Jazz Blossoms Art Deco Pattern

Tags

Adobe Illustrator, Ai, art deco, design, graphic, pattern, pattern motif, Photoshop, spoonflower, tulips

Using Adobe Illustrator, I created the motifs for this design. Then I assembled them into an initial pattern layout.

I exported the initial layout as a .png file and opened it in Photoshop. I applied the offset filter to wrap around 1/2 the vertical and 1/2 the horizontal distances. This moved the empty black areas to the center for editing.

I chose this method because the center of my design had the spacing just as I liked it but needed the outer edges revised. After applying the offset filter, my outer edges will now align perfectly with each other when I tile out the pattern in repeat.

Next I selected each quadrant, cut and Edit > Paste Special > Paste in Place, to get each on its own layer. I used layer masks to hide the excess black areas of the top 2 quadrants. Then I selected the top 2 quadrants and moved them together straight down to meet up and align with the bottom 2.

Then I cropped the tile to the new top edge.

I used a layer mask to hide the excess black area of the lower right quadrant. Then selected both right side quadrants and moved them to the left to overlap and align, closing up the extra black space.

I cropped to the new right edge. Now I had a repeatable tile with the excess black removed.

To test the revised design, I entered the pattern tile in Photoshop’s pattern library. Edit > Define Pattern and selected this new pattern tile. Then in a new larger document Edit > Fill > Contents: Pattern and Custom Pattern: select the new pattern. An alternate to test filling in a new document is to add a pattern fill layer to the same document and scale the pattern down.

Looking at the test repeat of the tile, I could see that the repeat was working, but there were a number of changes I wanted to make.

If you compare this test to the final design below, you’ll see that I removed one each of the duplicate vertical rows of medium size motifs, changed the centers of the largest diamond motifs, and rotated the tile 90 degrees for a more horizontal emphasis.

©2018 Alice Frenz all rights reserved.

My Jazz Blossoms Art Deco design is available for sale on Spoonflower and Roostery

 

Moo Cards

Tags

awareness, cancer, childhood, faith pruden, gold, graphic design, ribbons

Business cards for Friends of Faith Pruden Foundation arrived yesterday from Moo. I designed the layout and art.  I’m very please with the printing and paper quality from Moo.

View previous post about my logo and website design in Friends Project.

©Alice Frenz 2015

A New Website for Plate

Tags

food photography, graphics, illustration, New Albany, Ohio, responsive web design, restaurant, website database

desktop screen

After many weeks of work, Plate’s new website is live ~ www.platenewalbany.com

Studies show that 85% or more of all Restaurant website visits in today’s mobile world are via mobile devices. So an important aspect of this design was that it be responsive, giving the visitor a quality experience and impression of Plate on both smart phones, tablets, and full-size screens.

iPhone 4 screen

iPhone 4 screen

I planned and coded the arrangment, size, and placement of elements to accommodate changes in viewport (screen size), always keeping in mind that visitors often have different purposes to their visit when using different sized devices.

2 months ago, I didn’t know my way around a digital SLR camera. Thanks to guidance from Hélène Dujardin’s book Plate to Pixel, I’ve learned to take food photos for Plate’s website and social media promotions, using natural light from the windows in Plate’s Granville Banquet Room with white foam core boards propped up to bounce the light to all sides of the dish. More than half of the photos on the new site are mine, as well as the illustrated graphics.

This is a CMS website, Content Management System, which means it’s designed for ease in making regular updates to content. This is important for many businesses, including restaurants, who have special events to announce, menu changes, etc.

The menus are database driven, which means that changes to a menu item, such as price or ingredients, only need to be made once. The changes will then automatically carry through to every place where that item appears on the site.

Friends of Faith Pruden Project

Tags

awareness, cancer, childhood, faith pruden, gold, graphic design, illustration, logo design, ribbons, web design

This monarch emerged from its chrysalis August 27, 2010

Faith Pruden was a first grader, with a wonderful zest for life when she was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in February 2010 and very little time left. She got her wings on August 7th 2010, 6 months later. She touched many hearts with her love and courage, and is missed by all.