Luckily for you, it is actually easy to create your own styled vector graphs using Adobe Illustrator. The steps are pretty easy. So anyone with some basic knowledge of how design software works should be able to easily handle it. Here are the steps that you need to follow to create simple vector graphs.

1. With an open document, select the Pie graph tool.

2. Now, click on the canvass where approximately you want the centre of your pie graph to appear. Enter the appropriate values for the size of your pie graph.

3. Afterward, you will see a table. Since pie graphs are representations of a whole, then you will want to enter values here that sum up to 100%. For our example, we are using 60, 30 and 10.

4. Once done, click on the checkbox. You will see then the graph rendered with the values that you entered.

5. Next, we break the graph into parts. First close the data table by just clicking on its “X” icon. As it is now, the graph is a whole. So we will need to ungroup it. First select the selection tool (Hotkey V) and then click on our pie graph. Afterwards, select Object -> Ungroup.

6. A window will ask you for confirmation, just press YES.

7. Let us then add some colours to the parts of the graph. Simply select each element and add a colour.

8. Now, separate your pie elements a bit to add some space. This is now actually a simple 2D vector Pie Graph. However, to make things more interesting, we will make it a 3D type graph.

9. Do this by selecting one part of the pie and clicking Effect -> 3D -? Extrude and Bevel

10. Once the controls are open, select custom rotation. Now, you can set your own rotation by dragging your mouse across the example cube. However, to make things faster, just enter these values.

1. X Axis:  40 degrees
2. Y Axis: 15 degrees
3. Z Axis: 10 degrees
4. Extrude depth: 50
5. Bevel: None
6. Surface: Plastic

11. Afterwards, you will see a nice 3D pie area.

12. Now, just repeat the process for the other two. You will see the 3D pie graph is complete!

13. Now just style the surfaces. Use Colour gradients if possible to make things look even more interesting.

14. Finally, just add some numbers to make things look credible.  Make sure that you pay close attention to the position of your pie graph chunks. You can actually make it appear that one chunk is lifted over another for emphasis.

Great! Now you know how to create vector pie graphs in Adobe Illustrator.

Author’s Bio:  Irene Thompson is a professional writer and a graphic enthusiast from PrintPlace.com, an online printing company. She has been living in Houston, TX since 2004. Her design experience includes print graphic and illustration.

Do you want to copy that glossy chrome style vehicle emblem look and texture for your headline titles? This style is perfect for covers when booklet printing or brochure printing and can even work for poster printing projects that need that touch of sleek “automobile”-like elegance.

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In this tutorial, you will learn how you can convert your text with a glass type texture plus all the glitter and glint effects that come with it. This is perfect for your advertising covers for brochures, booklets and catalogs, especially if you are going for that smooth, glass and glossy theme. So just follow the steps below and discover what you can do.

1. First, let us setup the document. Simply go to File -> New… to open the New Document window.

2. Choose the size that you want. Remember that for web images 72 is good for resolution while for printing 300 is recommended.

3. For now, leave your background white and press ok.

4. Right now, our background is white. Since we are creating a glass type text, it would be good to have a coloured background.

5. So for this tutorial, we copy-pasted a textured type color background as a good contrast to glass text.

6. Next, we place our text. Just use the text tool and type in the text you want. Use white color for now for the text. Of course, choose the appropriate font style that you want for your theme.

7. Now, let us edit the text to make it look a bit more solid and three dimensional. Right click on the text layer and select the option to add blending options.

8. Once the layer style window opens, click on the checkbox for Bevel and emboss.

9. Change the altitude attribute to the 70-80 range.

10. Change the gloss contour to “ring double”

11. Aftewards, press ok.

12. Now, we have something almost glass like, but not quite of course. The next step is to change the “fill” of our text to a transparency to make it look like glass. So go back to the blending options, and click on the “Blending Options: Default” section.

13. Under “Advanced blending, drag the fill opacity slider to the left. Make it 5%.

14. Afterwards, to add more realism to your glass text, tick on the checkbox for “drop shadow” as well.

15. Adjust the angle of the light source to 45 degrees. Once done, press “ok”

16. Now you should have text that is transparent, but have glossy glassy edges and a shadow.

17. Change the background and see how it looks on different textures and colours.

18. Another example:

19. Now, here is the great part of this technique. You can apply it to any layer actually. Including shapes and graphics.

20. So it all depends on your creativity really, but you can basically turn anything into glass.

1. Now, actually it is very easy to add sparkles to your design. Of course, you will want to start out with a finished design to retouch with sparkles. For this example, we are going to retouch a title design like so:

2. Now, we shall add a new layer for our sparkles so that they are easily manipulated without bothering the other layers and text. Press CTRL+SHIFT+N to add a new layer to your document.

3. Just use the default settings for the layer. You may want to name it sparkles.

4. Now, select the brush tool in your toolbox.

5. Next, open your brush panel, and select the “Start 70 pixels” brush.

6. Once the brush has been selected, start experimenting with the placements of your sparkles.

7. Now, here is the trick, once you have an initial set done, try to vary the size of your brush. Right click on the canvass and then vary the pixel amount or the size of the brush.

8. Play around with bigger 100px brushes, or smaller 50, 30 and 20 pixel brushes.

9. Here are the initial sparkles with varying sizes.

10. At this point they look pretty ok already. However, we may want to add some additional color variations to make this interesting. To do this, we will add a colour gradient option in the sparkle layer.

