yo what's up everyone i'm still getting over a cold so today if you use adobe illustrator you can
see some of the best tips and tricks and workflow techniques shown on this channel over the past
24 months you will surely learn something from today's video if you watch every single section
so let's get into it so the first tip relates to logo designing or even some of those people who
work on illustrations but it can be applied to pretty much any workflow in illustrator
simply come up to window and add a new window now you're going to notice that i have the same
document but just version 1 and also version 2 as you can see here well let's go ahead and arrange
the windows as a tiled orientation and let's see what happens so the awesome thing about this
setup is that i can have one window zoomed really far into my design and the other can be a broad
outlook of the overall design and of course that means i can be working on finer details
zoomed right in on the left and then my logo on the right is also going to be changed as i work
on the left but i get a broader kind of picture of what's happening on the right hand side
i can also select the design on the right and press command h on a mac or control h on a pc
and this should hide anchor points so i can see the design a lot clearer
now this is neat because you can make a grid in lightning speed
perfect for logo designing so head up to object path and then split to grid
you have full customization over the columns the rows as well as gutter options here too but i
personally don't want to use those for a logo grid this grid is actually a stroke path for now which
means we can adjust the stroke weight but even more useful maybe is right clicking the artboard
and then converting the grid to guides and so just like that we've made a logo design grid
in a few seconds and let me quickly ask you to think of a font right now off the top of your head
now you might go ahead and say something like myriad and that's because most of us
have this font appear when we generate some text in illustrator and that's because it's a default
setting however we can actually completely change that and also a lot more than just the font itself
so as you can see i have myriad here but let's come into the character style panel
and then navigate over to a character style options menu
in this box we can put in our defaults for when we generate some text and obviously
let's address that font first and foremost and the font i personally use quite a lot is aileron
and so i'm going to select that and also a bold version but we can also change things like the
leading which is the spacing between lines and also the kerning settings and i'm going to use
optical because i do find myself using that more often and these are all going to be now default
settings for me in my illustrator program and to test that theory i'm now going to generate
some text and it should start with lron and my specific settings that i just punched in
so firstly come into the appearance panel and then add a stroke
we then need to offset the stroke and like before
it looks rather messy if you remember back to the previous video
however all we actually need to do is to come into the pathfinder option right
here and then click add we can now edit the text whilst the stroke is offset
awesome a lot of the time when we're working with stroke pass we might have a stroke style like this
and this is the direction of the path now you can also make a manual adjustments with the width tool
and that is shift and w on your keyboard but what if you want to change the direction of this path
well press p for the pen tool and then just simply click one of the anchor points on one of the sides
hold down the command or the control button and then click away
this is a simple feature that not many people know about or even use in their workflow but yeah this
isn't probably news to a lot of you guys and you can use this on the brush tools and so forth but
there is a setting that you do want to take into consideration if you press command or control
k and you bring up the preference settings you can then come into the general settings
and there is an option to select precise cursor icons and this means you don't need to have your
keyboard stuck on uppercase caps all of the time and you can still use the precision crosshairs
whenever you want to now i often like to use these when i'm working on detailed designs
because some tools such as the pencil do obstruct your view from the design and just
your workflow so you do keep in mind that little setting in the preference settings
well if you click under the text tool you will find the touchpad tool now with this tool
selected you can move characters around without having to outline your text and that goes for
moving up and down as well however there is no shift option which allows you to keep things
on a straight line so you have to nudge the characters on your keyboard using the arrows
you can also hold down shift whilst doing this to make them move 10 times faster if you wanted to
know how many colors are on this design or even limit the design to a specific amount of colors
say for example maybe you're printing a t-shirt how would you do that we can come into the recolor
panel here and then you're going to notice that you can adjust the amount of colors in this little
box and then we can move through as many colors as we want for our design and again this is helpful
when you're printing via adobe illustrator and you can also move your colors around too and actually
this panel is something i suggest that designers do really get to know because it has a lot of
uses and a lot of things going on inside it now i've made a quick selection of circles
here and i can actually go ahead and open up the swatches panel to turn this into a pattern itself
that's not the actual tip however it's just part of the process but in the swatches panel
you will find the patterns menu right here and i can drag and drop my shapes into that menu
and it's going to give me a made pattern swatch now the thing i've learned is that
you can apply your pattern to a shape and if you rotate that shape the pattern rotates as well
but the question arises what if you want to only rotate the pattern or just rotate the square well
in the rotate menu you can check only the pattern box and this is going to allow you to rotate the
pattern itself within the shape and of course the shape is staying stationary which is pretty cool
if we use the minus front option in the pathfinder window i cut the top shape into the shape below
the thing is that we can see in the layers window just here that we have just one shape
if i then go ahead and commit the same process but this time if i hold down the alt key on windows
or the option key on a mac while clicking the pathfinder function i now have a genuine compound
path we can come into the layers window and then click only the middle section with the blue icon
and then just manipulate the shape and the size in any which way we want to
this isn't a colored circle you are literally seeing through
the shape onto the background and i can demonstrate that right here
so there are some nifty tools and probably actually hidden tools to some people i hope
you got some value from this video but if you do want to see more graphic design content by myself
just click a video on screen and until next time guys design your future today peace you