Back to Illustrator tonight and for this exercise I'm going to recreate the cover for Queen's 1978 album Jazz. In actual fact, this particular cover is not much of a favourite of mine. However, it's ideal for taking advantage of Illustrator's extreme ease of use when it comes to creating geometric patterns.

It also gives me the opportunity to put Illustrator's excellent blend function through its paces, as well as creating an Opacity Mask, some 3D revolve, a little Free Distort and the Polar Grid tool

Don't worry, it's a lot easier than it sounds.


So let's begin:

1. I'm going to start by drawing the concentric circles that form the major part of the design. There are actually countless ways of doing so but in this case Illustrator's Polar Grid tool is perfect for the job. Select the tool and click on the artboard to bring up the Polar Grid tool dialogue box. These are the settings that I've used. The skew value is particularly important as this governs the increasing gap between the concentric circles.



This is the sort of result that you're after:



2. Before you do anything else select all and bring up the Align palette (Window> Align). In the palette menu make sure that Align To Artboard is checked and then align your Polar Grid to the artboard both vertically and horizontally. When I'm creating artwork I always find this a useful thing to do. It will place the object exactly in the centre of the artboard.

Now go to the Layers palette and expand the contents of the layer by hitting the small triangle. In the concentric circle group hold down the shift key and select the first six concentric circles. Now hit delete to get rid of the nasty blighters.



3. Now for the inner circles. Create a new layer and then draw a constrained circle that is just a little smaller than the inner concentric circle and set its stroke width to around 6pt. Copy the circle, Paste In Front (Command-F) and then reduce the circle in size (hold down shift and alt to do so). Now select both circles and hit Command-Alt-B (this will blend the two circles. Double-click on the Blend tool and from the pop-up menu choose Specified Steps. Make the value 7. You now have a second set of concentric circles.





4. This set of concentric circles now needs a little perspective added to it. Go to Effect> 3D> Revolve and tweak the circles a little. Below are the settings that I have used.



Here's how both sets of concentric circles should look:



5. Now select all and apply a white stroke to everything and a fill on none. Create a second new layer (you now have three in all) and move this one beneath the other two. Now draw a square and fill it with black. Use the Align palette to align the square to the centre of the artboard.



6. Now we're getting places. But first we have to do something about the concentric circles on layer 1. At the moment they are just a little too bright. They need to fade as the circles get smaller. As always there are many ways to do this, but on this occasion we are going to use an opacity mask.

Copy the black square that you created earlier. Now select the concentric circles on Layer one. Go to the Transparency palette and select Show Options from the palette menu. From that same menu select Make Opacity Mask. In the Transparency palette you will now see two squares. Click on the one to the right and hit Command-F to paste the black square into the Opacity channel.



7. You will be forgiven if you are now feeling a little confused. The concentric circles seem to have disappeared. Not so. Go to the Gradient palette and after selecting Show Options from the palette menu, double-click the gradient to fill the black square you pasted in with a gradient. Make this a radial gradient and tweak the settings as I have done below. The concentric circles are now back and they are gently fading to the centre. Now exit the opacity channel by clicking on the left hand square in the Transparency palette.



8. Now for some text. Create a fourth layer and make sure it is sitting on top of the other three. Choose the type tool and create the 'Queen' lettering at the top . I've chosen Myriad Italic for this and tweaked the vertical scaling and tracking as below.



9. Colour the text white and position it towards the top left of the illustration. Now alt-drag a copy of the text to the far right of the illustration. Select both bits of 'Queen' text and as before hit Command-Alt-B to create a blend. Double-click on the Blend tool and change the settings to Specified Steps with a value of 3.



Here's what you should have now:



10. Now for the Jazz logo. Select the Type tool and single-click somewhere away from the illustration. Type in the word and set it to Myriad Bold, colour the type red. Now to add some perspective to the type.

Back in the Selection tool, select the type object and got to Effects> Distort & Transform> Free Distort... Drag the anchor points to get something like this.



And that's just about that. Easy, huh?

Of course, aficionados of Queen will be quick to point out that there are some bicycles missing from the foot of the cover. Haven't got time for bikes now, some other time maybe...

