Guilloche Designs with Adobe Illustrator by John Webster

This book is recommended for beginners and experienced designers and artists alike. It is heavily illustrated and teaches by doing.

Guilloche design is of interest to more than just hobbyists. Guilloche can be an important element in logo development, certificate design and general design work. It can add a spark to your designs. Guilloche makes good borders and rules (separators). These designs can be used to grab and retain visual interest in the work.

Downloadable companion files contain the exercise artwork and bonus material.

The artwork on the cover was created using simple shapes and the methods in this book. In fact, many of the shapes are from the book exercises.

If you want to create graphics like this, you can learn what you need from this book.

From the back cover:

Guilloche is a pattern of intersecting lines used for decoration and copy protection. The best part, though, is that it looks great alone or as part of your larger project. The Spirograph ® toy makes guilloche artwork that is simple yet elegant. If you like those designs, you will enjoy this book. You can make designs you thought impossible and there is no need to draw complex artwork from scratch. Lean how Illustrator can do most of the work for you. You don’t have to spend endless hours drawing minute details. The methods in the book show you how to use simple shapes to create guilloche patterns.

The methods in this book show you how to create guilloche using Illustrator’s pattern brushes, blends and transforms. You don’t need any plug-ins to make eye-arresting vector guilloche designs. Combine these tools to create truly remarkable artwork that you can use in your projects today. You’re not sure where to start? Guided exercises show you. There are exercises that demonstrate many techniques for making designs with brushes, blends and transforms. There are Things to Try at the end of most exercises. They suggest additional experiments you can do to build on your experience.

Illustrator explained:

• Exactly how Divide Objects Below works on different objects.
• Why odd-sided polygons don’t align, distribute or rotate from their center and what to do about it.
• Why blends distribute objects differently for open and closed paths.
• How Illustrator determines the order of any number of blended objects.
• How to make Transform Each rotate objects from any center point, even outside the object.
• What are complex regular polygons and why are they good for guilloche designs?
• When should you use a negative scale value, and why?
• Which Distort and Transform Effects are best for regularly spaced guilloche?

Additional book data:

• Large format book, 8.5 x 11x .53 inches (US letter size)
• There are 216 pages exclusive of front matter (226 pages total)
• Color printing and perfect bound soft cover
• Non-essential related information placed in sidebars
• Abundantly illustrated
• Index for important terms
• Clear typefaces used throughout
• Exercise steps are numbered