Deke’s Techniques

Your weekly quick-fix of Deke, with ideas you may inspire or inform your own projects.

Illustrator Pen Tool (Triceratops) Tricks

Deke shows you exactly where to put the anchor points and place the control handles for drawing his Triceratops logo.

Designing an Animal Logo in Illustrator

Deke begins the time-traveling journey of creating a triceratops-themed logo in Adobe Illustrator.

Very Large Artboards in Adobe Illustrator

Deke explores the possibilities of the extra large artboards you can now create in Adobe Illustrator 2021.

Drawing a Universal Power Symbol in Adobe Illustrator

Deke uses some handy shape features in Adobe Illustrator to draw the universal power symbol.

Tracing an Object with the Photoshop Pen Tool

Deke shows you how to trace a pixel-based heart with the Pen tool in Photoshop in order to make smooth, artifact-free scaleable shapes.

Rendering Your Name in Playing Cards in Photoshop

Deke uses the characters on playing cards to spell a very important word in Photoshop.

Tracing a Specific Letterform with a Shape Tool in Adobe Illustrator 2021

Deke uses the new Snap to Glyph option in Adobe Illustrator 2021 to fill in the counters of a few O's with a relative ease that was previously hard to come by.

Snapping to a Specific Letterform in Adobe Illustrator (Using Snap to Glyph)

Deke shows you the ups and downs and in-betweens of the Snap to Glyph feature in Illustrator, that allows you to align your object with a specific letterform (and a specific part thereof).

Snapping to Letterforms in Adobe Illustrator

Deke explores Adobe Illustrator 2021's ability to snap objects into alignment with different parts of letterforms, which Adobe calls Snap to Glyph

Aligning to Point Type in Adobe Illustrator

Deke demonstrates the immense usefulness of Adobe Illustrator's new Align to Glyph features, which give you better control when aligning to point or area type.

Blending Vectors with a Pixel-Based Photograph in Photoshop

Deke uses layer effects and some meticulous masking in Photoshop to make text on the side of his van look like it belongs there.

Drawing Arrows in Photoshop 2021

Deke takes you on a road trip with Photoshop's Line tool and points the way with a quasi-dynamic arrowhead.