It's about time I put InDesign through its paces. I've been neglecting Adobe's fantastic DTP package in favour of Illustrator.

For this exercise I'm going to show you how to create a table of contents in InDesign. In my experience this is a very useful thing to do. Not only do you automate the creation of a table of contents, but by creating PDF bookmarks you also make life a lot easier for yourself when you later come to format your document.

For this example I'm going to try something a little different. Rather than waste time getting you to create a book from scratch, I've taken the liberty of making the file that I use in this exercise available to everyone. If you wish to download the example file it can be found at:

http://europatraining.co.uk/Animal%20Farm.indd.zip

(Copy and paste this url into your browser window if the files does not automatically download.)


So let's begin...

1. For this exercise I'm going to be creating a table of contents (or TOC) for George Orwell's Animal Farm. As you can see from the screen-shot below, I've created a number of Paragraph Styles for the book. After we've created the TOC you can try out applying them to the text if you're so inclined.





2. In order to create a TOC in InDesign you must first ensure that certain Paragraph Styles have been applied to appropriate portions of text in the document. In other words, if you apply the Paragraph Style entitled 04 Chapter Header to every incidence of the word 'chapter' in the text, you can then tell InDesign to look for occurrences of that Paragraph Style and make a note of the page on which it appears.

You could do this manually, of course. You could trawl through the document and apply the Paragraph Style 04 Chapter Header to the beginning of every chapter of the book. I'm a lazy person by nature, however, and I'm going to let InDesign do this for me.

To do so, go to Edit> Find/Change... and ask InDesign to look for the word 'chapter' and replace it with the word 'chapter'. Confused? I don't blame you. As you know, this action will obviously make no difference to the document whatsoever. However, if you click the More Options button in the Find/Change... dialogue box, you can then access the Change Format Settings and select 04 Chapter Header from the Paragraph Styles pop-up menu.

So what we're actually doing is telling InDesign to look for the word 'chapter', replace this with the word 'chapter', and at the same time change the Paragraph Style to 04 Chapter Heading. I hope this is making sense to you.



3. So now every incidence of the word 'chapter' has been put into the Paragraph Style 04 Chapter Header. But what, I hear you say, if the word 'Chapter' happens to occur somewhere in the actual text? Don't worry about that just now. We'll get the opportunity later on to ensure that there are no glaring errors.

Of more immediate concern is the fact that our Find/Change... has ended up putting our chapter headings bang in the middle of the text in apparently random places as shown in the screen-shot below. What do we do about this?

My aim is to actually have all chapters beginning on a right-sided page. Once again, if I were not quite so lazy, I could scroll through the document and do this manually, using the 'enter' key instead of the 'return' key to force the chapter headings up to the next linked text box. However, once again I'll let InDesign do this for me.

In the Paragraph Styles palette double-click on the style 04 Chapter Header. In the resultant dialogue box select Keep Options, then choose On Next Odd Page from the Start Paragraph pop-up menu. Problem solved. All Chapter headings now start on a right-sided page. InDesign will even insert extra pages to automatically facilitate this. What an excellent program InDesign really is. I'm a fan.





4. Almost there. We've applied the appropriate Paragraph Style to every incidence of the word 'chapter' and we've got all our chapters beginning on a right-sided page. Now we go to Layout> Table Of Contents...

It's worth your while now trying a little cause and effect. The fields in the TOC dialogue box are fairly self-explanatory, I think. As a starting point you might like to use the settings that I've selected below. Remember, all we're basically doing it telling InDesign to look for the Paragraph Style 04 Chapter Header and make a note of the page numbers on which this occurs.

Please make sure that Create PDF Bookmarks is checked. This is going to come in handy very soon...



5. Click OK when you're happy with your settings and a loaded text icon will appear at your cursor position. Navigate over to Page 1 and click inside the text box on that page. Hey presto! A table of contents.

But it gets better...



Go to Window> Interactive> Bookmarks and you'll find a ready-made set of PDF bookmarks that link to every chapter heading in the document. Double-click on any of these and you get taken to that position in the document. You can now apply the appropriate Paragraph Styles to finish the book.

