[Vincent Rosati]

I just drew the left side with the pen tool, as paths. The ‘s’ isn’t perfect, but you could mess with it if you need to.
Then I typed the right side with Avenir 35 Light, with a .5pt stroke to give it more weight.
cmv10.ai.zip

Vince

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[Vincent Rosati]

You would probably still get the distortions that you are concerned about, if you use a warp.
You could also try a mesh, but that might also have the distortions.
With either of these methods you wouldn’t need to convert to outlines.

Sometimes you just have actually illustrate stuff. In Illustrator you can control positioning down to 0.001 pt, which is quite accurate I think.

Depending on your needs, you might also need to add Bezier curves to the bottom points of the text.

The attached file shows results from a couple of different methods.
I think that doing it by hand has the best potential.
archv10.ai.zip

Vince

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[Vincent Rosati]

You might just have to Type/Create Outlines and drag the points into position.

Vince

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[Vincent Rosati]

I’m guessing you might need to make *Multiple* clipping masks.

Or you could outline all of the paths and finish them using various Pathfinder tools.

It might take a bunch of extra work. Maybe not necessary unless this is going yo be used for a die cutting job, 3d spline, motion path or something.

Or you could try Effect/Secret Effects/Vector Awesomeizer. 🙂

Vince

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[Vincent Rosati]

Select the path and open the Stroke palette and check Dashed Line.
You can enter values for dash length and gap length.

You can click the Round Cap button if you need to make circular dots.

If you need the dashes to have different shapes you would create a new Brush, using the Brushes palette.

With the Appearance palette you can layer additional paths, with it’s own style if necessary.

If you’ll need to use the style multiple times, you can drag the styled object into the Graphic Styles palette, they apply your new custom style to other objects.

911_illustratorpathstyles.zip

Vince

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[Vincent Rosati]

you’ll find more people who live in the video world in a video forum like:

COW Forum: After Effects

or
COW Forum: Premiere

The COW has over 450
Tutorials for After Effects
and many of them utilize vectors for graphics, shapes, masks, and motion paths.

I would argue that Illustrator is a fundamental tool (and an advanced tool). Do you need it to do video – no. Do you need it to create vectors – no – you can also do that in PS and AE. Are you going to need the array of tools that are available in Illustrator, to quickly create complex vectors – maybe. Only you will know that.

Generally I’ll push Illustrator, because so often people want to know how to convert something they’ve already created in some other app into a vector. At which time I’ll explain that their workflow was backwards, and they should have started in Illustrator to build their primary components.
But that’s just my workflow.

Vince

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[Vincent Rosati]

Not sure if this is your issue, but in the past I’ve had tablets lose functionality when updating software because of driver issues.
Maybe the manufacturer has an update that is CS5 compatible?

Also, I noticed you’re using an ADM Athlon 2000. It’s probably an SSE processor (as opposed to an SSE2). If it is, you shouldn’t have updated past CS2 – for AI and PS anyway. I can’t remember what you lose in IA, but in PS you lose some Render filters, for instance.

Vince

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[Vincent Rosati]

I took a shot at your challenge also.
I was able to create the leg of the ‘R’ by skewing a film frame, making a tile out of it, then creating a pattern brush and applying it to the path. It looks good, but…
I couldn’t get anything to work well for the hard curves.

I’d just:
Draw the length of the film as a path, and set the weight.
Duplicate the path to create the back edge.
Draw the cells and the notch things by duplicating objects that you may already have.
Then tweak the parts, by hand, that are in the tough spots. Boom. Done in 20 minutes.

Vince

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[Vincent Rosati]

Are you sure that there are no CKYK objects in your artboard?
Are you sure that there is only 1 PMS (with screens for different values) used in your artboard?

I’m just not sure what else might they want. To my knowledge there are only RGB and CMYK color spaces.

I’ve forwarded this question to another forum leader.
In the meantime, let us know that you have verified the above questions.
Perhaps consider uploading or linking the file.

Vince

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[Vincent Rosati]

Do you know the root PMS swatch that you are supposed to use?
Either way you would just save a CMYK file as your friend has done, with the used pantone in the swatch palette, and only use that pantone and it’s percentage variants/screens in the actual artwork.

You could also save swatches for all of the used screens/percentages of the pantone, which would be more for your sake that the printer’s.
It seems that they want spot colors in the file as opposed to a process colors.

View your swatches in list mode. You want the ‘Spot Color’ icon for all colors used in the file – a square with a circle in it.
If it’s CMYK the swatch will only show the 4-color ‘Process Color’ icon.

Hope this helps.

Vince

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