Mike's Blog

It is best to choose RGB or CMYK at the very beginning of creating a document.  You can switch during your project, but artifacts can show up and there may be problems.  For example, with color swatches you create, they may still be applied in the other color space rather than the one you’ve switched the document to midstream.

Web or video -> No reason to go any higher than 72 ppi for Raster Effects.
Print (CMYK) -> 300 ppi is a good amount for Raster Effects
Raster Effects -> drop shadow, gaussian blur, glow, other effects will get rasterized (displayed via pixels instead of vectors)
Artboard, Type, or Transparency:

With Type you can enable “Highlight Substituted Fonts” and it will highlight any fonts that are not installed on your PC that are used in the file.

Transparency -> Print world – Make sure you have high resolution for the preset.  For web, medium is okay.

Hit TAB key and all panels get hidden.  Shift+TAB hides all except for main panel.

Shift+click to get different options on control panel.  (Context sensitive bar at the top)

Double click on hand = Fit in window zoom level.

Double click on magnifying glass = 100% zoom level.

Ctrl+space bar = Zoom in tool.

Ctrl+Alt+space bar = Zoom out tool.

Ctrl+R = Toggle Rulers on or off.  Remember you can drag out guidelines from the rulers (top or side)

Guides are regular objects, but they act as magnets.  Things snap to them.  VERY IMPORTANT to remember that it is the CURSOR that snaps to the guideline, and not the object.  So make sure your cursor is closest to guide when you want to snap an object to it.

Right-click on screen and “Lock Guides” to keep them from being selectable.

Can select the guide and choose “transform” and give it x y coordinates to move it to.  Can choose any object and can go to “View menu” and can choose “Make Guide”.  Then can choose “guide”, “Release Guide” and it will go back to the former attributes that the object had.

Having the grid background on helps to easily see when an object has “No Fill” vs a white fill color.

Opacity grid lets you see whether an object has an opacity level set (can see through to the grid)

To change the color or pattern of the opacity grid you go under File, Document Setup, and choose Transparency from the “Artboard, Type, or Transparency” drop-down.

Selection tools:

“Selection Tool” -> With bounding box enabled (view->”hide bounding box” or “show bounding box”) you can’t move an object by any of the edge points to snap to a guideline because it re-sizes it instead of moving it.  Press and hold down ctrl to temporarily change to the “Direct Selection Tool” which you can then use to drag by the edge point.

Smart Guides:  ctrl+u to toggle.  Great tool.

VIEWS

• Pixel Preview mode:  use it for web design.
• Show page tiling: Shows how close to the edge the printer can print it for the printer you’re using.
• Proof Colors: Shows how it would look on a particular medium that is setup using “Proof setup”  ie: printing to a newspaper type paper.
• sRGB color space:The web uses the sRGB color space, so that’s what you’d use in the “Proof setup” if you want to use proof colors to see how it would render on the web.

Tool Keyboard Modifiers:

• Grid tool -> x,c,v,f   while creating the shape to skew the lines up/down, right/left.
• Polar Grid tool -> Same as above.
• Most tools -> up/down key to add or remove points.  ie:  star -> up = add more points, down = remove points.  Quickest way to create a triangle is to use the star tool and take it down to three points.

Pencil Tool:

Double click on the pencil tool to bring up options for it.  Best to uncheck “keep selected” and then you can press the ctrl modifier key (ctrl on the keyboard) when you’re working with the pencil tool to quickly switch back to the selection tool and select the pencil stroke that you want to modify with the pencil tool.  Can also change the pixel sensitivity for the adjustment of the stroke (how close you have to be to the original stroke you’re modifying in order for it to adjust the existing one instead of creating a new stroke).

Pathfinder Tool: “Expand” makes completely combines the shapes so that the primitive objects are no longer editable.

When you choose one of the shape modes to apply Illustrator uses the top-most object’s properties and applies them to all selected objects -> ie: color.  If the top-most object is yellow and the underlying one is blue, then the underlying one will turn yellow when the shape mode is applied.

