The other day while watching ESPN, I noticed one of the advertisements for their NBA broadcasts titled “Destination NBA”. At the tail end of the spot they show an image of street signs with the upcoming games and times, with a cool worn/grunge effect to them (here’s a screenshot). Since it seems that I’ve developed a flair for creating graphics with the same grungy look, I decided to try my hand at recreating the signs and at the same time write a tutorial on how I did it. My overall purpose of this tutorial is to show you how you can create the effect on a street sign, not to duplicate the fine work by the ESPN graphics team.

I have included a resources file at the end of the tutorial for you to download if you like. Included in the resources file are a few of the textures that I use along with a few brush sets used in the tutorial. The font used for the tutorial was purchased by me and I cannot share it with anyone, as it would be against the usage policy. With all of the fine details out of the way…let’s get started.

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The crew from Go Media are at it again as they just released their 13th collection of “stock” vector artwork. I use the word “stock” lightly, because their work is anything but! This latest release is chock full of great stuff and includes a total of 137 high quality, detailed vector pieces in seven individual themes. As always you can purchase the entire collection for set 13 or choose to purchase them in their individual packs, but you’ll pay almost $34 more if you were to purchase all seven packs separately. This set includes some very interesting stuff; I’m very interested to see the “Flow” pack in action as it’s got some really cool geometric shapes in flowing patterns…very cool stuff.

I’m not 100% sold on the 3D Skull collection, but I’m guessing with some tweaking and some experimentation they could be used very cleverly to create some cool artwork. The entire set has some really cool stuff in it which includes:

• 3D Skulls (mentioned)
• Robots
• Bound (Vines, Ropes, etc)
• Flow (mentioned)
• Too Sexy (sexy silhouettes – also seen on “Speed Network”)
• XTreme Sports
• Apparel

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For the past few days, whenever I could find time I have been working on putting together a simple tutorial that will show you how to create a logo for my feature post “Heads Up Seven Up” Blogroll. The logo was created with Adobe Illustrator, which is a bit of a specialized illustration program. The reason I choose to use Illustrator for something like this is that it creates vector graphics, which is quite different from Photoshop with creates bitmap graphics. With vector graphics you can shrink, enlarge, twist and shape the images without messing up the quality of the image. I can also import the file created in Illustrator right into Photoshop to create a smaller image for web!

There are many vector drawing programs available that offer similar features like Illustrator ($599) and are a “little less expensive” too. Corel Draw and Adobe Fireworks come to mind first and foremost, but Corel Draw carries a hefty $429 price tag. Fireworks while still pricey at $149 is the next best option. The great thing about Fireworks is you can edit both vector and bitmap images. I did find another vector program that is free called DrawPlus; I haven’t used it, but it doesn’t look to bad. If you’re a student and want to purchase any type of software I suggest searching Google for “student discounted software”. With all of that out of the way let’s check out the tutorial.

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