While browsing the beer aisle in the supermarché here in the French Alps on Monday, on my first skiing trip, I received a phone call from Lizzie at Germination, the company behind the London version of the event.

“Good news — you’re in!” A great way to start my holiday off, knowing that I’d be one of the eight starting competitors in the showdown on April 4th. Plus the prizes are something to look forward to… My poor Wacom pen is gaffa-taped together now, so the replacement tablet and pen’s going to be very welcome.

If you’re around in London that weekend, come on down to Elephant & Castle and support me and the other guys (but cheer louder for me!).

For those of you interested, here’s my process for getting ready for the tryout…

Initial Sketch (24/02/2009)

I received an email last Tuesday night letting me know that I’d been accepted for a trial to enter Cut&Paste, and that I was to come up with a 15-minute design on the theme “Bliss”, with an optional challenge that it should be a t-shirt design.

Out came the notepad straight away, and after a brief brainstorm, I came up with this, which is a kind of ‘blissful unawareness’. The guy’s strolling through some post-apocalyptic landscape while listening to music, which transports him away into his own mental paradise.

Practice #1: 15 mins (24/02/2009)

This dreadful first attempt is a clear indicator that I had no idea just how much can be achieved in 15 minutes if you don’t panic and rush…

Practice #2: ~30 mins (24/02/2009)

Whereas this one’s an example of what can happen when you get carried away and decide to ignore the timer. Actually, it was a case of taking the image as far as I would have liked it, and seeing how long that took.

Practice #3: 21 mins (25/02/2009)

Refining the previous image, trying to find ways to cut some minutes off my time. It’s getting there…

Practice #4: 15 mins (27/02/2009)

The next couple were strict 15 minute tests with my decent design, trying to get as much done as possible while still furthering the illustration.

Practice #5: 15 mins (27/02/2009)

Practice #6: 15 mins (28/02/2009)

My final practice, finished about 10 minutes before I had to leave my flat for the real trial… I realised that I could save myself an easy minute or two by drawing the smoke with my Wacom instead of a series of ellipses — believe me, over 15 minutes, a one minute time-saving is a massive advantage!

Trial Entry: 15 mins (28/02/2009)

And finally, the final submitted image. I’m mostly happy with how it turned out, but there’s a few things I would have liked to have done a little differently. Unfortunately, the trial took place on a Mac — currently as a PC user, the keyboard layout and the terrible default Mac mouse got me pretty stressed out, which means I didn’t get to intersect the man’s shirt, nor did I have time to clip the background to a t-shirt shape. In fact, with 20 seconds remaining, I went to crop the image and couldn’t find the icon in the CS4 toolbar, so my final submitted image was actually about 10,000 pixels square. Oops.

© Rob Barrett Design.

For those of you who don’t know what Cut & Paste is, it’s a design competition taking place in 16 cities across the world in which 2D, 3D and Motion designers battle it out in 15 minute create-from-scratch rounds in front of judges and a crowd of fans and well-wishers. Over a few stages, the contestants eventually get whittled down to one grand winner (for each category), who — along with receiving some sweet prizes — gets a place to compete against the other 15 winners in a global final in New York.

So, I’ve been given the theme for Saturday’s audition, I’m coming up with ideas, and I’m having a go at some speed sessions in Illustrator. I’m down to 30 minutes to get from blank page to presentable design, so I’ve just got 3½ days to knock 10 minutes off my time now…

© Rob Barrett Design.

I’ve put together a set of 10 vector symbols for you to use in whatever you like. Commercial use is fine, but for my own curiosity, I’d appreciate it if you let me know where you’ve used them. Enjoy!

© Rob Barrett Design.

I just found out a few minutes ago that my Twitterlove Bird won the Styl.eti.me Vector Twitter Mascot competition.

Thanks a lot to the competition host, Roger Byrne (@styletime) and the judge, Chris Spooner (@chrisspooner).

I’ve been following VectorTuts in my RSS reader for a while now, and I often get excited about a tutorial description, only to find it’s a ‘PLUS’ — so this prize is certainly going to come to good use!

Nice work, all the other entrants as well — lots of varied styles there!