Alt+click the shape mode to apply the change and “expand” the shape in one step.

ORDER OF PERFORMING THE OPERATIONS MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE.  Illustrated in following:

Types of text in illustrator: Point Text or Area Text.

For Area text the offset you can do is uniform for the whole area.  With paragraphs you use “indent” which is different in that it does not have to be for the whole paragraph.  You can have only certain paragraphs within the selected paragraph area that are indented and those that aren’t.

For kerning text you can use ctrl+left or right arrow key to increase or decrease the kerning between characters.

“Leading” is pronounced “ledding.”  It is the amount of space between baselines of text.  ctrl+up or down arrow key to increase or decrease the leading between baselines.

Tracking is for a uniform spacing adjustment for selected text.  It looks like it keeps the custom settings of kerning while it makes the adjustment.  Does not override, just increases or decreases while maintaining the closer or further spacing for individual kerning between characters.  (If that makes sense)

Turn off hyphenation (when auto-wrapping paragraphs) through the “paragraph” toolbar.  (checkbox at bottom)

Adobe “Every-line composer” is interesting.  Makes a more consistent reading experience.  Ties together with Adobe in-design.  It is set by clicking on the little 3-lines in the right corner in the picture above and choosing it in the pop-up menu that launches from there.  Also the “Roman Hanging Punctuation” which makes the hyphen hang out on the right so it’s more noticeable.

“Text thread” => When you have one continuous story that is too large for one containing text area.  Linked across multiple text areas.  You get more control with a text thread as opposed to creating multiple columns because you can’t control the individual attributes of each column..  they are uniform.  With a text thread each text frame or box are independent so you can size them as you wish.  Boxes by upper left and bottom right corners are called “ports”  “In port => upper left.  Out port => lower right”

Good shortcut:  Ctrl+Shift+> or < to increase or decrease the font size of selected text by 2 pts at a time.

Increase or decrease baseline shift for text on a path:  Alt+Shift+up or down arrow to increase or decrease as shown in image here:

Convert text to outlines: Ctrl+Shift+o or “Type,Create Outlines” from the menu.

Don’t really need to convert text to outlines in order to change the look of text because of “Live Effects” (CS3 or above) but there are some times you may want to use the convert text to outlines.

One reason might be so that you don’t have to worry about having a particular font installed for someone you’re sending the illustrator file to that includes text.  If you convert to outlines then it’s completely independent of any installed fonts.

One thing to note is that when you convert to outline the text does get a little bolder.  If you have very very small text then you will see a difference on a printout as opposed to if you had not converted to outline and had it rely on the installed font to render it.

Most professionals use the direct selection tool because with the modifier keys you can use the regular select tool, the direct selection tool or the group selection tool all with the same tool selected.

The “Appearance Panel” is one of the most important panels in Illustrator.  Should be familiar with it.
The word that appears at the top of the appearance panel is called the “TARGET”  One example would be “Path”.  If it’s a path then “path” is the target name.  The TARGET is also shown in the upper-left hand corner of illustrator.

The option to change the stroke alignment is only available for closed paths, not for open paths.  (Change to be outside, inside, or center.  Default is center).

Ctrl+Shift+[ or ] to send object behind or bring object forward.

“Stacking order” also applies within objects themselves.  As in the image above of the path.  The Stroke is above the fill attribute.

Always look at things from the bottom up.  That is how Illustrator builds things.  Things at the bottom (Default Transparency in image above) are first, then others get put on top of them (Fill next, and then Stroke on top).

You can also apply different attributes to specific sub-targets of an entire object as shown above.
To add more attributes like additional strokes or fills you can click on the upper-right-hand drop-down as shown above and choose that option.  The image on the right shows the extra strokes added to the one object with different attributes.

Very important keyboard shortcut to know:  “D” Sets object attributes to Default.

