The Money Look

If you've happened to swing by the main page at snook.ca, you'll notice a different look than the one the blog has. It's just a basic site for the freelance business. A few of you who have seen it have wondered how the line effect in the header was done. I call it the money look as it reminds me of those fine lines often found on paper money.

This is done fairly easily using the blend tool in Illustrator. First, create separate lines and make sure that there is no fill. Clicking on the white box with the red line through it will remove the fill.

After that, select the blend tool as seen in the following diagram.

Double-clicking on the tool will bring up the blend options. Select 'Specified Steps' from the Spacing drop-down and specify a good number of steps. If you're not sure what you want, not to worry, you can always come back to this.

Now, with the blend tool selected, hover over the first path until you see the X. Click on it and then move on to the other line. This time when you hover over the path, the cursor will feature a plus sign. Click on it and the blend will be created.

And voila, our final result. Double-clicking the blend tool will bring up the dialog box and allow you to change any of the settings. If the number of steps you specified was too little, specify a new value and hit okay. The changes will be reflected on the current blended object.

Feel free to bring this into Photoshop or Fireworks to integrate it into your final design.