Top stories

A New Kind Of Heist: Six Apps For Free

Those crazy MacHeisters are at it again, and this time the deal is even harder to resist.
The first ever MacHeist Nano won’t cost you a penny. You can download, without charge, fully licensed copies of ShoveBox, WriteRoom, Twitterific, TinyGrab, and Hordes of Orcs. If 500,000 people take part (which I think is a pretty safe [...]

Getting More iPhone Home Screens – And Keeping Them

A couple of weeks back, I wrote Temporarily Get More iPhone Home Screens Via Cunning Bug Exploit, but had heard staying away from the iTunes Applications tab within my iPhone was probably a Very Good Idea. Reader Larry Pressnell noted that since the most recent iTunes update, his extra screens have been accessible in iTunes.
Since [...]

Cult of Mac Favorite: MobileStacks Is the Best Reason To Jailbreak. Period.

I really like Stacks on my Mac. Stacks makes it fast and easy to find files, folders and apps right from the Dock. It makes managing a Mac pretty slick with all sorts of little UI tricks. That’s why I recently gave MobileStack a go on my jailbroken iPhone.
I must say that it lives up to the [...]

Gallery: Behind the Scenes From Two Classic Apple TV Ads

Is this Steve Jobs driving a tank in a classic Apple TV spot from the late 1990s? That was the rumor at the time: Jobs was making cameos in Apple commercials.
Ken Segall, the TBWA ad man responsible for naming the iMac and Think Different, reveals the truth after the jump. He also shares some rare [...]

Typeface Portrait of Steve Jobs: How It Was Done

steven_paul_jobs_by_dylanroscover

Remember the fantastic portrait of Steve Jobs using Apple’s classic typefaces from last week?  Here’s a step-by-step guide showing exactly how designer Dylan Roscover created it in Illustrator and Photoshop (24 hours straight hours of work, no sleep).

Dylan, a self-described ‘design nerd’ who lives in Aloma, Florida, explains:

“I used Adobe Illustrator and the Pen tool to trace his facial contours the way I figured they would make sense, one by one using the Type on a Path tool for each path.

The larger lines of type were hand-kerned character-by-character to fit accordingly. Near completion I used the Magic Wand tool to select areas of text and apply gradual shading.

Everything was composited in Adobe Photoshop as a smart object to give it that deep blue effect and the background  + texture.

In total it look about 24 hours to complete during three days with no sleep (class assignment).”

Click the pictures for Dylan’s detailed step-by-step instructions.

The original photo I used for reference. This is a very personal depiction of Jobs which I feel conveys him very strongly and evUsing levels in Photoshop, I bumped up the contrast to help me better distinguish light from dark.Having imported the Photoshop image into Illustrator, I started with Steve's beard hair, using a lowercase Adobe Garmond &quThis was after about the first half-hour's work. I began with pure white for all of the type, ignoring color and shadow  and focAn outline view of the type-only. The face completed, with shading added to the type. (You can depict the text here on a white background as well as black backgroDetail of the overall typesetting process. I would frame each path of the facial contours using the pen tool, and then copy and In certain areas and larger blocks of text, I would manually set individual characters. Fonts were grouped with each other to maI took the Illustrator file back into Photoshop as a smart object (File > Open as Smart Object) and applied the type as aSays Dylan: "Steven Paul Jobs took about 24 hours to complete in a three day period of no sleep."

About the author

Leander Kahney

Leander Kahney is senior editor of Cult of Mac, editor of two books about technology culture, Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, and has written for Wired, MacWeek, Scientific American, and The Observer in London. Follow Leander on Twitter @lkahney and Facebook.

Email the author | Read more posts by Leander Kahney.

6 comments

    This is truly inspirational, and great to see such an attention to detail. I think this as a type exercise would be great to give to students learning design, typography and a vector drawing package. I might just do that, they might not love me – but they will when they’ve completed it: )

    Thanks for the post and to Dylan for sharing the process with us.

    [...] Es curioso ver las imágenes del proceso completo. [...]

    Increiblemente estupendo diseño,

    [...] illustrator. Nel caso siate particolarmente curiosi, trovate un tutorial con il makin’ of qui. Di seguito, vi sottopongo poi Inlingua, un concept creato dall’agenzia Kolle Rebbe [...]

    [...] web site Cult of Mac holds a short explanation detailing how Rosco created the portrait using Photoshop and [...]

    [...] Steve Jobs… This is a cool picture of Steve Jobs drawn completely in typeface.  Click here to find out how it was done and click on the picture to see a bigger image… (via Cult of [...]