Of course you can. Just go through the Google Analytics process as usual. Copy the javascript code snippet that they provide into your custom theme’s markup. (Click “customize” on the dashboard, then “Theme”). The google analytics code snippet goes just above the <body> tag.
Take that tumblarity! Now I can clearly see my literally dozens of site visitors.
Now…just remember, okay…It’s not a love. It’s not a love. It’s not a love song. (Emphatically. It’s not. Dammit!)
The good people at Camp Tannadoonah who always accept everything I say from a design consulting perspective with absolutely no hair pulling, wailing or gnashing of teeth recently directed me to “draw a Polar Bear for a T-shirt design.” Projects like this remind me of why I enjoy being a designer. Whether or not it’s the best single-color vector Polar Bear you’ve ever seen is, in this case, subordinate to the fact that it was really really fun. I can’t wait for these shirts to come out so I can proudly wear one around until I wear holes in it.
The design was done in Illustrator. I built from this pencil sketch:
I generally sketch on a section of a long roll of cheap tracing paper. It takes the pressure off to come up with a perfect sketch because you can always rip of another sheet and trace over it if you mess up. Also the paper kind of carries with it the idea that, under no circumstances are we producing a show piece here. It’s crappy paper, it’s not going to last. That reduces some of the pressure to be an anal perfectionist as well.
I don’t have a scanner so I literally took a snap with my Nikon D40, used Photoshop to convert to grayscale and then used adjustment layers to lighten the image up and bump the contrast a bit. I save files like this out as .tiff when I’m going to be using them in Illustrator. I’m pretty sure I do this because .tiffs end up full resolution when placed in Illustrator. (The truth I do it because that’s how I’ve always done it, but I think that resolution is why i started doing it).
Clearly, the sketch is too detailed (even as loose as it is) to make a good t-shirt. I’m going to be relying on a screen printer to reproduce this, and I’d prefer not to give the poor guy a migraine, so my illustration has to be designed with screen printing in mind. That means no little tiny hair lines, no gradients, etcetera. One ink, big thick lines.
I drew the basic outline shapes with the pen tool and bumped the stroke weight up to thicken them, then drew in the white area of the bear behind the stroke outlines. I expanded the strokes. This is the result in outline preview:
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The thick, double outline is the expanded stroke. The rough, jagged line that runs all the way around the bear shape is the white fill area in the background. I can further refine this shape, so that I’m providing one, easy to print vector to my printer though. Ideally, I want to send him one solid white shape with no extra vectors to add complexity. The first step is to use the Pathfinder to merge the ice cube shape and the white background of the bear into one shape. Then I select this newly created white shape and the blue expanded outlines (making sure that the outlines are on top). Use pathfinder one more time to take the expanded outlines and use them to clip the white shape underneath. Below is the result:
Much simpler. Much easier for anyone with a basic knowledge of Illustrator to open and immediately understand. A designer’s life is made so much easier when he isn’t putting unnecessary hurdles in the path of his production vendors. At this point, if you’re really anal (as I am) the one thing that’s left is to use pathfinder to take the eyes and nose and clip them out of our white shape.
Every so often I check through the search terms on Google Analytics that have led people to my site. Often people end up here after searching for very direct, pointed questions (mostly) about InDesign that are somewhat related to things I’ve already discussed. This series of posts seeks to answer those questions for others having the same issues.
InDesign users will run into this issue all the time: you’re finished with your document and you want to tie up some of the extraneous loose ends that are a natural result of the design process so you go through and make sure all of your images are CMYK and properly linked, you don’t have any missing fonts, and you go through and delete all of your unused swatches in the Swatches panel, but you can’t make them all delete. Why do some of them refuse to go away?
You have a placed vector file that you (or someone else) created in Illustrator. The swatch that you can’t delete exists in this file and is being imported into InDesign automatically. It can’t be deleted, because the setting that calls for “PMS 289″ for example is an Illustrator setting. Not an InDesign setting.
You need to open the original Illustrator file, find the offending swatch and convert it to a process (CMYK) color. To do this, double click on the swatch in the swatches panel that you wish to change.
Change “Color Type” to “Process Color” and “Color Mode” to CMYK, as shown. Then click “Okay,” save and close your document
Back in InDesign, update the link in the Links Panel if InDesign does not update it automatically. You should now be able to delete the offending swatch from the Swatches Panel.
If you stumbled on ATCO in the last week and checked out my gallery page, I apologize for the mess. I’m an arrogant little cuss and I decided to try my hand at improving some of the blog styling on the home page.
“It’s a website,” I cried, brandishing a “gallery” classed div like Joe Pesci’s gun at the poker table in Goodfellas “What could go wrong?”
One frantic IM conversation with Nunemaker later, I’m back to a December 2008 style sheet backup, which will learn me to play with code without a back-up.
Anyway…if you haven’t, feel free to poke around in the Gallery now that it’s been properly cleaned and sanitized. If you get bored, amble over to my Flickr set where I stash everything else that’s in the general vicinity of portfolioic.
oAk is a web and print designer with AgencyND, the on-campus design office at the University of Notre Dame.
I'm also a freelance designer from South Bend, Indiana.