Transcripts
1. Graphic Design for for Lunch 20 Things New Illustrator Users need to know Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design Lunch for class 20 things new Illustrator users need to know. Really, it's all the things that I wish somebody had told me before I started using Illustrator, so that I didn't have to work them out for myself. Now, Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in application, such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Now, today we're looking at 20 things that I think every new Illustrator user needs to know. We're going to look at things like why text behaves differently to objects. We're going to look at why CMYK and RGB choices really matter. We'll look at finding tool options, a whole heap of tips and tricks for working in Illustrator that quite frankly, I wish somebody had told me. I'm going to help you out and show them to you. Now as you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which asks if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer, yes, that you would recommend this class, and secondly write even in just a few words, why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now if you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started on 20 things new Illustrator users need to know.
2. Pt 1 Grouping Matters: When you're working with a number of objects at once in Illustrator quite often whether or not, these objects are in a group will have an impact on how they behave. I have three shapes selected here and you can see in the last panel here, they're just three individual shapes. Let's choose "Effect", and then "Distort &Transform", and "Transform", because I want to rotate these shapes around. So I'll set 55 degree rotation for the shapes. When I do that, you can say that H-shape is rotated, but the entire series of shapes is not rotated. I'll click OK". So let's just keep that there, so we can look at it. I have another set of identical three objects here. We'll put them in a group and the way we do that is choose "Object "and then "Group". Now, let's go and choose the exact same option, "Effect", "Distort & Transform", and then "Transform". I'll turn "Preview" on. I'll set this to 55 degrees. Let's say what happens this time. Well, because these objects are grouped together, then they're going to be treated as if they were a single object. So they rotating around their midpoint at the moment 55 degrees. There are lots of other occasions when the groping of objects really matters. Let's have a look at this series of objects. Now select over these four here. Let's say in the last panel. Well, we've just got a rectangle, a polygon, and two ellipses. What I want to do is I want to center these over this. If I just select all those four objects and click here on the "Horizontal Aligned Center" option, this is what happens. The two objects that were at the top are treated as if they're individual objects, and the Illustrator has just aligned everything in line. Now, if we want these two objects to be centered over the other two, then we can group them. You can see here. I've already grouped these two objects. All you do is select over them and choose "Object", "Group". Now, let's select at group of objects and these other two objects. I'm just shift clicking on them, so I have all three selected. Well, four shapes but one group, and two extra shapes. Now, let's click here on the "Horizontal Align Center" option. The result this time is very, very different. This gave me what I wanted. I wanted the combined shapes here, centered over the other two objects. So if something doesn't work the way you expect it to work the first time, ask yourself, would grouping some or all of these objects give me the result that I'm looking for.
3. Pt 2 Why the appearance panel is important: The appearance panel in illustrator can help you understand what's going on and it can also be a tool for arranging things differently in illustrator. We're going to see this elsewhere in this class, but let's have a look at it now in terms of adding a stroke around objects. I have a selection of three different objects selected here, they are not in a group. I want to add a stroke around them. In the appearance panel, I can just click here on the stroke and click to add a stroke. I'm going to set this stroke to 20 pixels wide so we have no chance of not saying it. Here you can say that each of these shapes has been given a stroke, if I was to separate them out, you could say the stroke is around each of the shapes. That's the result we get when we select over a series of objects. Go to the appearance panel and simply add a stroke. Individual strokes are added to individual objects. Now I have a group, so I'm selecting my group. Here we don't have an option for adding a stroke, but I can do it by clicking here on add new stroke. I've got a black stroke selected here, but let's make it the same orange, and let's set it to 20 pixels. Here we have a very different result, here we have what appears to be a number of different strokes around our shapes, but it seems like the strokes are on top of everything else and that's really a hint as to what's happening here. We added a stroke to this group and we added an above the contents of the group. What's happened is that each of these objects has been stroked, but the stroke has been placed on top of everything. Let's say we wanted a stroke around the collection of objects if we want the stroke to appear all the way around the group in the appearance panel, we can pick up this stroke and we can drag it underneath the contents. We've got a stroke now that it's appearing around the group, around the combination of items. Because the positioning for this stroke is centered over the object, we're only seeing half of it, we're saying 10 pixels worth if you like. If I open up the stroke panel, there is no option for changing this, the align stroke option has to be center. If we wanted a 20 pixel line here, we would need to double this value. We've got 40 pixels, which gives us 20 pixels outside and 20 pixels inside. We're getting the visual perhaps that we want, but that's the way that you do it. The appearance panel in illustrator is really crucial that you get a handle on using it, because there are so many things that you can only do if you've got the appearance panel visible, because you're dragging things around or creating things within it. We're going to see that again in this class elsewhere. I encourage you, if you're new to illustrate to kick the appearance panel open so that you can see what it's doing, because understanding it and learning to drive it is a key to applying some advanced effects in illustrator.
4. Pt 3 Save file formats: When you're working in Illustrator on a day to day basis, you're going to be saving your files as AI files, as Illustrator files. The reason for this is that if you want to make changes to it, that's the easiest format to use. I have a document here that I've created, so I'm going to choose file and then save. The default is to save it as an Illustrator file. I'm just going to call this, tree. This tree is from my whimsical tree class here at Skillshare. I'm just going to click save. When you see this dialogue generally what you'll do is just click the okay button, just accept the default settings. Now, if, for example, you want to share this file with somebody else, but you're not sure if they've got Illustrator or not. You can actually share a PDF file that has illustrated functionality built into it. If they were to have illustrator available, they could make changes to it. But in the meantime, they'd be able to at least see it. To do that you would save the file as a PDF file. File, in this case, we'll need to save as, because we have to save it as a PDF because we've already saved as an AI file. We'll come here and choose Adobe PDF. I'm going to call it tree because it's going to be a separate file to the AI file. I'll click save. At this point, I can set up the Adobe PDF save format. Here you can see preserve illustrator editing capabilities. If we leave that checked, anybody who has illustrator will be able to open this file and edit it exactly the same way as you would be able to edit it in illustrator. You don't want to give them that functionality, then just disable it. But if you want to give them the option to be able to edit it, then you can do that and click save PDF. Now what this does is it creates a PDF file so you can view that in any regular PDF viewing application. I've opened my PDF viewing application and here is the tree PDF file. It's open and visible here in a regular PDF reader. But if I go ahead and close this file and then go and open it again, open the PDF version. When it's opened in illustrator, here's the last pallet and here are all the editable objects in that file that we're available in the original AI file, but this is a PDF file. It's a nice format to use when you want somebody else to have a look at your illustrator file, but still maintaining the integrity of that file, should you wish to do so.
