Transcripts
1. Class Trailer: Hello, Internet. My
name is John Brant Crusoe Design Co.
Around seven years ago, I put out one of my most
successful classes ever. Adobe Illustrator Speed course. That class got
thousands of students, I had a rating of
over 98% and tons of reviews pouring in about how it changed their
workflow from then on. So I figured it's finally
time to do a sequel. Welcome to Adobe Illustrator
Super Speed course. In this class, I'm
going to be going over a brand new selection of my favorite tips to maximize
your speed and work flow. We'll be going over a
ton of tip like how to temporarily hide the clutter
with a click of a button, working non destructively
with Pathfinder, how to use quick keys, to select only what you need, a new type of extremely
adjustable fonts. Why transparency
mass can be better than clipping mass,
Pen tool tricks, appearance panel tips,
using libraries to get the most assets
fast and more. This class is aimed at
intermediate to advanced users, although all skilled users will probably learn something that
they didn't know before, but we'll be skipping most of the basics in this
class for that reason. So, if you'd like
to know more about MMA graph designer
and illustrator, and I've been working
on a wide variety of design projects for the last
16 years professionally. I now specialize in logo
design and branding, as well as merchandise design. Worked with bands
like Blink m82. Brands like How Mine was Mark. I've collaborated
with great companies like New Eric to produce
my own merchandise. In recent years,
I've been really diving into the disk off world, working with brands like
thought Space Athletics to design some disk off
stamps like this one here. I'm also an original
skill share top teacher since 2015 when the
program started, I've taught over
100,000 students, and they've watched over 2.5 million minutes of my content. But enough about
me, keep watching, and let's get into
the class so we can increase your daily
workflow, MTB Illustrator.
2. Canvas Tips: Select Artboard Only, Rotate, & More: All right, so jumping
right into what we're going to start
with some Canvas tips. This is actually one of my
favorite tips because it's something that I use
consistently throughout my day. First thing I do want
to do is Adobe right now is at testing a ton of
different new features, AI and stuff, and
I hate these bars. They jump around and
they get in the way. So I'm just going to
click these three dots. Click Hide Bar and then
it's gone for now. This is one of my
favorite tips it's small. Maybe you've seen it.
Maybe you haven't. If you click view
and click Trim view, what happens is you get rid
of all of the distraction. It's removing the bleed, it's removing anything that is
not on your artboards. It's a really cool way to really quickly get a good idea
of what your artwork actually looks like
without having a mask or mess around with too many layers or
anything like that. If you've ever taken any
of my classes before, you know that I'm a big
fan of using quick keys. I don't want to have to come
up here and select this every single time
to turn it on and come up here and
select to turn it off. I'd rather be able to do it
with a click of a button. I'm holding command
and I can hit Dot. And you can see, I can just
cycle on and off really fast without having to go up
and mess around with menu. In order to do that,
I go over to edit and I change my
keyboard shortcuts. So in order to set this up, you just want to make
sure that you have your menu command selected. We're going to type
in the word trim. And then we come down here
and I'm hitting command dot. And you can see just like that, it's added, so go
ahead and click. And what I actually do is
I'll set up my Varin set. So you just click here to click Save and you give it a name. In my case, it's just
called Trim view. You can see I've
already done it. S we'll overwrite
it. That's fine. And then we'll go
ahead and click. And now, if we just
hit command period, you just see or
cycling on and off. I won't say this too many
times for the class, but if I'm saying
the word command, that's a MAC term on a PC, control is the same thing, so you would hit control period. That tip is pretty
awesome, I think. Another tip that I
think is pretty cool, I'm going to open a new
document to show you. All right. So jumping into
our new artwork here. All we need to do is go to a window and then
choose new window, and it should pop up
right here in your tab. So it'll say a one at the end and it'll say
a two at the end. So what's cool about
this is you've actually got the
same document open, but it's two separate windows. And here's how it gets a
little bit more useful. If we click and drag this out, and we go over to the right, we should be able to
see a blue line here on the right hand side,
and I'll just release. And now we've basically got the same document open in
two different instances. And then you can
click and drag this around until you get it to basically the
proportion that you want. Let's go like this.
So now I can see this is my full artwork. What's cool about this is sometimes when I'm illustrating, I need to zoom right in and whether I've got my iPad
hooked up to this or not. I can actually zoom
right in here, and I can start making
edits really close. Let's say I want to get in Zoom, and I don't have
my iPad hooked up, I'm just going to do
this with my track pad. This is going to
be a bit sloppy, but I can come in here and
I can start making changes, and I can get a full idea of
what's going on over here. That was a bit subtle.
