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I’ve been using Illustrator for some time now and I’ve got a few really handy tips and tricks that I’ve learned along the way from other designers or found by myself that, if I had known about them before, would have saved me tons of time and headaches. I’ll update this post when I remember new ones or find new tricks that are worthy of noting.

If you have a trick you’d like to submit to be posted here, feel free to post it in the comments or shoot me an e-mail. You can use the contact form on my portfolio site (I don’t want any robots to track it here and spam me to death).

NOTE: The following tricks are all done with the shape tools and are executed when you hold down the mouse (without releasing it). When you release it, you draw the shape onto the canvas and have to transform them manually.

Draw a circle from the center I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to draw a circle from a central starting point instead of the default top left. This is so easy that it sickens me. To do this, grab the circle shape tool and hold down the ALT key. Use SHIFT to constrain proportions or hold down the SPACEBAR to move the circle around before letting it sit on the canvas.

Wish upon a star To make a perfect five point star, hold down the ALT key. If you’d like to add points to the star, hit the up arrow on your keyboard, or remove points by hitting the down arrow. NOTE: This is an easy way to create a triangle in Illustrator since there is no triangle tool. You can also hold down the CTRL key to make the shape concave or convex. It’s really neat, give ‘er a whirl!

Grid lines Grab the rectangular grid tool (under the line tool) and start drawing your grid. In much the same way as the star tool, you can hit the up/down arrows to add/delete lines to your grid.

Rounded rectangle mania Normally to make a rounded rectangle you select the tool and click on the canvas somewhere to set the corner radius. This can get annoying as you may want to experiment with radius sizing. VOILA! Click to draw your rounded rectangle and press the up/down arrow keys to change the corner radius on the fly. This is VERY useful.

Without having to type everything out, just play around with the up/down arrows, CTRL key, ALT key, and SPACEBAR key on all shapes to see what they do. You get some surprising results.

OTHER TRICKS

Make something cool! This really has no title I can come up with, but try it anyway. Draw a shape, then another one off to the side somewhere (try a different color for coolness points). Grab the blend tool (W) and click on one shape (don’t release) and drag your mouse to the other shape. BAM! But wait, there is more. For a different effect (and how I made the rounded rectangles on my portfolio), double click the tool in your tools palette. Click the preview checkbox (and if your shape is still selected) you can see an on the fly change in your shapes. In the spacing pulldown, select specified steps and edit the number of steps. You can change the orientation to align to path (the second option) and then take your direct selection tool (A) and move one of the end points of the line it created around to see it change real time. Alternately, you can use the convert anchor point tool (SHIFT+C) on one of the points (click on the point and drag it out to get bezier handles) and see the coolness unravel before your eyes! For added effect, experiment like this with two lines each different colors and see what you get when you blend those together.

Make a crop area I’ve worked with people who design in AI and all on one canvas, even if they are designing separate pages for a project. A handy feature to make screenshots of what you have done without having to delete everything other than what you want to save is to draw a rectangle (or whatever shape for that matter) on top of what you want to save out. So lets say you have four pages laid out on one canvas. Draw a rectangle over one of the pages at whatever size you want to save it out as. Make sure the rectangle is the top most shape (with it selected, hit CTRL+SHIFT+], otherwise known as bring to front), and go to Object > Crop Area > Make. Now you can simply save a .jpg file (or whatever) of the area that you wanted to be in the screenshot and go right back to your canvas. Go to Object > Crop Area > Release to get the rectangle back, move it around over your next screenshot, repeat the process, and you’ve just made four screenshots in about a minute without having to delete anything or hide anything on your canvas.

Make a clipping mask In much the same way as you create a crop area, you can create a clipping mask (some people just refer to them as masking, like other programs do). You can do everything like the crop area trick except you have to remember that the top most shape will be the mask and that it has to sit over the part you want to mask out because only whatever is inside of that object will be revealed. When ready, go to Object > Clipping Mask > Make. Alternately, to release it, you go to Object > Clipping Mask > Release.

Make a stroke for Flash Flash doesn’t really like strokes coming in from Illustrator (that will probably change now with the merger). A better way to do it is to make a shape, select it, go to Object > Path > Offset Path and enter a value. Change the color of the new shape (it auto selects it after you’ve done this process) and you can see it now acts like a stroke. You can specify negative values to make an inner shape so the old shape becomes the stroke itself. This is a VERY handy tool that I use almost every time I’m in Illustrator. It’s really a life saver.

Make a stroke into a shape Sometimes I want to take the lazy route and draw a line, change it to a thick stroke, and be able to edit it later as a shape. Instead of drawing two separate lines that are aligned the same way but offset a couple of pixels to give the effect of a thick line, simply draw your line, set the stroke to a thickness of your liking, and go to Object > Path > Outline Stroke. You can see the stroke turn into an editable object with vertices that are fully editable.

This is a good amount of tricks to get you started. As stated above, if you have any tricks to contribute or want to know how something can be achieved, please feel free to drop me a line.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 30th, 2005 at 7:01 pm and is filed under Illustrator, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.