Drawing, patterns and transparency

Lines, shapes, gradients and transparency drawn as instructions in the file, not as pixels — sharp at any size, and weighing almost nothing.

Everything on these pages is drawn rather than photographed: a line is an instruction, not a grid of dots. Blow it up to the size of a poster and the edges stay clean, because there is nothing to blow up — the shape is worked out again at the size it is wanted.

On top of that come the usual effects: one colour fading into another, a shape showing through what lies under it, a pattern repeated across an area, a drawing reused in twenty places without being stored twenty times, and layers a reader can show and hide.

What it saves you

Sharp at any size: The same seal on a business card and on a poster. Nothing goes soft at the edges, and nobody has to keep a second version of the artwork for large jobs.
Almost no weight: A border drawn as a handful of instructions weighs next to nothing beside a photograph of the same border — and a document that is light is a document that arrives.
One drawing, used everywhere: A logo is kept once and placed as often as you like, so a sheet of a hundred labels does not carry a hundred copies of it.

See it done

A month's report, its charts drawn in curves

A pie of where the hours went, a ring gauge of how far into the year the work is, a card with eased corners, and arcs told where to go rather than how far to turn.

Cutting out what you draw

The same area of stripes shown through two windows: a plain disc, and a ring whose middle is left bare.

Transparency and blend modes

Half-transparent fills that overlap and mix, one orange square laid over a blue bar in four different ways of mixing colours, and a line of overlapping letters painted two ways.

Gradients in a line, in a circle, and read from a function

Five panels: a header that fades out, the same fade on the diagonal, a glow carried past its own circle so the corners fill, a blend that goes by way of a third colour, and a checkerboard whose colour is worked out from where each point stands, redder to the right and greener towards the top.

Text and shapes filled with a gradient

A gradient used as the colour something is filled with: a headline whose letters are windows onto a blend of three colours, and a panel filled with a circular one.

Four kinds of mesh, every corner its own colour

Six triangles round a centre they share, their edges stroked over the paint; a lattice of points in the four printing inks; a patch whose four sides are curves; and the same patch pulled about by four points inside it.

One drawing, and each reader sees their own

The same floor plan on six layers shown and hidden one at a time: the furniture and the distances shown, the internal notes hidden until asked for, and a draft watermark meant for the screen and not for the paper.

A plan that shows what can be read

A land plan whose layers decide by themselves when to appear. A wide name stands over the plot while the plan is looked at whole, the fine wall figures come in once it is enlarged twice over, and the sentence under the plan is there in two languages, of which reading software shows the one it is set to.