© Rob Barrett Design.

Given what my holidays have been like, I think this wallpaper I made this morning is a fitting tribute to the pastime I feel I’ve been sticking to most for the past couple of weeks… So, join me in raising a glass bottle to the next twelve months — here’s hoping it brings bigger and better things for all of us!

I’ve catered for the most common resolutions of my visitors, according to Google Analytics, but if I’ve missed out a lot of you, let me know and I’ll add more sizes.

© Rob Barrett Design.

In a few minutes that I had spare, I doodled a couple of birds to offer up for use, and sent across the best of the two for consideration. It didn’t get taken up, so rather than let a sketch go to waste, I decided I’d illustrate it for a tutorial of how I like to use Illustrator.

This is also the method that I used to create the cover images for the Adam Eason CDs.

Step 1:

Firstly, I took a photo of the sketch and loaded it into Photoshop (I’ve not installed my scanner yet since I reformatted my PC, hence taking a photo and not a scan). This first image is the sketch that I submitted.

Step 2:

I wasn’t quite happy with a few bits in the first draft — the tail was too short, and the eyes made the bird look stoned! So, adding a couple of new layers in Photoshop, I used white and black brushes to paint over the parts I wanted to edit. At this stage, I also decided to group the sketch layers and set that to Multiply, so that I could throw down some colour underneath, to get a feel for the final look.

Step 3:

Happy with the last stage, I loaded up Illustrator and placed the sketch into the bottom layer. I locked it and set it to 50% opacity, so that I could work over the top of it.

I then began to use the Pen tool to loosely draw the bird. I say ‘loosely’ here — it’s best to be as accurate as possible from the start, but at this stage there’s still lots of time for refinement. Just getting it drawn is the first priority.

As you can see, I made quite a few changes to the sketch here. I didn’t like the feet clutching onto a branch — I thought it would make a stronger and more versatile image to have the bird standing on the ground, reaching out to pass the heart, so I reworked his feet. The eyes were an accidental discovery — I created the circles for the basis of the eyes, and then decided that I preferred the look of them being wide open, so it stayed like that. The mouth got tweaked a little as well, to look less awkward.

Step 4:

Here’s the lengthy part. This is where I take my basic lines, tidy up the curves, so that everything flows nicely, and then where I make the nice, varied line-widths.

So, using the white arrow Direct Selection Tool (press A) and the Convert Anchor Point Tool (Shift-C), modify any lines that look like they’ve got any unintentional angles and points within them, so that they curve smoothly.

Next, to create the variable width line, lock all objects and layers except the specific line you want to work on. Select it (Ctrl-A / Cmd-A), copy it (Ctrl-C / Cmd-C), and paste behind (Ctrl-B / Cmd-B). You now have two copies of that line, one on top of the other. Using the Direct Selection Tool, select one end of both lines (so you have two anchors in your selection. Join them with Ctrl-J (or Cmd-J) and select ‘Corner’.

Now you’ve turned the two lines into an outlined shape. Invert the fill and stroke with Shift-X to set black as the fill. Now if you move any other anchor points on the object, you’ll see the shape of the line begin to emerge. This takes a fair bit of work, playing with the curves, to get the line to look smooth throughout, but that’s the simplest and easiest technique that I’ve found for varied widths. If you don’t want the line to come to a point, simply seperate the end anchors before joining.

Step 5:

At this point, just before adding colour, I then take a look at all of the lines and, using the Knife tool, slice off any segments that are overlapping — i.e. if a line should be receding behind another, then that is the one that’ll get chopped up (TIP: Hold Alt/Option when you start to use the Knife tool, and you’ll get a straight line).

Then just delete (or hide, if you like) the sections of line that you won’t need to show in the final image.

Step 6:

Not much work to go now! I now create a new ‘Colour’ layer beneath the ‘Lines’ layer and roughly block out the main sections of colour as set out in my Photoshop sketch (it doesn’t need to be neat, as the edges of these block are hidden behind the black lines).