5. Pt 4 Hidden Gradients Patterns Brushes and Symbols: When you install Illustrator, you're also installing and getting access to a number of different resources, but it's not always immediately apparent what those resources are and where to find them. For example, in the Swatches palette, it might look as if the swatches that you're seeing on the screen are all that are shipped with Illustrator. That's not the case. From the fly-out menu here you can select Open Swatch Library and you get access to a whole series of Swatch Libraries that are shipped with illustrator. You can also get access to them from here, the swatch libraries menu. For example, if we wanted to find some interesting color swatches, we could do so. Let's go and select the nature swatches and let's choose foliage. Well, here are a whole series of foliage colors, and we can add them to our illustrators swatches dialogue by simply clicking on them. Soon as you click on a set of swatches they are automatically added to the dialog here. But a foliage wasn't actually what you were interested in now that you see it, you can get access to the others by just clicking here and this swings you through all the swatches in the swatches panel. When you see a collection of swatches that you like, just click on them, and again, they'll be added to the swatches panel. Let's go and use one of these swatches to color our shape. Now in addition to color swatches, there are also gradients swatches, again from the fly-out menu, Open Swatch Library, and this time you'll go to gradients. Let's select Color Harmonies. These are the color harmonies gradients. Let's just target this shape and let's put a gradient into it. So illustrators thinking in terms of a gradient fill. Well, let's go and test one of these color harmonies. Every time you click on an individual swatch, it will be added to the Swatches palette. Gradients don't come as color groups the same way as color swatches do. They're just single entries in the top of the swatches panel here. But we select the color harmonies. We can go and have a look at other gradients. Here are the earth-tones and here's one that's a radial gradient. It's set up as a radial gradients rather than a linear one. Now again, that's not all that you have in Illustrator. You also have patterns. There are a couple of patterns probably in your existing swatches panel, but there are other patterns that you can access from the fly-out menu, choose Open Swatch Library and then go to patterns. Here are some basic graphics. Let's go and have a look at the lines with my fill selected here. I'm just going to click on one of these patterns and it's added to my shape. If I click here, I can go around and have a look and see what other patents have been shipped here with Illustrator. Every time I click on a pattern to even test it in my document, it's added to the swatches panel. Again, like gradients, swatches for patterns are just individual swatches. They don't come in color groups. Now there are other collections of things that you might be interested in. One of those is brushes, illustrator comes with a series of brushes that you can use for individual shapes and they're visible in the brushes panel, but of course that's not all that is shipped. Go to the fly-out menu and choose Open brush library and you get access to a whole series of brushes that are accessible to you. There are a number of border brushes, so let's just go and have a look at the frames. There are special brushes that are set up to be used as borders around shapes. They are pattern brushes in the main. Whether or not they'll work on your shape really depends on how they've been created, but these are borders frames. Now there will be other brushes in this set here. I'm just looking for a brush library that is a little bit different. This one here is more like a bristle brush or set of bristle brushes. These are a little bit different, these are art brushes, not particularly good for shapes like we're working with here, but good for painting on a single line, for example. Then there are decorative scatter brushes. Every time you click on one of these brushes to even test it in your document, it's added to your brushes panel. These are the border brushes, these are the art brushes and here are your bristle brushes and up here will be your scatter brushes. There are also symbols, so if you go to the symbol Library, you'll see that there are symbols, for example, here, a small house. I'll go to the symbol sprayer tool and just click to create a house in my document. But again, as you might expect, there are other symbols that are shipped with illustrator. Let's go to the fashion symbols. I'll click fashion to open it up. Here we have symbols that are more related to fashion. So I'll go to my symbols sprayer, and this is my T-Shirt symbol. Here's a handbag symbol, for example. Again, there are lots and lots of different symbols that you can get access to by simply clicking around the symbols library. Some are way more complex and some are more simple. If you're looking to harness some of the power of resources that are shipped with illustrator. I suggest that you always try out the fly-out menu here and see if there are symbol libraries or brush libraries or pattern libraries or swatches libraries that you can access and use for your own art.
6. Pt 5 Find Options hidden in flyout menus: One of the disconcerting things about working in Illustrator is quite often things are hidden from you. I have the align panel visible here and this is its default state. Let's select however all of the stars and I have an option here for horizontal distribute center. When I click it, the center of each of these objects is distributed so that there is an even space between all of those objects. Now, that's a really handy tool but there's an equally handy tool that doesn't even appear in this dialogue right now. But if I click here on the flyer menu and choose show options, then some additional tools become visible. This time I can choose to align to a selection or align to the art board. There's also align to key object in here but right now it's grayed out. With these objects selected, I can now go and select it and what it allows me to do is to adjust the spacing between these individual shapes and make it even. If I want each of these shapes to only be separated from the next one by say 10 pixels, I'll type 10 pixels in here. Then I'll click horizontal distribute space and now every one of the shapes has been aligned so that there is 10 pixels of space between the right side of one of them and the left side of the next one. These panel options can be really, really important and they can be features in the panel that are hidden behind these menus. You will want to be aware of that and test the flyer menus in Illustrator panels to see if there's something there that would add additional functionality to the panel. Let's have a look for example at the transparency panel. Here in the flyer menu again, we've got some additional options. There are options that are simply not visible until you go and select them and this is the default state in Illustrator. These will be hidden from you and of course that makes it a little bit difficult for you if you're a beginner. Illustrator is when key features are hidden away but now you know how to display them.
7. Pt 6 Scale effects when scaling shapesng shapes: When you're working with shapes in illustrator that have effects applied to them, such as a pattern fill here, or a stroke or a brush. There are some differences depending on some settings in illustrator as to what happens when you resize those shapes. I've duplicated all those shapes so we can keep an eye on the original and the duplicate. I've selected this one, I'm holding the alt and the shift keys so I can scale it out. You'll see that the brush has not changed size as we have scaled this object. Let's go and do that here with this shape. Again, making it much larger and it's quite apparent that while the star has got a whole lot bigger, the stroke has stayed exactly the same. Let's have a look here at this pattern. Again, will make the star bigger, but this time the pattern has got bigger too. Let me undo all of those and let's see what's controlling this in illustrator. If I go to edit preferences and then go to general, that would be illustrator preferences general on a Mac, you'll see here that we have scales, strokes and effects disabled. Effects such as brushstrokes and the stroke around the shape are not being scaled when the object is being scaled. But see here we've got transform pattern tiles selected. That's why the pattern got bigger when this shape got bigger. Now you can make changes to these options. You could disable, for example, transform pattern tiles, I'll click OK. Let's go and test this one now. Now, the pattern itself doesn't change size when the shape itself does, I'll just undo that. There are also options for these effects when you resize using the object transform tool, let's select this shape. Let's choose object, transform, scale. Now in this dialog, I can select what happens when I increase the size of my object. If I take this object up to 150 percent of the original, here, I can select scale, strokes and effect, and that makes the brushstrokes bigger in proportion to the new size of the shape. Let's click OK. The same would happen if we did this to this shape here, object, transform, scale. With scale strokes and effects, the impact is that the stroke around the shape can be increased in proportion to the increase of size of the shape. You will cause Nate to have preview turned on to save these effects. Let's have a look at patterns, object, transform, scale. If we want to enlarge as shape by 150 percent, then we can transform the pattern as well should we wish or not at all. It's really up to you to make a decisions to what makes sense in terms of your art, but just be aware that when you're resizing a shape, there are possibilities for controlling how the pattern inside that shape is transformed, the stroke, and also any brushstrokes.
