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Illustrator: The Tilde Trick

December 19, 2007 | Posted in Illustrator | 89 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
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Get More-Natural Adjustments with the Illustrator “Reshape” Tool

November 28, 2007 | Posted in Illustrator | 64 Comments »

A hidden gem in my opinion, Illustrator’s “Reshape” tool can come in very handy in a variety of situations. In a nutshell, the Reshape tool allows you to drag a single point on a path and it tries to retain the overall shape of the entire path, while you only move the one anchor point. What? I’ll explain below.

The Illustrator Reshape Tool
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Requested Tutorial: Crop Excess Illustrator Artwork

November 13, 2007 | Posted in Illustrator | 59 Comments »

This tutorial was requested (by David) and I’m happy to report, it’s really not very hard to do. If you’ve ever used a clipping mask to hide all of the extra artwork that hangs off the edges of your Illustrator artboard, and wished you could just get rid of the excess, here’s how…

Requested Tutorial: Crop Excess Illustrator Artwork
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Illustrator: Rock-Solid Alignment using Anchor Points

November 6, 2007 | Posted in Illustrator, OS X | 16 Comments »

We all know that alignment is a huge part of any design. The more control we have over alignment, the better. After a certain point, 100% alignment control gives way to new opportunities to make Illustrator even more useful, like making seamless patterns for example. I want to show you how “anchor points” work in Illustrator, and hopefully send you into control-freak bliss.

Illustrator: Rock-Solid Alignment using Anchor Points
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Illustrator Brush-Making Tip: Colorization Method

October 24, 2007 | Posted in Illustrator | 24 Comments »

Making a custom brush in Illustrator can be easy and frustrating at the same time. No matter which type of brush you create, one of the most important settings to pay attention to is the ‘colorization method.’ If you don’t change the colorization method from the default setting, you won’t be able to customize the colors of your (custom) brush strokes later. Here’s what you need to do…

Illustrator Brush-Making Tip: Colorization Method
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