There are some popular sketchy fonts available that are great for grungy and hand-drawn designs and illustrations. My problem is, I want to be able to use this sketchy style in any font. Turn’s out, it is actually really easy to do in Illustrator. Moreover, you can create a Graphic Style and easily apply the style to other editable fonts!

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Asmaa Murad, from Aivault, has created an awesome set of floral stamps for Vectips! I quickly got lost in creating scatter brushes, patterns, and more with the 14 Floral Stamps. Download the set and see what you can come up with! Post links in the comments to your creations!

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Looking through some of my past work, I noticed I used the font Myriad a lot. At first I wondered why, then I came to the realization, it might be because Myriad is the default font in Illustrator. After that, I changed my default font for new documents. It is really easy to do, so read on to find out how.

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Grant Friedman of Colorburned contacted me last week to create a Tweet This icon for the wonderful site redesign of Colorburned. In turn, Grant created an exclusive set of Illustrator multi-colored paint brushes for Vectips! Download the set and have some fun playing aroung with them. I also suggest checking all of Grant’s awesome brushes at Colorburned.

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Lately, I have been working on some children illustrations, creating some über cute creatures. In the follow easy tutorial, I show you how to create a cute panda bear face icon all from ellipses (well, actually there is one rectangle for the background). The great part about this tutorial, is that you can easily apply the techniques to other icons, illustrations, logos, or other projects.

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After reading Lensco’s comment “Cool tip, all we need now are gradients on strokes. Pretty please, Adobe?” on the previous tutorial Quick Tutorial: Adding Gradients to Text, I decided to write a quick tutorial about how I create gradient strokes. This super simple technique use the Appearance panel and effects to create editable gradient strokes in Illustrator.

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I’m sure a bunch of you have seen this technique before in other blogs or are already aware of how to add gradients to text, but it is worth mentioning for those that don’t know this technique. Moreover, I found that adding an extra step to this known technique, enables you add transparent gradients to text in Illustrator CS4 while still keeping the text editable!

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