[Steve Crook jr]

Yes, it looks like you are headed in the right direction. I don’t have a lot of time to study it, but I see two distinct things you should work on first:

1) The colors of the gradient fill are off. I’m sure you noticed already, but you asked. How I match colors is make a small box they eye dropper a color and add it to my swatches – you can then choose that color in the gradient tool.

2) The outline of the letters in the original artwork is a much thinner outline, then a drop shadow added.

Hope this helps.

Steve Crook, Jr.
http://www.stevecrookjr.me

I am a simple creative professional that can get my Adobe suite and a few other creative tools to do what I want. Barely. 🙂

[Steve Crook jr]

Muse is not built (at this time, anyway) to be a shopping cart system. A quick Google search of “muse shopping cart plugin” returned the well-known Ecwid plugin, but Ecwid doesn’t offer digital downloads on its free plan…

So, what to do?

Maybe use something other than Muse? For a simple site, OpenCart is the first that comes to mind. There is also Magento, but it has heftier requirements than OpenCart.

Hope this helps.

Steve Crook, Jr.
http://www.stevecrookjr.me

I am a simple creative professional that can get my Adobe suite and a few other creative tools to do what I want. Barely. 🙂

[Steve Crook jr]

Hm.

We don’t have enough information to give a solid answer. In the future, let us know more about the artwork, specifically, what kind of file it is. PSD? JPG? AI? EPS?, etc?

If it is AI or EPS, is it an embedded image (or images) or a bunch of paths and shapes? (Any other format, you would be better off asking in another category of the forums, unless you are asking how to redraw the whole thing.)

If you have the image in AI, here are some possibilities:

1) The stems will be easy if the artwork is vector already. Just select them and set your fill color to what you want. (It might already be white, btw.) If the artwork is NOT vector do as in #3 below. Use the optionals sparingly here, unless the artist in you has a strong feeling about it.

2) You are in a bit of luck with the heads – they are all just scaled/rotated/reflected copies; you only need to “fix” one, then copy it (or just the fix) and correct its orientation.

3) To fix the 1, I’d use the pen or curvature tool to draw a path around the biggest head. Fill the path with the desired color, set the stroke to none, move it behind the existing artwork in the layers panel.
Optional #1: Don’t trace the outline too closely – leave some variance to the inside and out. Gives some visual variety.
Optional #2: Feather the path. A lot or a little to your taste.
Possible Problem #1: If the logo/image is not vector it is likely a black and white image. (What I see from the Cow is, anyway.) You will need to go into Photoshop or another image editor and remove ALL the white – even expand the selection just a bit to bite into the black just a bit to remove most of the gray edges along the black.

As in most of my responses, this morphed as I wrote it. 🙂 It should solve most of your problems with this logo if you have the skills in AI & PS.

Good luck!

Steve Crook, Jr.
http://www.stevecrookjr.me

I am a simple creative professional that can get my Adobe suite and a few other creative tools to do what I want. Barely. 🙂

[Steve Crook jr]

I was rushed when I wrote it. 🙂 I can’t believe all the grammatical errors upon re-reading it. Sigh.

Thanks for your feedback.

Steve Crook, Jr.
http://www.stevecrookjr.me

I am a simple creative professional that can get my Adobe suite and a few other creative tools to do what I want. Barely. 🙂

[Steve Crook jr]

Two parts to your question, so two answers. 🙂

Also, I am new to the Illustrator to AE, and I have done this for the first time just a couple of days ago. 🙂

So, I did a search for importing Illustrator file into AE and Illustrator has an option to help.

In the layers palette, select everything and then choose “Release To Layers (Sequence)” from the layers options menu.

This is not a perfect solution, but the best one to have Illustrator help you. You will lose group names, but you have to manually name the layers now, anyway, right?

Just play with this until you get the layers set up the way you want.

Further, talk with your designer and ask if they can set up future projects to help you out. Here is an article you can point them to that better explains why I just said and more: https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/quick-tip-prepping-vector-files-effects/

For the pixelated issue in AE that is very simple to fix:

In each layer’s switches area, there is a “sun” right next to the shy guy. check that for each vector layer.

How this works is turn on that switch tells AE to process and redraw the vector for every frame, including any/all effects/transforms/etc. If you do not activate this feature, then AE processes the effects, etc., on the original raster created from the vector.

Hope this helps. 🙂

Steve Crook, Jr.
http://www.stevecrookjr.me

I am a simple creative professional that can get my Adobe suite and a few other creative tools to do what I want. Barely. 🙂

[Steve Crook jr]

Like Kalle before me, I do not know of any jargon or term to describe this…

Further, I have recently started using InDesign (ID) with any kind of depth, so I can just start to be called a beginner. 🙂

My solution would be to keep everything inside ID:

* I would make two single page ID files, one the English and one the Spanish.

* I would then make a third ID file that has two pages of the appropriate size.

