BlogmyQuery – BMQ

We live in a world, in a society, where it’s almost impossible to go a day or a couple of hours or even a few of minutes without trying to be sold something. Sometimes an opportunity to purchase can present itself subtly; perhaps a friend has a product you like or perhaps you drove past a billboard on the interstate. Sometimes the opportunity to purchase presents itself directly in the form of a salesperson, or even a blatant advertisement of some sort urging you to buy.

Most times, advertisements are the way in which we are given opportunities to, at the very least, learn about a product. Whether it’s a commercial or a billboard or a radio spot, advertisements are everywhere. The inconsistency in advertisements comes in the way in which they are presented, for example, are they humorous or serious, or in this case, what is the art direction?

Today, we are going to look at some print advertisements that use an artistic approach to selling their product. Sometimes print advertisements use glamour shots, or even great photo manipulations to convey a point, but this time we just want to showcase some of the artistic advertisements whose main focus is on conveying their point very creatively.

Selling Art

Bayer Nazol: Smells of the World, Countryside
The best advertisements are those that over exaggerate a bit. Here, this wonderful illustration let’s us believe that if we buy and use this product we can pretty much smell everything. The hand drawn, simplistic direction makes this fun.

Top Digital: Paradise
This audio company used some illustrations to show how they use sounds and such to create their paradise. The illustrator uses some crazy designs and shapes to create the finished product.

BWF Badminton
The focus for this ad is basically the motion and energy created by badminton. Quite frankly, many don’t believe this sport to be that exhilarating or exciting, but this advertisement tries to show otherwise. This is an extremely creative ad.

Cocaine: Amy
Though a bit of a controversial piece, this ad did a great job illustrating someone who can be argued to be an icon.

Yellow Pages: Coffee
Art isn’t just about what you can draw or paint, but it’s also the way in which you compose. This collage of sorts visualizes a coffee cup and saucer. A very interesting piece.

La Curacao Store: Orange and Carrot
The folks in charge of these ads decided they wanted to use art straight up by mixing the colors of the fruits and vegetables used in certain blends they have tried. This one focuses on oranges and a carrot smoothies.

Gilera Creation
Well, this one is obviously all about the art, with one of the most famous pieces of art represented in the background. The team here makes it seem as if the motorcycle is a piece of art (note: the paint splashes and brush and palette) to be put up against the greats.

Gotte Optician: Tie Guy
While not sure if these shapes were actually cut out or if this is some great shading, the illustration here as well as the imagined process gets all the focus.

Invaders Pest Control: Disintegrate, Mosquito
This is an extremely simple, yet effective piece that uses another illustration to convey their point.

Jornal O Povo: Hendrix
This ad shows another illustration of a huge musical icon, drawn and with a seemingly thought provoking question to go along with it. The only visual focus, really, is the actual illustration.

La Salle
There’s a lot of things going on in this advertisements and a lot of things to be said, but each is conveyed creatively with a mixture of illustrations and pictures. The ad is for a school of the arts, so why not use art to convey their message?

Magazine Luiza: Coffee Machine Sale
With a bit of a humorous look, this is another illustrated piece that helps convey a little bit of fun. It’s simple, it’s easy to get and the art is pretty good too.

Marmaluzi Baby Food: Frozen Meat
The illustration and composition here are amazing. The idea was obviously to look a bit like a comic book cover or movie poster and they did such a great job. It’s very different for an ad, especially one for baby food.

Mikro Club
It’s easy to think, when you’re advertising a night club to just have pictures of the club and work around that. This club decided to take a very artistic and creative approach to the idea, which actually strikes up a bit of interest.

Nescafe: Sailor
Sometimes when you want to get a message across, the best way to do it is with no frills and fluff. This simple, nice illustration does just that.

Purrel Hand
Hand sanitizer is meant to kill the germs found on your hand. This ad illustrates many of the things we touch that have the germs on them. Some of these are eye openers and nevertheless, this is a wonderfully executed illustration.

UNICEF: School Bullying
The idea here is that bullying is not a game, especially for the one that is being bullied. The art director here chose to parallel that idea with a game of pinball via a super amazing illustration.