Above is a great example of how you can use this method of targeting attributes (with accompanying settings under the all-important appearance panel).  This is actually just a single open path.  A straight line with attributes applied to multiple strokes for the appearance of the object.  The great thing is (as also shown above) that you can then modify the path with the handles in one shot.  If you created this same graphic by laying multiple paths on top of each other you would not be able to do that.  You would have to adjust the handles of each different path on their own and try to line them up.  Awesome!

Above is an example of how you could use multiple fills in one object.  It’s a pattern fill combined with a gradient fill with the blend mode set to multiply.

Filters and Effects.  Two very different ways to apply effects.  Both menus have an option under “stylize” for “drop shadow”  Filters are “old school”. You can apply them once and then that’s it.  You can’t change them anymore.  With the Effect menu you can adjust the effect any time you want.  Generally should avoid Filters and use Effects instead.  Applied Effects becomes an attribute of the particular object you apply it to.  With Filters it creates a different object.  Sometimes this might be the desired effect.  Maybe a quick way to create a certain look.

Object->Expand appearance:  Breaks apart one object or path into multiple objects or paths with one attribute for each path or object.

“Basic appearance” vs “Complex appearance”
Basic appearance is an object or path with just two attributes associated with it, namely the top-most stroke and the top-most fill.
Complex appearance is one object or path with multiple attributes associated with it.

To create a “Graphic style” just click the icon next to the targeted path and drag it over into the “Graphic Styles” panel.
You can update any graphic style and it will make the changes to any path or object that has that style applied to it.
Once you’ve edited the style you can then apply it to all objects with that style applied by clicking on the “Fly-out menu” (upper-right-hand corner with three horizontal lines) and then choosing “Redefine graphic style”.

To change it so that new paths or objects that are drawn inherit the same appearance of the “graphic style” click on the “New Art has basic appearance” button to toggle between that and “New art maintains appearance”

By default the eyedropper tool only picks up the basic appearance of an object when you’re using it to select the appearance of another object to apply to the selected object.  Double click on the eyedropper tool and check-mark the “Appearance” checkbox on both the “Eyedropper picks up” and the “Eyedropper applies” sides.  The eyedropper tool also works on text.

GROUPS: Effects get applied to the group as a whole and not to individual objects within the group as illustrated in the example below:

• Group Isolation Mode: Double click any group to go into this mode that will allow you to work just with the group and will disable things behind, on top of, or otherwise compared to the group.  Works exactly the same way as Flash.  To add items to a group, go into group isolation mode at the group level that you want to add an object to and go ahead and add the object.  It will become a part of that group.

LAYERS: Names of layers in italics indicates a non-printing layer.

Can move selected items between layers or copy (hold down ctrl while dragging) by clicking on the little blue icon to the right of the layer name in the layers panel as shown to the left:

Layers are always shaded in Gray while objects or groups have a white background:

Using layers is a quicker way to add objects to a group (depending on the situation.. sometimes it might still be best to do it using “Group isolation mode”)  The little circles on the right are called “Target Circles“  Use them to target objects.  When there is a double circle for the object or layer it means that is currently targeted.  The blue squares to the right show that the object is selected.  An object can be selected without being targeted.  A circle that is filled in (sometimes called a “meatball”) indicates that the object has a “complex appearance”.  The white circles without a fill indicates it has a “basic appearance”.  If there is a “meatball” on a particular group then you know for certain that if you ungroup it then you will loose some effects or properties that have been applied to that group because you’re removing the group object those attributes have been applied to.

Template Layers:  Basically Illustrator’s name for a Tracing layer.

Layer Attributes:  You can apply attributes to an entire layer.  Can apply attributes at OBJECT, GROUP, or LAYER levels each with different results.

You can create a group with only one object inside of it.  You would do this if you wanted to just use the group as a container for applying settings at a higher level.

LIVE PAINT: Basically throws all of the pathfinder tools (divide, intersect, exclude, etc.) out the door.  Makes it easier.

Hold