8. Pt 7 Effects work differently with text and shapes: One of the things that is perhaps a little unexpected when you're working in an illustrator is that quite often texts and shapes work a little bit differently. Let's select either this shape and I want to give it a scalloped edge. I'll go to the appearance panel so I can make changes to it. I'll go to the stroke here and I'm going to set a dashed line. This allows me to add dashes around my shape. If I make my dashes round cap, then they start to take on the look of little circles. I'll make the gap is the same as the weight of the line and I'll set the dash to 0. That gives me this dotted appearance around my shape. So far so good with the shape itself. Let's go and do the same thing to our pace of text. Well, when I open the appearance panel, first of all, it looks as if there is no appearance applied to it. I need to double-click on characters to get to the appearance area. Let's go to this stroke and let's set up the exact same option. Here I have a stroke weight of around about 30, a dash of 0 a gap of 30. I've got round caps so looks as if this is going to be pretty much the same as my star. But if I want this to be a scalloped edge around the star, what I would do is I would select either my star and I would drag the strike behind the fill. When I drag the stroke under the fill, the fill covers the other half of the circles. The half of the circles that fitted inside the shape and now hidden behind this fill. I've got to scalloped edge. Let's now go and try and do that to the type object. I'll select the type object, double-click on characters. Now when I try to drag the stroke underneath the fill, I can't do it. It's just not possible to do that. It would look at first instance as if I couldn't create this effect on text. Well, I can, you just need to drive the appearance panel a little differently. Let's select on the text, let's double-click on characters. Here, I'm going to remove the stroke and remove the fill from the text, so I'm stripping everything offered. I'll go to type no appearance and when I select that my type has no appearance at all. It's got no film, no stroke. It's not able to be same but it is there. I'll click here and it doesn't matter whether I click on add new stroke or add new fill because clicking on either one of them adds both. Now we have a fill. Let's go and get our orange color. That's our fill. Now let's go and get our green color for the stroke, and we'll make this the dotted line. Click on Stroke. I'll set the white to 30. I'll set dashed line on dashed 0, gap 30 pixels. Let's make it round caps, and that's what we've got exactly what we came here to do. But this time when I try to drag the stroke underneath the fill, it works perfectly. We can get the exact same look on a piece of takes his weekend on a shape, but we have to do it a little bit differently. Working with text is a little bit different to working with shapes in Illustrator, but once you know how to create these effects and know that you have to do it in the type area and not in the characters area, then you are often running.
9. Pt 8 CMYK vs RGB: If you've ever taken any of my illustrator for lunch classes here at Skillshare, you'll know that I'm always, always using RGB color mode. Well, today I've just taken a step away from that and I have a document created here that's in CMYK. The reason for this is that CMYK can often behave completely differently to RGB. RGB is to my way of thinking the better way of working in illustrator particularly if your ultimate desire is to create things for the web or in JPEG format. Let's see why I tend to use RGB and not CMYK. I have a shape here, I'm going to fill it with a gradient. Let's click the Gradient tool to default gradient is black to white. I'm going to make it a Radial gradient and I want the black bit in the middle so let's just flip it around and I'd like it a bit more black than white. That looks pretty good to me. I'll just click away from the Gradient tool. I'll now select the shape and apply a color halftone effect to it. I'll choose Effect, Pixelate, Color Halftone. Now I'm going to take the default settings. Default settings right in front of me now that I'm quite happy with are Maximum Radius eight. That means that the largest circle in my halftone pattern will be a maximum of eight pixels wide. That's pretty good. Here what I'm concerned about is that the channel numbers are all different. It doesn't really matter too much what they are, but they are all different. I'll click Okay. Now I get a halftone pattern but I selected color halftone and this is not a color halftone, this is a black and white halftone. Well, the cause of this object being black and white right now is the CMYK color mode. If I change the color mode, things are going to change completely in this document. I'll choose File and then Document Color Mode, then I'll set it to RGB Color. This is what I call a color halftone pattern. This is also why I use RGB and not CMYK. Effects like the effects that you can apply on the Effects panel will quite often behave differently if you're working in CMYK mode than if you're working in RGB. When I say differently, it is that they just won't work the way you expect them to in CMYK and when you choose RGB then they work just fine. Unless you have a really good reason for designing in CMYK color mode, my recommendation is to use RGB.
10. Pt 9 Quick and easy recoloring: One of the really handy tools an illustrator that a lot of people don't know even exist much less how to use it is the ability to recolor artwork. I have a rectangle here, the size of my Artboard. It's one of the pattern that's shipped with illustrator. It's just a series of diamond shapes. Well, I want to recolor the shapes because I like the pattern but I don't like the colors. I'll select on the shape itself and click here on Re-color Artwork. This shows me that colors that are in this artwork, the four colors that comprise this pattern. Here, I could double-click on any one of these colors and re-color, so I could just select an alternate color and the pattern is automatically recolored. But there's a much more fun way of doing it and that's going to the edit option. Here we get access to the colors on a color wheel. I'm going to make sure that the harmony colors are linked, so when I drag on one color, all the other colors change in proportion. The relationship between these four color stays the same. It's just that we're walking around the color wheel, so we can take it into the blues and purples, we can take it into the reds and oranges, we can take it into yellow green area. It's also possible to unlink these colors, so if you unlink them, you can take the individual colors wherever you want them to be on the color wheel. You can also adjust saturation and brightness for individual colors here as well. There are a lot of things that you can do here. I have a class solely on the Recolor Artwork dialog. But once we've finished recoloring, I'll just click Okay. If we look here in the Swatches panel we now have two patterns, we've got the pattern that we started off with. But what illustrate has done in this circumstance, it doesn't usually do this, it only does it for patterns. But when you recolor a pattern, it gives you a new version of the pattern with your re-coloring applied to it. If you're new to illustrate, if you've never played around with the Recolor Artwork dialog, I think you're going to really like it.
11. Pt 10 Rotation points on shapes: When you're working in Illustrator, you're mostly working in vector shape, and so the rotation point of a shape is very important. When you select on a shape, you'll most likely see the center point as well as the outer rotation points. So if I want to rotate this shape by default, it will rotate relative to its center point. So for example, if I choose "Object", "Transform", "Rotate" and rotate it 30 degrees, it will be rotated relative to that center point there. I'll just click "Okay". Now it is possible to rotate an object around another point, but you can't use the Object-Transform-Rotate option to do that because there's no option here in this dialogue for changing the rotation point. Let's click "Cancel". We could choose "Object", "Transform", "Transform each" because in the Transform each dialogue is the ability for us to choose a transform point. So if we wanted to transform our shape around this point, we would click, out of this set of nine boxes, the one in the bottom right corner that matches this point here, and now if we rotated it 30 degrees, you'll see that the shape is rotating around the selected rotation point. I'll just click "Okay". Now let's go and create yet another shape. And if I want to rotate this shape around another point entirely, even one that's not one of these nine points, I can do that too. I'll click on the shape to select it, and I'll click here on the rotate tool. You'll see that in doing that, the center point of the shape is visible. Well, I can change that rotation point if before I do anything else, I auto-option click where I want the rotation point to be. Now, I've just made it down here, and now when we rotate the shape, it's rotated around this point here, not any one of the points that are around the shape itself. I'll just click "Okay". Each one of these shapes has been rotated 30 degrees, but it's been rotated 30 degrees relative to different points: this one, relative to the center point; this one, relative to one of the corners; and this one, relative to this arbitrary point over here. When you are transforming shapes and using tools that transform and rotate a shape, where you are transforming relative to can matter. So just be aware of those nine little rotation points and sometimes the possibility of even using an external point as your rotation point.
