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X-Acto Knife Holder
One of the courses that I'm taking at school assigned me to make something in Tinkercad and Adobe Illustrator. For the Tinkercad assignment, I was allowed to make anything as long as it included at least three shapes. I decided to design an X-acto knife holder for the table at our maker space because it was missing one.
I first decided on how I wanted to place the knife on the holder. I didn't design the knife holder as a long term storage solution, only a temporary solution to make sure that knives wouldn't fall off the table. The second step was to make a rough design in Tinkercad. I just sized a rectangle to an approximate value of how large I thought the knives would be. Then I made a 3D model of the X-acto knife with accurate dimensions. Finally, I duplicated the knife model and cut a hole in the rectangle, making the stand. The final picture of the model can be in the picture on the right.
Business Cards and Logos
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For the Adobe Illustrator assignment, I had to design a logo and put it on a business card. The process of designing that I went through involved thinking of how I want my logo to look and what shapes I wanted to include. I decided that I want to include an X shape and on the outside, a gear shape. I started by making the gear shape. The first step to make the gear shape was to create a circle. Then I made a rectangle and scaled the top two points down to create a trapezoid. The third step was to just duplicate it and put it around the circle. The final step was to join all of the squares and the circle. Then I just added a smaller circle to make the gear shape look like a gear shape. To make the X, I just put two line segments. Then I just added the text and used line segments to make the symbols. Finally, I added the Austin Prep logo and rectangle around to encapsulate everything. The final business card can be seen on the left.
For the logo, the first thing that I wanted to represent was the name of my blog, RGAPXT. I wanted to design a logo that was able to integrate all these characters. The picture shown on the right became the final logo. It is obvious how the RG and AP was integrated inside of the logo. The way that the T was integrated within the logo was by representing it with two shapes in the middle that look like screws or nails. Finally, the way the X was integrated into the logo was by creating a big X in the middle of the circle, which separates the RG, AP, and T.
In conclusion, I learned a lot with the Adobe Illustrator Project, because I had never used Adobe Illustrator. By designing and creating this logo and business card, I was able to get a rough idea about how to create 2D objects in Adobe Illustrator.