Step 7:

Time to add the finishing touches… Create a new ‘Shadows’ layer above ‘Colours’, and select shades of your main colour blocks. Draw out the shapes of the shadows as sketched in Step 2. You can also add a ‘Highlights’ layer, as I did for the heart. Depending on the number of shadow/highlight depths you want, this can either be a very short step or an incredibly long one.

To add the final touches, I drew the stripes on the bird’s legs in a dark brown, and set the edge of the tongue in a dark pink, to take some focus away from it.

Final image:

© Rob Barrett Design.

Don’t start work until the manuscript is 99% complete

Or as near to that as you can get, anyway. Really, this is the really big one. It doesn’t have to be polished and perfect, a few bits can be added or dropped, but make sure that the vast majority of the content that you’ll be typesetting is complete before you start work on it. The sheer amount of back and forth between myself, the author, and the translator to complete various sections of the book in stages was mind-boggling, not to mention at times extremely morale-sapping.

Had I insisted that I would not begin work until the author input stage was complete, I could have saved on so much hassle, and really, a lot of the following points are born of this one oversight.

Don’t have more than one point of contact (unless absolutely necessary)

With this particular book having both an author and a translator working on it, wires inevitably ended up crossed at times. The translator should have dealt solely with the author, and he should have been the sole liaison with me (save for any possible urgent contact that could be needed with the translator). Fewer points of contact = fewer possibilities for confusion.

Don’t keep your To Do list on scraps of paper

On such a large project as a book (this ended up as a 718-page novel, plus covers), there is of course a very large To Do list to keep track of. I’ve finally found a system that works for me, although it had a process of evolution throughout the project.

First of all, there was the Excel route, listing out the various tasks and marking them off in grey as each was completed. This worked fairly well, except that on a system as I’ve currently got, having yet another memory-hungry programme open when you’re already running Adobe apps isn’t desirable. Things eventually progressed to be written down on scraps of paper to be entered into Excel at some later date, and in the end not everything made it into the spreadsheet.

The next stage was to ditch the PC altogether and move onto print-outs and paper notes. The tactile approach certainly improved the satisfaction of a job well done when you’re able to scribble out a task, but without being able to group related, completed and outstanding tasks, it proved to be a downfall for me. Things would get forgotten until the last minute when I found them tucked into the work folder, and then the project’s turned into a rush job.

I’m using Basecamp now (and hoping that the free ProjectPier will prove a suitable alternative once I’ve had a chance to explore it), and it feels like I’ve finally found the perfect fit for how I work — I can create a task checklist, clear off tasks when completed, and track milestone deadlines all from one place… and as my internet browser is near enough always open, it’s not a drain on performance either.

Don’t lose track of feedback

For years, I’ve been using CPanel’s Horde webmail for my work email — it’s stored on the same server as my website, and I’m used to how it works. Its downfall, though, is that it’s got a rather poor search facility. I just recently (in the past week) set up all my work email to forward to a new Gmail account. This is so far working ideally, as everything is in one place, I can tag emails from different clients, I can easily see which have attachments, email conversations are tracked, and of course there’s Gmail’s fantastic Google search, making it a second’s work to find the email I’m after.

A couple of other points that were far from ideal on this were that the author would often call or text (SMS) me with feedback. The problem with this is that information isn’t stored together. The sensible thing to do is to always follow up a call with a confirmation email, and (in my opinion) ban feedback by SMS altogether (generally, messages are too short to get the point across clearly enough).

Don’t go in blind — learn the software (or RTFM)!

When I first started the first book project (from which this latest one evolved), I barely knew InDesign at all. There are so many features that I could have used from the beginning to make my work process so, so much easier, but because I wasn’t familiar with the software, I just didn’t know about them, let alone how to use them. For instance, I only recently realised that you can set a language for a paragraph style — in this particular case of having a split language book, this is invaluable! Set one style to English and another to German, and you’ve got automatically correct punctuation, and the Spell Checker automatically switches language when you want it to!

Now that I’ve finally got a breather from InDesign work, I think now’s the perfect time to expand my knowledge with some tutorial blitzing!

Does anyone know of any must-follow tuts on book production (or even just essential general InDesign tips)? How about additions to the list of ideal practices above?

© Rob Barrett Design.