Converting Text to Single Stroke in Illustrator

To create outlines from text in Illustrator is the most common things to do when you deliver ready to print vector file. But what about to convert text to a single working stroke in Adobe Illustrator?

Recently I did a little experiment in LottieFile to animate an SVG file using a particular animation style which only animate the line paths or strokes of text and illustration element. It will not working if I just create outlines from a text, so here's a video tutorial that will explain of how to turn fonts or text into single line paths in Illustrator CC. 

There are few other techniques explained in an old forum thread in Graphic Design Stack Exchange of how to convert text to single stroke in Illustrator, but I think a few of them still relevant and worth to try.

Last thing, here's the final result of my experiment:

The decorative lineart frame is part of my design item on CreativeMarket: 25 Multipurpose Squary Lineart Font used: Grand Hotel

Video Branding with FlexClip

The growing number of businesses, products and services is unstop-able. How you market your business today is different than the old-school advertising. The challenge is how to personalize your business with strong branding presentation. How to get your potential customers and the loyal ones to engage more with your product with more entertaining visual media. We are familiar enough with graphic media which is rather static and presenting lesser of story to your product or service in one package. But how about video branding?

How can a brand spread its message on diverse platforms and talk to different audiences through unique content, while also clearly capturing the brand’s voice, look and feel? There's an interesting article written by Stanley Meytin for Forbes that explained how video brand identity can work as a blueprint for effective marketing.

There are many reasons why you should use video branding. Obviously, selling is about storytelling, and videos are a great way to share a story of your product or service. Video helps people get to know, like and trust you. Videos will always keep your audience interested and feel convenient, no matter your product or service.

But what if you don't know how to create a video? For that, there's a great web tool that you can try, and it's called FlexClip. FlexClip is a simple yet powerful video maker that creates marketing videos and family stories in minutes. Make a great video will not take too long in a simple interface, much simpler than any other video editor software :D.

First of all, you can create a project then pick one of many collection of video templates that will fit what you need. Add videos or photos from computer or stock libraries to the storyboard. FlexClip has extensive media library where you can search great numbers of high-resolution photos, and royalty-free videos and audios to create a highly original video. You can also upload your own music file and voiceover.



Then customize your storyboard by adding text template with various style options of animation provided in the editor. Basic and Plus subscription can add watermark in each storyboard.

What I love about FlexClip is that you can apply the same color scheme for texts or design elements to all of your storyboard to consistently fit to your logo or brand identity. 

Preview your video and if you're happy with how it goes, you can download the video (in .mp4 file format) in different Video Quality. Free plan can download the 480p quality, 720p for Basic and 1080p for Plus subscriptions. 

As a video editor, FlexClip is equipped with quick video cutter & trimmer, and simple audio editor. The limit is your creativity as you can produce a movie for business, festivals, special events, and social media platforms with great efficiency. It can also work as a slideshow maker. Fantastic produced slideshow by FlexClip will make easier to grab the attention of your audience, making teaching more active and effective. More importantly, it can help to promote your business, to grow brand awareness or advertise your products to boost sales.

Try FlexClip for free and experience how easy and exciting it is to create your own video :D

Today FlexClip share with you 2 exclusive GIVEAWAY Plus accounts and we will have a small contest as follows:

1. Make a video on FlexClip with your new account.
2. Send it to our email: graphicidentity.blog [@] gmail.com or share it by YouTube link. 
3. Best two videos of the giveaway contest participants will be featured in the next post and the creator will get Plus accounts. 

Don't forget to join the regular Weekend Poll on Twitter :D

Weekend Poll topic: #video #videobranding #videobrand #videomarketing #videoads #marketing 📹 🗳️ 😎 👍

Do you use video to promote your brand, products or services?

— Audee (@GraphicIdentity) September 29, 2019

How Do You Subscribe to Blogs?

These days online content is widely accessible for us in the form of infography, forum website, Facebook story, Tweets, blogs and many more as the gadget technology innovation becomes diverse and growing in types. Reading is easier to do while travelling as you can access online content anytime with your phone. But today we will focus more on Blogs. In an article which is written by WP Beginner, it explained the different between a blog and a website:

A blog is a type of website where the content is presented in reverse chronological order (newer content appear first). Blog content is often referred to as entries or “blog posts”.

