In this very simple tutorial I am using Adobe Illustrator (CS3) to show you how easy it is to get a nice gloss using the opacity mask. Start by creating a new 400 x 400px rgb document. I will use popular star (badge) shape that you can see a lot around telling you that something is new or so.

Step 1

Select the star tool and click on the blank canvas, for start use the following settings from the dialog.

(more…)

Gloss effect is very popular weapon in the arsenal of web 2.0 designers. You can create it using any main stream app but I will show you how to do it in Adobe Illustrator CS3 (any version will do I guess except maybe some ancient one ) . This is I believe the easiest way yet and gloss effect can come handy for many things if you are Aston (or any other app) skinner. You can use it for instance for glossy balls like in Vista glossy orb start button, icons or whatever.  Ok launch your Illustrator and create any size basic rbg document (use rbg document for all that does not need to be printed on paper – that is the fastest explanation I can give). Size of the document or of the objects is not important since we are dealing with vectors here and we can always resize it at any time without any fear of quality loss.  In order to have something to apply gloss effect to I’ll show you by the way how to create nice blended object which is neat alternative for gradient fills and can lead to some pretty cool results.

Step1

Let’s quickly draw two circles by using the elipse tool, set the color of the larger circle to  darker color than the one inside and set the stroke to none.

(more…)