Posts Tagged with Illustrator
This is a quick Illustrator tip, but in my opinion, a priceless one if its new to you. Have you ever been typing in Illustrator and hit the “V” key to select the move tool (or any other tool shortcut for that matter), but instead, Illustrator just types a v? Yeah, it happened to me all the time, until I figured this out. Are you tired of having to click on the move tool, then click on the artboard, then click the text tool, and then click again, just to start another empty text box? It’s truly annoying to be stripped of your tool shortcuts while you’re editing an active text box, but help is only one keystroke away.
It’s always nice to see people put BB freebies to good use, but there’s no way to spot them all. I was flipping through Rolling Stone over the weekend and spotted some of my Illustrator brushes (teardrop foliage) in an ad for Bonnaroo 2008, a huge music & arts festival in Tennessee.
This is a very quick Illustrator CS3 tip that will hopefully save you some time in the long run. I’m sure a lot of you, if not all of you, know how to load a Brush Library. There are 3 ways, actually, but my favorite, and quickest way is the Brush Library icon.
![Illustrator: Load Brush Libraries Faster [CS3]](/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/faster_illustrator_brushes_2.jpg "Illustrator: Load Brush Libraries Faster [CS3]")
In this tutorial, I’m going to cover several things that effect the way we use Illustrator brushes. Remember, there are 4 types of Illustrator brushes, and this tutorial will be covering “Art” brushes. There are many things that effect the way your brush stroke will take form, and I hope by the end of this tutorial, you have a better idea of what you can tweak to get the results you’re looking for when using your art brushes.
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.
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.
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.
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- New Blog Post: Free Texture Tuesday: 5 Unique Cloud Textures: Today I’m giving some cloud photographs that are a... http://t.co/fJxEqEpr
- New Post: http://t.co/yq8XkgjK
- New Blog Post: How To Create A Set Of PS Brushes From A Single Texture Photo: Creating Photoshop brushes is rath... http://t.co/ljZ39pJf
- New Blog Post: Free Texture Tuesday: 5 Split Wood Textures: http://t.co/GcEkrC6z