So it is understood that blogs will likely have regular updates and informative in nature. People with different interests will chose to read blog topic that would fit their interest or preferences. Why people read blogs? to answer that question, Neil Patel wrote a great post article about 'Why People Read Content Online'. You may want to subscribe to a blog because you need to follow new information or keeping yourself updated with news. You also want to improve your skill or following tutorials which have been posted regularly by your favorite blog. You may just read a blog, because reading simply will make you feel good :D             

From this point, I assume that some of you read or follow several blogs from time to time. You either subscribe to a blog by RSS Feed, subscribe by email or just bookmark a blog URL to read its latest posts later on. Our weekend poll will have a question: "How Do You Subscribe to Blogs?".

Each option of subscription will have have advantage and weakness which is depending on your reading style and need. I'd like to know your reasons of what you will vote. You probably want to share your favorite feed reader platform too, so feel free to leave comment either on the Twitter poll post or just comment here! :)

 Happy weekend everyone!

Weekend Poll topic: #RSS #blogging #subscribe #newsletter 🗳️ 😎 👍

How Do You Subscribe to Blogs?

— Audee (@GraphicIdentity) September 22, 2019

The Right Team to Build Your Brand Identity Concept Idea

The same question always there when building your Brand Identity. Why Brand Identity is so important for your company or business?
A good brand is the most valuable assets a company owns, to get public recognition of a product or service. Devoted costumers or prospect costumers would prefer to buy products or services from a familiar brand.
The next question will be: How to compete with big brands that are already there for long time with their devoted costumers?
You need to find ways to differentiate–with a solid brand building process of your own. This good article by FreshSparks. will give you some tips of how to get a successful brand building process and you can also download step-by-step PDF workbook with tips, templates and guidance to start building a brand for your business from their page.

Icons made by Nikita Golubev from www.flaticon.com

Another following question will be: Who is the right person or team to develop or build your brand identity idea or concept?
This question will be related with the level of your business. When you start a new small business, with limited budget you have to be creative to compete with larger company. MarketingDonut published great article tips to build a brand for your small business that you can check.


So basically there are options for you to decide of who would design your Brand Identity.

Design your Brand Identity by yourself
This option is worth to consider if you just start a small business with limited budget for marketing and advertising. No need to worry even you're not an expert because you can learn how to design a logo that fits your product or service from online resources such as CreativeMarket Blog tutorial to design a logo or to study to understand the aspects needed to create brand identity from Format magazine.

Hire a logo or Brand Identity designer
Hiring an expert can be a better solution if you want a more profesional look for your logo design.
But if yo have no experience to work with a logo designer, you can read this interesting article from Penji that shares tips of hiring a profesional to get your logo perfectly done for your business, hence you would have more idea about it and what to consider before you hire someone.

Getting your instant logo from Brand Marketplace
This option could be effective if you want many alternative of logos and business name for your company. So Branding actually has several components and a few of them are the logo design plus the unique and memorable company name. Brand Marketplace will provide you many alternatives of brand stocks to choose with. But first you'd probably need to understand how to pick a great brand name that will stick to your customers mind and this article from Rebrandly will help you to name your Brand.
You can also check some of Brand Marketplaces such as: BrandCrowd, BrandBucket and Namerific to get instant logo and domain name designed by business type categorizes.

Feel free to join the weekend poll related to this article after you read this article, and include your preference in comment :D

Weekend Poll topic: #brandidentity #logo #LogoDesign #branding #brands 🗳️ 😎 👍

Who would be the right team to build your brand identity?

— Audee (@GraphicIdentity) September 15, 2019

Dark theme enabled and reason of why

Each weekend I will post weekend poll either from my Twitter or other poll services. I hope there will be some active social media interactivity where we can learn better about today's trends, brainstorm new ideas and improve our knowledge. Feel free to participate and leave comment when you like :)

Fun weekend quick poll #UI #ux topic:
Dark theme enabled and reason of why 😎

— Audee (@GraphicIdentity) September 6, 2019