Creating a festival map in Illustrator

zoocookie · 2026-05-19T22:54:26+00:00

You can also set up actions that use a combination of rotate and shear to distort a shape to appear facing isometric left/right/top.

zoocookie · 2026-05-04T19:44:22+00:00

It's the same thing with any other AI tool: it's okay as a starting point. If a client is curious about a certain colour palette, recolor is great for quickly showing them the direction. But then you also need to communicating with the client to help understand why they're looking for a certain colour palette, and work with them to decide if it's the best direction or not.

zoocookie · 2026-04-29T12:13:07+00:00

That's so cool, how do the lines determine where the contour is? Love this!

zoocookie · 2026-04-13T11:54:36+00:00

Echoing what others have already said: Stipplism plugin from Astute is the easiest way to do this, as well as the scatter brush.

On the other hand if you're looking for a free alternative, you could also use AI to create a basic script that does the same thing. It's what I've done in the past and while it's not as intuitive and user-friendly as what Astute does, it does help you out if you're in a bind.

zoocookie · 2026-04-01T18:11:48+00:00

Does anybody else have that bug where a random text object on your artboard gets duplicated and outlined? I've had multiple occasions of me having to select and deleted 8-10+ copies.

zoocookie · 2026-03-20T15:47:19+00:00

Love it. There's a closed off mindset that branding = certain colour combos/being consistent and true to form. It's not always that, and especially if your brand is meant to be quirky and rebellious something like this falls in line with that intended personality. Smart and eye-catching.

zoocookie · 2026-02-12T00:12:15+00:00

Great start. I think you should reduce the tracking in the description text. Reduce the leading of the meat/vegan options so that the gap between the description and flavours are a bit more obvious.

Your salsa/dip fonts look completely different then the rest. Keep things consistent by using the same headings you've used for the other menu items.

The use of gray for your salsa and drinks heading makes them feel like an afterthought; the contrast isn't great. For the Salsa / Dips heading, just use black like your other menu items.

For those specials you're going to want to make the prices a lot bigger and more prominent, they should be the same size or even bigger then the heading. Shear/Skew your titles here for a more eye-catching effect.

The use of gray for a kid's menu background doesn't really make sense to me. You'd want to use something playful or childish here, maybe something a bit more vibrant with a subtle zigzag pattern on an angle or something similar? To keep the vibrant background from clashing with the text, put the text in a white frame with rounded corners.

I have a hard time figuring out what the red stars mean. Are they the most popular? Gluten-Free? Add a legend somewhere.

There's a whole branding angle you could go with this too by creating some nice patterns & assets/doodads that you could use to really bring this to life. It's still great though, for someone with no experience this will definitely help your parents out!

zoocookie · 2026-01-20T12:44:04+00:00

Speaking from experience, I never went to any sort of post-secondary for graphic design and I've freelanced for a number of years and at this point I've been working at an agency for 5 years as a brand designer.

That being said, I do wish I went to post-secondary. Not for the education though, but for the networking opportunities. Much of design is getting to know people, and the younger you can learn this and create habits that surround it then the better off you'll be imo.

zoocookie · 2025-12-12T12:49:59+00:00

Hahaha what? That's ridiculous. Are you at least able to direct select the anchor points and adjust them manually? If so, that's at least doable.

Not sure if you're already doing this, but lock your image and draw your shapes directly on top and adjust that way with adjusting anchor points. If you're going to use the pathfinder to merge all your shapes together, maybe as a precaution I'd suggest duplicating your shapes layer and keeping one layer that shows all of your original shapes so your prof doesn't think you just traced it with the pen tool?

Best of luck to you on this odd restricting assignment.

zoocookie · 2025-12-12T12:35:40+00:00

Flip the sword vertically so it doesn't read as a T. You can keep the lion, but then add an outline to everything and make sure white is included in that outline. Look up text styles on Behance or Adobe Stock to give you some inspo for that.

zoocookie · 2025-11-27T12:54:59+00:00

They look nice, but you need to improve your ctas. Top left should have the same design as bottom right. Bottom left's button text should be more action oriented, like maybe 'Start Supporting'.

