Illustrator | BittBox

Archive for the 'Illustrator' Category

Illustrator: Rid Yourself of Pesky “Expand Appearance” Woes

April 1, 2008 | Posted in Illustrator | 32 Comments »

In the spirit of April Fools day, I wrote a tutorial on something I once considered “tricky.” If you’ve ever run into problems while trying to “Expand Appearance” on your brushes in Illustrator, you’re not alone. Expanding the appearance of your brush work has many helpful uses because you can get paths that outline your shapes, instead of just the brush stroke itself. This helps preserve the shape of your brush work when scaling and allows you to send files to print with outlined paths that prevents problems when the printers open your files, among other things. Let’s get started.

Illustrator: Rid Yourself of Pesky
Read the rest of this entry »

Illustrator Workflow: “Persistent” Brush Palettes

March 25, 2008 | Posted in Illustrator | 22 Comments »

Workflow is always important for productivity. Avoiding as many clicks as possible is an everyday battle, and, with this little Illy tip, I hope to help you avoid yet another 3 clicks. For some reason, the folks at Adobe decided that Illustrator shouldn’t have a ‘Preset Manager’ like Photoshop, so here we are working around it. I’d like to share with you one way I get around a lack-of-a-preset-manager in Illustrator when it comes to brushes.

Illustrator Workflow:
Read the rest of this entry »

Illustrator 101: Faster Font Selection

March 3, 2008 | Posted in Illustrator | 37 Comments »

It’s important to note that this will also work in Photoshop, but I’m using Illustrator as an example. If you’re anything at all like me, you have a ginormous font collection and scrolling through the entire list to find the one your looking for can be cumbersome at times. Here’s a quick tip to spend less time scrolling and more time designing.

Illustrator 101: Faster Font Selection
Read the rest of this entry »

BB Special 3 Ways: VECTOR HALFTONES from RASTER Images

January 28, 2008 | Posted in Illustrator | 70 Comments »

This is by far the most-emailed question I get here at BittBox. How can you make vector halftones from raster images? Well, our friends at Adobe haven’t seen the need to throw us a bone in this situation yet, but there are some brave souls out there taking on the challenge themselves, and answering the call. I’m going to show you 3 different ways to create vector halftones from raster images, 2 of which are free, and the 3rd is only $15. Grab a random image from your archive, and let’s get to it. . .

3 Ways: VECTOR HALFTONES from RASTER Images
Read the rest of this entry »

Illustrator: The Tilde Trick

December 19, 2007 | Posted in Illustrator | 86 Comments »

BittBox Reader Jeff F tipped me off about this neat little Illy trick. It just so happens that if you hold down the “tilde” key on your keyboard, you can get a neat effect using any of Illustrator’s drawing tools. Holding down the tilde key, (the little squiggly line above the tab key, left of the number 1 on your keyboard.) while using a drawing tool will cause Illustrator to repeat the shape rapidly as you move your mouse. Examples after the jump. Thanks Jeff!

Illustrator: The Tilde Trick
Read the rest of this entry »