12. Pt 11 Reveal hidden tool options: I just drew these two lines with the pencil tool in Illustrator and they look very different. One's got lots of wiggles in it and one's really smooth. Well, was the difference me or was the difference Illustrator? The difference was Illustrator. I have the pencil tool selected here but if I double-click on it, some tool options appear and that's a secret in Illustrators. There are a lot of tool options hidden in the tools themselves. When you select the tool, double-click on the tool as well to see if there are tool options available. This is the setting I had for this line here, it's accurate, so the pencil tool is following my behavior. If I wiggle, it wiggles. If I set it to smooth and I draw with a pencil tool, then I get smooth lines, Illustrator is smoothing out the effect. There are whole lot of other options here too, for the pencil tool. Some tools have options that are not immediately apparent. If I target the selection tool and double-click on it, well, there are no options. But if I take the selection tool and select either a line or something is selected, now if I double-click on this tool, then options appear. It turns into a move tool allowing me to specify how things move. If I were moving an object and I can choose to transform the object and/or transform the patterns themselves. Lots of things are hidden in this tool area in Illustrator. Pretty much the only way that you're going to find them is clicking on the tool to target it and then double-click to see what is available for that tool, if anything.
13. Pt 12 Differences between Expand and Expand Appearance: One of the things that new Illustrator uses quite often find a little bit difficult to understand and justifiably so is the concept of expanding an appearance. Here I have a number of shapes, I'm going to look at each of these individually. The first one I've got here is just a basic hexagon. It has got a strike around the side and a fill. Now I haven't selected. So you can see here that's targeted in the last panel. You can also see the handles are around it. Now I can expand that the appearance of this shape. In doing so for this particular shape, what that's going to do is it's going to separate the fill and the stroke. The stroke is actually going to become a filled shape, so it's going to have anchor points on the outside and the inside, and it's going to be a filled shape and not just a stroke applied to another shapes. Let's see how we do that. We'll choose object and then expand. Now at this point, you might be confused about the presence of expand and expand appearance. Well, a wonderful thing about these two options is, I've never seen them both selectable. There's always one that's grayed out and there's always one that you can select. So it's not really a choice that you have to make because you're going to just choose the one that is available to you. So I'll click on Expand. Now for this shape, object is not a selectable option because there is no object here to expand. But we do have a fill and we do have a stroke. So you can select to expand the fill or the stroke or both. Now in this case, because we actually do have a stroke and the fill, I would choose both of these. But in other cases, if you have a shape that doesn't have a stroke for example, then just select Fill. I'll click Okay. Now here in the last panel we have a group and we've got a composite path for the stroke. So this is a stroke and I have it selected. So you can say that we can move the strike away because it is now a filled shape. Two is the original fill, that's a fill here and I can grab it using the Group Selection tool. That's an easy way of doing it too. So this is a way of breaking the stroke away from a shape so that it is an independent and filled object. Now why would you want to do that? Well, sometimes stock agencies, for example, don't like you to apply strokes to shapes. They want to see the stroke expanded. In that case, that's what you might need to have to do. Now, let's have a look at another object. I have a circle here and it's going to transform on it. If we have a look in the appearance panel, we can say that this is as shape and it's got a transform effect. Now that transform effect is just an effect. That doesn't mean that there are four shapes.It's this just one shape with the transformation applied to it. Well, if I want to break this out so that I have four shapes instead of one with a transformation, I'll select my one shape and choose object and in this case, expand appearance is the option that we'll take. Now let's have a look and say in the Layers palette what that gives us. This gives us a group in which there are a series of additional groups. You'll see here that what you probably didn't expect was going to happen has happened. Not only do we have four circles now, but we've actually got those circles split into the stroke and fill. If you don't want that to happen, let's just wine back. I'm going to show you a trick. I'm just going to wind back by pressing Control Z to undo that and let me make a duplicate of this shape. Let's go to this one and we'll expand it with Object, Expand Appearance. That's broken up into a series of filled circles and filled outlines, so filled strokes. So that may not be what you want to happen. If you want to have, at the end of this, I circle with a stroke on it, then remove the stroke before you begin. So here's my circle. I've got the Transform effect applied to it, but I've removed the stroke. Now I'll go ahead and choose Object, Expand Appearance. If we go this time, you'll say that we have a series of groups, but inside each of these groups is just a single path. For nice and neatness sake, I'm going to select the group here and I'm going to choose Object Ungroup because it's really untidy to have groups that only contain a single objects. Let's go and break all of those out of here. Now I have four individual paths, well I can select either all four of those individual paths and let's go back and put now the stroke on them. I can't quite remember what color I used. They're probably this one here. Let's just wind up the stroke. We can end up with the same appearances we had previously, but this time our circles actually have strokes on them. This is a stroke circle, not two separate objects, I filled center part and then this stroke which has been also converted to a filled shape. Just be aware that that can bite you when you're expanding an object that has a fill and a stroke, you can end up with two individual paces. Now the sign is going to happen either here. Here I have a hexagon and I've converted it to a flower using what's called Pucker and Bloat. It's available here through Affect, Distort and Transform and Pucker and Bloat. What that does is it pulls and pushes the shape to make something else from it, this is the hexagon. This is a hexagon with Pucker and Bloat applied to it. Now in the exact same way as this transform effect worked when we expand this, we're not only going to get the flash shape, but we're going to get the fill and the stroke broken out separately,Object, Expand Appearance. Let's go to what it is that we get here. Here is the path that represents the stroke and we can just move that out of the way and then we get the fill as well. Now if you don't want that to be the case, let's just wine that back. Let's go and put it back to a hexagon. In this case, I'm going to remove the stroke from the shape. I'll choose Object, Expand Appearance and then having expanded the appearance of that object, now I would go back and put my stroke on it. I can actually just sample this because this shape has a stroke and the fill. So if I just sample the look or the appearance of this shape, then that's what we get over here. Ask yourself, do I want to lose my stroke as a strokes and make it into a filled shape if you don't, before you go and expand this, just trash the stroke and then put it back again later on. Now there's another object down here and this is a blend. So I've blended from a shape that has a fill and a stroke on one end. Let me just click here on this so that we can see what's inside the blend. Inside the blend you have a spine. That's the path on which the blend is taking place over. Then you have a starting point and an ending point. So this is the ending point, orange outside, green in the middle this is a starting point, orange in the middle, green outside. If we want to bust these shapes out of this blend, we would select the Blend and choose Object and then Expand. Here we get a series of options. We can expand the object and also the fill and also the stroke. So if we choose all of these, we're going to get each of these circles as an individual object, but the strokes are going to be turned into a filled path and so too are the centers. If we don't want to do anything like that, if all we want is our circles, then we just expand the object and click Okay. Now when we open up our group, you'll see that we have a whole series of individual paths and each one of these paths has a fill and a stroke and these aren't separated into a separate shape for the stroke and a separate shape for the fill. So they're the rudimentary basics of this Expand and Expand Appearance option. Just be aware that you'll only get one selectable. So there's no choice to be made between the two of those, but there are things to know about what they do to your shape.
