posted November 26, 2009 06:10 AM
Hi, I have one of those jobs to do- mostly a favour for a freind who's owed a favour...
They have a really old fuzzy jpg logo from a decade ago, and I've been asked to redo it on a banner- 6 x 3 ft or thereabouts.
The text is distorted in a wave, then has a really deep shadow with some shading on the shadow. It is kind-of like what you can do with Xara- but it's not achievable in Xara.
I've tried making a vector & distorting it, but can't find any program to run a deep shadow, and maintain it as a vector.
Does anyone have any ideas of which program can help with shadows like that?
If all else fails, there's the option of hand-doing it all, I guess, but I was trying to avoid that, as I wanted it to be over quickly...
-------------------- "Stewey" on chat
"...there are no limits when you aim for perfection..." Jonathan Livingston Seagull Posts: 7014 | From: Highgrove via Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia | Registered: Dec 2002
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posted November 26, 2009 07:36 AM
by shadow, do you mean bitmap shadow or solid vector shadow with sharp edge? I would have thought Illy could do it. But I'm not sure exactly what you mean.
posted November 26, 2009 08:05 AM
Stewey, I am new to Flexi-signpro. It has done everything I have asked of it so far. Of coarse you have to be inteligent enough to ask it nicely. I like Mr. Dalton am a little unsure of your dilemma as described though.
-------------------- Bob Sauls Sauls Signs & Designs Tallahassee, Fl
"Today I'll meet nice people and draw for them!" Posts: 765 | From: Tallahassee, Fl | Registered: Jun 2009
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posted November 26, 2009 09:05 AM
Does the shadow have a gradient or a solid color?
-------------------- Kelsey Dum Dum Designs Sherwood, AR 72120 501.765.2166 kelsey@dumdesigns.com Posts: 827 | From: Sherwood, AR | Registered: Oct 2005
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posted November 26, 2009 09:53 AM
I use CasMate for creating shadows like that.
If you want, send it to me, and I can drop the shadow on it for you.
-------------------- Mark Kottwitz Kottwitz Graphics Ridgely, MD www.SeeMySignWork.com -------------------------- Imagination is more important than knowledge. -- Albert Einstein Posts: 746 | From: Ridgely, MD | Registered: Oct 2000
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-------------------- Joe Crumley Norman Sign Company 2200 Research Park Blvd. Norman, OK 73069 Posts: 1428 | From: 2200 Research Park Blvd. | Registered: Sep 2001
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posted November 26, 2009 10:10 AM
I sort of doubt Ian would say shadow, if he meant extrude... but I wanted an excuse to play with the 3D extrude effects anyway, so I did... just in case that's what he meant...
posted November 26, 2009 07:09 PM
Thanks- sorry Doug, I'm from the old school, before the word 'extrude' came into general computer use! I guess some call it 'blocking', too. What you drew is what I was meaning- an extruded block. I still tend to call it a shadow, though it's not bitmapped or fuzzy.
Here's the picture they want... (I won't give my opinion of it, as I'm sure you all know it already...!)
I have vectorised the background, and done and average job of finding text that it could have been (actually for what I have, it most closely resembled a font from The Fontry, except for the initial S).
It was the shadow (sorry, the extrusion!) I was stuck on generating by vector.
[ November 26, 2009, 07:21 PM: Message edited by: Ian Stewart-Koster ]
-------------------- "Stewey" on chat
"...there are no limits when you aim for perfection..." Jonathan Livingston Seagull Posts: 7014 | From: Highgrove via Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia | Registered: Dec 2002
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posted November 26, 2009 07:19 PM
(does the photo come up? I can't see it here)
-------------------- "Stewey" on chat
"...there are no limits when you aim for perfection..." Jonathan Livingston Seagull Posts: 7014 | From: Highgrove via Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia | Registered: Dec 2002
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posted November 26, 2009 09:00 PM
Thank you Doug- I'll go & get the file. I did try with Xara- nice-looking & easy- but it left me with formats that were not exportable for decent printing.
The friends with the logo, well they have a studio & have done some recordings of one of our daughters very well. This is a favour from me for them going over & above what we asked for.
With some people, you just don't even try to convince them of a different design- not worth the potential friction! I had another job recently like that & had to just 'do it' get the money, and look the other way every time I pass it. The customer was a 'graphic designer'. In fact the sign is a billboard that is illegible, but it's what she wanted & what she created. Too bad it doesn't work & you can't read it. Her personality was one of those with which disagreement involves many hours of tortuous monologues in which interruption is impossible, and winning or education is even further from possible! Sometimes these sorts turn up.
