out of their way to make sure it was only accessible in the least intuitive way possible.

It's weird, is all. The whole thing is weird. Happy pathfinding.

Animation with PowerPoint

PowerPoint can be used for animation. It probably shouldn't, though.

Paradium and You - The Citizen Guide to Safety came out yesterday. It was initially done as an animation entry to my local film festival and slowly, through hard work and determination, became the same thing but completed a bit too far past the deadline.

I didn't really have any place to enter a film festival. I'm an ex-culinary student who switched majors to pursue graphic design two months ago, and neither of the fragmented educations I have received thus far have prepared me for the world of competitive short film making. But I saw a poster for the festival on the day of the deadline, determined that if I could throw anything at all together in the four hours I was allotted it'd be a miracle, and decided that amateur speed cinematography sounded like a fun way to spend an afternoon. And of course, in the absence of proper animation software or common sense, I figured the fastest thing to do would be to make an animation in PowerPoint.

If I've learned one thing, it's this: PowerPoint is not appropriate software for animating.

I've previously pointed out that PowerPoint can export to video. This is a wonderful feature if you're looking to put a slideshow on YouTube. It is a terrible feature if you're trying to animate, because it lulls you into believing that if you can make a good bulleted list, you can make that list dance.

Take Janice, the only animated character in the five minute animation that can honestly be said to be animated, and that's if we're being fast and loose with our definition of honesty. Janice is on screen for a minute and forty seconds. During this time, she waves, blinks, has an x-ray look at her bones, shakes in nervous anticipation for twenty seconds, and collapses over dead. She doesn't walk around, doesn't turn her head away from the camera. This is her animation sequence in PowerPoint.

Can you understand what's going on in there? I made the thing and I can't understand what's going on in there.

The problem with animation in PowerPoint is that it doesn't support frames. Every shape from every second is in your work area at once, stacked in the order in which it will appear on screen. You can't even move things out of your way, because doing so effects how that shape will appear in the final product.

And the range of animations you can apply to any given shape is decently varied, but you have to bend it and wrestle with it to get anything to do what you want. See in the above image, those black bars in the animation pane on the right? That's a spin effect. In order to get Janice to shake in horror, I had her dress spin 0.5 degrees clockwise in a span of 0.1 seconds over and over and over again. It was possible to do, and the effect turned out looking alright, but I can't help but feel like there had to be a better way to do that.

I don't animate often, and I don't animate particularly well, so I don't know how common vector shape animation is, but that's all you can do in PowerPoint. That's why I keep talking about putting effects on shapes. If you want something to move, you've got to make that something a smart object and give it a set of choreography instructions from a predefined list. There's plenty of customization within that list (a shocking amount, actually. Like I mentioned, you can make fear quivers from spins). But it ultimately feels like it's more geared for text effects. Like some sort of presentation software or something.

I'm expecting too much from PowerPoint. Just because it can be used as a vector drawing program doesn't mean it should be. And just because it can be used to make fancy WWII era dark-comedy animations doesn't mean it's the best tool for the job. It fact, it's probably one of the worst. It's like an artist who dedicates his life to creating portraits in bottle caps. They may be wonderful portraits, but ultimately it's an unnecessary and somewhat silly limit to put on an artist.

So yeah. I guess if every you felt the compulsion to make animations in PowerPoint, the lesson here is don't. Use different software. It's probably easier and the results will probably be better. I'm not really sure what other audience I could possibly be writing this for.

Making Pixel Art from Scratch

It's been a pretty text-heavy week, so let's get some colorful drawings in here. And a tutorial, no less! Today I'm going to show you my method for pixel art. I'll be using a recent icon I made for a friend to use on a Minecraft forum. Meet ChiefofPigs. This is the finished product we'll be working towards.

Let's begin. This is her skin in-game that I'll be using for reference. While we're on the subject, Miners Need Cool Shoes is a pretty good resource for looking up and editing Minecraft skins.

In Minecraft, you can attach carrots to sticks and use them to lead pigs around. This pose seemed fitting. Sketching your idea beforehand is useful to determine angles and detail.

