10 in 10 - Ten Top Adobe Illustrator Tips in 10 Minutes - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Graphic Design for Lunch 10 in 10 tips Introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley and welcome to this 10 in 10 class, 10 Adobe Illustrator tips in 10 minutes or less. In this class, I'm going to show you 10 wonderful Illustrator tips that you can put to use in your workflow right away. I'm also going to give you a download link so you can download all the files I'm using if you want to practice and follow along as I do this video. As you're working through the video, you may see a prompt to recommend this class to others. If you're enjoying the class, please give it a thumbs up. Recommendations like this, help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you want to learn more about Illustrator. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look out and respond to all of your class projects. Now let's get started with our 10 in 10, 10 Illustrator tips in 10 minutes or less. 2. Graphic Design for Lunch - 10 in 10 tips for Adobe Illustrator: Our first tip is pixel alignment. This orange square here, and I'm going to try, and position it about halfway between its current position in the black square, however hard I try, I cannot do that because it's got aligned to pixel grid turned on. Whenever you can't move an object to exactly where you want it to go, if illustrated takes over, here is the tip. I'm going to the transform dialogue. You can get to that by choosing Window Transform with my shape selected, I'm going to disable Align to Pixel Grid. Now this object will move freely. I can put it exactly where I want it, like go, and it's going into the exact position. Anytime you find an object that's not going where you want it to do, open up the transform panel, and disable Align to Pixel Grid. Our second tip is how to select by properties. I have a rose here, it was a photograph, and I've traced it. I've got a number of colors in this image. For example, I want to change one of these colors. I'm going to select this object here. I've got it selected, but I also want to select every other piece of this rose that has the same color. I could do it manually or I could get illustrated to do all the work for me. To get illustrated to do the work, I'll select the first object, one that's colored in the color that I want to change. Now I'm going to choose, Select, and then Same, I want to choose the same fill color. All objects with exactly the same fill color. Now they're all selected, I can come in here to the color tool, and I can just change the color of all of them all at once. Our next tip relates to saving patterns, Swatches in illustrator, I've created a herringbone pattern here. It's here in the Swatches panel. When I save this document the swatch will disappear from the Swatches panel in all new documents. I wanted to have it accessible to me. We're still if I go ahead, try, and save the Swatch from this file, I'm going to save all these colors with it. If I get rid of the colors here, I can save a single Swatch, but I'm going to lose all these colors from this particular document. Here's my work around. I'm going to select either this shape with the pattern associated with it, and choose Edit Copy. I'm going to create a brand new file. I'm going to Paste the object into this. Here's the patents Swatch in the Swatches palette. I'm going to click away from the shape, and then I'm going to select all of these Swatches, and drag them to the trash cans. The only Swatch left is the one I want to save. Now I'll click the "Drop-Down list", Save Swatch Library as AI. I'm going to call this herringbone, and click "Save". In future in any new document I can get my pattern back by choosing Open Swatch Library User-Defined, and click herringbone. Here's my Swatches panel. It's got just one Swatch in it. Our next tip relates to using global colors. I have three shapes here. I'm going to open up my Swatches panel. I want to change the color of my ice cream. I'm just going to click on the color that I used, and I'm just going to alter it when I click the "Preview", you can say that every single one of these shapes is changing color. The reason for this is I set up my color as a global color before I applied it to any of the shapes in my image. To make a color, a global color, you just double-click on it and click "Global". Do that before you use the color in your image, and then at anytime, even without selecting the objects, you can easily change the color of them by double-clicking on the color, and then just choose a different color from the color picker here, and click "Okay". Our next tip addresses the situation where you want a shape like this, but you want the top of it to be a different color in the stroke. I'm going to select either this shape, I'm going to choose Edit Copy, and then I'm going to paste a duplicate back on top of the original using paste in place. I'm going to lock down the back copy, and turn it off for now. I'm going to the top version. I just want to select this top area. I want to remove all the rest of the objects. I'm just going to select over the bits to remove with the direct selection tool, and delete them. Now, I'm going to select this shape, and I'm going to change the color of the stroke to blue. Having done that, I can now go ahead, and bring back the shape underneath. For completeness, I would select over both of these, and group them together so that they are going to travel together in future. But we've achieved a result where part of the shapes stroke is one color, and the rest of it is another. In this tip, we're going to look at the difference between using the Delete Anchor Point tool, and the Direct Selection tool for removing points on a shape. Let's go to the direct selection tool. I'm going to select over this anchor point here, and press "Delete". What happens is that what was a closed shape is now an open shape, and we're missing the line down this edge. In contrast, when I use the Delete Anchor Point tool here to click on this same point on an identical hexagon, we get a very different result. We still have a closed shape, and we still have the stroke down this edge. Depending on the result that you're looking for one or other of these might be a better choice. Just be aware that this is not something that you are allowed to generally do with stock imagery because you cannot have open paths for stock images. In this tip, we're going to look at two options that you have for smoothing out lines. One of them is to go, and select the line, then use the Smooth Tool, which shares a toolbar position with the shaper, and pencil tools. With the line selected, you can just draw over the line, and you will smooth out the line as you work. If you double-click the smooth tool, you'll see that there are options for how smooth the smoothing is that you're applying to the line. The other option is to select the line, and go to Object Path, then simplify. In this case, turn Preview on, and determine how closely you want to illustrate to stay to the existing curves, and adjust the angle threshold. Here you're told the original number of points on the line, and the current number of points. You can flick between the original, and the final version, click "Okay", when you're done. When you need to cut a shape into pieces using some free form line, you've got a couple of techniques you can use. One of them is to use the knife tool, which shows a toolbar position with the eraser tool. While the knife tool users nice soft lines. One of the problems with it is if you don't get your line right to start off with, you have no choice but to undo it, and start again. Because there is no way of changing this line once you've actually applied it but what it does do is, it divides your shape into the pieces that you asked for. A better alternative is to use the pencil tool or the pen tool to draw your line. I'm going to use the pen tool here. I'm just going to draw a line to use to cut this shape. Because this is a pen tool line, I can go ahead, and adjust itself. It's not in the right place. I can adjust it until I get it right. Then with the line selected, I'm going to choose Object Path, divide objects below, and this just divides the object in two using the line as a cutting line, a much smarter way of doing it. When you're drawing simple objects like this, you can get a more organic field to your illustration if you vary your line weight. One simple way to do this is to select over the shape. I have a 6.0 stroke here. To vary the line weight, I can open up the brush profile panel, and I can apply a brush profile to the line. You can say this is giving me a more interesting result. If I increase the stroke weight, I can see a little more clearly, and I could also use the Scissors tool if I wanted to perhaps cut that line in one or two places to achieve an even more organic result with the lines that I have in this illustration. Our final tip is for creating dotted lines. I have this line selected. I'm going to the Appearance panel. I'm going to click to open the stroke, and making sure I have rounded cap selected. I'm going to select dashed line. I'm going to set zero as my dash. I'm going to set my gap to around the white of my line. Now my line right now is one, but I'm going to set this to 10, and then I'm going to go up here, and set the line weight to 10. That's giving me nice dots. If my line weight is higher, the dots are going to run together. If it's lower, the dots are going to be spread apart. The relationship between the white, and the gap is critical. Let's have a look at the square again in the appearance panel stroke, round caps, dashed line, always a zero dash. I've got a 10 pixel gap so I'm going to set my line weight to 10 pixels. The only thing to be concerned about when you're using shapes like this is the difference between these two icons. Clicking one sets your dots off-center, clicking the other, make sure that they're neatly presented around the shape. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for launch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.