-------------------- "Stewey" on chat
"...there are no limits when you aim for perfection..." Jonathan Livingston Seagull Posts: 7014 | From: Highgrove via Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia | Registered: Dec 2002
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posted November 26, 2009 11:02 PM
Squint Dave Squint!! It'll be fuzzy and nice again!!! LOL
Good 15 min reproduction Doug..If you spent a couple of hours you could make it perfect!!!
But as Ian says...why???
I was never close to the best...but that is a pretty bad thing to have to start with.
-------------------- Dave Grundy retired in Chelem,Yucatan,Mexico/Hensall,Ontario,Canada 1-519-262-3651 Canada 011-52-1-999-102-2923 Mexico cell 1-226-785-8957 Canada/Mexico home
posted November 26, 2009 11:24 PM
Wow, thanks, Doug! I don't think they'll know the difference! I'll just retweak the gradient inside the text, a bit better- that green comes in badly from the left, though the rest is tolerable.
I'll have to spend more time with that feature & with Illy. We have CS2, but my main use of it is file conversions between other formats. Sometimes they only work if exported from another program (eg X3) , opened in Illy & resaved.
I really appreciate that.
-------------------- "Stewey" on chat
"...there are no limits when you aim for perfection..." Jonathan Livingston Seagull Posts: 7014 | From: Highgrove via Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia | Registered: Dec 2002
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posted November 27, 2009 07:39 AM
Just to be safe, you should 45 degree your Gradient Fill Doug. It kinda looks like that on the original. Wow, that's a lot of colors.
posted November 27, 2009 08:05 AM
I've since done that, Curtis, but thanks for seeing it!
-------------------- "Stewey" on chat
"...there are no limits when you aim for perfection..." Jonathan Livingston Seagull Posts: 7014 | From: Highgrove via Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia | Registered: Dec 2002
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posted November 27, 2009 08:06 AM
I've since done that, Curtis, but thanks for seeing it!
(P.S. back to my original query of a sort- does anyone have any idea what program it might have been created in, originally, with those extrusions/shadows like that, and the shading on them?)
-------------------- "Stewey" on chat
"...there are no limits when you aim for perfection..." Jonathan Livingston Seagull Posts: 7014 | From: Highgrove via Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia | Registered: Dec 2002
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posted November 27, 2009 08:52 AM
Sadly it looks like MS Word's "Word Art". I come from a town where everyone who owned a $200 computer could open Word and drop a cat on the keyboard and call it "Graphic Art". Word Art was a big thing in the late 90s. It still makes me cry today.
posted November 27, 2009 09:35 AM
Is it not strange that many of us will refuse to do a job with a client's bad art and risk loosing a buck yet let a friend give us the same and we buckle due to the personal ramifications. I suppose we do have our priorities straight in an inside out sort of way. No. no. no. Sara, you really do not want to use this art. Here is why..... It is a risk.
-------------------- Bob Sauls Sauls Signs & Designs Tallahassee, Fl
"Today I'll meet nice people and draw for them!" Posts: 765 | From: Tallahassee, Fl | Registered: Jun 2009
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posted November 27, 2009 10:03 AM
Ian....To answer your original question, and since you mentioned X3, CorelDraw has the "extrude" feature. It might take a bit of fiddling with it to acheieve an exact duplicate of the JPG though.
-------------------- Dave Grundy retired in Chelem,Yucatan,Mexico/Hensall,Ontario,Canada 1-519-262-3651 Canada 011-52-1-999-102-2923 Mexico cell 1-226-785-8957 Canada/Mexico home
posted November 27, 2009 11:25 AM
on the question of guessing software guilty of the original...
It's been so long, I can't remember if typstyler played with colors & shading, or just vectors... but it was a fairly powerful type bending program I used with illustrator on a mac in the 80's
posted November 27, 2009 11:35 AM
Ian...It takes a bit of fiddling to get the distortions to match the original but, yes, it can be done in CorelDraw (I never used extrude much because I dealt in vinyl cutting rather than print)
-------------------- Dave Grundy retired in Chelem,Yucatan,Mexico/Hensall,Ontario,Canada 1-519-262-3651 Canada 011-52-1-999-102-2923 Mexico cell 1-226-785-8957 Canada/Mexico home
posted November 27, 2009 02:57 PM
Thanks for showing me that, Dave. I had tried the extrusions effects in Corel a week ago, and just couldn't get anything I thought vaguely OK without an inordinate amount of tweaking- far too much tweaking, I felt. You make it look easy!
-------------------- "Stewey" on chat
"...there are no limits when you aim for perfection..." Jonathan Livingston Seagull Posts: 7014 | From: Highgrove via Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia | Registered: Dec 2002
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