Illustrator: Rid Yourself of Pesky “Expand Appearance” Woes

April 1, 2008 | Posted in Illustrator | 34 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
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Illustrator Workflow: “Persistent” Brush Palettes

March 25, 2008 | Posted in Illustrator | 23 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:
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Illustrator 101: Faster Font Selection

March 3, 2008 | Posted in Illustrator | 39 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
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Free Illustrator Brushes: Ink/Watercolor

February 13, 2008 | Posted in Freebies | 75 Comments »

I’ve got another set of Illustrator brushes for everyone. I previously released these shapes as vectors, but decided to go ahead an make a brush library out of them. I hope you can put them to good use. Screenshot after the jump.

Free Illustrator Brushes: Ink/Watercolor
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Free Vectors: Tree Silhouettes

January 10, 2008 | Posted in Freebies | 66 Comments »

It’s free vector time again, and I’ve got some tree silhouettes to share with everyone. Download ‘em and stick ‘em in your archive. Hopefully they’ll be of good use! Details after the jump.

Free Vectors: Tree Silhouettes
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