In the good old days when I worked in publishing, I've seen lazy subs take a whole day trying to finish formatting a document. Thanks to your PDF bookmarks you can do this in a couple of seconds. The Bookmarks palette is also the place to check for any errors in the document. If the word 'chapter' does happen to appear in the book's narrative you can now apply the correct Paragraph Style and go back to Layout> Table Of Contents... to update your TOC.





Hope you enjoyed that. Please post feedback. I get a little lonely sometimes.

Hello everyone on this lovely Summer’s day. This evening, in a wine-soaked stupor,  I’m going to be taking a look at one of InDesign’s most powerful and juiciest features. Nested styles appeared back in InDesign CS2 and I, for one, was excited by the possibilities of being able to nominate character styles to appear in any order or position in a paragraph. But then that's the kind of guy I am...

The following exercise is a real-world problem that I had to find a solution to a couple of years ago while working for a fairly big-name magazine in London. What the designers wanted was to have a paragraph style that began and ended with one line of a particular character style. At the time we were using QuarkXpress (sshhhssshhh!), which meant that we were had no choice but to manually apply character styles in a kind of hit-and-miss manner until we achieved the results we wanted. It worked – after a fashion – but InDesign, naturally, presents the more elegant solution. Read on...

1. For this exercise I’ve created a very simple A4 page with a two-column grid.



2. The next step is to create an equally basic body copy style. In this case I’ve named it ‘body copy’. No prizes for originality.



3. Now create a character style. In this case I’ve called it ‘ Red Intro’. It’s a very simple 12pt Arial Black, coloured red.



4. Next you have to create another character style that is identical to the ‘Body copy’ paragraph style. I’ve unimaginatively named it ‘body copy’. I hope that this isn’t confusing you.



5. Now we create a nested style. Alt-click the new button in the paragraph styles palette and head over to the Drop caps and nested styles pane. What I’ve basically created here is a ‘Red Intro’ sandwich.

In other words I have the ‘Red Intro’ character style applied to the next End Nested Style character; this is followed by the body copy character style applied to the next anything (it really doesn’t matter what you apply this to because you’re not really going to apply it, if you see what I mean). Finally, I have the ‘ Red Intro’ character style applied to another End Nested Style character.



6. The end result of this is that once you’ve applied the character style you only need to go to the Type menu and choose Type> Insert Special Character> Other> End Nested Style Here where you want the first ‘Red Intro’ style to end. And then you choose the same command at the place you want the Body Copy Style to end. And if you’ve done it correctly, this is what you get:

Here’s a quick tip which is very useful for those occasions when you want to make a fairly complicated selection in Photoshop.

Illustrator CS2 included the welcome addition of a 3D effects module, older timers like me will remember this from the days of Adobe Dimensions. It's a relatively simple 3D app but still fun to use. Here we're going to use Extrude And Bevel to create a simple 3D dice.


1. To begin go to the View menu and turn on Grid and Snap To Grid. Now draw yourself a simple square, adding a fill and removing the stroke. Then draw a simple circle and colour it. Next, alt-drag the circle to make a copy, select the two circles and alt-drag downwards to create two more circles. Finally, hit Command-D to repeat the transformation. You now have a dice with six spots.



2. Now select the dice face and alt-drag to the right. Next select the two dice faces and alt-drag downwards to create two more dice. Finally, hit Command-D again to repeat the last transformation. You now have six dice sides.



3. Now it's time to start removing the spots that you don't want. Moving a few here and there, deleting others. In the end you'll finish up with something which looks like the screenshot below.



4. Now it's time to save each dice side as a Symbol. Select the symbols palette and drag each side into it, one by one.



5. Now delete five of the dice sides and remove all the spots from the final one. Make a note of width of the square. In this case mine is 120px. Select the square and choose Effect>3D>Extrude And Bevel. Turn on the preview and set the Bevel depth to whatever the width of your square is (In my case 120px). Next, hit the Map Art.. button.



6. Now it's time to apply the dice symbols that you saved to each side of the 3D dice. Trawl through each surface and choose the appropriate dice face. Remember to check the Shade Artwork (slower) button and hit OK.



7. The dice is almost done. All that remains is to add a little perspective (everything in the real world has perspective) and light the dice to your satisfaction. Here I've used three lights to do this.

Now start rolling the dice!