So let's just go ahead and just paint with a
red for the moment. Big brush. I'll
just draw this in. Let's say that for some
reason I was doing this. So it automatically as soon as I let go, it shows up here. This is a nice way to
get a full version of your artwork at the very same
time as your drawing small, so you can zoom right in,
and you can see exactly what's going on in
the full picture over here at all times. The good way to
make sure they're not making any strange mistakes. Another tip that I
like here, and again, this is really great
when you're drawing is the rotate Canvas. So on my track pad I'm actually
going to use two fingers. I'm simply going to
twist and rotate. And once again,
these two options actually work pretty well
in tandem with each other. So I can zoom in here and I can get comfortable
with my wrist position, and I can make changes
in ray scene things. But once again, over
in this window, my artwork is staying square and straight and easy to view. So, again, it's just a really
awesome way to get in here, make some changes
while I'm drawing, make it so it's comfortable on my wrist that I can
rotate the canvas. And over here, I'm
getting the full picture. And at any point, I
want to just undo this rotated canvas
in this window. You just have to hit
the escape button, and it just pops back into the proper orientation of
zero degrees basically. Other thing I really like is to be able to select my artwork. So normally what someone
would do is they would go command A to
select everything, which is control A on a PC, and I'm not going to go too much into where these menu items are. I'm going to assume that intermediates know
some of these basics, but normally we go
select and all. And we'll do that a
lot in this class. Just give me a rough idea. The problem is, I don't want
to select all this artwork. I really just want to focus
on what I'm doing here. So a lot of people will come in here and they'll click
and drag and select, but maybe they'll miss
pieces or maybe they won't. But it's just a
little bit tedious. And again, if I'm
zoomed right in, let's say, I'm
zoomed in drawing. I've got this canvas rotated. Now I want to select
the whole thing. I got to zoom back
out, you know, try and figure out what
pieces are connected to what. But there's a quick key to this that a lot of
people don't know. And that is command option A. Control A, and that
will actually select everything on only the artboard
that you have selected. So you can see if
I zoom out here, none of these other
versions are touched, and I've selected everything I want right here and I
can now move it around. Again, if I'm zoomed right in, and I just want to say, Hey, let's move this whole artwork
around for some reason. Command Option A. I know that I have everything
selected on this artboard. I can move it around,
and I know that I have not edited anything
else outside of it. I find that to be super useful. All right. So jumping back into this Ecclestone business card. The next key tip that I like is using something
called actual size. If we zoom out
here like this and I simply hit command
and the number one, this zooms right in
and that allows me to know the exact size
of the business card. But there's a big
caveat to this. I find I use an external
monitor all the time. I'm using one right now. The
external monitor seems to, for one reason or another, not do this quite as well. I'm actually going
to transfer over to my internal monitor on my
MacBook Pro for 1 second. All right. So we've jumped
over to my internal monitor. It'll be interesting
to see if the colors look all different and
everything changes. But now what's cool is if
I zoom out, and again, I'm going to hit command
one, control one on a PC, I have a ruler in my hands. So what I'm going
to do is I'm going to hit my artboard here, and you can see it's 2.75
by 3.688. That's inches. If I hold my ruler up
to my screen carefully, I can see that this is
exactly 2.75 " wide. So that is really,
really useful. So now if I use my other tip that I
showed earlier where I hit command in period
or control period, you can see I'm
hiding everything, and the reason why this is so important is this is showing you exactly the size of your printed item, what
it's going to look like. This is a really good way,
especially if you don't know sort of the general rules to make sure that your
types not too small, that it's going to
be ratable and get a good idea of what's
visible, what's not visible. You know, it's
always super useful. Again, it's great
to always print something if you can
to really test it out. But this is a good
solution in the meanwhile. This allows you to
see exactly the size your printed item
will be when printed. Again, for some reason, I'm only finding that this works with my internal monitor. It doesn't seem to want to
work on external monitors. Probably a resolution setting. If anyone knows this
answer, let me know. But that's it for some canvas
tips, so let's move on.
3. Selection Tips: Save Selection, Group Select, & More: All right. So I want to talk about some selection tips
because selecting your artwork is something
that you're going to do over and over and over and
about what you're designing. I'm using an illustration just because it's a
little bit complicated, but you can, of course, use this for anything, pattern designs, logo designs, any
kind of layout, whatever you're making
a adobe illustrator, you're always selecting
and deselecting items. So the first thing
I want to talk about is the group select tool, and I'll show you what makes it useful compared to not using. So if we go over here and I
select this sort of TSA art, you can see, I've got my
whites kind of combined. I've got my golds more
or less combined here into their own little
layers, sub layers anyway. And so let's say I want to move this gold circle and I want
to move this letter A. Well, in order to do that, I would have to double
click to go in here, and now I can move this A
because I'm within this group, and then I would have
to double click in here and move around
this gold thing. And the only way to
really select the two together is if I go
in a wire frame, and I use my lasso tool. I can kind of slowly Try
and lasso these like that. Now switching over
to my normal tool, select tool, I can
move them together. You can see that's a
little bit convoluted and a bit of a pain in the butt. So using the Group select tool is actually extremely useful. So Group Selection tool right now doesn't have a Quick key. I showed you earlier how to set up a quick key, so you
can always do that. But if we go over
there and click it what's cool
about this is I can instantly just click this
Letter A, I can move it around. And if I hold shift, I can
click on this Gold circle, and just like that, I
can move it around. It does not matter that
they're in separate groups. It's just a really quick
way to select them. Another thing that's cool
about this because you could say for those
e that use it a lot, using my normal direct
selection tool, I could click in
the middle here, I could click in
the middle here, and I can kind do
the same thing. Now I can move around. So
you might be thinking that. But here's an advantage of the group selection tool again. If I come in here and let's say with my normal
selection tool, I just select in the middle. I've got everything.
But let's say I just want to make the
outside a bit bigger. In order to do that, using my direct selection tool
here, I have to click here, then I have to grab each
one of these little points, pitch over to my
selection tool and then click these I'm
holing option and shift. But this is how I drag them. So this is not so bad when
there's only four points, but of course, if
there's a ton of points, it can be a big
pain in the butt. Using your group selection tool, all you have to do is click
this outside and it is now selecting the entire
outside just like that, no matter how many points it is, and you can now click and drag, and of course, you can
do that with the inside. It doesn't really matter. So
that makes it pretty useful. So the next thing that
I think is really cool is safe selection. This is something that most
people don't seem to use, but I'll show you an example of why it's for me
extremely useful. So here I've got
these crazy sort of painted blobs coming, and what's important
about these is they actually go in and out
of the gold layer. So you can see that these blobs are actually beneath
the gold layer, and these ones are
in front of them. So I couldn't have
them all in one layer. So you can see if
I move this white. These are separate
because they're on top. So if I want to select and now, just move just
these blobs around. There's no real easy
way to do this. I could try using my
group selection tool that I just showed
you and really get in here and zoom and grab all these and then painfully, slowly select all of these blobs and say that maybe I just want to try
change to the color. And that is going to work. But the problem with this
is that in the future, if you want to do it
again, you have to do the exact same process again. We're all about efficiency here, and we want to move fast. So let me show you the
better way to do it. I'm just going to
double click to get into this white
layer for now. The first time is
going to be a pain in the butt I'm going to have
to select all these blobs, and you can use the Lasso tool, if that's a little more
fast and efficient for you, depends on what your
artwork looks like. But I could switch over
here to the Lasso tool, and quickly draw in a
whole bunch of these dots. But in general, this part's going to be a bit
slow in a pain in the butt. I can't select those because they're on a different layer. I've got all the
dots selected in this layer and it took a
minute, as you can tell. What I'm going to do is
I'm going to go to select, and then I going to
choose Save selection. And we're just going to go
ahead and call these blobs. It's really cool about this now. I'm double clicking
to get out of there. At any point, I can just go
to select and click blobs. Now all of those are
still selected again. I don't have to reselect
them painfully every time. And now, because I'm
in a different layer, I can select these pieces that were outside that I
was missing before. These guys right
here. Now I've got all of our blobs or
all the blobs I want. And now if I go over to select, I should be able to see
this update selection. I'll just click that. Now if I deselect everything
and I go to select blobs, it's going to grab all of
those dots from both layers, which is really nice
and convenient. Now I can easily just
come in here and say, Hey, let's see what
they look like green. And again, I can't
group these because as soon as I try and group
these two things together, you can see it's going to
mess up the layering, right? So it's complicated
with different layers. Now that they're all a different color than everything else. Sure, I could use something like same selection, fill color, and I could use magic
wand and so on, but when they were the same
color as everything else, it was a huge pain in the butt. But what's great is
that now at any point, I can just go to select blobs for the rest of
this files history, and I can just constantly
change, manipulate them, do whatever I want,
and I don't have to tediously click every little
single blob all over again.
