Super basic Illustrator: event invitation

This article is originally published at https://lcolladotor.github.io/

Amanda and I are organizing a cultural student mixer for students in our department. One of the things we needed to do was invite everyone to attend. I like using computers, but graphic design is not something that I’m too excited about, but I still wanted to try something out.

My goal was to show an image of a bowling lane where the Earth (as the ball) knocks down “statistical pins”. We recently covered least squares in our class, so I felt that the analogy of “minimizing our cultural differences” fit perfectly. 

I’ve used Photoshop in the past, but after reading (or parts of) Photoshop, Illustrator, or Indesign? by Chris Takakura I decided to use Illustrator. The first thing I tried to do was to crop the Earth from the following image which I found using Google Images with the “large” option (I didn’t want small pics that would look bad if enlarged).

Source

But it turns out that you don’t “crop” in Illustrator. You use “clipping masks” as explained here. It took me some time to figure this out, but it was easy once I used the “ellipse tool”. I was expecting a visual shape, but I got a circular “path”.

Next, I found a good bowling lane image:

Source

With this, it was easy to “place” the image (I found the term from this tutorial). After resizing everything and moving the Earth image to the front (arranging it), I followed this tutorial to place text on a path. This was quite easy. 

Finally, I just wanted to add a green checkmark for the drinks + snacks + beers message. That was easy using the following image:

Source

After some revisions, the end result was the following ad which we sent via email to the other students:

This is as far as my graphic design (well, putting together) skills go :P

Thanks for visiting r-craft.org
This article is originally published at https://lcolladotor.github.io/
Please visit source website for post related comments.