design (iMagiTiger in Tiles)*
Art Director’s Toolkit, iMaginator and Create
iMaginator lets you place guides to help in cropping or figuring out co-ordinates. Simply type Command+R to make the rulers appear. You can have inches, centimeters, points, or picas. These can be set in File>Preferences.
I prefer to have a Set Units drop-down in my Toolbar. Go to Tools>Customize Toolbar...then drag the Set Units icon to the Toolbar.
If I want to create a quick and uniform grid to lay on my image, I use Art Director’s Toolkit from Code Line Communications. I go to the “Layout” tab and select the “Grid” for Mode:. Since the tiger image is 800 x 600, I type in 11.11” width and 8.33” height. I got this conversion from within iMaginator by toggling between points and inches. Then I set my margins to “0” on all sides. I wanted a 6 x 6 grid, so I typed that into the Columns and Rows with a 0 Gutter. I then clicked the Copy Layout as PDF to clipboard button in the lower right of the window.
iMaginator doesn’t handle PDF files, but there are a few different ways to convert the clipboard to something else. The way I used was to use Preview. Simply open Preview and go to File>New from Clipboard. I then saved it as a JPEG. I then Option dragged the grid JPEG onto my iMaginator window so it was atop the tiger image. I used the grid image to place my guides in iMaginator and then “turned off” the grid image.
Utilizing my guides, I used the crop tool to make selections of different sizes and dragged the JPEGs from the iMaginator image well to my Create document. On the Create document, I had placed a black background to make the placing the image pieces easier.
Quick Tip: Make it easier to make selections and switch back in forth between iMaginator and Create. After you make the first selection in iMaginator and drag from the image well, you will be switched to Create. Either use Command + Tab or click on the iMaginator toolbar to switch back to iMaginator. This will preserve your selection in iMaginator. Now Option + click on the selection to drag and move it to it’s new location. You can also click on the selection edges to resize the selection.
You could add a white fill to the image pieces in Create and then add a drop shadow if you wanted that look.
Monday, October 16, 2006
Above: Art Director’s Toolkit