4. Font Tips 1: Spellcheck, Recents, Filters: Okay. Alright, it's time to
get into some font tips. Again, fonts are something.
We're all using constantly. Let's try to figure out how
to use them the fastest way. Here's something that I actually didn't know until recently. I was working on some labels
in the marijuana industry, and they have all
of these warning labels that they need to use. And I'm in Canada, so they
have to be bilinguals. So you need the English side,
you need the French side. Personally, unfortunately I'm not that good at
speaking French. I didn't learn it
too well in school. And so this becomes
problematic for me. Now, I have spell check
turned on right now, so it's actually highlighting
under the misspelled words. So if we go to edit spelling, I have auto check
spelling turned on. Sometimes we can turn that off, so I'll just leave it
turned off from now. What I would do is I
would automatically check my spelling and I would do
that by hitting command, and then I'll hit Start. You can see it's going to tell me that all of these words are spelled incorrectly.
There's a reason for that. It's because it thinks
that these are English, and it's saying, Hey, these
are not English words. Therefore, they must be spelled incorrectly, their mistakes. You can see the spell
check ends there and it doesn't see any
spelling errors over here. Why is that? It's because I
learned about a little trick. Let me show you. I'm going to
open up my character panel. I'm just hitting command T, control T on a PC. I don't like selecting
these things in the back. I'm just going to lock this
by hitting command two. Now my charcoal
backgrounds locked. So what I have to do here
is using my type tool. I'm just going to select all of my French texts like that. I'm going to come over here
and where it says English UK. I'm just going to select that, and I'm going to do down
to French Canadian. Alright, so I just
quickly undock this because it wasn't being cool
with my second monitor, and it was this pop up was showing up on
the Lower monitor. Anyways, so with
my text selected, all I have to do is go
over here and click French Canadian and s with this little
area here anywhere, then I have a
different language. And of course, it can be
any of these language, as you can see, have a
pretty fast keyboard here. And the great thing about
this is that from now on, if I hit my spell check, you'll see that there are
no spelling mistakes. Now, more importantly,
this is very important. If you don't know how
to spell in French, like me, let's just say I
take the eye out of there. So had I have retyped this from something
that someone gave me, I'd be like, looks good to me because I don't speak French, but now this thing is actually going to be able to identify spelling mistakes in French because it knows it's
supposed to be French. And that's how we make sure that our spelling is
perfect and correct. This is super useful to me. Maybe is a bit a niche tip. I don't know if you're going to be using bilingual things, but knowing to be able to change your spelling is super useful. The same thing goes with using English UK versus English USA. Sometimes there's
different spellings, so it's nice to be able to get the exact spelling
that you need. All right. So my next font tip is recent fonts, as you can see. So a lot of times when
I'm doing loader design, what I'll do is I'll type
out whatever the word is, whatever the logo
is going to be, and I'll grab, I'll shuffle
through my fonts over here. And I'll try and find you know I can highlight and go over
here, some of these fonts are. Not going to be nice
to me, but over here, and I'll try and pick
some fonts I like. So let's just say, I come down here and I go this Aalto
Apache fonts cool. So then I'll click and drag, and then I want to pick up
right where I left off, but now it's dropped I'm all the way at the
top of the list. Now I got to go
all the way down. Try and find out where
I was or maybe type it, and then try and pick up
where I was. Drives me nuts. And, personally, I
don't need this, like, quick little list of
my most recent fonts. I don't really care if
I could just select it. As soon as I select
it, you can see if I go here again, now
it's all the way up here. So now I got to go all the way down, try and find yellowtail. I find this annoying. So
here's the work around. We go up here to Illustrator. We're going to go to
settings and hit type. From here, you'll see the
number of recent fonts, your number might be
different than mine. I have set to five.
