You can also meet the work and purchase pieces from Colombian designers while enjoying their art gallery which is constantly being renewed. Today we’d like to share with you some of the work of this talented artist, I hope you enjoy it.

If you want to know more about Lucho and Kalú, don’t forget to visit his website. If you’re looking for more inspiration, then we will see you in our next post, have a nice day!.

Among the things you can do with the perspective grid tool we have defining up to three vanishing point perspectives, adjust different perspective parameters, draw objects directly into the grid, work with real measures and more. To activate the Perspective Grid simply click in View>Perspective Grid>Show Grid or hit Ctrl+Shift+I (on Windows) or Cmd+Shift+I (on Mac), now you can start working in your perspective designs. Let’s take a look at the different parts of this tool so you can take advantage of all its features.

Click on the image to enlarge

I just took the original graphic from Adobe and re-scaled it for the site, these are the different parts that make part of the perspective grid.

A. Use that icon to switch between planes in the perspective.

B. This is the left vanishing point.

C. Vertical Grid Extent

D. Perspective Grid Ruler

E. Right Vanishing Point

F. Horizon Line

G. Horizon Height

H. Ground Level

I. Horizon Level

J. Extent of Grid

K. Grid Cell Size

L. Ground Level

M. Extent of Grid

N. Right Grid Plane Control

O. Horizontal Grid Plane Control

P. Left Grid Plane Control

Q. Origin

In addition to these features, you can also select the Perspective Selection tool by pressing Shift+V or selecting it from the Tools panel. This tool snaps the objects to the perspective grid while you move, scale, duplicate or bring them into the perspective grid. The Perspective Selection tool allows you to:

Some useful links about Perspective Grid Tool

While searching online I found a few examples that can help you learn more about how to use the Perspective Grid tool to create pretty impressive artworks, I hope you find these useful:

Well then, we hope you’ve enjoyed this small roundup featuring the best works from our fans in our Flickr group, don’t forget to send us all your works so we can share your work with all our visitors, thanks for visiting Mishës and we’ll see you in our next post.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this roundup, you can see more of Art3sano’s work by visiting his online portfolio, thanks for visiting us and we’ll see you soon with more inspiration and articles!.

Facebook Timeline: More attractive, more cluttered

Let’s start with Facebook’s timeline. The first thing you realize when opening the timeline profile is the cover picture, a neat picture that Google Plus had no other chance that adapt it to their own layout. The cover picture is specially useful for companies but any person can make a great use of it (see 75 Surprisingly Creative Facebook Timeline Covers) to show in one image what he likes or does in his life. In our Facebook page we decided to use the cover picture to represent the essence of Mishës, which is graphic and web design from Latin America to the world.

I think the Facebook team did something great with the cover picture, it’s a large amount of space where people can easily let go their creativity, the fact of including the profile picture in one side but also in top of the cover helps you integrate both pictures in clever ways. Now let’s move on to the other areas of the timeline to see how they work.

Once you start scrolling down, you can see the person/company information, number of fans, photos and if you click on the down arrow, more options will display, which can include custom apps and more. It’s from this part of the timeline that things start getting a little messy for some users, let’s scroll down a little more to see how the rest of the timeline looks like.

This is how the rest of the timeline looks. On the left side you can see a small orange label on top of a post, this indicates that the post has been moved to the top and no matter how many posts you publish after, it will remain on top the rest until you stand out another one.

You can also highlight a post without having to place it atop your timeline, a regular highlight will make the post to cover the whole width of the page as you can see on the previous picture, this is useful for highlighting important events and relevant contents on your site. Do you see the small dots between every post?, you can click over them to create an event in your timeline like this one:

At simple view it looks like another highlighted post, however, an event has some important differences such as the fact that you can include a main picture for it, add the date of the event and even a short description, this is very useful for companies that want to showcase their history to their clients to make them look more trustworthy. That’s basically how the new Facebook timeline looks like, of course there are some other changes but we just wanted to give you a general idea.

Contras

The problem with timeline is that once you go beyond the amazing cover picture things get a little too messy. Now you only have a small panel featuring the comments of the followers, which gives less relevance to them, therefore why would a person want to leave a message in the wall if it will be buried almost instantly by other comments?.

Then it’s the fact of the posts. People are used to read things from left to right (unless you’re reading in Hebrew) and top to bottom, the new timeline makes them read in zigzag, which makes kinda difficult to understand which publication went first and which one is more relevant than the other. There’s also the fact that when you highlight a post, a big empty space appears in some occasions in the place where a regular post should be.

As a graphic designer, I really like the new Timeline, I think, however, that the Facebook team needs to remember that not all the users will understand how to navigate across their profiles (usability first!).

Google Plus: Leveraging white spaces, still not reaching its audience

If you want to see how the original version of Google Plus used to look like, you can take a look at our article “Google Plus, what’s up for designers?” and you will notice that even though Facebook timeline represents a stronger change in respect of its previous version, Google Plus has also been through a nice revamping process.

As you can see, the new Google Plus interface makes a better use of space, by bringing the main buttons to one side of the page, keeping them available throughout the navigation. The other change that stands out at simple view is something similar to Facebook’s cover picture, they might have copied this from the timeline but well, if an idea works there’s nothing bad in adapting it to your designs haha.

But in the case of Google Plus, it allows you to choose between inserting a large picture for your profile or instead (this looks similar to Facebook’s old style) place several pictures like the previous picture shows. I like that they give you the opportunity to switch between these two styles.

The new Hangouts page shows you all the hangouts that are taking place at that moment, you can either join a hangout or just watch it in case you missed something great. There’s no doubt that hangouts is one of the top features of Plus that Facebook hasn’t been able to match.

