Last Friday was 2nd Friday in Downtown Mesa, Arizona where my girlfriend had a table set up for her Minazona Minerals. She had some signs handmade using preprinted hunter’s orange and black sharpie, but wanted to improve the aesthetics with a new design. Little did she know her boyfriend was a former Lead Designer for Fast Signs on Central. It was time for some quick designs, quick signs.
Quick Design
I promptly came home and went to work on a templated design using Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator is one of the trusted programs I use for clean professional vector graphic designs. I’m a little rusty. It felt like trying to run after years of sitting in a car. The first few steps were painful as the weight of my body impacted the ground sending a shock wave through the fat and unconditioned muscles. My hands trembled trying to remember how to create multiple artboards.
Quick Signs with AI in Illustrator
The designing was gradually increasing in speed as my brain and fingers caught up to each other. I started with one star burst to create a representation of a geode, but it just wasn’t quite good enough. Then I copied and pasted the star burst rotating it and layering them. The final touch was applying transparency adjustments at 25% and multiplying the star bursts to create a representation of crystals. Sometimes that’s all a design needs is an artistic representation. A quick stack of ovals and viola, I had the template for the table signs.
There was something missing though. Clipart! I looked to my left and to my right and those old dusty books with clip art files on CD’s were no longer beside me. Then I saw the new AI “Text to Vector Graphic” panel in Illustrator. I thought to myself, “Should I? It’s not like anyone would know.” We typed in Amethyst and the results were spectacular. Soon I was looking for rainbows, earrings, and a copper heart. Holy Cow! The results were amazing. The AI was so good it even matched my color scheme.
Production of Quick Design and Quick Signs
Now the designs were complete and ready for printing. I didn’t have my printer set-up yet. Nor did I have a program to RIP and align the designs to make efficient use of the paper and ink. My first attempt at exporting a Jpeg was a fail.
It was time for Photoshop. I imported the whole sheet to Photoshop and made short work out of quick signs. Or something cool like that. They were easy to arrange and the design was good enough it naturally made their own crop marks.
I transferred the files to a USB stick and handed them off to Minazona Minerals for her to print and cut just in time to load up the wagon and hit the dusty Apache trail to downtown Mesa, Arizona for 2nd Friday.
Here’s the table set-up playing a little with video on my phone.
