ST vectors WIP
More Jon Stapp | atomicvibe
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26 Responses (page 1 of 2)
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Jon Stapp | atomicvibe
Vectory beginnings...
over 1 year ago
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Matt Vergotis
far out! this looks awesome. brilliant line work and i love that blurry pixel thing you've got going on there for presentation. nice job!
over 1 year ago
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Colin Tierney
a true dribbbler you are, jon. this is sick.
over 1 year ago
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Norman Chan
Oh my! I feel a bit light headed Jon!
over 1 year ago
Wow man, this is sick. And I second Matt with the "blurry pixel thing"...rad to the max!
over 1 year ago
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Jon Stapp | atomicvibe
Wow, thanks for the positive feedback so far, guys! Glad you're feeling this one.
Re: that blurry-pixel-presentation effect, man, I toiled endlessly one day on the creation of a signature "presentation look" for both my pencil and electronic sketches. I wanted the pencils to feel very organic, which is why they look like they're done on old parchment paper. For the e-sketches, I wanted them to look like actual snapshots from a camera of images on a monitor - but without all the problems that come from taking pictures of computer monitors. So, in Photoshop, I created a layer that simulates a pixel pattern, and overlaid it with several lighting effects layers and a blur layer to get that right amount of depth.
Re: the line work in this sketch, holy shit, that took forever for me to get right. Still need to tweak it some, but I think it's 90% there.
My initial idea was to attempt drawing this with as few strokes as possible — on my Wacom tablet, with modified 6d pressurized brush tips — to really get that true hand-drawn feeling. For those that aren't familiar, pressurized brushes allow you to vary the thickness of your stroke in realtime by adding (or easing up on) stylus pressure on the tablet. Then I figured that anything that needed fixing later, I could hit with the Line Width tool. Sounded like a good plan, until I got started. A) Pressurized brushes are very squirrely, and sometimes don't produce good results. Editing bezier curves afterward on one line section sometimes produces very less than desirable results on another. You fix one problem area, but end up inadvertently creating another. No bueno. B) The Line Width tool does not work on pressurized strokes. So to edit any less-than-perfect strokes, I'd have to expand the strokes to filled shapes, and then manipulate two sets of strokes to get one seemingly smooth stroke.
So, I first spent hours trying to get all the linework done in one shot with the pressurized brushes. I drew — no lie — probably hundreds of that S, and always came *close* to a perfect line, but not quite. After finally getting one that was passable, I attempted about 30 tries of the "weet T" combo, and got really frustrated after the pressurized brush started randomly filling in the tops of my E loops.
Finally, I said "fuck it," and started over by drawing the letterforms with a non-pressurized, normal round brush, and then using the Line Width tool on several places along the line segments to get that varying thickness.
It's funny, because for a logo that's supposed to look like it was hand-drawn — in ICING, fer crissakes — I spent HOURS drawing the curves to get them *just right*.
over 1 year ago
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Jon Stapp | atomicvibe
^And all that was my attempt at making the construction of hand-drawn type easier by using a Wacom tablet. :B
In the olden days (like about 5 months ago, before I had my tablet), vectorizing hand-drawn type meant either A) drawing a super-tight pencil sketch, then auto-tracing and cleaning up the bezier curves in Illustrator, or B) using a tight pencil sketch as a template and manually tracing over it with fresh bezier curves in Illustrator. Either process is very time consuming, and, unless the pencil sketch is super-tight — and super-realistic — or unless your forté is type design (which mine ain't) the resulting vectors never really look accurate.
Any type designers reading this care to share some secrets/tips?
over 1 year ago
Very informative description. It's nice getting to hear about your process on this. I still have to do everything manually like you explained in your "olden days" haha. I generally lean towards just drawing fresh curves over my sketches in illustrator though.
over 1 year ago
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Inka Mathew
Nice blog, Jon ^_^
He he... great logo too for all that toil.
over 1 year ago
This looks terrific, I really like it. Love the shape of that 't' and how it forms the underline. The double 'o's as well.. excellent!
Thanks for sharing your process, the end result sounds well worth the toil though. I too use "olden days" techniques and manually vector over a sketch (neat or messy, either way it always needs a lot of tweaking).
over 1 year ago
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Nathan Trafford
Those ee's look much better. I dig it
over 1 year ago
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Simon Ålander
Superb!
over 1 year ago
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Mike Bruner
Damn, Jon, this is looking hot! love that type, man.
over 1 year ago
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Simon Frouws
Whoa! Holy cow. Heck. Gee-wizard. Now that is some pretty type.
over 1 year ago
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Jon Stapp | atomicvibe
Kris, Inka, Claire, Nathan, Simon, Mike, thanks for looking, and for your nice comments.
Been tweaking the curves like crazy today. Very minor stuff, but just tightening up the whole thing, optically lining things up, filling awkward gaps, and making the curves a bit more dramatic. Wanna add some shading and background texture before posting up another shot. Stay tuned...
over 1 year ago
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Julius Koroll
This is so amazing. The blur-effect makes it pretty awesome. Want that on my agency-wall!
over 1 year ago
Nice lettering!
over 1 year ago
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Jovan Petrić
Smooth and sexy. What else do I have to say?
over 1 year ago
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Jon Stapp | atomicvibe
LOL @Simon. Thanks for looking, bruv.
Thanks, Julius! Back when I was a big time dribbble-lurker, I was always drawn to concept shots that had some extra presentation bells 'n whistles goin' on. Dramatic perspective photos of the concept on paper, depictions of grid lines & mega-high-brow geometric associations, blurred out screen grabs - all that eye candy shit that makes you feel like you're not doing enough with your own weaksauce way of presenting.
over 1 year ago
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Jon Stapp | atomicvibe
Appreciate the comments, Nemanja and Jovan!
over 1 year ago
I love that lettering too.
over 1 year ago
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Java Acosta
Dang Jon!! those curves are affecting parts of me that shouldn't be affected by type! Fantastic work!
over 1 year ago
Rebound
ST vectors WIP 01b
by Jon Stapp | atomicvibe
Tightened everything up. See attachment for full-size. I think this one's pretty much ready for the client. Got two more concepts I need to crank out by week's end for my first presentation. Sleep? Who needs it?!
over 1 year ago
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Sean Heisler
Great type, Jon!
over 1 year ago
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Jon Stapp | atomicvibe
Thanks Sean!
over 1 year ago