today we're going to get the most we can out of Adobe Illustrator with seven lesser known
features that graphic designers really should know about this is one part of a design I was
soon going to look at and even make but if I press command or control Y and then enter
into outline mode we can see that this is only one single Vector path and yes I'm sure many of
you out there know how to make this and it's not actually one of the features we're talking about
today we're getting to that right now but let's press L for the ellipse tool and hold down shift
to create a circle now I'm going to apply a stroke weight of 10. lovely okay so now by pressing C for
the scissors tool let's click these two anchor points here and then press delete to remove the
lower half of our Circle we're going to apply the same effect as the line in the top right corner
of the screen and to do that we need to jump into the appearance panel now instead of just clicking
a new stroke you can simply hold down the alt option key and then click and drag below but we
also want to increase the stroke weight by only 20 points for this new stroke so that means it's
going to be 30. now I'm using the background color for this new stroke okay now we need
to hold down the command or the control key and click the two strokes and then like before just
hold down the alt option key and duplicate them below like so you'll probably thank me later when
this shortcut saves you heaps of times in long workflows in the appearance panel and just like
before I'm going to increase each Stroke by 20 points until I end up with this shape right here
now the really cool thing that we can do with this design or any shape and
illustrator for that matter starts by opening up the Pathfinder window foreign
option we can convert this to a compound shape now illustrator is going to join together the shape
because a compound shape needs an enclosed path to work what we're about to do can work on any shape
in illustrator now if I duplicate the shape things are as what you would expect however if we double
click the shape and enter into the isolation mode and then we copy this shape with command or Ctrl C
and then paste it with command or control V we can see that our compound shapes unite in some form
of kind of Wizardry and we can actually manipulate them in any way we want to and add multiple copies
of our design flip them rotate them and so on and this is all while we only have single Vector paths
now you can click the top gray bar to enter out of isolation mode but yeah this process
can be applied to pretty much any shape that you want in illustrator and you can really have some
fun with this and come up with some interesting designs when using compound shapes in this way
next up a tip that will help you remain super organized and neat working in Adobe Illustrator if
you come up to object artboards and then rearrange all artboards a very handy dandy window is going
to appear now we have a setting for the left to right or up to down orientations how many rows we
want and also the spacing between each artboards you will likely want to move the artwork as well
but you might run into a smaller shoe like this where something hasn't moved with your artboard
and that's simply because it was locked pressing alt option as well as command or control and then
two will unlock everything on your document and then you should just have no worries of
moving stuff around you cannot seriously deny how much neater and Visually pleasing things
look right now when you have an organized space an illustrator you often feel more comfortable
and more creative when designing stuff or maybe that's just me hmm also if you want to share your
documents with clients I'm pretty sure they will appreciate you being neat and organized like this
so the new version of Illustrator has a new tool but we're going to expand on things and take it
to the next level so select your areas or your shapes and then head up to object intertwine
and make you now have access to this new lasso icon and simply but carefully click around the
areas that you want to intertwine and if by magic things are swapped over instantly
but let's be honest here Adobe should have added this years maybe a decade ago now that
looks pretty cool but what about this right here and actually this only takes a few seconds to do
all you need to do is press M for the rectangle tool and then draw a small shape here if you have
Smart guides activated things should just snap to the edges very cleanly now we want one side
of the gradient slider to be dark and you can choose any color really depending on your design
and the other side should be white but however the white should be set to zero percent opacity
make sure that the angle is correct as well of course
but once you've made that simply hold down the alt option key and click and drag to duplicate it
you only need to make one of these so you have a pair and then you can just copy the pairs all over
your design and I think this would look pretty cool on typography and other artistic designs
as well using Adobe Illustrator now I have shown this one on the channel before but so many people
don't know it exists to this day so when we want to add text along a path there is a handy menu
box found here that we can open up and have some fun with this thing gives you a lot more scope for
adjustment and freedom when creating typography along a path and yeah let's just ignore that typo
for a second I'll change it later I promise so this menu can dedicate where on a line the text
is going to sit which is probably the best part of this feature really we can also change the leading
for some reason I don't know why flip the text and also change the orientation to weird and wonderful
layouts and then to change the typo because yeah it's starting to annoy me at this point as well
now I would like to see some built-in method for knowing when the text is
Central but instead we can pull down a guide from the rulers and do things that way
do I like this typography design I've just made for this demo no not really but let's move away
from the demo and onto a trick that really helps with alignment so today's video is sponsored by
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traditional software now it's more like working on the wall so to speak in a creative Studio
it allows you to map out your projects collect all of your ideas and inspiration in one convenient
place and it also allows you to collaborate with your colleagues or your clients in real time
so I've been using a millennote for the past three years to keep my creative projects organized and
this awesome tool is available for free with no time limit so if you haven't done already sign
up for free using the link in the description box below and start to streamline your graphic
design workflow today When selecting objects to align we can press another click on the focal
point or the object of interest and that's going to align other objects to that thing
for example I want these horizontally aligned but to use the middle shape as a point of reference
if I align these two shapes vertically they kind of shift but maybe I just want the lower shape to
remain exactly where it is so then I just simply click it again to ensure it's highlighted and
thicker and Bolder we can also do things like aligning the top three shapes in accordance to
the very top height of the diamond design in the middle or maybe even the bottom line of it
there's something else that's pretty cool with the new version of Adobe Illustrator
and that is that adobe have given us a bunch of free templates now you can find them here
and there are some interesting things to look at however I will say that for a company as
large as Adobe they could have made a better logo design template logo templates are not
something I personally think are a good thing anyway but yeah maybe you can find some useful
things lurking around in the recesses of the Adobe template section now let me know in the
comment section below if you have learned something today because I sure hope you did
but whoa wait there if you want to continue to Gig out on Adobe Illustrator content just click
the video on screen and until next time guys design your future today peace foreign [Music]