Spoleto Restaurants: Food Fantasy, Little Red Riding Hood
Though this has a nice fun and childlike illustration, this advertisement does have a very serious message. Nonetheless, the texture and the execution of it all are very inspiring.

The Times of India
Again, this creative ad isn’t about how great of a drawing or painting is put in place, but how the actual focus is prepared. This seems to be a bunch of newspapers gathered to look much like a finger print.

The Ultra Asian, 1
This massive illustration attempts to create a large piece dedicated to asian culture. There is no one focus, but the task was carried out creatively and beautifully.

Vogele Shoes: Box Models, Skater
This shoe company is about making a creative difference with affordable shoes. How can you not like it?

La Fabbrica di Nichi
Many graphic designers and illustrators put a good amount of emphasis on typography as an art. Here we have an advertisement that uses some decent typography to get their point across.

Caos Sustainability: 7 Billions, 2
In an attempt to display a bunch of scientific (and sometimes boring) information, this agency decided to try a little creativity for their art direction. It’s as if they took a picture of a couple faucets and made a kaleidoscope–it’s a bit busy but attractive.

Koolfoam Mattress: Lullaby Baby
There are a lot of ways someone can visualize a baby sleeping on a soft mattress. This agency decided to take an artistic and illustrative route.

The Pepsi Slavic Epopee, Kubicek
There are times when companies try to take something extremely iconic and make it conform to their idea of their company. This go round, Pepsi decided they wanted to reinvent the Slavic Epopee –and the illustrator did an amazing job.

Perfecthalf.com: Common Place, Her
This is an extremely different and creative approach to an advertisement. Advertising what would seem to be a dating service, they show their uncommon approach through this uncommon ad.

Angels in my Kitchen Bakery & Confectionery: Santa’s Gift
Guess Santa got tired of someone stealing his treats? This extremely artistic and creative advertisement seems to believe as such.

Scrabble
Some people really believe that there is an art to playing word games such as Scrabble. This advertisement tries to make that clear, not just by presenting the words that can come out of the letters, but through the artistic execution of this ad.

Faber-Castell: The Scream
As previously mentioned, some agencies love to take something that’s recognizable and use it for the sake of the company they are selling for. This time the agency is trying to sell art supplies by using some of the most famous art works seen–by creatively recreating them.

Conclusion

Now that you have gotten through this showcase, and seen the many ways that art is used to sell products or services through print advertising campaigns, we want to hear from you. What did you think about this collection, or what type of print advertisements do you prefer? Are their any great iconic print campaigns you feel should have made the list?

(rb)

As all widely used web browsers (unless you still consider IE7 as being widely used) now support the :before and :after pseudo-elements along with the content property, using those pseduo-elements has become more and more common.

There are many clever CSS tricks they can be used for, like implementing a particular design without having to insert extra markup into your HTML. There is one catch though, and many developers seem unaware of this: several screen readers will speak content that is created this way. VoiceOver does (in both OS X and iOS). NVDA does when used with Firefox, though not with IE. I made a CSS generated content demo page so you can try it yourself.

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Posted in Accessibility, CSS.

Copyright © Roger Johansson

Well, its official: social media is here to stay. While it can be difficult to keep up with the ever-changing social landscape, a basic understanding and implementation of the different platforms available can get big results. Companies of all sizes are taking advantage of the free publicity and word-of-mouth that social media can offer them.

One of the most logical ways for companies to capitalize on this trend is to integrate their social media campaigns with their websites. Unfortunately, some websites treat their social media links as an after-thought, and it shows. These sites will often use stock icons supplied by the social media outlets that do little to coordinate with the look and feel of the website itself. In other cases, the links might just be shoved into any blank space that was previously unoccupied. Either way, this is no way to treat such a potentially valuable marketing tool.

The following collection of websites, on the other hand, do a fantastic job of integrating their social media campaigns into the design itself. Through custom designed icons and typography, these social media elements fit into the page stylistically, and are easily accessible without overwhelming the user.

Websites With Seamless Social Media Integration

Trailer Park Truck is food truck based in Los Angeles, and they want to make sure their fans can always find their current location. They placed their twitter and Facebook links in the left margin of the site in what looks like an attached wooden sign.

