Everything New is Old

I am thinking of changing the name of this blog from "Because Why Not," an admittedly rather noncommittal title, to "Last to Know" and write about the cool things I find or learn or like, ignoring the fact that I am not the first one to discover these things.

That may never happen, but I'm going to start with the blend tool in Illustrator. Today I was looking at some really cool vector art on a stock image site. I've always admired them and have tried several times to figure out how they do it. So I looked up tutorials for Illustrator and found a site that had one for those bending twisting groups of lines that seem to recede and stretch out into space.

The first time I saw that was probably on desktops that came with my eMac running OSX, 10.1 or whatever the lowest version was. Making this complicated-looking graphic was so insanely simple, I almost hit myself that I had never figured it out before. You draw two lines, select them and then tell the computer to blend them. As many "steps" as you set in the options is as many lines as the computer will draw between them.

The blend tool is also responsible for all those wet looking aqua icons that Mac gave us with OSX. Another tutorial showed how you can make the iTunes icon.

Designers are some of the most insecure people, they do not want to reveal their secrets. So, kudos to Nick La, who not only has some beautiful illustrations, but the guts to share his knowledge. He seems to understand what one of my college professors said, if you discover something and tell no one, it dies with you. And what good will that do the human race?