Fan of Cards?

[Jacklad]

Hi there - I've had Xara products for quite a while, but I've taken a long break from doing any graphic design at all. Now I'm back at it, and was thrilled to upgrade to Designer Pro. In a lot of ways, it's like coming home - but there is one effect that I'm trying to achieve that I just can't quite get.

I'm trying to draw a fan of seven cards - rounded rectangles make the card shapes easy enough, and I can get a nice spread of cards using the blend tool. But I can't get them to fan - attaching the blend to a curve just produces an arch. I suspect I'm on totally the wrong track.

But it just feels like there should be an easier way than just manually setting rotation and eyeballing placement... any ideas?

Thanks for any help.

Jackie

[gwpriester]

Welcome to TalkGraphics

You can try setting a rotation distance in the Page Options > General tabbed area, then double clicking on the card, dragging the rotation point downwards, and rotate and duplicate. Hold down the Ctrl key (to constrain the rotation degree), drag/rotate with the right mouse button, each time you release the button a duplicate is dropped.

[Sadler]

In this image, on the first fan I just eyeballed the rotation of the first and last card then blended straight. The second fan I blended straight without rotating the cards the applied a curve (2 points). The third is 52 cards blended around a circle. The blend seemed very sensitive to the curve shape but I guess with more points it would be more predictable. Using the blend, of course gives the advantages of profiles

[Egg Bramhill]

As Sadlers method but just using an arc. Change the size of the arc to change the fan shape.