Adventure World is a theme park in Australia with a fun, retro website. Rather than use icons that might clash with the site’s design, they opt for the typographic treatment. They chose a quirky script font that coordinates perfectly with the images as well as the other typography on the site.

Lefft is the portfolio site for Irish Illustrator and UX designer, Paddy Donnelly. The site as a whole has a very colorful, tactile feel to it, and the social icons complement this beautifully. A subtle hover effect darkens the icons as you mouse over them.

Brand designer Aran Down‘s portfolio site has recurring ribbon embellishments used throughout. This treatment works very well with the custom-colored social icons used.

No Leath is a women’s shoe company with a pretty slick parallax scrolling site. Not wanting their social links to be left behind as their customers scroll, they are in a fixed position, right underneath the main navigation. They have been subtly customized in black, with a slight bevel to match the black leather shoes of course. Gotta match the shoes.

Flint Boutique specializes in wedding invitation design, and that is translated very nicely into their website. Their oversized Facebook button includes a variation on the traditional Facebook “f” inserted into a heart. That combined with coordinating typefaces and a faux-stamped texture makes it feel as handmade as their invitations.

The portfolio site for Pixel Peak design is a study in simplicity. It follows a very grid-like structure and the attention to detail is spot-on. The social icons blend in with the header seamlessly, and the hover effect on each slides up to reveal a pop of color.

Carl Rosekilly‘s design portfolio site is layered, dark and bright all at once. His links to Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are meant to look like little discarded bits of paper, which may not work on other sites, but it fits this grungy, layered site very well.

Tigi Hair Products uses an ultra elegant black bird icon positioned above an equally eye-pleasing Twitter feed. It cycles through their most recent tweets, one at a time. It is just large enough and centered on the page for maximum impact.

The Rexona For Men site wants to know what makes you a superhero? Styled like a comic book, the social icons take on the shape of shields.

The Thomas Oliver Band doesn’t want you to forget to follow them, tweet them, or email them. That’s why they practically nailed their social buttons to the floor. As you scroll up and down their site, the simply styled buttons remain anchored to the bottom of the window.

The World Wildlife Fund’s Earth Hour 2012 site is simple, using cool colors, simple shapes and plenty of white space. They chose to use an oversized footer with a large Twitter call-to-action. It matches the aesthetic established for the rest of the site, while calling due attention to itself.

Blind Pig Design is the portfolio site for designer Aaron Awad. It has a hip, illustrated vibe with subtly distressed elements for character. He uses a halftone pattern for his social media icons, which lets them fit right into their surroundings nicely.

The portfolio site for Marco Rosella has one of the most interesting navigation concepts I’ve ever seen. Rather than scrolling up, down, or side-to-side, you zoom into the content on the z axis. When you zoom in far enough to get to the contact info, that’s where you will find links to his Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook, cut into interesting, organic shapes.

Moovents is a social media agency, so one would expect great social media integration in their website. Keeping it simple, but sophisticated and noticeable, their social icons are greyscale versions of the famous logos, presented front and center in the header bar.

House musician Ricky Ryan‘s website features small but mighty social links colored in shades of copper. Placed right under the musician’s logo, (which stays in place no matter where you are within the site’s horizontal navigation) they are not likely to be missed.

The site for Upward Creative has a very mod 1960s look, and the simple row of circular icons certainly lends itself to that era as well.

Pulp Fingers is a team of designers and developers that specialize in making apps. The overall look of the site is very retro and playful, with typography and images seemingly cut out of construction paper. The Facebook and Twitter icons have a similar look, with a slight paper texture.

The minimalist site for Tokyu Agency deserves minimalist icons as well. Breaking free of their usual enclosing shapes, these icons use only the familiar initials as links. Only a slightly darker color than that of the background, they are barely there, yet always there, as they are in a fixed position at the top of the window. A mouseover reveals a colorful circle background for each icon.

Layout Lab‘s website is light and breezy with lots of negative space and a healthy dose of lime green for flavor. The links to their Twitter and Dribble accounts look right at home in fixed tabs on the upper left side of the window.

The site for Fancy Rhino uses triangles as a recurring design element. Team member photos, and portfolio work all appear in triangular shapes, so why not their social links? A simple row of triangles on their contact section communicates the different ways you can follow their work.

