[homegrown]

I'm trying to make a custom gradient, but instead of fading in color I want my design to fade in size. I'm want to use the pattern below, you can get an idea of what beginning and end sizes i'm going for. Is there any way in Illustrator/Photoshop or using some plugin/script to achieve this? I don't know if I have the patience to do it by hand.

[b-kandor]

Coreldraw can do that - I'm not sure about illustrator. It's called blendshape I believe.

[sampson]

you ought to be able to do it with a Blend in illustrator.

[RonB]

I am not an illustrator expert but it can be done with the Blend tool. My limitations of the program force me to do some manual labor though. I can ceate the graduation in size, then I must manually arrange the first two rows, then duplicate them to fill a page. I'll try one and post the results. Give me a bit of time.

Cheers, Ron

[lebbeus]

I did this in Illustrator 9 using blend…really fast so it is possible, but it will require some tweaking. Be sure to keep the centers aligned otherwise you'll get some funky rotations

[homegrown]

Thanks guys. I've been playing with it in Illustrator. Can the blend offset them slightly like I have? or just duplicate them in a row. The symbol also seems to get distorted as it gets smaller. If I try blending two rows of the shape (one row made of larger symbols, the other smaller) it always pulls my intermediate symbols towards one corner.

[RonB]

Oops, what I found is, it's simple to do a single row but it gets complicated after that, due to the dimensionality of the needed offset. We need some math genius, like my son the programmer, to deal with it. If you can't figure it out I'll ask him to come up with something, perhaps a script of some kind.
Here's what I get:



Either way what you are going to end up with is a radial kind of blend going from left to right...its impossible to do a straight blend....

[b-kandor]

Just do an array of the large size, then 'tilt' it with perspective.

[RonB]

b-kander,
I tried that it just distorts it...

[b-kandor]

Predistort the original to compensate before the array? i.e. stretch it out to an oval shape in the horizontal direction, array it, and then tilt it until it's round again.

[homegrown]

wow, ron, you got it pretty close. But it looks like I"m going to have to do some by hand either way. I was kind of thinking it would require a script or something. It would be cool if there something that could produce patterns with set images based on input parameters. Kind of like context free but not so complicated (contextfreeart.org).

[tom]

I think you need to call Roger Penrose