* With the third file open and the other two closed, I would use File Explorer to drag one of the closed files to page 1 and the other to page 2. NOTE: File > Place… works, too, but I am lazy.

* Finally, I would rotate page 2 180 degrees. (Full-on American here – I’d have the English on page 1 and the Spanish upside down on page 2 since I can’t read it anyway.)

I see a couple of benefits to this method:

1) Faster workflow. I generally find it faster to work in one program if I know how to use it sufficiently.

2) Editing the individual English and Spanish files reflects in the combined file when you open it and update links when ID asks you.

3) One single output step to PDF from ID rather than combining in Acrobat.

Final thoughts: I automatically started to think about the publication being sent to an outside printer – that is, after all, how most people use ID. However, I print over half my work in-house. If I were going to print it myself, I would NOT rotate the Spanish page and instead tell my printer to duplex the print by “flip paper on short edge”. This would also work from any program, btw.

Hope my ideas helped.

Steve Crook, Jr.
http://www.stevecrookjr.me

I am a simple creative professional that can get my Adobe suite and a few other creative tools to do what I want. Barely. 🙂

[Steve Crook jr]

Well, as I see it, you may not be giving us all the information. 🙂 The size of the font is very important to help you better… Now you get to experiment!

The important part is the “.4cm” in your offset path.

.4cm is a hard dimension that will give you different results based on the size of your text. If your original text is 6-12 (or even larger) all you will get IS a big blob. If your original text is 250pt, then the .4 will make little difference.

Try adjusting the offset from .005 to .1 (with preview results checked) and see what value you like for your artwork.

Good luck.

Steve Crook, Jr.
http://www.stevecrookjr.me

I am a simple creative professional that can get my Adobe suite and a few other creative tools to do what I want. Barely. 🙂

[Steve Crook jr]

Hm. I’m a little pressed for time, so I can’t do a full step-by-step; there are however several on the Internet with a quick Google search: illustrator layer mask tutorial

Basically, you will:
1) Create a background fill that is larger than all the outlines of the letters (a rectangle is fine).
2) Create the shapes you want to overlay the background and give them the appearances you want. Be certain that any design elements you don’t want seen are outside the outlines of the letters.
3a) It helps if you have combined all the outlines of the letters into a compound path (CTRL-8)
3b) Group all of the elements you just created with the text outlines.
3c) In the layers panel, move the text outlines to the top spot in the group.
4) Turn the group into a clip group. (In the layers panel, the light & dark boxes icon right next to the hour glass, or one of the other ways described in the tutorials you find in the search.)

You should be done. Just tweak your design to your needs.

Steve Crook, Jr.
http://www.stevecrookjr.me

I am a simple creative professional that can get my Adobe suite and a few other creative tools to do what I want. Barely. 🙂

[Steve Crook jr]

For this question, there are a whole bunch of answers. 🙂

One set of files should be provided no matter what, and that is the base media files: jpgs, pngs, gifs, PSDs, AIs, etc. You should be able to get an editable copy of whatever the designer creates to give your site its flavor and branding.

From there it gets tricky, but the short answer is whatever files the designer creates and uploads to a web server, plus the files to create them.

Is it being designed in Dreamweaver (or equivalent)? How about Muse (I know some people scoff, but it builds simple and attractive sites easily)? Or is it done completely online (such as a WordPress or gomobi site)?

With the first, you should get a bunch of html, css, js, etc. files along with the media.

With Muse you should get the .MUSE file plus the media – but don’t forget to ask about what plugins were used because you likely won’t get those. The next designer working on the site will have to remove that functionality or get the plugin.

And for those built online? Well, even the designer doesn’t usually have most of those files. You’ll just get the base media files.

For WordPress or other CMS systems, it can be more complex, but basically you can expect the same as one built online.

This probably isn’t the only right answer, but it should be a good summary and a great place to start.

Steve Crook, Jr.
http://www.stevecrookjr.me

I am a simple creative professional that can get my Adobe suite and a few other creative tools to do what I want. Barely. 🙂

[Steve Crook jr]

1) Nobody likes BEING YELLED AT, so often we’ll just skip over the questions.

2) Give it time. I certainly do not sit like a vulture on top of the forums to answer any questions that pops up the moment it does. I don’t think many others do either. In fact, I read Creative Cow daily in digest form.

3) I do not know the answer to your problem. I have an idea, though. Don’t yell at me if it is wrong, though.

When Photoshop is waiting for a confirmation from you to finish a task, it disables most of the menu options. This might be what is going on with you. Look in the area just below the menu bar to see if there is a prohibited symbol (kinda like “Ø”) or a check mark. If there is, you must accept (check) or decline (Ø) the operation before you can do anything else.

So. If this isn’t the case in your situation, sorry. Maybe if you ask nicely and wait a reasonable time, someone else will answer.

Steve Crook, Jr.
http://www.stevecrookjr.me

I am a simple creative professional that can get my Adobe suite and a few other creative tools to do what I want. Barely. 🙂