Friendly Gents is a Cincinnati web design studio with a vintage barbershop-inspired site. They use a lot of distressed fabric textures, and their social media links look like they are literally embossed into the fabric.

Ghosthorses‘ website is another with a quirky retro style. It uses a lot of mid-century typography, and textured ribbon embellishments. Their custom styled Twitter feed and follow button fit the rest of the page’s style like a glove.

Fringe Web Development goes even further back in time, with a turn of the century look and feel. The main navigation is in a left sidebar with a row of simple, elegantly styled social buttons right beneath it.

Liechtenecker is a “superfresh” web agency in Germany. Their site is fun, colorful, and textured, and the honeycomb-shaped social links are no different. They stand out in contrast to the neutral beige background, yet they complement the visuals on the rest of the site perfectly.

Share Your Thoughts

That does it for our list, but now its your turn to get social and share some of your own favorites. Which did you like on this list? Do you have any others that we missed that should to be included? Take a moment and give us your opinions in the comment section below.

(rb)

I see more and more devices that have a pixel ratio bigger than 1.5, even 2. My Galaxy Nexus for example has a pixel ratio of 2 and so do the latest versions of the iPhone and iPad. Retina display seems to be the next evolution and next challenge for us as designers.

Native mobile app designers have already learned how to take advantage of those devices with high pixel ratios to display bigger images with better quality, so as to enhance user experience. They are used to creating the images in both normal and retina @2x sizes for the iPhone, and creating 4 sets of drawables in 4 different sizes for Android devices.

With the iPad 3 also having retina display, it is definitively something that will be harder to avoid from now on. In this article, you will see how to use some CSS3 tricks in the field of image replacement to serve images with better quality to those high resolution devices.

Story Behind the Code

It all began when I was creating a jQuery Mobile application for the iPhone. The idea was to make a full HTML5 jQueryMobile app, and to embed it in a “native shell�, using Phonegap.

For this application, I created a bottom tab-bar that was imitating the native iOS tab-bar, and also a header with a logo image in it. Both the header and footer were HTML elements that used image replacement techniques to display the icons and logo.

When I tested the application on the iPhone 4S, I saw that the logo and the icons were highly rasterized and looked pretty ugly.

The Demo

I re-created a fake application page similar to the iOS native style so you can see what is going on. Whether you have a retina device or not, you can test it here with your phone. You can see the demo here. You can also download the code here.

As I said, if you load the page on a non retina device, it will look good. If you load it on a retina device, the images get rasterized.

This is due to the pixel ratio being 2, so the image is multiplied by two and stretched by the device, creating this unclean rendering. Here are some screenshots of the demo on iPad 3, iPhone 4 and Galaxy Nexus with the images being rasterized:

Galaxy Nexus:

iPhone 4:

iPad 3:

CSS Image Replacement Techniques

In this demo, I used different techniques for replacing images that will have varying consequences when we will want to change for retina images.

The first image we replace is in the logo, being sure to only set the height of the element. The HTML looks like this:

<div class="ui-header"> <h1> My logo </h1></div>

The CSS like this:

.ui-header h1{

color:#fff;

display: block;

outline: 0 none !important;

overflow: hidden;

margin:0;

text-align: center;

text-overflow: ellipsis;

white-space: nowrap;

text-indent:-9999px;

background:url(img/logo.png) no-repeat center center;

height:33px;

}

Again, what’s important here is that we give it height, but no width.

The second technique is to use the delete button. We want to keep the text for this one, so we will add the icon in the :before pseudo class. The HTML looks like this :

<p> <a href="#"> Delete item </a> </p>

And the CSS code like this:

.delete:before{

content: " ";

display:block;

width:20px;

height:20px;

position:absolute;

left:6px;

background:url(img/delete.png) no-repeat;

}

Note that in this case, we gave the element both a width and a height but no padding.

The next element to which we want to add an icon is the download button. The HTML looks like this:

<p> <a href="#"> Download </a></p>

And the CSS like this:

.download {

background:rgb(222, 227, 232) url(img/nuage.png) no-repeat 8px 6px;

border:1px solid rgb(199, 206, 212);

padding: 25px 0 25px 120px;

font-size:20px;

color:rgb(144, 160, 176);

text-shadow: 0 1px 1px rgb(239, 242, 245);

}

This is what we will call the third technique: assigning some padding, but no height or width. You will understand why below.