I'm going to actually put this to zero,
and then click. So what's cool here
is that before we had that top of that list that gave you all
the recent fonts. But since that's gone,
now I like this. Let's just make a
copy over here. I'm holding an option, by the
way, when I drag over here. And I can pick up exactly
where I left off. You can see all the other
patches right there. I can just go down here. Let's pick something in the
ss Cooper for some reason. And then you can see it picks
up exactly where that is. Now I can actually really
easily continue on, and you can do this
with your arrow tools if you select here. So again, I can say, Hey, I really like this font. Make a copy and come over here, and I can just pick up
and keep going down, or I can do it much faster by actually looking and you
can see the samples here. And if you didn't
know, you can change the size of your sample
text right here. So you can see it really
big really quickly. You can say, I like this font. I don't, but let's say I did. And you can just keep going. So personally, I like
to have my recent fonts set to zero for this purpose. Also, here's a quick
little throwaway tip. If you have these fonts
selected at any point, you can just change
the caps. Small caps. You use large caps strike
through underline. You probably knew
those were there, but just in case he didn't. Okay, so along the same lines, again, when I'm using
Luggage design, sometimes I want to be able
to find a specific font, and I want to be able
to find it fast. Go to undock this and
bring this up here again. So selecting here,
let's just say, Hey, I want to use
a Sansera font. We actually come
up here and click this little button
beside the filters. I can now say, hover over here, see San Saraf without SRF. I can select that, and now this is only going to
show me Sand Serra font. It's going to filter
out everything else. It's a way faster way
for me to cycle through. And of course, there's tons of options, and if you
hover over them, it'll tell you which
ones, and you can select a classification
and a property. Let's say, for example, you do want SAF, and then
you want them to be bold. You can actually
check that or if you want it extended
with and so on, you can pick a lot of
different options and then figure out whether
those are going to be there. Or you just click Clear all, and you can see
they're all back. Idea with favorites. That
one's pretty obvious, but it'll show your
favorite fonts. So at any point,
you do decide, Hey, this is my new favorite font,
you just come over here, add to favorites, and
then from then on, you'll be able to select this. This works really good with. You've gotten rid of recent
fonts because maybe you have some fonts
that you do want to refer to really quickly. So just make them your favorite. Continuing with these filters, you can see really quickly here, recently added fonts that can be useful or recently activated
fonts using Adobe Cloud. So you can have multiple selected, so just
keep in mind, see, you've got all
those selected, and then you can deselect
and select them. The sticking in this
menu, you'll see up here, you can actually
choose Find More now. These are in the newer
versions of Dobe Illustrator, so you have to make sure that
you're pretty up to date. But you can see that now you
don't actually have to go to fonts.adobe.com
or whatever it is. You don't have to open
the Creative Cloud thing to try and find new fonts. You can actually find
more right in here. And again, importantly, you
can filter those fonts. So it'll show you fonts that you can download
straight off of the Adobe Creative Cloud
in the exact style you want. Again, great for any design, not just log design, any design. Find more, really awesome. And I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Generally speaking, you
can use these in logos. Okay. Remember 2 seconds ago
when I said it's annoying to have to open up this
fonts.adobe.com website? Well, I just did
it. And here's why. Now, if you're using fonts, whether it's Dobe, Google Fonts, any of those kind of providers, you can now type in
something called variable. And a number of these fonts are now something
called variable. So this Sher born,
for example, here. And what's cool about this,
of course, is you can add it. So normally there'd
be a button here. You just click Add, hop
back in Illustrator, and we'll be able
to find that font. And here it is here. Now,
what is a variable font? You may wonder, It's a
font that allows you to make a lot more customizations
than a standard font. The standard fonts, you'll
be able to select here, and then you can simply click the subheading and you can pick whatever
options they give you. Let's say they give you bold. Cool. But then if you say, Well, I want a little less bold? Well, F one, you're going to find that they're
going to give you a lot more options here than
a lot of fonts give you. So you can find a medium. You can find a semi bold. But maybe you want to go a little crazier one
way or the other. Well, with a variable font, you're going to see this
little icon over here. If we select that, We can actually change
the weight manually, and you can go very small
increments you can see. And this thing is so cool. So you can actually go so thin or so heavy and literally
anywhere in between. You no longer need to try
and customize the font. You can literally
pick any little spec along the spectrum. A lot of times there'll be
a second little bar here. This is allowing you to
mess with the optical size. Of course, if you select
only one part of your font, you can do the same and you're only changing what
you've selected as well. That's pretty cool. This
works for a variety of fonts. Now, I have noticed that if
you click a different fonts, this one's still Serborn, Let's use this one as a scale, and we click this again. You see the options are
actually different. This is width and weight,
and this one over here, was weight and optical size. Sometimes the options of
what you can change will actually be different depending
on the font you're using. You can see with
this font, I can select the width
versus the weight. The width is quite
obviously the width. How actually wide it is, and the weight is
actually the font weight. That's bold or thin or
anything in between. These variable fonts
are really cool. This is really going to change
the game for I don't know. I always focus on logo design, but this is useful for a logo design because this
is something that you would have to go in
and really manually kind of dial in to get
the weight that you want, maybe the right width,
and things like that. And doing this with
a traditional font can be really time consuming
and pain in the butt. T variable fonts are going
to be really useful.
5. Font Tips 2: Find & Replace, Area Type: All right. So my next
tip that I really like is something called
Find and Replace. I use this a lot in
a specific instance. I'll show you in just a second. But let's say you
have some words that are all throughout
your document. It could just be someone's name, a business name,
any specific word. Maybe you had a spelling mistake that you consistently
spelled wrong, and you don't want
to use spell check, whatever it is, you can really
quickly change them all. If we just go to edit and
then find and replace, we can simply type in exactly what we're
trying to change. So, in this case,
super cool bikes, and we can replace it
with not so cool. Okay. So we're going to click Find. And then I'm just going
to click Replace All. You can see all of that text and tells you how
many were changed, 24 of them, and it was
all changed instantly. So I don't need to go in and manually edit each one of these, fine replaces super useful. And here's where I use it a lot. So this is an older logo
design presentation. And so what I would
do is I would have say the business
name or you know, association in this case, Shop loco Shop the bridge. And you can see I
have it as my title, and I actually have
it as a small print on every single page. And I also put the date
in the corner. See that. So every little page shop
local shop the bridge. Now, if I want to come
in here and I want to use this again for
the next client, I'll just come in
here and I'll type shop Local, Shop the bridge. And then I'm just going
to replace it with amazing plumbers because let's pretend that's the next client. Same thing, fine.
