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
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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:
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Workflow: OS X 10.5.2 Fixes Stacks!!!

February 11, 2008 | Posted in OS X | 13 Comments »

Whatever kind of designer you are (be it web, print, 3D, multimedia, etc.), you most likely rely on quite a few different apps on a regular basis, and you’re always looking to improve your workflow efficiency. With the release of OS X 10.5, we were introduced to stacks. A feature that promised everyone a clutter-free desktop environment. I don’t know about everyone else, but I was more than dissatisfied with stacks. Good news folks. Apple released 10.5.2 today, and one of the fixes I was personally hoping for came true. Stacks have been beefed up, and we got our list view back! This really made my day. No more 3rd party apps like HierarchialDock to keep my desktop clean. Thanks for listening to us Apple!

Workflow: OS X 10.5.2 Fixes Stacks!!!
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