For the footer however, we also assign a width and height for the element, padding too. The HTML:

<a class="bubble button" href="#"> bubble </a>

The CSS:

.ui-footer .button{

background-color:rgba(187, 185, 185, 0.2);

border:1px solid rgb(22, 22, 22);

box-shadow: 0px 1px 2px rgba(22, 22, 22, 0.5) inset ;

text-indent:-9999px;

padding:10px 15px;

width:40px;

height:40px;

background-position: center center;

background-repeat:no-repeat;

margin: 0 5px;

}

.bubble{

background-image:url(img/bubble.png);

}

At this point we have different case scenarios for the image replacement that will load non retina images for all devices, for now.

Media Queries Pixel-Ratio to the Rescue

The next idea was then to find a solution to make those devices load better quality images. I remembered the media query device-pixel-ratio (vendor prefix needed). I never used it before, and decided to give it a try. You will need some vendor prefixes here (Mozilla is the strangest one).

The idea was pretty simple: I decided to try to serve those devices an image that would have twice the size of the desktop one. I chose a @2x notation for the retina image because I’m used to doing so when I create images for native iOS apps. I ended up doing something like this:

@media only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2),

only screen and (min--moz-device-pixel-ratio: 2),

only screen and (-o-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2/1),

only screen and (min-device-pixel-ratio: 2) {

#myelement{

background:url(myicon@2x.png) no-repeat;

}

}

You would think that this works good. True, the retina image is loaded, but the problem is that the image is now twice the size. Still not displaying properly. Here is what it looked like on my Galaxy: the icons are nice and sharp, but not quite right.

Background-Size Property Lends a Hand

Now that we have the high resolution images loading, we need to ensure they are the right size. To do this, we will use the super useful CSS3 background-size property that is actually able to resize backgrounds as needed. You can either use pixel properties for width first then height, use percentages, or set the value to “auto�.

It’s simple to see it in the code. (Note that I used the id #retina for the demo purpose to only target the second part of the demo, but you can of course omit it in your code)

For the header button you remember that we did set the height but not the width, to do the trick here, we will then set the background height to the same value (we can leave the width at auto).

#retina .ui-header h1{

background:url(img/logo@2x.png) no-repeat center center;

-webkit-background-size: auto 33px ;

-moz-background-size: auto 33px ;

background-size: auto 33px ;

}

For the delete button technique it’s a bit easier, since we did set both width and height AND since it has no padding, we can set the value to 100% for each, meaning that the icon will use the whole container space:

#retina .delete:before{

background:url(img/delete@2x.png) no-repeat;

-webkit-background-size: 100%  100% ;

-moz-background-size: 100%  100% ;

background-size: 100%  100% ;

}

For the download button, it gets trickier. Since we did not give it any width or height, we will then have to set the exact sizes of the non retina image for this one:

#retina .download {

background:rgb(222, 227, 232) url(img/nuage@2x.png) no-repeat 8px 6px;

-webkit-background-size: 70px 68px ;

-moz-background-size: 70px 68px ;

background-size: 70px 68px ;

}

For the footer icons, we did set width and height, but the element has some padding. So here we will have to set at least one of the two values to make it work:

#retina .bubble{

background-image:url(img/bubble@2x.png);

}

#retina .loupe{

background-image:url(img/loupe@2x.png);

}

#retina .folder{

background-image:url(img/folder@2x.png);

}

#retina .ui-footer .button{

-webkit-background-size: 40px auto ;

-moz-background-size: 40px auto ;

background-size: 40px auto ;

}

And this is what it now looks like:

What About HTML Images?

I only base this article on the CSS images, but of course there are also images directly in the HTML. For this, you will have to take a look at some responsive image techniques. So far I tested retina.js and have to admit that it’s pretty simple to use, you just have to put a @2x image in the same folder as the normal one and include the script. There is also the Retina Images plugin that seems to do the same job, but needs more server side configuration.