11. Do this by right clicking on our sparkle layer and clicking on “blending options”

12. Once the layer options is open, tick on the “gradient overlay” option.

13. Next, click on the gradient box to choose a “gradient color”

14. For our purposes, we are going to use a very colourful Spectrum gradient. This is a combination of all the colours of the rainbow.

15. Once done, press OK. You will see now that we have nice colourful sparkles around our title.

16. Next, let us add a light touch of a glow in our sparkles. Bring up the blending options window again. This time, you will want to tick the option for “Outer Glow”

17. Also, change the blend mode to “Linear light” while you might want to adjust to a more yellow color for your sparkle (though this depends on your colour scheme).
18. In the elements section, use a softer technique. Set the spread to 0% but set the size to 10 pixels. Leave the rest on the default. Press ok once you are done.

19. Great! As you can see, that adds a nice soft glow on each of our sparkles. Now you have lots of colourful glowing sparkles around your title.
20. You can duplicate the process over and over again to add more sparkles. Adjust the opacity accordingly to add varying levels of intense or soft sparkles.

Great! Now you know how you can easily add colourful and magical sparkles to your titles. You can just vary the colours and the positions of your sparkle effects to get the precise sparkling magical effect that you want. Good Luck!

Turning boring text into a point of interest can be easily done in Photoshop CS4 and can really add a lot to any poster, web page or, with its ever growing fanbase online, business card printing designs. In this tutorial, you will learn how to give your text the wooden look in 6 easy steps.

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Designing the perfect business card that reflects your company’s identity can be quite a challenge, much more if its designing an entire corporate identity package. Here are some ideas that can help you jumpstart your creativity.

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If you’re looking into designing posters, custom business cards, flyers or maybe–if its appropriate for your line of business– for catalog printing with a comic or animation theme, you will be glad to know that this is a very manageable effect to do in Photoshop. You just need to fill in the correct filters, colors etc. This tutorial will help you do the step by step process from raw image to comic book style. Let us start with the things you need.

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In this tutorial we will teach you how to turn your design titles into three dimensional type text. Just follow each step and you will not go wrong in how to do it. So let us start with creating the document first.

1. Start by creating a new document. Go to File -> New… to open the New document dialogue window.

2. Set the size (width and height) that you need for your design. Take note that these are measured in pixels, but you can change them to inches by just clicking on the drop down menu of the measurement type. For prints, a resolution of 300 pixels/inch is recommended. For web images 72 pixels/inch is good. Press OK once you are done.

3. Now, let us get to creating your text. For 3D text, it is best to choose large type or fat type fonts. Script fonts are not ideal of course as you won’t get a clear three dimensional look, though of course, you can try and experiment for yourself.

4. In this tutorial we will be using the font IMPACT in our text, as it is a nice simple blocky type text. Just choose something wide and blocky for your own 3D text base.

5. Now that you have the text, ready, we will want to add some perspective to it to make it appear to be in a three dimensional environment. First though, make sure that your text has no misspellings. Also make sure that it is the right title or word that you want to use, as we are going to convert the text into a shape and by then you cannot edit the text readily. So make sure that your text content is in its final form.

6. Once ready, right click on the text and select “convert to shape”. You will now see that your text layer becomes a vector shape.

7. Next, simply press “Ctrl+T” on that text layer to start transforming your text. Once the selection box appears, right click on your text shape and choose “perspective”

8. Note that you will see box handles in the transform selection box. Click and drag these box handles to transform your text in the proper three dimensional perspective. Just experiment with it. (remember that you can always go back to the original untransformed shape by pressing the ESC key) Once you are done, Press enter to commit the transformation.

9. Now comes the sort of tricky part. Duplicate the layer that you created. Just right click on the original text layer and select duplicate layer.

10. Next, change the color of this new layer, to make it distinct from the original. Do this by double clicking on the colour layer thumbnail of the layer and choosing a solid color.

11. Next, we are going to create another duplicate layer of the text to make the other additional layers for that three dimensional effect. Just click on the text layer that is at the bottom, and press “Ctrl+J”

12. Doing this instantly creates a new layer copy of the selected layer.

13. Now, we are going to move this new layer a bit to make it part of the 3D effect. Click on the move tool or press “V” to be able to move your new layer.

14. The easiest way to accurately move your layer is to just use the arrow keys. With the layer selected, simply tap the arrow keys in the selected direction that you want. In our case, we would want to tap the left arrow key, as the 3D body of our text should protrude there.

15. Here, we pressed the left arrow key just three times to get the effect.

16. Now to get the 3D effect to be thicker, we will continue on creating duplicate layers and then nudging those new layers each by one. Do this by pressing CTRL+J and press the left arrow key once, over and over.

17. So the order of pressing it should be CTRL+J, Left Arrow key, CTRL+J, Left Arrow key.

18. After just ten repetitions of this, we get something like the image below:

19. Now that looks like a 3D image already.

20. To make things look more Integrated, we will change the colour of our new layers. First merge them by selecting all the duplicated layers and clicking “Merge Layers”

21. Next, add a color overlay blending option to the merged layer. Do this by right clicking on the merged layer and then picking blending options.

22. Click on the option for Color Overlay, and then choose a color that matches your front colour layer.

23. Once done, you should see a nice 3D type looking text.

Now all you have to do is to customize the colors and the angle of your text perspective to get the 3D effect that you need in particular for your own designs. Good Luck!

Resources:

Visit www.PrintPlace.com for more tutorials like editing effects of brochures.