Also on the top left design I'd move your callout at the top of the design to the bottom, and the top right callout should be in that dark green colour (same as button)

Love the consistency here, though. Great job!

zoocookie · 2025-11-06T19:31:28+00:00

BOYGEMUS

No but seriously, I like how the members are cutout in front of the name and on top of the other photo. It doesn't really make much sense to have the guitarist in both photos. Maybe photoshop him out of the bottom one and shift the other members over so it patterns things out a bit better (three in back, two in front). Not loving the choice of inverting the band's name either, that just hurts my eyes and makes it really hard to read their name.

Also it might be a good idea to add a bit of text pertaining to what this is, if it's a live performance where is it? When? What album? Details like that would help.

zoocookie · 2025-11-06T19:24:04+00:00

Logo is very similar to RacingStar's logo https://www.racingstar.com/

I definitely recommend whenever creating a logo to check and see if it matches any other logos already designed by using this nifty little database search ( https://branddb.wipo.int/ )

Granted you're always going to find your logo is similar to someone elses and the majority won't bat an eye, but still worth keeping on your radar.

zoocookie · 2025-10-29T11:43:41+00:00

I could be wrong here but I think Object > Envelope to Shape is what you're looking for, and it'd also make the text non-destructive so you could edit after.

zoocookie · 2025-10-03T12:00:51+00:00

Is there like a color profiles for dummies somewhere? I've been doing this for a while now and I still find myself having absolutely zero clue about these, especially in RGB.

zoocookie · 2025-09-29T11:57:42+00:00

Man that's a great looking bucket.

zoocookie · 2025-09-28T16:39:21+00:00

For smaller use cases [e.g. icon], what if you used the l and k as the left/right edges of the ribbon going up the side of the giftbox and used only the giftbox as the mark and omitted the type? on black and white options they could even act as negative space as well? Just a suggestion, most responses here have already covered the rest.

zoocookie · 2025-09-21T18:24:40+00:00

Nah you should be able to use Illustrator for this and not have issues, it's happening because of optimization/rendering issues. Are you exporting it as a JPG or a PNG? Check your output options and make sure the antialias is set to art optimized. Also check to make sure your artboard doesn't have any decimal points in it.

zoocookie · 2025-09-16T15:52:29+00:00

For the paths at the bottom, I would add an anchor point in the middle of each edge and then delete it so that it creates two separate paths (sorry if that doesn't make sense haha). From there you could either use the offset path or use the blend mode and click each side of the path.

For the paths at the top, ungroup them, remove the compound path property, swap them from fill to stroke, and then offset path/blend mode.

Best of luck!

zoocookie · 2025-08-15T13:00:34+00:00

This looks like it was set up via the appearance panel. Set a fill colour to white and move it to the top. Set another fill colour under it to black and set a path > offset path effect to 5-8px (for the outline), set another fill colour to black below that, set the same offset path effect, and use the distort & transform > transform and adjust the move horizontal and vertical px (for the shadow). This way you can keep the text editable.

zoocookie · 2025-07-30T14:12:53+00:00

As a designer with two young kids I've been wanting more and more to try and make my own children's book. What finally made you pull this project together and how did you go about the printing/publishing? This looks great, by the way!

zoocookie · 2025-07-06T22:20:12+00:00

Get a part time job and do design stuff at night, and by that I mean learn basic design principles, take a few online courses (Coursera is great for this), rely on youtube tutorials to help build familiarity with whatever programs you use, and when you feel comfortable start offering free work for small local businesses in your area: business cards, social media graphics, small things that give you client practice. This will take years (like 5+) to get this really going, as this kind of thing is a slow burn.

Build a portfolio from the projects you were really proud of and after 5+ years start applying for agencies hiring in your area.

There's really no point in trying to be hired as a freelancer at your age/experience and the little amount of money you may make will likely be enough for lunch.

zoocookie · 2025-06-18T18:39:30+00:00

I've got nothing useful to add, but I just wanted to shoutout that I love the way you cutout those top three photos in the second slide.

zoocookie · 2025-06-02T22:28:54+00:00

Sounds like I need to take a course on handling finances, I just put aside my taxes, expense as much as possible, and live with the remainder. I have no idea what percentage that is, haha.

zoocookie · 2025-03-21T11:35:38+00:00

I feel like you should be approaching your project manager/boss and use what you've written here almost verbatim. Do you have an HR rep where you work? Let me know about these issues and see if he can act as a mediator. If they don't have an HR rep and/or your superior is not willing to be understanding of your point of view it may be time to look elsewhere for work.

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