If you've had a lot of experience designing sprites, it's possible to go straight to the pixel-drawing stage from here. But if you need some help, you can make a template to work off of. This is where you open the image editor of your choice and get your guidelines established. I use a vector editor like Illustrator (or PowerPoint, if that's your thing). Just as a side note, a hard black outline adds a lot of bulk at a low resolution, so if that's your plan try to make everything just a bit thinner than normal.

Add details. Keep in mind that you're going to be reducing the resolution quite a bit, so don't add anything too miniscule. To give you an idea of scale, in this instance the pupils ended up being only two pixels tall.



The specific colors you use aren't important, because you'll be drawing over them with new ones when you refine your pixel image. The important part of this step is making sure that you'll be capable of distinguishing all the parts of your image by color. For instance, the skin further away has a darker shade to separate it from the foreground skin. Stuff like that.

Resolution reduction results in a ridiculously ragged replica. The next step is fixing this. Scale your image down to the desired dimensions of your finished product. Finding the right balance is crucial: the smaller you make it, the more detail is lost. Always keep a backup of your source image. In the image editor of your choice, draw over your low-res image using the shapes and colors as a guide. MSPaint works well for this, but Photoshop with a one-pixel pencil brush has the added benefit of letting you work on a new layer to keep your reference and product separate.

A lot of what you do in the refining process is up to your judgement. You'll notice I added a bit of shading on the legs and arms, and used a less solid outline on the headdress to give it a more feathery look. This can be a little tedious, but I've had nothing but great results with this method.

And there you have it! Have fun making your own pixel art and sprites! I'm bad at ending tutorials! Say hi to the family I guess!

The Spy's Guide to Omegle

Omegle is crazy. It's a one-on-one conversation with a complete stranger that can lead to some of the funniest, deepest, most heartfelt, most disturbing, or just plain entertaining communications you can have with another person. It's seen some decline in recent years, and you have to work a bit harder to have a worthwhile conversation, but once you get it going, it can be a fantastic place to kill a few hours.

A while back, Omegle introduced Spy Mode, which allows a third person to ask a question at the start of the conversation and watch as two strangers discuss it. I had plenty of fun with that, and compiled some of my favorite responses into a handy guide.

An Orderly Fashion

Image 1: Fuzzy

Image 2: Eliminate

Image 3: Floorplan

We had another four-panel assignment recently, this one on the principles of organization, or the way a design is divided between subjects and whitespace. As it was taught in this class, though, there are only three principles, so the fourth panel went to a combination of all the other principles.

Balance: Balance is probably the most common way of organizing an image. It refers to the amounts of each element in relation to each other. Image1-Panel1 creates a balance between internal and external with a dividing line of elements. Image2-Panel1 introduces an unusual balance, dividing the image between a defined but less prominent series of crosses opposed to an open, empty field of whitespace. Symmetry is a form of balance, but asymmetrical balance can be achieved a number of ways, such as using one large object used to balance several smaller ones, as seen in Image3-Panel1.

Emphasis: This is the way elements are arranged on a page so as to draw the eye into a certain area. The focal points in all the emphasis panels are very clear. In Image1-Panel2, the eye is drawn to the center of the various spokes, where the higher contrast sets it apart. Image2-Panel2 brings the eyes immediately downward to the heaviest concentration of shapes. And a break in the otherwise uniform field of rectangles brings focus to the dark rectangle in Image3-Panel2.

Rhythm: Rhythm is the defining aspect of a pattern. Anything that repeats in a noticeable way can be said to have rhythm. This is seen in the grid in Image1-Panel3, or the diminishing size and distance between the X shapes in Image2-Panel3. Image3-Panel3 takes a different approach, employing a pattern not of shapes but of a predictable pattern of breaks in each shape.

Combination: I like the combination panels. They're neat.

