i'm going to show you the illustrator pathfinder tool like you've never seen it before unless you
happen to be a dev for adobe of course but for the non-developers out there let's jump into
some advanced tricks with this thing i have here a png image and none of this is vectorized or able
to be handled in terms of a vector object but the pathfinder can help in interesting
ways with this object now as you can see i've made a black shape with the pen tool earlier
and actually i could neaten this up a tad but anyway i have a shape overlaying this layer and
then some text off to the left i'm locking down this png with a command or control 2.
and then i'm going to place my text in a way that i think is going to work for my design so
as a reminder i have the text on top of the black shape and then below that to the png i'm now going
to hold down the alt option key when clicking functions in the pathfinder window and that's
such as the exclude option found here and nope i don't actually like that effect so what about the
intersect option that looks pretty cool actually and i'm also liking the minus front option as well
again remember to hold down the alt option keys when you're doing this
but we can go even further than that and there's something cool about this that you will soon
see anyway i can make a freeform gradient on the shape and repeat the same process over a gradient
but yeah one of the main uses for this is that my text is fully 100 editable i can rewrite things
change the fonts the color and so on so yeah that's the interesting way to use compound
paths with the pathfinder but what about a problem that i'm sure you've encountered before
i have four black squares and on top of that i have this pinky red circle
now i want to cut this circle into four squares leaving negative space in the middle
if we select everything then hit the minus for an option bam we get this that's not ideal okay so
what if we group the black squares together do you think that would work command or ctrl g to group
them bring the shape back over and nope the knight the next logical thing to try maybe is to create
a compound path from the four squares so let's go ahead and do that in the pathfinder panel now when
i click the my network option nothing seems to happen at all that's because we need to hold down
your top shinky like we did before crucially after we've turned the squares into a compound shape
this is how you cut a shape into multiple objects below using the pathfinder
okay so next something really cool to remember and to add into your workflow
this is why we use the alt option key when using the pathfinder tool yes these three
shapes are in fact united but i can double click one of the shapes to enter into isolation mode
meaning i can then move things around as i please scale recolor and so on but also in illustrator
if i click out of isolation mode i can still do things to this united object
such as edit the live corners with the direct selection tool and that is a on your keyboard the
pathfinder tool is also great for cleaning up a design but what do i actually mean by that exactly
well if i select this object here and quickly press command or control k to bring up the
preferences i'm just going to enlarge my anchor points so you guys can see what's going on
okay so i have a few unnecessary anchor points on this object in the pathfinder options menu there
is an option to clean up redundant points if you uncheck this basically turning off you will notice
that when i click the pathfinder merge function nothing happens however if i go back and turn
that setting on and then click the merge function illustrator removes the redundant anchor points
you can control how precise you want illustrator to be so that you can keep the original shape
intact less anchor points are always better as a general rule in adobe illustrator and
here's another feature of the pathfinder tool that designers often do forget about say if i go ahead
and unite these shapes at the very top and then i go along with my workflow i do this i do that
but then i want to unite the other objects below that as well instead of clicking the pathfinder
menu say if i've just closed it or something like that i can just press command or control
four this is going to repeat the last operation in the pathfinder so yeah there are some neat
things with the pathfinder in adobe illustrator if you want to learn more about graphic design
or ai just click a video on the screen and until next time design your future today
let's peace