Badges Have Been Replaced With Joining Facebook Groups.

I don't know if it's a sign of me getting older but I do remember the days when kids used to have badges on their school bags of their favourite bands or celebs, I was one of them. Though I don't see many anymore, though I myself sport the college "Respect" badge on mine still, I swear they are still around just more modernised, it's just all the random groups people "like" on facebook.

Anyway I've gone off the rails slightly, but there is a reason I'm talking about badges, in Ross' lessons we've been getting to grips with Adobe Illustrator, first the toolbar we created, and now we've been making badges, even giving them slight shading to give the illusion of 3 dimensions. I really enjoyed doing this, we first did one together, using a vector image that Ross had provided (Butterman) and he showed us step by step how to use tools such as Pathfinder, something I had never come across before, to trim shapes which had overlapping shapes on them to leave a perfect crescent which we used as the light reflection on the badge.

This was the first badge design I created, thought I'd be creative and use a star shape, however the effect I used to get the light shine effect was just putting an eclipse shape over it and changing it to a soft overlay, this didn't work very well as you can see, the contrast between how light it is compared to the rest of the badge is unrealistic.

After asking Ross for some reminders of how to use the pathfinder tool I managed to make this, going back to the original circle shaped badge was a good idea in my opinion, the star just makes it look a bit too complex, the simplicity of the circle is nice.