from obscure keyboard shortcuts that you didn't know existed to a pathfinder feature very few
people know about let's look at some wow moments in adobe illustrator so with this shape here i can
press shift plus d and click not once but twice and we find a new bounding box this is the quick
way to enter into the draw inside feature but we can take things a little bit further
first i'm going to press b for the brush tool and then draw a little something like so i'm not sure
what this is but hey this is it anyway hold down a click over the direct selection tool for the group
selection tool and then select your line once selected press v for the selection tool to enable
scaling and other edits to this part of your design for example we could actually increase the
stroke weight and move it around the inside shape and remember the keyboard shortcut is shift and d
next something that solves an annoying problem that you might have faced in adobe illustrator
now my design consists of two shapes and i want the left edge anchor points to be the
exact same location precisely now if i press command or control y to enter into outline mode
we can see that isn't the case this likely has happened to you in the past especially on more
complex designs with many different anchor points however press a for the direct selection tool
and then select the anchor points in question you then come into object and then the average
option found here we now can align them horizontally or vertically but clicking
the both option will bring them to the same point and that results in one happy designer
a quick expansion on the anchor point thing we also can align things with precision by using
the align menu again select the anchor points you want to align and then we can choose various
different ways to align them in this instance we might design this star where the top point
isn't symmetrical and the design just looks a bit off the align window can help us if we select the
three anchor points and then use the horizontal distribute center function so let me skew the
design to make the change obvious sometimes we do need such functions to remain properly
precise as you can see this does make everything precise next another problem solver but this time
with the pathfinder tool and no it isn't the compound path keyboard shortcuts that everyone
knows about at this point quite often when we use operations such as the divide function we have
an annoying issue that crops up now that i've divided my design along the vector paths i can
ungroup everything to have individual sections and then just remove the sections i don't want
but here there is an invisible section remaining in the very middle i bet that
you've had this happen to you many times over at some point in your workflow now coming
into the layers panel we can in fact confirm there is a vector shape here that's invisible
the solution to this is in fact very simple come into the pathfinder panel click here to
open up the options and then check the remove and painted option now when we go back in and
perform the divide function illustrator is going to remove the shapes that are not filled with
anything thus removing the annoying task of deleting invisible objects on your artboard
now here's a quick keyboard shortcut that will save you heaps and heaps of time in the long run
some keyboards might not even have this key but the symbol we're looking for is called the back
quote on my keyboard it is below the tailed symbol which is that kirby like
thing right here anyway press command and back quotes or control and back quotes and
this will toggle between different windows in illustrator this will save you time having
to click through many different documents when you do have a busy workload on the go
next something people often forget about illustrator and that is that illustrator
is in fact a mathematical machine now i've got my logo design right here and let's
say for presentation purposes or for final outputs i want it to be exactly 25 smaller
now we can open the transform window in the top drop down menu or i do have it right here
in the height and width values i can literally just type in 25 and illustrator will crunch the
numbers and scale my design by 25 now you can use this across so many different tools
and functions within illustrator and it's just something to keep in mind that's very very handy
and next a friendly reminder of something truly awesome but also how to make the most out of it
now to use the smooth tool which can be found here under the shaper tool we first
have to select it then select our design and then select it once again now what a headache that is
am i right we will soon see to that problem but just don't forget that you can double click the
tool to change how precise or how smooth you want the end results and also just look how ugly and
unsmooth this curve is this smooth tool manages to smoothen things out with just a few clicks now you
can probably tell how much i like this tool and you should like it a lot too but to make it more
accessible let's jump into the keyboard shortcuts menu search for the smooth tool itself and then
give it a hotkey preference by default it isn't actually given one by illustrator but considering
it's such a pain to navigate to every time you want to use it we just might as well give it a
hockey and this is especially true for people who work with illustrations quite a lot if that's you
then i suggest you do this right away and you'll thank me later about this move tool also don't
forget that if you want to learn more about adobe illustrator and the wonderful things that you can
do with the software just click a video on screen and until next time design your future today peace
you