You can replace each one and you can
actually skip them. I'm just going to replace all. It's going to tell you 34
changes that were made. And just like that,
it's going to have changed those
on every page. Same thing with the
date. That's when I did it September 23. So let's say 0923, and maybe you're
making a new one. Let's go in the future, okay? Let's say it's 1025, right? And you're going to
find, replace all. And just like that, the
date and the client name is replaced on every single one of these pages in every
instance of it. That's why I find it
replace super useful. Okay. Another thing
you may not play that with that
much is area type. So there's two different
types of type basically. There's area type and
there's point type. So area type is when you
click in drag a box, and then that's your type. That's an area of type. And point is when
you just click, you're not dragging,
and there's a point. So the biggest
difference here will be let's type a bunch of words. You can see it'll just
go and go and go and go. But up here if we go, let's
type a bunch of words. You see it's actually, you know, fitting it into the
space that I need. And that's aatype. The other
great thing about that is you can actually convert from one to the other at any point. So maybe this is getting
annoying and you start typing this out and you
realize, hey, I'm over my head. Having to manually make separate lines and
things like that. Do you can actually just go
to type convert to area type, and now you have a box that
you can click and drag. And so that's a nice clean,
easy way, and of course, you can actually go backwards, go to type, convert
to point type, and now you can manually put these back on separate
lines, just like, so, speaking of area type, I actually have some in here, and this is just Laura
My some that fills in. But if we go to type and we
click area type options, we actually have a
lot of options here. What I've done here is
I've made two columns. That means that this text is smoothly running right
into the next column. I find that to be pretty useful, and you can play around with
all thes different tips. I'm not going to go in each one. What's cool about
that is if you made two manual ones and you want to try and change some of the type, this is actually going to
automatically put it over to here. So however you're typing. Anyway, so these are literally
connected as two columns. Really useful when you're doing any kind of layout design. Another thing you can do is actually use your
overflow types. So let's just delete
this for a second. So you can see right down here there's a little red plus sign, and that's to tell me, Hey, I have more text that's
not showing in this box. See, that's all this text. Now, what I can actually
do is just click. I'm holding all, and
I'm dragging over here. And let's say because
in the area type, I can't put two columns randomly throughout a
layout. In this case, I can. I can change them. They can be totally different. I can
have this over here. And so what I could do here
is just select it all. I'm deleting it. I've
got that box there. And now if I come over here
with my selection tool. Once I click it, I'm getting this kind of this
weird symbol here. I'd like to zoom
in, but it's dots with a little brick pattern. And then I just want
to find my other box. And if I click there,
now these are linked, and it's actually going to put all of this type over here. Same thing, I get to draw
another little type over there. Just delete all that. And
then I can select this. I'm ti selecting
it's a bit finicky. You got to be careful
and just like that.
6. Masking Tricks: Clipping Vs Transparency: Alright, so let's get
in some masking tips. So I used to have this cool work around that I really liked that would allow me
to use editable type. You see this Zoom
type is editable. I can change it to
whatever I want. And what was cool about it is you couldn't you used
to not be able to mass a traditional clipping
mask with editable type onto a photo or illustration or whatever
texture background, whatever you have that
you want to mass. You used to not be able
to do that. You'd have to s had this work around in
the transparency panel, and I thought it was all clever. But Adobe finally said enough is enough,
and they fixed it. See I've got this editable type selected and it's on
top of this photo. Now, selecting that
photo and that type, I can just hit command seven, and it is actually editable type that is
directly over that photo. So you can see just like
that. That's something that they've actually changed. Super easy feature to use. You don't have to mess around with the
transparency panel. Unless you want to get a
little more complicated. Let's just say we want
to make this type red. Well, have it
selected. Click red. I don't know, what's
it doing? You can see it's weirdly edged under, but it's got this photo on top, and it's not right. So let's just get rid of that. If we undo the mask, now
we can come in here. You still can't
really make this red because whatever
color you make this, it doesn't matter because
you're masking it, so you're just right
back to where you were. So what you could arguably
do is now we could draw, say a red box here. Right? And then I could change the opacity mask
to multiply maybe. And then I need to command X to delete it. Now I
want to select this. Command F to paste in place
over top of that photo. Now I got to go to wire frame, select all of these things. Command seven. Okay, now
I've got a mask kind of. But then if I want to
change that color, I'm using my direct
selection tool. It's not actually because
this texts editable. So it's not really easy to, in order to change
that color now, I got to unmask it all, then I got to, you
know, change the color. I wire frame. It's a little slow, right? It works. Se. But we like
to do things faster. So that's where the transparency panel can be useful still. All right. So here's a
different type of mass. Instead of using the clippy mass like we were doing before, this will allow us
to make some changes like color a lot
faster and easier. And this is the old method
that I used to use, but it's better
for this specific instance of changing colors. Basically getting a dual ton which I'll talk more
about in a moment. So I've got my type
here editi and I've got my image down here. So what we want to
do is basically use one to transparent
mask the other. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to take this image, and I'm going to hit command x, which is basically cutting it. So cutting it means
you're copying it, but you're also deleting
it at the same time. I'm going to select
the Zoom text, and I'm just going to go
over here and click Ma Mask. And now this part is
really important. You can see my types
disappear and it's confusing. Over here on this little panel, you want to be able to
select this right panel. There's a little blue outline. This might be hard to
see on your screen. I'm going to come
over here and I got to click this panel. And now I'm in this mask, in this transparency mask. And now I'm going to
command F. So I'm pasting the image of
the dogs exactly there. Now, this is going to
look a little weird. There's clip, there's
not clip, there's invert mask and non invert. So you can leave this on for a moment, and then
we're going to come back. So to get out of this, you
might try clicking places, and you can't do
anything anymore. This is really confusing,
especially for people that aren't
experienced with this. So the only way to get out of
this weird thing is to come back over to this panel and click that. And
now we're back. I can make edits, I can move things around and change things. Now what's really cool is if
I take this editable type, it's still totally edit see. But if I change the color of it, you can see it's
changing the color of the image underneath it. And this is where invert
looks pretty crazy and weird. So let's turn off that invert. And now you can see we're gazing basically the same
result as we had before, but remember we had
to do all those different steps to
change the color. Now with this version of it, this is editable, and the color
is actually kind of live. So I can actually just
change the color to anything I want and instantly see the results. There's
no confusion. It's super fast and simple. And the other thing
that's really cool about this is the color, the secondary color here is actually cut out
of these letters. So it's showing whatever's
in the background. So what I mean by that is, let's change this charcoal
color to a green. You can see that it's instantly changing the color of the type, because basically
anything that was black was actually
cut out of this type. So it's a really nice, clean, easy way to kind of
make some changes and make sure that your
art is looking cool, and that it's really
fast to edit, which is a big reason
why I like to use transparency maps when they
make sense, of course. Just to really drive
home this point because this is going
to be pretty ugly. But if we come in here,
let's do this thing again, we undo this and we select
this and make it red, and come back here, redos, we grab that, undo that. Okay. We got kind
of the same thing, but not really, because this is still using that full image. This is actually cutting
that image out of the type. So the big difference here is
if I change my backgrounds, let's just do
something like green. You can see again here,
this is cutting it out, so you're seeing the green up
here. It's not doing that. It has no interaction with
the background color. So maybe you want
that, maybe you don't. But no matter what, the black and the dog is going
to stay black. So let me turn my smart reds. Se. See the dogs
black no matter what. And down here with the
transparency panel, the dogs will change to whatever color your
background is. So that's pretty bad ***. I like using the
transparency panel. So here I have one more example. I'm also using the transparency mass for the exact same reason. And this is basically
creating a duotone. So you've only got two
colors more or less. You've got the green
and you've got the gray that's actually
behind the image. So it doesn't really matter what color your image
was originally. But if I double click in here, you can see I'm
selecting my image now. And what's cool about
this is you can actually put effects
onto the image. So in my appearance panel, you can see that I've
added that grain. So I can actually hide that grain or just turn
it off completely. And again, it's just
a super easy way, but you got to make sure I see now I've changed
around this. You got to make sure you open
your transparency panel, and you click back over
here to get out of it, you'd be stuck in transparency
mask prison forever. But again, this is just
a nice way to make sure that you're interacting your back with your foregrounds, which is essentially
what a duotone is. It's two color image, really easy to edit,
really easy to mess with, and just see what
looks cool and have an interaction from
foreground to background. Way different than
a clipping mask. I'm sure a decent amount of you never
knew the difference.