14. Pt 13 Make Guides from Any Object: In Illustrator, you can create guides quite easily. The first thing you're going to do is choose view and then rulers and choose show rulers. At this point you can just drag a guide onto the screen. It has a light blue color depending on what it is that you've set it up to do but the default is a light blue color. If we have a look in the layers palette, you're going to be probably a little surprised just to what you see. You see a guide is just a shape in Illustrator. You can do things with guides that you do with regular shapes. For example if we want this guide to be centered on the page, we could select it and then go to the align panel. You can also get to that by choosing window and then align. I'll click the flyer menu because I want to show the options and I want to be able to align everything to the art board because I want to align this guide to the art board. With the guide selected, I'm just going to click here on horizontal align center and the guide will jump into the center of the document. Now, if you don't want your guides to move, it's best to lock them down. To do that, you'll just click here in this space here and it gets a lock on it. That means you can't select it or move it but you can still align things to it. I've got a circle here, I'm just going to drop it over my guide and you can see that it's snapping to that guide. Now, you can also make guides from anything in illustrator so you don't have to drag them off the rulers, so you don't even have to display the rulers if you don't want to. Instead let's just go and get the line segment tool, I'll just go and to press Control or Command zero so I can see the edges of my document just simply because I want this guide to reach all the way down the page. I'll hold the Shift key so that it's constrained to a straight line and let go. Now, it doesn't look like a guide right now and it's not a guide. Let me just select over this shape to select it and then I'm going to choose view and then guides and then make guides. The selected object now becomes a guide and it has also got the blue-green color on it. Now, it's called a line even though it is a guide. It's called a line because it's not an expanded shape. If we were to select it and choose object and then shape, expand shape, then it would be expanded into a path which then is called a guide. Really confusing this shape expansion but just be aware that when you make a guide even though it's not called a guide it's still a guide. Again, you can just lock it down if you want to. Now I'm going to unlock this. When you come to no longer wanting your guides, then from the view menu, you can choose view and then guides and you can choose either hide guides which will just hide them but still leave them in the layers panel so they're still there. Or you can just click ''Clear Guides'' and that will remove the guides from the document but leave in place everything else that you have in that document. Now, before we leave guides, I said to you that anything can be a guide. Well, it really can. Let's go and get a rectangle. Let's just drag out a rectangle in the document. For convenience let's just expand it, so we'll choose object shape and then expand shape so it becomes a path here in the layers palette. It's still selected, you can tell it's still selected because it has got that little dot here selected. So I'll choose view and then guides and I'll choose make guides. This is now a guide. You can see that it still selected here in the layers palette and this is a guide and it's going to have that very typical light blue color. Now you can align objects to that because it is a guide and they can align to any point on it using that smart guide option. When you no longer want your guide, view guides, either hide the guide so it's still in the document but not visible or click ''Clear Guides.''
15. Pt 14 Multiple places for tool options: Some of the tools in Illustrator for applying certain effects can be found in multiple places. There are bits and pieces of the tool in each of these places. I have a circle here that I applied a gradient to a new start with a gradient by clicking here on the "Gradient" options. This is a solid fill color, this is a gradient fill, now, in the gradient dialogue, you can only apply gradients to the shapes that are actually already in existence in the swatches palette or the gradients that you've actually made yourself. If you want to find a gradient swatch to use, you'll go to the swatches palette, and then go and open the gradient swatch libraries and choose a gradient to use. I'm just going to go and get a sky gradient, we'll just apply that to the shape. Now if I go to the gradient panel, the sky gradient is visible here, but I can also revert to any gradient that was in the swatches panel. Now having created and filled the shape with a gradient, if we want to adjust how the gradient itself is added to the shape, then we come back over here to the gradient tool. Now we can just drag to position the gradient in the shape where we want it to be. That's going to be the same with a linear or a radial gradient. We can just work on positioning the gradient in the shape using this tool here. We've got one option here, we've got gradients in the swatches panel, we've got the gradient panel for making the gradient and then the gradient tool for applying it. A little bit confusing, but that's the way it works. Now let's have a look at another tool that is in a few places, and that's the blend tool. I'll select on the blend tool here, I'm going to click on one shape and then click on a second shape to make a blend. I'll double-click on the "blend" tool because I want to make some adjustments to it. The blend options here are in the blend tool, so just double-click to open it up. Now, I would like specified steps and I'm just going to create a few more steps for my blend. I'll click "okay". Now if I want to do something with the blend, like replacing the spine, for example, let's just make a curved line for our blend. I'll press escape to finish drawing my line. Let's just make it a line that we can see. I'll select over the line and the blend itself. There are no options here when I double-click the "blend" tool for doing anything with a spine. Those options are here on the Object menu, so we'll choose object and then blend. Here are our options such as replacing spine and reversing spine and reversing the blend from front to back. Well, I'm going to replace a spine which puts my blend on this curve. When I need to expand my blend, then I'll go again to the blend options here on the object menu. Object, blend, and then I can expand my blend to make a series of colorful shapes rather than a blend with a spine. Just be aware that it's not always self-evident where anything is going to be in Illustrator. Sometimes the tools you use might appear in multiple places and there'll be some of the tool available in one place and the rest of the tool available somewhere else.
16. Pt 15 Point type and Area type: In Illustrator, there are basically two different types of type object. Now, if I click on the Type tool you see that there's a Type tool and an area Type tool. You can get to both of them by selecting the Type tool and what you'll create or what will create first of all, is point type. To do that with the Type tool selected, you'll just click in the Document and start typing. Now typically, this is used for a single line of type, but it can also be used for multiple lines of type. To add multiple lines of type, you just press the Enter key. Then you can press the Escape key, which allows you to go back to the Selection tool. So you can then do something with that type, for example, move it around the document. That's called point type, to create area type, you can do it from the type tool. In this case, what you'll do is click and drag to create a box into which your type will be typed and then you can say the insertion point is up here. So you can just go ahead and type your words. Now these two types work a little bit differently from each other. We're going to look at the main way that they differ. With the point type, if I drag on the Selection handle here, I'm going to distort the type. If I hold the Shift key, I won't be distorting the type, but I will be enlarging it or shrinking it, without the Shift key. Then we can distort it, we can squeeze it up or we can smush it down. I'm going to hold the Shift Key so that the type isn't bent out of shape. Let's see what happens when we select the area type and try and do the same thing. I'm going to drag in over the box here and when I do the type hasn't changed size. But what it's done is, it's spin squashed up to fit inside the box. So the lines have become much smaller. When I drag it out, the lines become much bigger. So we're actually adjusting how the text looks in a very different way when we use area type to when we use point type. Now here my box isn't big enough, because there's extra words in here that are not showing and we know that because there's a little red box here. When that little box is red, that's telling us there's more text here then can currently be shown. It's a warning to you, so if you enlarge the box, then you can get those texts back. If we want shorter lines here what we'll do is just squeeze up the box and we'll have to extend its length to fit all the text in. If we want shorter lines here, just squeezing up the type is not going to work. The only option we have is to come in and actually edit the types. So I'd go one line of, okay I want a new line here. I'll press the Enter key and I'll press the Delete Key to get rid of the space and I'll come across to the end here, and I have to delete the enter, the carriage returns I'll do that and I'll put a space in, so you can see that editing for line length, for example, with point type is really cumbersome. But editing for line length on area type is as easy as just changing the dimensions of the box. Now if you want, you're type to be larger then you just go to the type tool and select the type in the box and then you can enlarge it. So it's not that you can't enlarge it. It's just that adjusting the size of the box is not going to do that for you.
