Adobe Illustrator Shortcuts

Hello again. These last couple of weeks I’ve been sharing some of the broad lessons I’ve learned this summer with Cleveland graphic designers, Go Media, such as learning from criticism, and realizing the importance of presentation.

This week I’m going to get more practical and share some Adobe Illustrator tips that my coworkers have taught me.

We’re all in one big open room at the Go Media offices, so I have the freedom to steal glances at the other designer’s monitors. In my inexperience I would undoubtedly see them taking an approach I had not been exposed to, or would never think of taking. I started a running list of cool techniques I saw for future reference. I’d like to share some. We use Adobe Illustrator for almost everything here, so the tips are rooted in Illustrator. (Warning: these are revelations of a Go Media intern, so don’t be surprised if some of these techniques are less than ground-breaking).

1. Oliver showed me how to do make a radial.

1. Draw something cool (preferably long and narrow)

2. Activate rotate tool by pressing “R”

3. Move anchor point further out from the center of the object

4. Hold Alt and rotate the object by 5-15 degrees

5. Hold Ctrl+D (which repeats the last action) until radial is closed

2. How to Rotate Text Boxes:

1. Text boxes won’t rotate as expected when using the handles in Illustrator. Instead, the bounding box will simply rotate while the text remains horizontal.

2. In order to actually rotate the text, you must use the rotate too by pressing “R”, not by using the handles.

3. A Richer Gradient:

1. Make a regular gradient

2. Copy the gradient and Paste in Front

3. Change the pasted gradient to a solid color that is slightly lighter than the shade of the gradient.

4. Move the solid color to the back with the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+[

5. Change the blending mode of the gradient to multiply.

That does it for this week. If you’re a student like me, I hope you learned something new today. But don’t stop here! This is just a taste of what there is to know about Illustrator – and Illustrator is just one design application! I’ll be sharing more tips next week, but in the meantime keep educating yourself.