Expression Design Cable Tutorial

Interface Cable Tutorial

	Above we have a cable that you see in many interfaces. Creating this cable and doing different variations to it is simple with Expression Design. Try your own color variations and shapes to come up with some interesting effects.

	1) Open up a new project 640 x 200 pixels. To make our cable come to life I'm drawing a 640 x 200 pixel rectangle and coloring it R = 128 / G = 128 / B = 128 for a nice background. 2) To create our cable we'll use the B-Spline Tool. Just click were you want a shape node and double click when you are done. The first thing we want to do is set the Fill to None. Now set the Stroke to Black and the Stroke width to 20. Name this cable "Base" in the layers palette. 3) Click on the Advanced Properties arrow in the Properties Panel and select Round cap in the Caps dropdown box.

	4) With your cable selected do a Control C and the a Control V. Select the new shape, set the Stroke width to 12 and the Stroke color to R = 120 / G = 120 / B = 120. 5) Center it over the base cable and go to Effects / Effects / Gaussian Blur and set the radius to 1.

	6) With our top object still selected do another Control C and a Control V to duplicate it. Center the new object over the other objects, set the Stroke color to white and the Stroke width to 4. Name this shine in the layers palette.

	7) Go the the Layers Palette, select the object named Base and duplicate it. 8) Set the Stroke width to 22. 9) Click the box next to Dash in the Properties Panel and set it to 2. Now select Flat caps in the the Caps dropdown box. Name this object Cable in the Layers Palette.

	10) Now select our Shine object in the layers palette and duplicate it. 11) Center it over the other cable objects. 12) Select the Base object in the layers palette and add a drop shadow. I'm using the default settings.