17. Pt 16 Select Shapes: In Illustrator, sometimes you want to select objects by a property that that object has. For example, if I didn't like the blue that this cloud is colored with, and I wanted to change all the blues in this document, one way I could do it is using the Magic Wand tool. There is a Magic Wand tool over here, so I would target it and then I would click a shape, any one of the shapes that is colored with the color that I want to make edits to. Let's just click this shape, and when I do, every other shape that has that fill color applied to it is selected. I can go ahead now and change that color. I will double click on it and let's make that a slightly more blue color rather than a turquoise. It has a different color now. Now there are other options that you can use as well, and one of them is a menu option. I'm going to select this sun, it has a yellow fill. Let's go and select all the other objects in this document that have that fill. Select, same, and we can choose from a number of appearances. Now some of these are grayed out because they're not appropriate to the shape that we actually have selected, which is the sun here, but we could choose Fill color, and that would allow us to select every other object that shares this Fill color. Well, I'm going to do just that, and let's change that color. Let's make it a more orange color. Now when I click away, we'll say that something didn't change, and the reason for that is that this yellow here is not the same color. Let me just undo that change of color and let me just show you what's happening. I'm going to the group selection tool here because I want to first of all, click on this color, and if you watch over here, when I click on this shape here, the color actually changes. These two shapes are colored with yellow, but they are two different yellows. Well, the magic wand tool will allow us to select both of these shapes. Let's just go and say the magic wand tool, I'm just going to click on it and then I'm going to double-click on it because there are some tool features hidden behind the magic wand tool and unlike the Select same Fill color, there's an option here to use a tolerance. Tolerance is a setting that says to Illustrator, not only select the color that I've actually clicked on, but also some colors that are pretty close to that color. Now there's a maximum range for tolerance which is going to be 255, so 255 if you had a tolerance so that you'd be selecting everything, but if you want to just get yellows and pretty near to yellow, then something like 30 in a document like this is going to be really accurate, because it's going to pick up all the yellows. Let's go and test that, let's target this yellow here and now all of these are the yellow objects are selected, including the one that is the same yellow but not quite. We can tell that there are multiple shades of yellow selected over here because there is a question mark in the fill. If we were only selecting the one shade of yellow, then that shade of yellow would appear here, but because we've got different shades of yellow, Illustrator, can't show a static, can't show us multiple shades. Since I'll instead it just puts a question mark there saying, hey, there are colors here that are not the same. They are selected, but I can't show them to you because they're not all the same, but we can make them all the same because all of these objects are selected. If we double click on the Fill color, then we can go and select the color that all of these objects are going to be colored. I will target a color and click Okay, and now you can say that there is actually a Fill color shown here because all of the selected objects share that same Fill color. When you need to select objects in Illustrator, be aware of the magic wand tool and some of the settings that you can select for that magic wand tool, but also the Select same options which allow you to target a shape and then select shapes that share the appearance of that shape. There is also select object which for example, you can use to select all your text or Clipping Masks or Brush Strokes, if that was what you wanted to select by.
18. Pt 17 Distort and Transform: We've already had a passing look at the distort and transform options, but let's have a more detailed look at them. Let us create an ellipse here, just a simple circle. Let's choose a fill color for it and a stroke. Then we'll just make a slightly larger stroke. Now while we're at it, I'm also going to create another shape, so I'll go ahead and create a polygon. I'm going to make this just a simple six-sided object. Now it's inheriting the appearance of this shape here and sometimes that's handy. If you don't want it to, you can just press the letter D and it will get the default appearance, so that you can then apply your own choice of fill and stroke to it. Now the reverse is also true if you've got an object that has a default appearance and you want to use this appearance, then you can just use the eyedropper to grab it. Let's have a look at the distort and transform tools. I'm going to take this circle and I'm going to choose effect, distort, and transform. In this case, I'll choose transform, because this is one of the really handy features of illustrator. I'm going to make a row of circles. To do that I'll turn preview on, because preview in most dialogues is going to be disabled. In fact, pretty much the only dialogue that it's enabled for is the one that you don't want it to be enabled for and that's image tries. But in most cases, you'll have to turn preview on. Now I'm going to start moving this shape across, as far as I can take it. Now looks as if a 100 pixels is the maximum which makes you think that maybe this dialogue isn't going to be very good at all. But just because a 100 pixels is a maximum on the slide, it doesn't mean you can't increase the value, you just have to do it yourself. Now what happened so far is that this shape here has been moved. Its being transformed, it's been moved a 140 pixels across. But if I want the original shape and some more shapes, then I can just increase the copies. So if I do two, that's one copy and one original, I get two shapes, but I can continue to increase it. I really like this talk as it gives me a visual as to what things are doing and that can be really useful. Now you can also make these things into circles by swinging around the angle. Sometimes it's easier to do this by just increasing things by 10 degrees yourself. There are all sorts of shapes that you can create by rotating things. Now you can also reflect things, and if you reflect things on the y-axis with just horizontal movement, nothing's going to happen. But if we add some vertical movement, then we get effects like this. Now, to cover the transform effect dialogue in a short course like this is really impossible. I just want to give you a hint as to what's here in this transform effect dialogue. You can do a lot of things in this dialogue and it's lots of fun, but it's also a lot of practical use. I'm just going to turn reflect off. I'm going to do a rotation here. What I'm going to do is rotate around the other way. I just want to show you something else here. If I make this 80 percent of the width and height as the shape rotates and moves, it's also decreasing in size. The way that this decrease in size works, is that this shape here is 80 percent of the size of this shape. Then this one is 80 percent of the size of this one, and this is 80 percent of the size of this one. So it's got this nice change decreasing in size as it goes down. Now of course you don't have to use a value like 80 and you can also increase the size. You can also make them into more ovals by decreasing a horizontal and the vertical sizing at a different rate. So heaps of things you can do with this dialogue, I suggest you play around with it and see what it's capable of. I'm going to click Okay. If we have a look at this and decide that we don't like it we want to make some changes to it, don't be tempted to choose effect, distort and transform, transform. What illustrator is saying to you is, wait a minute, I can't make changes that way, I can add a new effect so I can give you something completely different as an add-on to what you've already got. But if you really want to just change what you've got, then you need to do it by going to the appearance panel. I'm just going to click Cancel, lets open up the appearance panel. With the shape selected, you'll see here that we've got a transform. That's what's happening. It's a transformer effect applied to this circle. If we double click on this then we can get access to the transform settings that we've set, and say I made a mistake and it was really supposed to be 80 percent, then I'll make my change and click Okay. Now another one of the distortion effects that you can apply is the one that we saw earlier, which is actually a pucker and bloat. I just want to show you what's possible with pucker and bloats. I've got a six-sided shape here, effect, distort and transform. Let's choose pucker and bloat and I'll click Preview. Now there are all sorts of shapes that you can make by either puckering, in other words, sucking in the sides of this shape or blowing them out. Here we have that flower that we created earlier and then if we push it far enough, we get a layered shape in here. Now the pucker and bloat depends to a large extent on how many anchor points you have around the shape. For this shape, if I just target the direct selection tool, you'll see that we've got anchor points in each of the corners. Well if I choose object and then path and add anchor points, I'm going to add an anchor point to the middle of each of these sides. So we've got way more anchor points now than we had previously. If we choose effect, distort and transform and pucker and bloat, the effect of the puckering and bloating is going to be quite different, because the puckering and bloating takes place relative to the anchor points. If you've got more anchor points, then you've got more puckering and bloating happening. So in this case, our flower is going to have 12 points and not six. Again, I encourage you to experiment with these options, these effect distort and transform options, roughen, and twist, and zigzag as well are just really handy tools for creating interesting effects in Illustrator, and effects that you don't really have to be able to draw to achieve. This is just an effect placed on a very simple hexagon, and this is an effect placed on a circle.
