The juxt look

programming flash
1

hey people,

I was looking through some designer sites that are out there, and a lot of people really like what the people at juxt have done. ( www.juxtinteractive.com ). I was playing around with Illustrator 9 today at work to try and duplicate some of the black bordered techniques they use on the site.

I came up with something that’s very simple to do, and gives some pretty good effects. Following these exact steps won’t get you exactly what they have, but using this technique can get you very close to what they have/use or something a lot more interesting if you want.

Open up illustrator.

Click on the pen tool and draw a shape. It doesn’t really matter what shape it is, but depending if you’re going for a menu outline, or just a random shape, try to put a decent amount of clicks into the procedure. (btw, it’s better to keep them angled, and not curved, but both work).

Once you’ve finished your shape, alter the stroke of the line to the relative thickness that you’d like to have. (again juxt varies it depending what you’re trying to duplicate). I set mine to 6 if you want something to base it on.

Select your thick shape and go to object, path, and outline stroke.

With your shape still selected, go to effect, distort and transform, and scribble and tweek. Here you can play around with it, but I left mine at the defaults (10% horizontal and vertical). And voila.

You can do some really neat things with this if you have the time to experiment. Varying the shape, the stroke, and the percentage of the last effect can drastically alter and product different (yet equally interesting) results.

Since I found this out at work, I don’t have time to post up a complete step by step (with images) tutorial. If anybody wants me to, just let me know.

Have a good one,

Uth :nerd:

2

Hmm, sounds like I need to get a bit more into Illustrator. I’ve got a copy of 9, but haven’t really had the time to muck around with it yet.

I like that site though, especially their logo… Wish I’d thought of that.

3

Hey Kit,

No kidding. I also wish I had gotten inspiration for something like that… because it’s quite good, and doesn’t look like they spent weeks on just their logo alone.

As to Illustrator, the only reason I use it is because I’m taking care of the print media for our organization while our head graphic artist is away. It’s been about 2 months now, so I’ve learned a decent amount on it, but I’m sure there’s plenty more knowledge to be had. I’m actually very curious how many people use it for drawing their initial conception shapes/borders and then move it into photoshop to edit and manipulate. It’d be interesting to see.

Anyways, thanks for responding… I was wondering if anybody else out there either used illustrator, or cared about the tutorial :o

Have a good one,

Uth :nerd:

4

Well my new employers have very kindly furnished me with not only MX Studio, but the latest versions of Photoshop and Illustrator. Photoshop is the one I use most often, but that more from neccessity really when dealing with the sort of thing they want me to do.

Illustrator is very handy for drawing shapes etc that Flash just can’t cope with. Importing things from Photoshop doesn’t give as good results. Most of the time.

I guess it really depends on what you’re after as a final effect.