7. The Class Project: All right. So at this point,
you might be wondering, what's the class
project for this class? This one is really
straightforward. All I want you to do head
over to the class project and let me know what your top three tips from this class were. What are the most interesting
ones ideally in order that you'll actually be able to use in your workflow going forward? You can even let me know, Hey, I thought this tip
was a bit duller. You know, everybody knows that, which hopefully is not the case. But I'd love to know
your top three tips, and On step further, if you want to, it'd be cool to see how you can apply at least one tip from this class into a project that you are creating or
have already created. Maybe it'll change
something that you already built that you
can now make easier. I'd love to know basically
what you learned from this class and what you
thought was the most valuable. I think that'll be a
pretty easy class project, but sometimes those
are the best ones, so I'd love to see what
you guys come up with. And let's keep going
with the class.
8. Shape Tips: Non-Destructive Pathfinder: Alright, let's get
into some shape stuff. If you're using adobe
illustrator, you're using shapes. You're making shapes,
whatever it is you're doing. There's shapes
happening. I can tell. So let's talk about
editing shapes, easy ways to make some changes. And of course, things that
you can do with the Pen tool. I have taught an entire
class on the Pen Tool, so you can check that
on in my profile. I'm not even sure
I kind of doubt I talked about this part,
so let's look at this. What I like to do is, I have two very
different styles. When I'm illustrating something, I'm drawing something
like I showed earlier, I don't mind it looking
really imperfect. I tend to draw on pro
grade, and I bring it in. It looks hand drawn.
I like that look. But then when I'm making logos, sometimes I go with that style, but a lot of times
I like the logos to actually be really clean, precise and the points
to be just really tidy. So a lot of times
I'll come back in, especially once we're
getting to the a. Once the clients fully
approved everything we're all good to go and I'm
just setting up the files. I'll try and make the
files as clean as possible and as few
points as possible. You can see this outer
shape here, for example, it's only four points. I
like that kind of thing. I want it to be as
clean as possible. Now, this guy he's got
some extra points. You can see you're
seeing a lot of these corner rounding
widget things, which make it look a
little bit sloppier. It's pretty good. There's
not too many excess points, but there's a couple that we
could get rid of for sure. So, generally, what
you would do is, if you've got your
pen tool selected, you would come in here
and say, Hey, okay, we don't need this point,
so you can just click it, and you'd get rid of it, right? That's okay, not so bad. But one thing that can
be pretty annoying. Let's just add a bunch. So
one thing that can be pretty annoying is coming in here
and then having a manually. Get rid of points.
It's kind of annoying. Little I missed, you know. So what you can actually do
is we go in a wire frame and I select all of those
points at once, just like that. I can come up here and just
click Remove anchor points, and then they're all
gone just at once. That's a faster way
to remove them. That's pretty cool. But
another thing that I really like is let's just say I come
up here with my pen tool. Let's say, Okay, I don't need
this point. It's excessive. Of course, I can't
just select it with my direct section tool and hit delete because it
cuts it basically. Now I've got a direct straight line from these two points. That's no good. That's ugly. Now, I could use my pen tool, and I could do what
I was doing before, but you can see it's
actually changing the shape. Well, that's not good either. So what we could do to make life a little easier,
because you could do this. You could do this and then
drag these out, right, try and get these things looking real clean with your
direct selection tool, your pen tool, trying
to get that shape back. But another little tip that you can do that you
can really give it a shot is if we actually go
to our pen tool up here, and we go to delete
Anchor Point tool, which is when you have
your pen tool selected, you just have to hit
minus on your keyboard. Again, if you deleted
this, same thing, you wouldn't know
the difference, but here's a little hot tip. If you hold the shift button, while using only this minus one, you have to use the minus
one, not the main pol. Holding shift, if I delete this, illustrator is going to
do its best to remove it, but keep the shape the same. You can see how well
it worked there. It doesn't always work as well. If we come over here and try
and get rid of this one, for example, you
can see the shape did actually change
a little bit. You're going to have
to finest it a little more with these lines
like I was talking about. But that's the goal
is to try and get rid of as many
points as possible. And I find using this
delete Anchor Point tool. That was a game changer. Again, let's see that
again, slow motion replay. We got the minus tool, the minus Pen tool,
delete anchor point. Holding shift.