While viewing the site at a 1024 x 768 resolution, I noticed how well the guys from Google have harnessed space to show all the important elements without making the site look too cluttered, I definitely have to say that I’m enjoying this new Google Plus layout, what do you think about it?.

Contras

It’s not like I’m a Google fan or that I’m not too much into Facebook (actually I rarely visit my Plus profile). I really like the new look of Plus, everything looks more organized, it harnesses the white areas in a smart way, the posts remained in a single column so no readability problems might appear. I cannot approve the fact that they found “inspiration” in Facebook to place their own cover picture, nevertheless I think that they give it a nice touch to it and it doesn’t look like a blatant extraction from Facebook archives.

There’s one thing that really annoys me, when I explore my saved searches, all the searches I have saved suddenly disappear and so I need to go back in order to check another key tag, why don’t just leave the tags in one side while I’m reading?, I’m not asking for something complicated or hard to implement.

Conclusion

Both Facebook timeline and the new Google Plus layout represent a positive advance in these sites, of course there are things to improve but they’re doing things right for the users. The real problem relies in the fact that even though Google Plus looks prettier and has even more features than Facebook, people already have their friends and family in this site and hence they don’t seem to find a reason to start using Plus, maybe we can explore this topic in a future article. What do you think about these two sites?; which one do you use the most?, don’t forget to leave us your comments and messages, thanks for visiting Mishës and we will connect with you soon!.

As you can see on the previous picture, you can view the current size of the artboard after selecting the Artboard tool, you can also modify the size of the artboard an many more things. If you go to View>Show Print Tiling you will be able to see the current relation between the artboard and the printable area, which is another useful feature that you can harness while working in your designs.

Then we have the Artboard bar, from left to right you can do the following things: Change between portrait and landscape view, create and delete artboards, change the artboard’s name, the next option allows you to choose whether copy the content when duplicating an artboard or just the artboard itself, the next option let’s you choose if you want to see the center mark, cross hairs and/or video safe areas, the next button opens the Artboard Options panel, which is basically the same options but displayed in a single panel, then you have the option to change the reference point and the artboard width and height values.

Printing and exporting artboards

You can choose to print a single artboard or print them all, just open the print dialog to check the order and set up other options regarding tint and paper size, you can also adjust which artboards you’re going to print by using the range option in the print panel, if you choose ignore artboards you can combine all the art into a single page or export just the current artboard you have selected.

Artboards panel (how to rearrange artboards)

And here’s the reason why I came up with the idea of writing an article about artboards in Illustrator. I was making a new brochure for a client in Illustrator (I’m just not too much into InDesign), everything was going fine because I thought that the client was printing the brochure, but wrong answer, he asked to print the brochure!, that wouldn’t have to be a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that I made the brochure in several artboards and in no order in particular, so that’s when I wondered “how can I rearrange these artboards?”.

Until this point I thought that the only way of doing this was eliminating all the artboards and then create them again in the right order, the other method will imply to move all the artworks from one artboard to another, believe or not I did that more than once haha. Then I looked in the top menu bar and I find heaven, you can find salvation in Window>Artboards.

This panel shows you all your artboards in the current order you have them, so if you want to rearrange them you just need to drag them to the correct position or use the arrows at the bottom of the panel, I cannot believe it took me all this time to find this menu, that’s because I always tend to overlook things.

A couple more tips

Well then, now that we have reached the end of the article I would like to share a couple of tips that I have learned in time that might come in handy the next time you’re working with artboards.

• To delete an artboard, you can click on the small X icon at the upper-right corner of the artboard, you can also click on the Bin icon at the control panel.
• If artboards overlap, the one with the left edge closest to the click location will be the current active artboard.
• To switch between artboards, press Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac OS) and then click an arrow key.
• If you want to see the content of an artboard as outlines, right click and select Outline, if you want to go back to normal simply right click and select Preview.

You can visit his website to see more of his work and stay informed about the upcoming release of his store in www.randymora.com.

We hope you’ve enjoyed the work of this great artist, don’t forget to visit his website and if you want to get featured in one of our articles, please send us your works to our Flickr group, we’re looking all the time for new talents from Latin America and the world.

So I decided to change the color of the strokes while leaving the fills intact, I thought that the only way of choosing the strokes only was zooming in and carefully selecting one by one, then my friend Richardini said “man there’s gotta be an easier way of doing that”, and indeed he was right, there’s an easy way of choosing strokes and/or fills separately without having to pick one by one.

We have this random shape made out of strokes and fills, I want to change the strokes’ color without affecting the fill, but I don’t want to zoom in and pick one by one, so what can we do?, well the trick is simple, just go to Select>Same and here you’re going to find a series of options that will help you get the job done.

As you can see, the “Same” menu is amazing!, you can select similar objects with ease, just define whether the objects you want to pick have the same color or weight and even blending mode. In this case I’m not sure if all the strokes have the same weight, but I do know that they’re all black, so I’m going to pick “Stroke Color” and voila!.

And that’s it, a really simple way of selecting similar objects without having to zoom in and pick one by one, despite the fact that I’ve been using Illustrator for a long time I just recently discovered this menu, so I think it may come handy for many of you, thanks for visiting us and we’ll see you in our next post.

Awesome graphic design resumes:

Ok then, we hope this sample can help you boost your creativity in order to make an original and well designed resume, don’t forget that once you have your resume ready you should build an online portfolio to support your c.v, you can read more about this in our post about design portfolio, best sites to showcase your work.

And that’s it, we’d like to thank all the contributors that are always nurturing our Flickr group, don’t forget to send us your best works and you’ll probably get featured in a future edition of the Flickr Monday, thanks for stopping by and we’ll see you next time!.