W4D's Blog

One of my Illustrator CS3 students called with a question about Artboards right after she upgraded. She started, “I understand that I can make Artboards work the same way as Crop Areas from CS3. When I try to click and drag with the Artboard tool (Shift+O) to make a ‘Crop Area’ over the top of an existing Artboard, the only thing I succeed in doing is that I move the existing Artboard. What am I doing wrong?”
To create an Artboard within an existing Artboard (to simulate the Crop Areas from CS3), select your Artboard tool (Shift+O) and move it over the top of the existing Artboard. Then temporarily hold down your Shift key and click and drag. Release you shift key and continue dragging until the Artboard is the size you’d like and release your mouse.

On behalf of layers magazine

Here’s a quick reminder of some of the quick keys that will get you working alot faster!!

X  - Toggles between the fill and the stroke
Shift & x  -Swaps over the fill and the stroke colour
? -Puts the colour to (none) meaning the red line will appear through it
Ctrl & 0 -Will bring you back to normal view if you have zoomed in too far
D -Default colours
Spacebar – Handtool
V -Black arrow
Ctrl – & + – control key and then either the plus or minus to zoom in and zoom out

One way to keep your file size small in illustrator is to make sure that you delete any swatches
that you arent using in your design when saving the file. A quick way to do this is too click the drop down menu in the swatches pallete and pick > select all unused then just trash them.

I saw one of my students trying to find the center of an Artboard, using Ruler Guides with Smart Guides. I said, “You could just select the Artboard with the Artboard tool (Shift+O) and then click the Show Center Mark button in the Control panel. It might be a little more efficient, in that you can more easily turn it on when you need it and off when you don’t.

On behalf of layers magazine

While playing with Effects in a recent training session, one student said, “I selected several objects at once with the Selection tool (V), and went Effect>3D>Revolve, and when I pressed Preview, the result was not at all what I expected. Each individual object Rotated around its own left side. I wanted all of the selected objects to rotate as one single unit around the same axis. Is there a way to do that?”
 
I answered, “If you want several objects to act as one, select them with the Selection tool and then Group them (Object>Group) before applying the Effect. With Rotate (by default), it will rotate the objects as a single unit around the left side of the Group.”

On behalf of layers magazine