What? It's perfect. We got rid of a useless point. That's a huge win in my books. There's still some more cleaning up that needs to be done there. Let's move on. I think this
tip is pretty game changing. I use the pathfinder ton. I still use it quite a bit more than the shape builder tool. Maybe it's an old school thing, but certain things, I just
like the way it works better. But I do want my artwork
to be non destructive, and there's some sort
of hidden features in the pathfinder that you may not have known
that can actually make your art less destructive. So here's how I used to do it. Go over here, let's say I've
drawn this little triangle. All I did was with
my smart guides on. I just grab my penable here, and I click the anger point, click this anger point, so on, and then let's just make it a color so you can
tell the difference. And then let's say I want to
cut this out of here, right? So I go over here. There's a
few different ways to do it. You could try messing with crop, but that's going
to do the reverse. You could try minus front, and there you go,
that would work. You could also divide it, and ungroup them
and deselect this. But you can see here, this shape is now finalized. That's that. I'm not getting that piece
back unless I kind of come in here and edit
this or delete it, which in this instance,
not that hard. But it's a permanent
decision that we've made. I can't really
easily change lines. But if I wanted this
to be a bit bigger, I'd have to, you know, really mess with everything. It's pain. Now, over here, I've got
something pretty cool going on. You can see here this is
moving around, right? This may look like
I have a gray shape on a blue shape, but I don't. Let me unlock my back here and
turn it red. You see that. It's changing to the
color of my background, because as far as
illustrator knows, this is the shape now. It's one big blue shape, but that's because
it's editable shape. So what I've actually done
here is if we go back now, and back to basically the same
thing I had before, right? So I just showed you how we could cut it out and
make it permanent, you can see that in wire frame
that there's no line here. But what we could
do here, instead, normally you would
come up here and click minus fra as I just showed you, and then that would be
a permanent change. But did you know that if
you hold the option button, again, that's on your PC, and we click that same button. It looks like it's permanent, but if we look here in
wireframe, it's actually not. So now one of the cool
things that's really great about this is if we use
our direct selection tool, we can actually grab that piece that was cut out of the blue. And now I can actually change
the size of the piece. That's I was saying earlier,
I can actually make it bigger and take
more away from it. But again, as far as the illustrator sees,
this is all cut out. So this is live. It's
non destructive. I can just change
it at any point. All right. So let's
move on here. So I like to kind of keep my art as non destructive as
possible, of course. So here I, you know,
we can change this. It's live edit font. And of course, the background. I don't have a stroke on it, so if we put this under
here, you can see here. There's no stroke
here. See that. The stroke is just
the background. So it's actually knocked out. I'll show you how I do that. It's a little bit different than what
you might be used to. One thing I still find
a little bit annoying, hopefully, something that
illustrated changes, is you kind of have to delete
everything here and then start over by adding a new fill and stroke in the
appearance panel. But some of you may be familiar with the
idea of doing this, and then so you could actually add a stroke, make it gray. I dragged it underneath. Actually here, let's make it yellow just so you can see it, do this, and then over here, you can duplicate it. Come down here, we'll select the next one, make it red again. Blow that up. So you see you're kind of getting
the same thing, right? And then here,
we'll make it match the background
color. But it's not. Okay, so whatever, right? But then if you change
the background color, so maybe you want it
to be knocked out. Let me show you another
way to do this. Now, we can actually use some effects inside of
the appearance panel. So if we go over here to effect, we can go to something
called path offset path. And here we can actually offset the path by a certain amount. So it's basically making
a bigger version of it. Mitre versus rounded corners. You see the rounded
corners there? And then you can play
with the mitor limit. Usually you wanted
something pretty low. We'll go ahead and
we'll click there. And you can see that that is actually affected
onto this fill here. What's nice about this is
you can actually hide it. You can hide the offset, and at any point, you
can go back and edit it. But what's also cool is if
let's say we delete that, we're going to go
over a stroke here. We're going to add a red stroke. Bump it up a bit. And now we can just do the exact
same effect on a stroke. We'll offset that, and we're getting kind
of the same thing. So we use the same settings. Ahead of something like that. But you can see there's
a problem here. Se these weird intersections. You know that looks funny. And that's because
my curnin, right? So if I blow my curnin up,
it's not such a big deal. If I have my curne,
all tight like this. They're overlapping.
That looks ugly. Well, this is where
another trick where you can use the path finder
people don't realize. So in my appearance panel, if I just click
add on the stroke, it's now going to add and
combine those together. And now, again, see how that's actually
knocked out of that group. It's a pretty cool way of using the pathfinder again
in the appearance panel. Again, everything's
super editable. If at any point you decide
what's great about using the offset path in the appearance panel
versus if you went up here and went object path, offset path normally, then
this is permanent that's done. That's the setting
that you're at. Whereas over here,
you can now just increase this as much as
you want at any point. It's completely editable, and of course, you
can decrease it. You can change
whether it's added or subtracted or different
things with the path finder, all completely
editable at any point. Here's another weird one, another example of
the appearance panel. Which, by the way, I
know I say this a lot, but I've taught an
entire class about the appearance fail
if you want to see some other weird tips. Okay, if we have
this selected here, we want to draw box. Normally, what you would
do is you draw box. I mean here, we'll
make it red round it. Put it beneath. We'll try
and center this to this. That looks pretty good,
but we've got a problem. Now the box is much
too big, right? If we come in here and we
have our fill set to red, our fill set to white,
let's just duplicate it. We're going to make a
red fill right here. You can't see it because
it's directly behind this. Now if we go here to effect, and this is a pretty weird
effect, convert to shape. In a lot of ways, it
seems like a weird, pointless thing to do, but you
can do it, so let's do it. We've clicked a
rounded rectangle. So what it's doing it is
converting that type that said, click me into a rounded
rectangle for some reason. I don't know why you
can do this, but here's why I guess.
This is pretty cool. So you can change
your corner radius, you can change the width. You can change the height,
and change whatever you want. And of course, it's in
the appearance panel, so we can change the
color at any point. And this is all very editable. So now we say oops, it goes exactly to the
size that I have here.
9. Library Assets: Social Media, Logos, & More: All right, so for any of you definitely higher level users
that use illustrator a lot, you probably know about
libraries already. Even some of you that aren't as experienced would probably
kind of mess around with it, but libraries are
actually really useful, and there's something
that I use all the time. In my original speed class that I taught in
Adobe Illustrator, I showed a way to kind
of sneak some logos that use all the time into
your symbols panel so that you could easily pull
them out and kind of reuse logos all the time without having to
open an old file. But now that they've
added libraries, that makes life a lot easier. So I can actually just
go into my libraries. I can click whichever company
that I'm working with, and I know the pantone
colors are right there. I can put font styles. You can basically drag just
about anything into here. So I've got different
versions of logos, illustrations, any kind of assets that I'm
using all the time. Are all right here, and
there's really easy to access. Is great for any
clients that you're doing work with a lot. It is great for any
personal projects. You can just have everything
super accessible. You don't have to
open a secondary file and copy and paste and
move things around. Libraries are just
crazy, useful. One of my favorite
things about libraries, and again, I have to do
production design sometimes. So one of the things I do
a lot is these town signs. So in the town that I'm in, I have these signs
that I have to do. I'll just pull one up here.