19. Pt 18 Clean up the workspace: Having a neat and tidy workspace in Illustrator is pretty much the same as having a neat and tidy desk. Sometimes it's just easier to find things when they're organized. Now, my interface right now is anything but organized and I can record a bit more tools. I can bring some panels out here and maybe just bring a few panels out and close them down and all of a sudden everything starts to look really different and really untidy. Well, I can get that back. I'm going to show you not only how I return it to what it looked like, but also how you can arrange it to suit yourself. I'm going to choose Illustrator for lunch. This is the workspace that I have and I'm just going to click on reset and that resets it to what it looked like when I created it. Here's what you can do. You can go and create a workspace to look exactly as you want it to look. Put these panels where you want them to be, so you can drag them around. These are the panels flown out, so I could put them fly out if I wanted to. I could also look at some of these panels and go, "I don't usually use you, so I don't actually need you to be in my panel display." I might want to put the last panel at the very end because I use that a lot. I don't really like the colors once. No, let's get rid of it so it won't appear in my regular setup. When I've got the Illustrator workspace organized as I want it to look, I can save that. I'll go to whatever it is that showing here, and it's obviously going to be different for you. I'll click on it and I'll choose new workspace. Let's just call this sample. I'll type the word sample and click ''Okay.'' Now that's saved as a workspace. Let's break that. Let's just go and get somebody else's workspace. There's a layout workspace. As soon as I select it everything changes to look the way that somebody else arranged for Illustrator to look. But if we want to go back to sample, then we'll choose sample. Then it goes back to looking the way we planned it to look. If you've got sample selected and then you go on break that, and that's easy enough to do. I do this all the time so don't think that you're doing something wrong by doing it, but you've got things broken out and maybe this dialogue's moved over here. You want to get back to sample and the moment of saying samples, so just going in and selecting samples is not going to achieve anything because you're already there. Click sample and choose reset sample. What reset sample does, is it resets it to what it looked like when you first created it. That's back to how it was when we created it. Now if you look at your sample workspace and say, you know what, there's something that I don't ever use, so I don't ever use this. Let's get rid of it and I want to resave this. I want this to be sample. To do that we'll choose sample and then new workspace because there's no option here for saving changes. We'll go to new workspace and we'll type sample in again. We're going to make this exactly the same name as the existing one and Illustrator goes oh, wait a minute, you've already got one called sample and the name already exists. If you click "Okay, you'll over write. But that's exactly what we wanted to do. We'll just click "Okay". This is now exactly what sample looks like. Whatever that dialogue was has now been removed. Every time you open Illustrator, you can just go to sample, choose reset sample, and immediately your workspace is going to be neat and tidy. Now, today I can find something that will do that for the desk what's in front of me right now. I'll be even more happy, but until then, it's the best I can offer you, your Illustrator workspace nice and tidy.
20. Pt 19 Save assets so you can resuse them: As you're working in Illustrator and as you're learning Illustrator, you may be creating things like brushes or graphic styles, or you might be creating special swatches, we could even be creating patterns. Let's just make a really simple pattern. It's going to get my hexagon here, and let me just hold the shift key so that it's drawn with a perfectly horizontal base and let's go and get a fill and a stroke so that It looks a bit more interesting than it does right now, and let's just crank up the stroke. To make a pattern from this shape, I'll just select the shape and in Illustrator [inaudible] I'll choose object, pattern, make, I'll click okay, and then I can bring in this dialog and I'm going to choose for my tile type, I'm going to choose Hex by column, because that's a nice pattern arrangement to use when you're using hexagons. I think that it's a little bit far apart, so I'm going to click this lock icon here, and let's just drop down these values to bring our pattern in a little bit. I just want it to look as if it's got nice, save, and size. When I'm happy with that, I'll click done. Up here in the swatches panel is my pattern. I've now got a pattern that is this hexagon pattern. I can delete this tile now, I don't need it any longer. As I've worked in this document. I want to go and create another new documents. Let's just choose File, New, let's go and create a brand new document. Click Create, have a look in our swatches panel and lo and behold our pattern is no longer there. The pattern has not been saved, and so it's never going to appear in the Swatches palette in Illustrator. In fact, if we were to go back to this previous document that has the pattern swatch in it, and if we were to close it without saving, then the patterns is totally gone, we'll never see it again. What we can do once we've created a pattern or a series of patterns in Illustrator is we can save them so that we can get them back anytime we like. To do that, we're first going to empty the Swatches palette of everything that doesn't relate to the things we want to save. I'm going to select all the swatches and click the delete, here, and delete those swatches. I'm going to get rid of these patterns all the way up to this white. You'll never get rid of registration or none. They just won't disappear however hard you try. Let's go and delete everything else. Now we've got none registration and the one swatch that we've created in this document that we want to be able to use at sometime in the future. To save it, we'll click the flyout menu and choose Save Swatch Library as AI. This takes us to the location where Illustrator saves the swatches. Now this is going to be different for each version of Illustrator, it will also be a bit different on a Mac, but illustrate it's going to take you there so you don't have to worry about that. All you have to do is type a name for your swatch. I'm going to call this hexagon and I'll click save. Now from that menu, it's vital that you use saves Swatch Library as AI, don't use ASE or the pattern won't be saved. Let's go to our new document which doesn't have that pattern available in it, but we want to be able to use that pattern. Let's go and make a rectangle so we can fill it with that pattern as soon as we get that pattern. Well, to find that pattern, we can click here on the swatch libraries menu or click on the flyout menu and choose Open Swatch Library and then user defined, and in the user-defined patterns will be the patterns that we've saved, including the hexagon. Here is our hexagon pattern, it's not yet in the swatches panel but as soon as we use it, it will be in the swatches panel or we can drag and drop it into swatches panel, so you got two choices. But since I want to use it, I've got my shape selected, I've got my fill targeted, I'll just click once on the new pattern and it will be applied to my shape. Because its been applied to something in this document, it's automatically added as a pattern swatch to the swatches panel so we don't need to keep the hexagon pattern file open, and even if we change this, even if for example, we were to apply a solid color fill to this shape, because the pattern has been used at least once, then it's still going to be in this document, so it's going to be available for use anytime. It's really important when you make color swatches, symbols, brushes, patterns, if you want to be able to use them again in Illustrator, it's critical that you save them, and the quickest and easiest way to do it is to always save them as an AI file if you're given the option, in other instances with brushes, you'll choose Save brush library and then you'll be prompted to save it in a format that Illustrator understands so that then you can come back and open it again later on.
