W4D's Blog

If you make your Rulers visible (View>Rulers), and click and drag from the vertical Ruler onto you work area, you get a vertical Guide. Do the same from the horizontal Ruler and you’ll get a horizontal Guide. But is there a way to drag a vertical Guide from the horizontal Ruler or a horizontal Guide from the vertical Ruler? Sure! As you click on either Ruler, hold down the Option key (Alt on PC) and the Guide will flip around sideways as you drag. This same trick works in InDesign.

On behalf of layers magazine.

Layers Tip of the Day reader, Mario Ramirez, emailed the following question about Live Trace objects.  Mario wrote, “After I trace something, it seems to me that the only way to add color is to use the Live Paint Bucket tool (K), but it takes a long time to go over each uncolored shape and click color into it, especially if the tracing is complicated. Is there a better way?”
 
I answered, “If I’m working with a Live Trace object and know that I will need to add color to its various shapes, I select the object, and start by pressing the Live Paint button in the Control panel. The only reason I first convert to Live Paint is to make sure that there are no Gaps between shapes. After fixing any Gap problems (Object>Live Paint>Gap Options), I press the Expand button in the Control panel. Once expanded, you won’t have to click on each shape with the Bucket tool to apply color. Just make sure the Fill icon in the Tools panel is in front (active) by clicking on it, then simply click and drag Swatches to each shape without selecting anything. Because there’s no selecting involved, drag and drop is the most efficient way to add Swatch colors.”

On behalf of layers magazine.

If you ever scale objects in illustrator and then end up with really thick stroke weights, Don’t spend ages faffing about altering all the weights try this.

Double click on top of the scale tool in the tool box (cs4 underneath eraser) (cs3 underneath pencil tool) then when your scale options open make sure that you have ticked scales strokes and effects and objects click ok and then now try scaling your item your stroke should stay the same scale.

Adobe Illustrator CS4 Tip – Odd Behavior? Trash Those Preferences

I got an email from Layers Tips reader Ruk Peterson, with a question about some Illustrator features acting very oddly. He wrote, “When I draw a simple ellipse, then go to Object>Create Gradient Mesh, there is a window that is supposed to come up showing options for Rows, Columns, Appearance, and Highlights. It comes up on my laptop, but not on my PC. I can’t figure out why? Any thoughts?”
 
I answered, “Anytime Illustrator seems to be acting very strangely it’s probably a Preferences problem. To create a new Preferences file, do the following. Quit Illustrator and relaunch the application while pressing and holding Option+Command+Shift (Mac) or Alt+Control+Shift (Windows). This rebuilds the default Preferences, and hopefully the problem will go away.” I was pretty sure that ‘Trashing Preferences’ would solve the problem and had this confirmed when Ruk emailed back, “Fantastic! That did it!”

On behalf of layers magazine

Sure! Open up several Graphic Styles Libraries (Window>Graphic Styles) and apply a Style to a selected object by selecting the Style in the panel. To add a new Style to the Appearance of the existing Style, hold down your Option key (Alt on PC), then click, drag, and drop another Style on top of the object. This will merge the two Styles together in one object.