caughtinthefire.com

Reflected Text Tutorial

A popular technique used when creating logos is to create some text and then create the illusion that the text is sitting on a reflective surrface. The reflective surface creates … reflected text! This is a pretty easy tehnique to incorporate into your logos and takes next to no time to complete.

Creating A Logo For An MRSA Website

I recently had to create a logo for a website about MRSA symptoms. I had two initial ideas about what style the design should be:

* based on an image of the MRSA bacteria
* a vector not associated with MRSA at all

Pixelated Fireworks Tutorial

I know that there are some pixelating plugins available for Fireworks, but I thought I would attempt some pixelating effects with Fireworks CS4 straight out of the box, and with no outside help. So let’s begin.
Create a new document at whatever size you like. Import (Ctrl-R) a bitmap image of your choosing. I used the [...]

Create A Pool Ball In Fireworks

This tutorial makes extensive use of the skew tools to manipulate objects.
First, create a new Fireworks document that is 200px wide and 200 px high. Leave the resolution at the default value. If you set the background colour to be #00592D, it will give the appearance that the pool ball is on the green felt [...]

Reducing Opacity To Create New Colours

We’re going to create a design with a dark and moody feel now. Create a new document 500 pixels by 500 pixels with a black background. To prepare the colours we are going to use, draw a red (#FF0000) square on top of a black square and reduce the opacity of the top red square. [...]

Create A Buy It Now Button

Recently I created a ‘Buy It Now’ button for a website and it had to blend in with that site’s colour scheme. I couldn’t just use my favourite colours, I had to choose colours that complemented those already used on the site.
Blending In With An Existing Colour Scheme
What I did was take an existing [...]

An Elliptical Logo

Create a new document that is 500 pixels by 500 pixels and has a white background. Draw an ellipse with a width of 200 pixels and a height of 120 pixels. Give it an ellipse gradient with a ‘white black’ preset fill. Position the gradient like this:

Copy and paste the ellipse and scale it down [...]

Gradients On Text

The next project demonstrates an easy but widely used techniques using text.
Type the following text using the Aero font with a size of 100:

We are going to give the text a linear gradient but first we need to decide which two colours to use. The design will be predominantly red so we will use #FF0000 [...]

Convert Marquee to Path

One of the most useful additions to Fireworks 8 is the Convert Marquee to Path function. If you have a bitmap with area of high contrast, you can use the magic wand to make your selection and then convert it to a vector shape. This is what we will be doing in this project.
Create a [...]

Combining Basic Shapes To Create A Logo

This project is a thorough exercise in combining basic shapes. Select the ellipse tool and drag out a circle 140 pixels wide by 140 pixels high. Choose any fill and stroke you like, as we will be changing them later. Copy and paste the circle and make the new circle 80% of the size of [...]