21. Pt 20 Use Shape builder to work with multiple shapes: When you're working with shapes in Illustrator, there are some tools here on the Pathfinder menu that you can use to work with those shapes. For example, if I have a star and a rectangle, let's just go and grab these two. I'm just going to Alt drag them across here to make a copy of them. If I have a star and a rectangle, I can do things such as subtract the star from the rectangle. The star is on top of the rectangle. It has to be because otherwise we wouldn't be seeing the bottom part of the star if it was underneath. We know that the star is on top of the rectangle, so if we go to, for example, minus front, we'll take the star shape out of the rectangle, will cut it out of the rectangle. Now, other things that you can do here on the Pathfinder menu, is you can select the series of shapes and unite them, join them all together to make one shape. Now, the shapes will take on different characteristics depending on which tool you're using. In this case, they've taken on the characteristic of the topmost shape, the star shape. You can experiment with these tools by creating a series of shapes and just look and see what you'll get. Here, if we select this tool, we'll get the intersection between the shapes. The one point where all three of these shapes intersect, which is in this area here. When we click on it, we get left with this shape here. Now, in the past, that was all we had for working with shapes in Illustrator, and so most of us laboriously learned what the Pathfinder tool would do for us, and which one to choose in what circumstance. But most recently, illustrator has been blessed with a tool called the Shape Builder tool, and it's here it shares a toolbar position with what's called the Live Paint Bucket tool and Selection tool. The Shape Builder tool allows us to do things with shapes, so let me go and just select these shapes, go back to the Shape Builder tool. Now, when I hover over each part of each of these shapes, I'm getting a literal mesh showing up, and that mesh is telling me I can do things with this shape. If we want to go and do something like this and just get that little piece out, this is what we do. We'd hold the Alt or option key because we want to start removing things, and we'll just drag over the pieces we want to remove. We want to remove all that part. We want to remove this bit here and these bits here and this bit. Then we get left with the exact same little piece as we got left with here, but we didn't have to make a decision about which of these Pathfinder options to use. Let's select either this, and let's do the equivalent of a unite. We'll go back to the Shape Builder tool, and this time we want to add things, so we're not going to use the Alt or option key because that's a way of removing things, this time we'll just drag over the bits that we want to keep. I'm just going to drag over everything. Now, in this case because of the way I made my selection, we're getting a different look to the object. It's got a stroke and a fill, but it's basically the exact same shape as we had previously, just with a different appearance. Let's see how we create this shape with this set of objects. Well, we're going to select all of them first of all because of the Shape Builder you actually had to have your shapes selected. Then target the Shape Builder tool. We don't want any part of the star, so I am going to Alt or option drag over the star to get rid of that. I could join these two together here by just dragging over them, and I could join these two together by dragging over them. Now, I've got a shape that I totally want to get rid of, I'll just Alt drag over it. You can use a combination of dragging and Alt dragging to get what you want in the end, which in this case was this shape here. If you're using a version of Illustrator that it has a shape builder tool, you'll find that is probably the easiest way of carving up shapes to get what it is that you want. That you might find that there is one or two tools here that from time to time you might want to use, for example, the Divide tool, which divides shapes up. But most of the time you'll find that the Shape Builder tool can do pretty much what is available in the Pathfinder tool, and it's just a little bit more visual, probably a little bit easier to use.
22. Project and wrapup: Your project for this class is to tell me which of the techniques, tools, and skills explained in this class that you were unaware of and that you think will be of most use to you. This is a comment in the project area. Now if you'd like to add an image that shows how you used or practice this technique or skill, please do. I hope that you've enjoyed this class, I hope that you've learned things about Illustrator of which you were unaware. As you were watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which asked if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes that you do recommend this class, and secondly, write even in just a few words, why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
23. Illustrator Configure Layer Thumbnails: This is an additional
video for this class because somebody asked me a really good question
and that was, how can they make the
layer thumbnail images much larger and do
it permanently? Here's a way to do it. I have a document open here. You'll see that in
the last palette, my thumbnails are
really nice and big. That's how I like to see them. Let's see how we could
make changes to yours. You're going to choose file and then open and
you're going to navigate to where your new
document profiles are located. This is the location
for a Windows machine and the location for Macs
are on the screen as well. You'll just need
to locate that for your version of Illustrator. I'm going to choose print.ai
but if you typically make mobile documents or art
and illustration or web, choose whatever it is
that you typically use. Let's go to "Open." Now, this is your Kai template. We're going over here
to the last panel. I'm going down to panel
options and I'm going to set the thumbnail size here to
50 pixels and click "Okay", because that's the size
I like to see mine. Now, on the face of it,
you should be able to save this and just be able
to use it in future, but I found that doesn't work. It's not reliable and
it's really tricky. This is what we're going to do. We're going to choose
file and save as, and we're going to
give it a new name. I'm going to call this
print large thumbnails. I'll click "Save" and "Okay". I'm just going to close this. Now, in future when we go
to create a new document, we're going to click
on "New File". Now, you're going to find this template in the print area, but you're going to have
to open up or print presets and you're going
to need to locate it. Here's print large thumbnail. That's a little bit tricky, but over time you
will find that this is going to appear
in the recent area. If you use it often enough, it's going to pop up
into the recent area. But there's an even
easier way to find it, and that is over on this
side of the dialogue. In more settings, you can just open the
profile up and you will see that print large thumbnails
is here in the list. I'm just going to use that as
the basis for my document, but I can change all
of these settings. It doesn't have to stay
what it is in the preset. You can do whatever you like. I'm just changing mine to RGB. I'll click "Create Document". And here is the last palette and here are the thumbnails
at a large size. That's the way that I suggest that you do it so
that it is reliable. If you consistently make web documents and print
documents and whatever, then I suggest you just go
ahead and create presets for every single one of those with large thumbnails or
something else on the end. It's just going to make
life a whole lot easier. Of course, you can also make other changes to your
document, for example, adding swatches or
brushes that you typically use for
these documents. There's lots that you
can do, but today, we just came here to deal
with layer thumbnails.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
