5 Illustrator Tips week 5
When it comes to Illustrator there are millions of things that are useful for. It is my preferred program to use for just about everything because it is a lot more fluid for me. Five tips that people might not know would be.
The Pathfinder tool
I use this the most when creating icons or complex shapes. You can make several components of an icon and merge them all together at the end to make one finished product. Or, if you need to, you can whittle away portions of the object without having to manipulate individual anchor points.
The Blend tool
The blend tool is usually used to create color fill blends with shapes, but I like to use it to quickly duplicate several objects at once. Below, you can see how I used it to create a custom scoreboard font by duplicating one dot into a grid of dots.
The Warp Effect tool
The warp tool is a quick and dirty way to modify an object’s appearance without having to draw the object yourself. It’s frequently used in logo projects, and usually paired with other effects (like the free transform tool or scale/skew).
The Live Trace tool
I haven’t used this one as much as I used to, but when it is used it can add a really nice effect to design. It’s also a great shortcut for when you need to do things like recreating a client’s raster logo into a vector file without having to individually recreate every single path by hand.
It isn’t perfect though, as it almost always requires some kind of manual adjusting, and is usually the best when paired with other effects.
Option Alt key Duplication Shortcut
Keyboard shortcuts are crucial for efficiency, and this is one I use so frequently that I don’t consciously realize I am using it anymore.
So instead of constantly having to go to the toolbar to select copy and paste, simply hold down the Option (or Alt) key while the object is selected and drag the duplicate onto your artboard. Bonus: If you hold Shift as well, the object will stay vertically or horizontally aligned to the original.
The Pathfinder tool
I use this the most when creating icons or complex shapes. You can make several components of an icon and merge them all together at the end to make one finished product. Or, if you need to, you can whittle away portions of the object without having to manipulate individual anchor points.
The Blend tool
The blend tool is usually used to create color fill blends with shapes, but I like to use it to quickly duplicate several objects at once. Below, you can see how I used it to create a custom scoreboard font by duplicating one dot into a grid of dots.
The Warp Effect tool
The warp tool is a quick and dirty way to modify an object’s appearance without having to draw the object yourself. It’s frequently used in logo projects, and usually paired with other effects (like the free transform tool or scale/skew).
The Live Trace tool
I haven’t used this one as much as I used to, but when it is used it can add a really nice effect to design. It’s also a great shortcut for when you need to do things like recreating a client’s raster logo into a vector file without having to individually recreate every single path by hand.
It isn’t perfect though, as it almost always requires some kind of manual adjusting, and is usually the best when paired with other effects.
So instead of constantly having to go to the toolbar to select copy and paste, simply hold down the Option (or Alt) key while the object is selected and drag the duplicate onto your artboard. Bonus: If you hold Shift as well, the object will stay vertically or horizontally aligned to the original.
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