So here's an example of one, these are one of
these town signs that get put up all over town. They have all these
different icons. These like, do not do
this or do do this, and telling you what
you can and can't do. But I've done this for
years for this town. So what can drive me insane is, I deal with a lot of different clients and a
lot of different work. And so for a long time before
I was using libraries, they'd say, Hey, look, I want this fireworks
thing or whatever. They go, I I want
the fireworks icon. And then sometimes I have
this noun project thing that I pay for. So I
would come in here. I'd type fireworks,
and I'd find, you know, a cool icon
that made sense. I'd put on here and
put the no through it. And then they go,
No, that doesn't match what we've done before. And then I'd go, it's got
to match what we did. So then I'd have to go
through, you know, like, 50 files over ten years and
try and find the sign that had that exact icon
that I wanted so I could copy and paste
it. It was crazy. It was time consuming.
It drove me insane. But with libraries, I can
just come in here now, and I can just type in
fireworks, and there, just like that, I've got the
icon, I can bring it in, I can size it as needed,
and it's linked to here. So what's cool about
the linking is that I can actually come
in here, eventually. I can update this, and it'll update it anytime
I open the file. So it'll all be consistent. This is the most
consistent way that I've found to make sure that these are always
going to be the same, and I can just pop
them in and out. And yeah, this kind of thing
makes life a lot easier. Another thing I love libraries
for is I'm doing lots of business cards and whatever
vehicle graphics and things, and people always want
social media icons. So now I've got Facebook, I've got the newer
version of it. I've got Instagram. You know, there's a new
version of Facebook, you know, TikTok,
Twitter, X, whatever. I've got all of these icons
that I'm using all the time. And so they say, Hey, I
just want the colored one. Boom, I can just pop that in. Maybe they want one color,
I can bring that in. I can embed it. For some reason, it does put this mask around
it, which can be annoying, but I can get rid of
these masks like that. And then I can just change the color or whatever
they tell me. And it saves me again. I
don't have to open files. Libraries are super useful. And then the other
pretty cool thing, I actually don't use
this all that often. But you can actually invite to let other people
into your library, so you can actually
share it that way. So that's pretty
useful. If you click these little
hamburger icon here. Creating your library,
you can import a library that someone
else sent you. You can export this library,
like I said, get it. Invite people get Link. There's lots of different things that you can actually do. So this is pretty cool. You can set this up
and then share it with a friend so that you guys
are saving each other time. So yeah, pretty useful. I would recommend that you use libraries for anything that you find yourself
constantly needing and constantly opening other
files or dragging in. Locus is a big one, like
I said, social media. All these examples have
shown colors are useful. You can do color palettes, though you could have
them in swatches. But whatever you
want to do, is just link it all into the libraries, and you can actually access
them from other devices. Think they work with
your iPad versions. It's pretty useful. Check
out libraries more often.
10. What Now?: All right. Thank you so
much for taking the class. I really, I hope you
guys enjoyed it. I hope you learned something, whatever your skill level is. I know I move fast
at some points, and then maybe
there's the tip that you already knew and so
that I can get boring, but it's hard to narrow in an exact niche of
the type people. So I'm trying to give a little bit of
something for everybody, but focus more on the advanced
and intermediate users. So if you did enjoy it, definitely please leave review. It really helps the
class trend hire, show people that
it's worth watching. And by doing that, it gives me some more money
so that I can make more classes and put
out more content for you. So it's really huge. Please do leave a review
and definitely head over to my Skillshare
profile and click follow. Somewhere in this class, you'll be able to find my profile, and you come over to this page, and there'll be a
button somewhere around here where you
can click follow. You can also go to
skillshare.com slash R slash Crusoe Design Co,
spell just like that. S R U SOE Design Co. You don't need
the period at the end. Of course, you can also
follow me on Instagram. I'm at Crusoe Design Co. I'm on most social media
like that, and importantly, I'm also on YouTube, but I haven't been putting
out a ton of content, but it's something
I plan to do more. Same with Reels on Instagram. And of course, it's free, and there's lots of
tutorials on there. So I'm going to try and do more. I really hope you guys
follow me, check it out, interact with me because
I need some motivation. If you did enjoy this class, I hope you check out
some more of my classes. Most of my classes are
on Adobe Illustrator, but I've taught on a few
other things like pro create, in design, photoshop,
things of that nature. But if you didn't
enjoy this class, I obviously you think
you should recommend. I obviously think
you should check out my Adobe Illustrator
speed course. That's the original class. It's got a whole bunch
of different tips that are still super useful, and I think it's
worth checking out. Along the same lines, and I may actually do a sequel
to this class as well, is my time saving actions
in Adobe Illustrator class. Actions can be so useful. I still use them constantly. In fact, I use, I
think, probably, like, 99% of the actions that
I used in that class. I still use to stay,
and it's probably been like eight years since
I put out that class. So that's definitely
worth checking out. I'd be surprised
if you don't find some useful content in there. And I'm pretty sure I've seen
some people copy some ideas that I've had in there and now use for their own tutorials. But that's okay. That's how it works in the Tutorial business. From there, you may want to
check out the pen tool class, if you're not
familiar with things like that, Mine illustration. Probably most of these classes, again, building
better vector shapes. That one's aimed a little
bit more at beginners. But there's a ton of
different classes. If you scroll through, hopefully you'll see some more that
you're interested in. I'd love for you to check
them out and definitely make sure if you come down here that you go to the Seymore button, and even more classes will pop up and see if there's
any that interests you. So that's it. I hope you
guys enjoyed the class. Again, I know I said
that the first time, but I really do hope
you did enjoy it. And hopefully I'll see you
again soon for the next one. Do click Follow and
you'll know when I put it out or follow me
on social media, and more likely both
would be really cool. All right, guys, I
hope you enjoyed it. I'll talk to you later.
Jon Brommet, Crusoe Design Co.
