Browsing the net today I found a really cool photoshop tutorial. I always wondered how they did this type of effects in photoshop. After watching this tutorial I can’t wait to try it out. They take a regular red apple and combine it with an open animal mouth, the result? it looks like the mouth is coming out of the apple, very very cool! a must see tutorial… and you know what? I was very surprise how easy it looked. (let’s see how it goes when I actually try to do it)

Photoshop Photo Manipulation Tutorial from Chris Gonzalez 

Another good resource I found from www.designm.ag is this post about 50 bold fonts to use for healines. As we know the headline is very important when designing a poster. It is the draw attention – first thing they see. A bad font in the headline can cause a reader to not continue to read the poster and move on to the next thing. 

If  you have worked with illustrator before or seen character created in illustrator you can see that shading and lighting are the key things to bring your character to life. Basic shadows and light effects can transform your character from boring flat to professional 2D.

I got a really interesting tutoral today from Nikki on my daily design newsletter, and with permission from Von R. Glitschka — the creator if this tutorial,  I am allowed to share his shading and Lighting illustrator tutorial with you guys. You can go to his blog post “Basic Shading and Lighting” and download the source files, step by step instructions (also available in spanish) and  how to create this amazing characters plus get the basic knowledge to create your own. and the best part? its FREE… yup… FREE just click the download button and start creating your characters and hey why not! share them with us!

hope you enjoy it as much as I did!  again.. here is the link where you can get all the goodies for this tutorial click here to learn about Basic Shading and Lighting using illustrator

I learned this technique last week and I thought its a really good way to create unique modern icons, so I decided to come here and share it with you.

Staylization is a representaiton of an image as an icon. An stylized art piece tends to have a set of rules, a
very particular style, in its representation of an image, almost like a
code for the ‘reality’ of the image,

There are 2 easy steps to do this. You first start with a photograph of what you want to stylize. I decided to do a lemon, I figured it could be  for a lemonade stand called “Lemonchello” Its a Lemonade stand owned by Marcello, so the combination of the two names gave me the perfect name.

This is the original image that I had.

What you do is you trace the lemon, do not add any details just the main lines of the shape you are working on.

(picture to be uploaded soon)

Then, you just doodle around those lines and shapes. With stylization there is no right or wrong, it is your own style. The only rule is that at the end of doodling around it, the icon will still have to be recognizable as the original object.

doodling has always been one of my favorite things to do, so this project was really exciting for me.  My result? well.. a very iconic stylized lemon. I decided to work within the triangle inside the lemon and for the complete lemon on the right, just use lines to create the shape. 

My next step would be to create text for this icon to make it into a logo for “Lemonchello”. Hopefully this gives you an inspiration to create you own stylized icons. If you do, post a comment and a link to your design to see your wonderful creation!  oh yeah.. by the way.. the teacher liked my lemon so much.. she kept it to show it next semester as a sample to other students… Have fun with this project, I sure did!

okay… so  I entered the 99designs contest for a logo. The company is called “Moobaa” they design some kind of souveneer items. They were looking for a logo to fit their brand. It needed to be hip, modern, fresh and with a speech bubble on the design. I was so excited I wanted to register right away. I closed the page and started to work on the design right away. after brainstorming for a few minutes, I started creating options, at the end, this is one of the ones I came up with.

(Copyrighted design@2008 amecoli www.amecoli.com
If interested to by please contact us www.amecoli.com )

the result? eliminated right away? Why? I don’t think is that bad, is it? well, I scrolled down to read the comment the cliend had and he said “NO COWS! read the brief”… well, he was totally right. I was so excited to work on the project, I forgot to finish reading the specifications. He didn’t want a design with cows or sheeps.. so I learned my lesson!