Limitations and Conclusion

As you can see, each case is different and you will have to play with the background-size values to get exactly what you want. The other limitation would be browsers downloading two images for this hack: first the normal, then the retina. I’m not an expert in this particular domain and did not run tests for the demo so if you want to, feel free to do and you can post the results I’m curious to know the browser used and if the images are downloaded twice.

The techniques used in this article are based on a lot of CSS3 code, so might not be supported by all browsers. Also, having to create all the images in two sizes can be hard for maintaining the code, and take more space on the server side. So you will have to think carefully before you use such techniques. Forcing devices to load images twice the size, and then to resize them can also be bandwidth consuming.

In conclusion, I would advise that even though this is a good technique for creating sleek pixel perfect nice interface for devices that support it, there are considerations to be made before using such a technique. Naturally, this won’t be the solution for everyone.

Going further

If you are interested in displaying nice icons without having to create the files twice, you also can take a look at the iconic font technique and at SVG images. There is also this article you can look to, but here again, this is not widely supported.

(Credits for the monochromatic icon set)

(rb)

In the following Adobe Illustrator tutorial you will learn how to create a semi-realistic lifebuoy graphic. We’ll start with a bunch of concentric circles and some basic vector shape building techniques. Once we create the starting shapes we’ll continue with some Pathfinder options, several Warp and Gaussian Blur effects plus some basic masking techniques.

For the highlights we will use some simple blending techniques along with a set of linear gradients. Finally, we’ll need a simple, dashed stroke, the Rounded Corners effect and some discrete Drop Shadows. The final illustration is easily editable so it won’t be difficult for you to pick different colors for your lifebuoy.

As always, this is the final image that we’ll be creating:

Step 1

Hit Control + N to create a new document. Enter 600 in the width and height box then click on the Advanced button. Select RGB, Screen (72ppi) and make sure that the "Align New Objects to Pixel Grid" box is unchecked before your click OK. Now, turn on the Grid (View > Grid) and the Snap to Grid (View > Snap to Grid). Next, you’ll need a grid every 5px.

Go to Edit > Preferences > Guides & Grid, enter 5 in the Gridline every box and 1 in the Subdivisions box. You can also open the Info panel (Window > Info) for a live preview with the size and position of your shapes. Do not forget to set the unit of measurement to pixels from Edit > Preferences > Unit > General. All these options will significantly increase your work speed.

Step 2

Pick the Ellipse Tool(L) and create a 255px circle. Fill it with black, lower its opacity to 30% and go to Object > Path > Offset Path. Enter a -60px Offset and click OK.

Step 3

Reselect the two concentric circles created in the previous step, open the Pathfinder panel and click on the Minus Front button. Fill the resulting compound path with R=241 G=242 B=242, increase its opacity to 100% and move to the Layers panel. Double click on it, name it "Body" and make a copy in front (Control + C > Control + F).

Step 4

Pick the Ellipse Tool(L), create a 195px circle and place it as shown in the first image. Select this new circle along with the copy created in the previous step and click on the Divide button from the Pathfinder panel. Move to the Layers panel and you will find a new group with three simple shapes. Open it, delete the small circle then ungroup (Shift + Control + G) the remaining two compound paths.

Step 5

Focus on the two compound paths created in the previous step and fill them with the linear gradient shown below.

Step 6

Disable the Snap to Grid (View > Snap to Grid) then go to Edit > Preferences > General and make sure that the Keyboard Increment is set at 1px. Reselect "Body" and make two copies in front (Control + C > Control + F > Control + F). Select the top copy and hit the up arrow three times (to move it 3px up).

Reselect both copies and click on the Minus Front button from the Pathfinder panel. Select the resulting group of shapes and turn it into a compound path (Object > Compound Path > Make). Fill it with R=134 G=139 B=145, lower its opacity to 30% and bring it to the front (Shift + Control + ] ).

Step 7

Reselect the second compound path edited in the fifth step (the large one) and make two copies in front (Control + C > Control + F > Control + F). Select the top copy and move it 5px up. Reselect both copies and click on the Minus Front button from the Pathfinder panel. Select the resulting group of shapes and bring it to the front (Shift + Control + ] ).

Open it, select the top shape, fill it with white and go to Effect > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Enter a 3px radius and click OK. Keep focusing on this group, select the bottom shape, fill it with R=134 G=139 B=145 and go to Effect > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Enter a 5px radius and click OK.

