CORE2291 Digital Design Lab 1:Illustrator Techniques

CORE2291 Digital Design Lab 1: Project 2 Illustrator Techniques

Greetings! In this project, I was tasked with recreating the Coca Cola script and background in Adobe Illustrator using the pen tool, where afterwards I design and create a pattern to use as the background themed around Coca Cola. Before this project I was sort of comfortable with using Illustrator from learning at my first year at CCAD and could get through only running into roadblocks due to lack of experience. After this project, Illustrator is feeling much better in my hands. It taught me techniques to better use the pen tool with curvy shapes (such as the Coca Cola script) and how to quickly and easily make complex shapes and objects.

Illustrator Techniques

This is the image used as a tracing image. After putting it through Adobe Photoshop to quickly straighten up the crooked image, I aligned the imagine inside of my artboard, and got my color swatches set up. I used the eyedropper to collect my colors, except for the ccred (Coca Cola offical red), where looked up the color code online. Not shown, I turn the layer of this image into a template layer, where its transparency is lowered to 50% so I can easily draw over it.

Use of the Pen tool to recreate the script. The way I am doing this is by imagining a box/rectangle around the lettering, and trying to place the points from the pen tool only where the imaginary box and the script I am tracing meet. You can see that at the top of the C as it goes along the left curve. After getting all of the points placed, shown below is me playing with the "handles" of the point, where I can affect the curves. This is all done on a layer just above the tracing art.

Above is the full "Coca", along with the small "trademark registered" at the bottom. The way this was created was by creating an ellipse and used text on path to align it with the curve. Registered was done the same way.

Here you can see a zoomed in version on trademark registered. This isn't text like the last image however. This text that was here was turned into shapes by outlining the text with the black selection tool.

Finished and colored Coca Cola red script, filled with ccred (talked about above). Before filled, all of the script was selected and put through the shape builder, where I punched the holes out of the O's and the A's (ect) and combined them all into one shape.

Coca Cola script.

Coca Cola script with white text color and gradient background. Used the ellipse and gradient tool.

Clean full Coca Cola banner

From here, it is time to begin creating our patterns! I had decided to go with the theme of Coca Cola donating to the firefighters in California as a charity event. Below is my visual exploration and thumbnail sketches.

The idea behind it was firefighters using Coca Cola to put out the fires, with a couple of symbols of California in a bubble, protected from the flames.

Above is the firefighter, I had decided to go with a profile view, as, my instructor had recommended that it would read better that way, to which I agreed! I had taken the Coca Cola bottle I created while recreating the Coca Cola script, and retrofitted it into the firefighters own personal water tank. I am aware that they normally do not keep water on them, this was a conscious design choice. I wanted to have him spraying up, as in the next photo as you'll see, the fire fighting plane drops water down. The idea is that it would add balance between the two.

I had done the same as the firefighter in reusing the Coca Cola asset for the fireplane.

With the bear, my instructor had commented to try to have the firefighters interacting with the wildlife for a more positive spin on the situation my project is referencing, so I had taken my firefighter from before, and manipulated him into embracing the bear.