Few days before, I wrote a tutorial on how you can build a web 2.0 logo with Adobe Photoshop. Here is another one for adding the reflection effect in a logo (like mine above) using Illustrator, which makes the reflection more flexible and easy to scale and manage. Open your logo in Adobe Illustrator and follow these steps:

1. Duplicate your image by pressing alt (command for Mac) and clicking it. Drag it down (pressing the “shift” key while dragging helps for keeping your image aligned) so it looks like the one below.

   

2. Select the original object and click object>lock>selection to lock it.
3. Select the duplicated object and click object>transfrom>reflect. Choose horizontal with 0 angle. Move the duplicated logo exaclty below the original one.
4. Select the rectangle tool and draw a rectagle that covers the reflected image like in the screenshot below (color does not matter).

   

5. Fill the rectagle with a white-to-black gradient, set angle to -90 and point color points like in the screenshot.

   

6. Select the gradient rectangle and the reflected image by pressing control+A (command+A for Mac) as the original object is locked and apply a transparency mask by clicking on the arrow in the upper right of the Transparency tab.

   

   

7. Drop down the transparency opacity to 40-50% to make the effect more realistic and your reflection is ready!

   

Note that making the reflection with Adobe Illustrator has nothing to do with the background color (like in Photoshop). Follow the same steps for applying it on dark backgrounds.

It is time to tell you something about what we use to create our products (like the cards from our Pet Shop Cards collection above). Our equipment consists of:

• Two Dell workstations powered with Intel Pentium D 3Ghz processors, 2GB RAM, running Windows XP Pro
• One Intel Core 2 Duo MacPro running Mac OS X with 8GB RAM
• One workstation equiped with a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor and 2GB of RAM running Windows XP Pro
• One G3 Mac with 512RAM running MacOS 8.1
• Our server which features a Pentium 4 processor, 2GB RAM, running SuSe Linux 10.2
• 2TB of total storage (multiple internal and external hard drives plugged to our systems).
• For printing we use an Epson Stylus Photo 800 inkjet printer, an HP Laserjet Plus laser printer, a Roland HifiJet 52 for quality CMYK printing (we use Light Magenta and Light Cyan colors as extra colors instead of the Orange and Green which are plotter’s selection). For digital printing, we use Xante Illumina.
• For scanning we use a Linotype Hell Topaz scanner, driven by Linocolor Software, running on the G3 Mac.
• For photocopier we use an Infotec which prints on any type of paper (A4, B3, A3 etc).
• All of our stuff is connected to an 100Mbit LAN via a 3com router and to the broadband Internet (we use a 2Mbit connection) via a Speedtouch 585.
• We also own a Wacom Intuos3 A4 Tablet.
• Our workstations have Eizo ColorEdge CE210W displays.
• For monitor callibration we use Pantone Huey.
• For color control we use Pantone Color Que 2.
• The software we run mainly is Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Fireworks, Quark Xpress, Adobe Acrobat and since January Adobe Indesign.