Step 8

Reselect the first compound path edited in the fifth step (the small one) and make two copies in front (Control + C > Control + F > Control + F). Select the top copy and move it 5px up. Reselect both copies and click on the Minus Front button from the Pathfinder panel. Select the resulting group of shapes and bring it to the front (Shift + Control + ] ).

Open it, select the top shape, fill it with R=134 G=139 B=145 and go to Effect > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Enter a 5px radius and click OK. Keep focusing on this group, select the bottom shape, fill it with white and go to Effect > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Enter a 3px radius and click OK.

Step 9

Reselect "Body" and make two copies in front (Control + C > Control + F > Control + F). Select the top copy and move it 10px down. Reselect both copies and click on the Minus Front button from the Pathfinder panel. Select the resulting group of shapes and turn it into a compound path (Object > Compound Path > Make). Fill it with white, lower its opacity to 30% and bring it to front (Shift + Control + ] ).

Step 10

Reselect "Body" and make two new copies in front (Control + C > Control + F > Control + F). Select the top copy and move it 5px down. Reselect both copies and click on the Minus Front button from the Pathfinder panel. Turn the resulting group of shapes into a compound path (Object > Compound Path > Make), fill it with white, lower its opacity to 70% and bring it to front (Shift + Control + ] ).

Step 11

Select all the shapes created in the last five steps and group them (Control + G). Reselect "Body", make a copy in front (Control + C > Control + F) and bring it to the front (Shift + Control + ] ). Fill it with white and open the Transparency panel. Select this white compound path along with the group created in the beginning of the step, open the fly-out menu of the Transparency panel and click on Make Opacity Mask. In the end your masked group should look like in the fourth image.

Step 12

Re-enable the Snap to Grid (View > Snap to Grid), pick the Ellipse Tool(L), create a 195px circle and place it as shown in the first image. Fill it with none but add a 30pt stroke. Set its color at R=150 G=150 B=150 then go to Object > Path > Outline Stroke. Select the resulting path and change its blending mode to Overlay.

Step 13

Reselect "Body" and go to Effect > Stylize > Drop Shadow. Enter the data shown in the left window, click OK then go again to Effect > Stylize > Drop Shadow. Enter the data shown in the right window and click OK.

Step 14

Pick the Ellipse Tool(L) and create a 265px circle. Fill it with black, lower its opacity to 30% and place it as shown in the first image. Pick the Rectangle Tool(M) and create a 65 by 75px shape. Fill it with R=255 G=30 B=45, lower its opacity to 30% and place it as shown in the second image.

Step 15

Focus on the red rectangle created in the previous step. Pick the Direct Selection Tool(A), select the bottom, left anchor point and move it 10px to the right then select the bottom, right anchor point and move it 10px to the left. In the end your red shape should look like a trapezoid (image #2). Make sure that it’s still selected and go to Effect > Warp > Bulge. Enter the data shown in the following image, click OK and go to Object > Expand Appearance. Select the resulting shape along with the circle created in the previous step and click on the Intersect button from the Pathfinder panel.

Step 16

For this step you’ll need the Round Any Corner script. You can find it here. Save it to your hard drive then return to Illustrator and grab the Direct Selection Tool (A). Focus on the red shape edited in the previous step, select the four anchor points highlighted in the first image and go to File > Scripts > Other Script.

Open the Round Any Corner Script, enter a 5px Radius and click OK. In the end your shape should look like the second image. Reselect it and got Effect > Warp > Arc Lower. Enter the data shown below, click OK and go to Object > Expand Appearance. Finally, select the resulting shape and increase its opacity back to 100%.

Step 17

Select the red shape created in the previous step and go to Object > Transform > Rotate. Enter a 180 degrees angle and click on the Copy button. This will create a vertically flipped copy. Select it, drag it down and place it as shown in the second image. The Snap to Grid should ease your work. Reselect both red shapes and go again to Object > Transform > Rotate. This time enter a 90 degree angle and click on the Copy button. In the end you should have four red shapes placed like in the fourth image.

More on Page Two

This new Adobe Illustrator tutorial isn’t quite finished yet! There is more waiting for you over on page two.