I'm posting the three I have right now because I really, really don't want to be tempted to do another gestalt week thing. I may miss posting a few days here and there, but it just got so hard to say new things about the same ideas repeated over and over in designs made only to showcase those ideas. So there'll be no organization week. Sort through your clutter on your own time.

Vector Drawing with PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 is not the best tool for vector illustration. It's a presentation program, and that's what it's intended for. However, the surprising thing is that it's passably good at both. It can export to .pdf, .png, .gif, .jgp, and as I recently learned, to video formats like .wmv.

PowerPoint has many of the features of more powerful vector editors like Adobe Illustrator, the problem is that they're pretty well hidden. You want a pen tool? Home > Drawing > Autoshape Panel > Curve. It's right under the text boxes and block arrows that people use for creating normal presentations.

The Illustrator Pencil tool is in the same panel in PowerPoint, but it's called Scribble. I get the feeling that some of these drawing tools arose by accident. For example, there's a tool that lets you draw straight lines connected by corner points when you click the screen, but turns into something like the scribble tool when you click and hold. I can't imagine the application for that in an illustration, but it makes sense if you're trying to connect two unusually placed points of data in a presentation.

And once you've drawn a shape, the editing tools available are incredible. You can edit anchor points, arrange the shape order, select grouping options, and just look at the shape format menu.

Every conveivable effect you could think to apply is in that left bar, and they're actually pretty well fleshed out in terms of variability. It even has raster editing options (Everything in the left bar from Picture Corrections down to Crop).

And because everything is drawn in vector, any necessary touch-ups can be done in other programs. You can save your design as a .pdf in PowerPoint and open it in Illustrator. Or, most surprising to me, you can just copy your selection from PowerPoint and paste right into a waiting artboard in Illustrator.

Where PowerPoint differs from drawing programs like Illustrator is its focus on presentations. In some areas, this causes drawbacks. There are no blob brush tools or pathfinder selections. Pattern fills are very limited, and text cannot be converted to shapes. However, because it's a presentation software, it brings with it something new: a library of animation effects and an audio recorder.

Here's a short thing I made to test the animation abilities of PowerPoint.

It's sloppy, but it gets the point across. In addition to regular movement paths, a number of slide transition animations can be applied to shapes. And all of it can be edited on a functional and precise timeline. Here's the timeline from the above animation.

I only recently started using the Adobe suite as part of my schoolwork, and I'm amazed at some of the capabilities of those programs. There is no doubt in my mind that Illustrator is better for professional design than PowerPoint. But as a veteran PowerPointer, there are some features I've grown used to that I feel are missing in Illustrator. Namely, the Format Painter and enclosed selections.

The Format painter is a tool in PowerPoint that lets you highlight an object and transfer all its format to a new shape. For example, let's say you have a rectangle with a 6-point dashed gradient line, two directions of drop shadow, and a 16° diagonal 3D rotation and you want all that on a circle. Just click the rectangle, click the Format Painter, and click the circle. Done. Maybe I've overlooked something, but I have yet to find that feature in Illustrator. The closest I can find is the Eyedropper tool, but so far as I can tell it only applies the fill color.

Enclosed selections were probably the biggest shock to my system. In PowerPoint, if you want a bunch of shapes selected at once, you drag the selection box to surround the shapes. This lets you select details within a large object.

Here's the selection process in PowerPoint:

And here it is in Illustrator:

Illustrator doesn't have an option to select only the shapes enclosed. Instead, everything the selection box touches is selected. So in this particular instance, instead of clicking and dragging once to make my selection, I would have to shift click nine times to select only the circles (or just deselect the rectangle, but that isn't always feasible). It's annoying, is all. Especially on projects with a higher amount of detail. Something on this sort of scale, for example.

If I want to do a quick, simple project, most times I'll still go to PowerPoint, just because it's an environment I'm more familiar with. The title banner of this site was made in PowerPoint. I'm sure that over time I'll become more accustomed to the Adobe suite. I sure hope I'll become more accustomed to it. That is one of the things I'm looking to get out of my Intro to Illustrator class, anyway.

