And the answer is, we were captured by pirates. Fleshless, Illustrator-loving pirates who locked us up in the hold of their ship, with only our laptops and daily rations of grog, refusing to let us out until we revealed the whereabouts of that long-elusive treasure-map-posing-as-a-book, Adobe Illustrator CS3, no 4, no 5 One-on-One. (Valued treasure maps go through a lot of iterations before you find them.) Anyway, the pirates have let us go. Well all of us except, David Futato, our design mastermind, who they insist on keeping captive until the book goes to the printer early this week. Of course, they’ve moved him to swankier quarters and they’ve upgraded his daily ration to sprouted lentil faux-meat products, multi-colored jello, and white russians.

So pour yourself a bloody mary on this fine Sunday morning as we regale you with the tale of how, in honor of our captors, or maybe just because his new home came with one of those flag holder thingies already attached to the house, Deke set out to create a pirate flag in Illustrator. And this week we honor our erstwhile captors and discuss how he went about doing it.

Here’s the adventurous tale of how Illustrator helps Deke fly his true colors:

Actually, Deke will describe this adventure in his upcoming Deke’s Techniques video blog, during which you’ll see the process in a more step-by-step manner. But here are the basic bullets of this week’s show:

• The illustration began as a drawing that Deke did on paper with a ball point pen, traced by hand with a Sharpie, scanned, polished in Photoshop, then ultimately Live Traced in Illustrator.
• While manipulating the pirate in Photoshop, Deke discovered that the Liqify tool works amazingly well for line drawings.
• The flag company that Deke sent the flag to actually requested a vector-based file.
• Turns out the flag printer starts with a white piece of nylon, so in some ways it’s like printing on paper.
• Oddly, to us anyway, the flag printer requested PMS colors. Who knew nylon-coating-flag-dye came in Pantone colors?
• One-sided flag (with 70% bleed-through) is much cheaper than two-sided.
• I can get Deke to reveal all if I use guilt.

Wave your own pirate colors after listening to this week’s show. Here’s the regular-quality audio file. You can stream, or for best results, right-click and choose Download or Save. Here’s the high-res version; you’ll want to download rather than stream. And don’t forget our usual plea to subscribe via iTunes.

Cheers until next week, mateys!