Ew. No thank you.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIf we’re going to seriously hold ourselves to a “better than print” standard, the fussy attitude is required. There are no excuses for buying stock art here. This is it.<\/p>\n
I’ve never been completely satisfied with the quality of things I draw and scan in. I’m not that great on paper, and the process seems too slow to be feasible. Also, it should be noted that I use a graphics tablet. That helps. Were I using a mouse, a scanner would be a necessity.<\/p>\n
I want something that has simple lines, but is also able to perfectly crop screen shots. We’ll have to show a lot of websites living inside these illustrations, so that has to work. They need sharp edges.<\/p>\nIt’s nice, but the lines are thin and scrawny.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nDrawing with a 3 pixel, 100% smooth brush in Photoshop seems pretty good. I turn off pressure-sensitivity, as I want the strokes fairly even. Yet in the end, I find that the result looks too soft for my taste, and anyway it’s not a vector. I want something that can scale to displays that have no visible pixels, so this doesn’t seem to be the right way to do it.<\/p>\nAt least it has a good crop on the screen shot. Interesting.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nSo I’ve got a layer with the ugly devices, and we’re tracing on a blank layer above that. I then take that newly-drawn layer into Illustrator, to let it auto-trace my lines…<\/p>\n
After a little tweaking, I love how this looks. The edges are tack sharp on this retina MacBook, and the flow looks even. Where lines intersect, there is a visually pleasing welling-up of ink. It really has a nice look to it.<\/strong><\/p>\nYes, please. Just look at that character.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nBut we have to then export these all back to Photoshop, since the web is still pretty much pixel-based. The decision has to be made as to when we place the screen shots. I do so in Illustrator, since it seems like it will have the best result. And it does, but that requires now that we use both Photoshop and Illustrator just to prepare one screenshot for the site.<\/p>\nNo we’re not building a retro-bowling-alley app.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIt’s worth it<\/strong>. These images have a timeless illustrative feeling, and they’re very pleasing to the eye. I’m honestly not sure how much of a difference a retina display would make, but probably a pretty big one.<\/p>\nIf you play around with the process a little, you can get all sorts of interesting qualities to the images.<\/p>\nThe lines are wavy, but they’ll do.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIf that’s the process it takes, so be it.<\/p>\n
What we’re building here is something we want to repurpose for things we can’t even foresee. Perhaps we suddenly wish to make a giant print ad with an illustration of this character. Maybe it’s part of our branding. It would be great to be able to throw together whatever was needed from these vectors for anything we were building.<\/p>\nOur show will be up all of February!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nWe’re pretty excited to tell you more. Stay tuned over the coming weeks, as we share more details about our process as we get ready to launch our redesign.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Searching for the perfect visual style to reflect our level of quality and attention to detail is not easy. Find out what we came up with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7384,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[665],"tags":[753,31,85,62],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/illustration4.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7379"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}