Coastal Vectors

The Reluctant Dragon

The Reluctant Dragon is one of my favorite Disney shorts. The basic premise is that there is a dragon discovered by the villagers of a town. Fearful of the dragon they bring in a dragon slayer. The Dragon however is not ferocious, and prefers to write poetry. At any rate, it’s a delightful short cartoon with very whimsical characters. I’ve always cared for the dragon’s care-free spirit, so I decided to immortalize one of his many signature poses.

Dragon_small

This was mostly done in Photoshop. The basic outlines were done in Illustrator, then brought into Photoshop where I tried to shade it all. It’s not perfect, but the likeness is certainly there.

Let Earth Receive Her King

This is an announcement that I recently did for an upcoming choral and orchestra performance for Christmas. The group generally uses simple 1 color designs with accentuated cursive fonts. I tried to keep it in line with previous design paradigms.

Really Illustrator?

I was trying to edit an SVG today. I do this quite regularly as a matter of fact, and as far as I could tell, this SVG was no different from the last one I edited. To my dismay, I was confronted with the following very informative error message:

Useless Error Message

What in the world could that mean? CANT? Very informative. I looked online to see what other people said about this error. I saw varying idea for what could be wrong, ranging all the way to “Your scratch disk might not be returning SMART data. [1]” Really?

I took my SVG file and started deleting chunks to see when it would again be openable. After removing every line, suspicious or not, I came to a line that looked totally benign. I didn’t even suspect it could be the culprit.

<text transform="matrix(1 0 0 1 451.4004 41\
8.0156)" fill="#FFFFFF" font-family="'HelveticaNeueLTStd-Lt'" font-size="8">foobar</\
text>

The problem was the font for this particular line. I uninstalled it a few weeks ago. I replaced the font name with one that I did have installed, and it magically opened without any issue. I’m sure it would have been pretty hard for Adobe Illustrator to tell me, “Can’t open this file… Missing fonts…,” especially since there is a font-dialog for just this occasion when opening PDFs and AI files.

At any rate… If you are trying to open an SVG file, make sure you have the requisite fonts installed.