A friend of mine is working on an annual "Star Search / American Idol" type program, and he's asked me to work on his site. There's a fifties theme to this year's event, so I thought I would "chrome" the website, using a neon/drive-in type motif, and in order to do that I decided to create some vector graphics.
Not having worked in graphics production very often, and certainly not recently, I wanted to do a primer in Macromedia Fireworks MX (the only version I happen to have), so I purchased a discount used copy of Fireworks MX: Zero to Hero. I was kind of skimming through the early chapters, where they explain what each of the tools do (which I pretty much know, or thought I did), and when I got to the vector line drawing tool, I almost skipped over it…
(Hey man! I know how to draw a freakin' LINE, MAN!!!)
So, anyway, to keep myself amused, I'm screwing around in the property inspector for each tool, to see what all I can find to screw around with– and I find I can use different virtual instruments for the line strokes. I pick "calligraphy" and move on to the "knife" tool. With that, I am instructed in the book to slice my line in half, and move one half to another position…
THAT's when I realize the calligraphy setting had a very specific stroke and texture, which became evident when I arranged the lines together. With an absurdly simple tool that I was preparing to overlook, I was able to begin a meaningful design by just arranging simple lines!
WoW!
Apparently, my pathetically short attention span paid some dividents in this case…