That's all for today, folks! Tune in next week for another exciting look at the world of drawing programs, where we'll take a look at how Microsoft Paint is totally comparable to Adobe PhotoShop! (We won't and it isn't.)

See you then!

POWERPOINT CAN EXPORT TO VIDEO

POWERPOINT CAN EXPORT TO VIDEO

POWERPOINT CAN EXPORT TO VIDEO

POWERPOINT CAN EXPORT TO VIDEO

Why did nobody tell me about this!? I've known about timing and narration recordings for a while, but I never used them much because they still required the viewer to open it in PowerPoint. But just File > Save & Send > Create a Video and bam. It's a .wmv file. Playable in darn near any and every video player known to man.

Here's a presentation on calcium I did in culinary school. It's an old educational film stylistically based on the brilliant parody series Look Around You, which itself is stylistically based on old educational films. And it's on YouTube. Because that's a thing I can do now.

I've used PowerPoint forever. I ran a t-shirt design business for two years off nothing but vector designs made in PowerPoint 2007. It is mind-blowing to me that I'm only just now learning this.

The Creative Process

The Contest

The Original Sketch

It's done! I'm finished with my entry in the calendar contest. It's been submitted and everything! And as promised, I'm going to walk you through my personal design process. Let's get started!

Step One



We start with the basic shape of our subjects. The enderman is a tall, slender fellow, while the snow golem is short and bulky. For our purposes, a triangle will be the best shape for the job.

Step Two

Double-click the shape to correct the angles. We now have an outline that'll serve as the basis of our foreground.

Step Three

You know, snowfellow looks a little too nervous. Select and triple click the eyes and pull the anger gradient all the way up. Press the select key to apply the changes.

Step Four

Much better! 

Step Five

Now it's time to add the color. Right click, select "add color," and pick "fancy" from the drop-down menu.

Step Six

Make sure your content awareness fill is turned to "Medium Well" in the settings, otherwise it loses that cartoony look. Now it's time to work on the background.

Step Seven

We'll be doing the background much like the foreground. Once again, draw out the basic shape...

Step Eight

...and double-click to correct angles.

Step Nine

Right click the background and color fancy again. As you can see, this is an integral part of the design process.

Step Ten

Since there are a lot of shapes to fill with a large pallet of color, this process will take a little longer to render than the first time. Be patient, the end result is worth it.

Step Eleven

So we've got a snow golem trying to hit a wily enderman. We need to show that he's been trying and failing for a while. Bring down the top bar, select "effects," and highlight the "snow filter" option. Strike the select key three times to begin the "Lots of Snowballs that Missed their Target" filter.

Step Twelve

 And here's the finished product! Ctrl+S to save, ⌘+P to print, and Ѫ+4 to frame.

So now we just wait until February 8th to see if this gets selected for the finals. If it does, it'll go to public voting. I'll be sure to post the links to all that when they become available.

The deadline's still a while off and multiple entries are permitted, so I might do another one if I get any new ideas. This one came together really well, and with any luck, it'll go far.

I've got a really good feeling about this.

Gestalt Water

Today the subject of our lesson was gestalt, the psychology of perceiving patterns. The assignment was to represent the four properties that related to design in four panels. They are, as follows:

Proximity: Elements close together are seen as part of the same group or shape. This is demonstrated in the first panel, where a bunch of wobbly dohickamajigs seem to make one larger dohickamajig.

Closure: Familiar shapes can be seen as complete even when they are not. Take the implied giant circle in the second panel, which dwarves the tiny circles surrounding it without even existing.

Similarity: Elements are seen as the same group if they have a similar shape. This is seen in panel two and three, but three was really made to showcase it. Three is also sort of proximity if you think about it.

Continuity: If a number of points or shapes are aligned into a line or curve, they'll be recognized as a shape. The tail in panel four was originally hollow, with just a dotted outline, but the extreme whitespace stood out a bit too much. And hey: why does the whole thing look like a whale? Yup. Continuity.

It's fun review to explain the principles behind this project. There might be a lot of that at first while I'm still learning the fundamentals.