Design the icons you want

My third course on LinkedIn Learning has just been released: Creating Icons with Adobe Illustrator. And of course as the title suggests, this is all about learning how to create your own icons using Adobe Illustrator. This course provides an overview of what an icon is and its key characteristics, then teaches you how to design your own icons using Adobe Illustrator. Instructor Bart Van de Wiele explores why you need icons, how you use them, and why scalability is important. Bart steps you through how to set up your Illustrator document before you begin your design process. He describes how to organize your work using Illustrator artboards for arranging, naming, and exporting your icons. Bart walks you through ways to import your sketch into Illustrator, then goes over how to clean up your sketch digitally. He shows you how to use simple, complex, and compound shapes to build your logo digitally, then explores several more advanced techniques. In conclusion, Bart covers best practices for exporting your icons for the web, for print, and for use in other applications like Photoshop.

Fast and efficient icon creation from Creating Icons with Illustrator by Bart Van de Wiele

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It’s that time of the year again! Adobe MAX, the biggest creative conference in the world is again taking place. However this time it is from the comfort of our couches and office chairs. But this years online edition does come bearing gifts. Because you can register for Adobe MAX for free and access all of the +350 sessions of the conference. So pretty amazing stuff if you ask me. And I am honored to be a part of Adobe MAX again!

My Adobe MAX speaker shirt was sent in the mail.

How to combine Photoshop-Illustrator-InDesign

My session at MAX this year is about using Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign as a powerhouse combination to save time, simplify your workflow, and create impressive work. Discover the value and benefits of using native file formats in each application to make roundtripping easy, and learn how you can speed up production workflows using techniques involving file placements, snippets, linking or embedding files, and much more.

The session is split into three separate sessions in order to make them easily consumable. After all nobody likes to sit in on a 90 min virtual session.

In Part 1, you’ll learn how to manage content in InDesign by:

• Using linked Photoshop snippets
• Using Photoshop layer comps to simplify your workflow
• Knowing the difference when placing Illustrator layers versus artboards
• Nesting InDesign documents

In Part 2, we’ll focus on bringing content into Photoshop by:

• Learning various ways of importing Illustrator artwork
• Discovering the value of InDesign snippets for mockups
• Learning how to use nested layer comps

In Part 3, it’s all about Illustrator. You’ll learn how to upgrade your artwork by:

• Discovering how to exchange text with InDesign
• Nesting native Illustrator documents
• Using linked Photoshop snippets to your advantage

Be sure to register for my session here.

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This is something that’s been on my bucket list for a long time and was finally able to make this a reality. In January of this year I traveled to sunny Carpinteria (CA, USA) to record my first LinkedIn Learning course (formally Lynda.com). I am not new to the world of recording, however this was my first time working on a personal project of this size. And instead of recording short videos from the safety of my home office, I spent a good amount of days in a professional recording booth working with my producer.

The result: Photoshop-Illustrator-InDesign Powercombo for Design

As a designer, you’re used to using a myriad of different tools, like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. And often, you need to place, import, or paste content from one of these applications into another. But choosing the wrong technique or file format can sometimes lead to restrictions in your workflow. Typical symptoms of this are difficulties round-tripping between applications, having to flatten layers, or having to save multiple versions of the same file. All of this can result in lost time or unnecessary additional files for you to manage. In this course, we explore the best ways to navigate Adobe’s flagship applications, using real-life production techniques you can apply in your print or online design workflows.

The courses is designed for anyone that wants to do more with Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign and includes both old and new techniques. The inspiration for my course came from my years working as a designer. I almost every project in this course is based on a specific project or situation that I encountered myself and was able to solve using these exact same techniques. So I hope this course will be useful to everyone.

Be sure to check out my course and try some of the free videos!

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