today's video is going to be packed with useful tips and hidden areas of adobe illustrator
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 gonna notice that i have the same document
but just version one and also version two 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 ctrl h on
a pc and this should hide anchor points so i can see the design a lot clearer so yeah
this first tip is an intuitive way to work on your design with two windows open at once
but let's move on to the next illustrator gem in today's video
now sometimes people ask me how do i fill my eyeboard with a completely bold solid color
now the trick is i often don't even have an artboard there at all so in the view menu we
can hide the artboards like so and now we're left with a giant workspace in illustrator
then we can come into the file and document settings and adjust the transparency option
now yours won't be orange as defaults and you can come into these squares and choose a color
there are various different options that allow you to select colors in different
and interesting ways and you even have a choice of sliders that include the hsb
scene here and that is of course hue saturation and brightness
so when you've chosen the color click the red x icon in the top left of the panel but
i forgot to mention that you can actually drag colors into the little swatch ui below seen here
now i don't want to check the background and so i'd like to have the same color on both
options which is my cool blue but once you have chosen your colors come back into the
view drop down menu and then click show transparency grid now you have a giant space
filled with a bold color of your choice before we move on to the other useful tips in today's
video we have some quick words from a long time sponsor of this channel and that is miller notes
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click the link in the description box below and head over to the sponsor of today's video miller
notes okay so tip number three is a setting that you probably have overlooked i'm sure many of you
know about the caps lock option on your keyboard as that will actually change some tool icons into
a crosshair as seen here and this helps with precision and also just a view of your design
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 then 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 do keep in mind that little setting in the preference settings
so the next tip is actually a few small tips when working with blends
but all of us know that you can press w on your keyboard and that will access the blend tool
and then you just click different shapes to generate a really smooth blend in illustrator
now one issue is that you don't have quick access to curve and you know bend your blend so to speak
because it's in a fixed straight line but even with a direct selection tool you can't really do
anything about it however if you press p for the pen tool and then hold down the alt option key
you can now curve and manipulate your blend path like so also you can hold down the command key
on a mac or the control key on a pc while you're using the pen tool and this will give access the
direct selection tool as seen here and releasing that button on your keyboard will actually revert
back to the pen tool not only that but when working with a blend and using the pen tool
you can change the direction of the blend by clicking on one end of the blend but the issue
is that you now have continued the path but that's not a problem because all you need to
do is hold down the command or the control key and then click away onto the upboard
let's take a look at that again one more time and yes simply just clicking away while holding
down command or control will deselect the path so i have two more tips that could very well
blow your graphic design mind away today and the first of those two tips relates to this star tool
and with this tool i'm sure many of you guys know that if you click the up and
down arrows while generating a star you can add or decrease the amount of points on your star
simple stuff but while generating that star you can also hold down the command
or control key and this will dictate the length of those points as seen here
so again with a star tool while holding down the command or control key we can go almost as smooth
as a circle and then all of the way up towards a really long spiked kind of shape and of course
everything else in between that commander control key has been quite influential in today's video
but yeah the final tip today is about color and illustrator has so many aspects that help you
guys with color when working on designs but in the swatches panel there is a color themes window now
this is something i've recently been making quite a big use of and that is in the explore option of
this panel now we can give searches for a kind of a mood a color an emotion a noun whatever you
want to search for there are many pre-built color themes that you can perfectly match to your design
but let's go back to my search for ice cream and you will notice there are three dots below every
single theme seen here by clicking that we can see we can add a color set to our library we can
add them to our swatches we can view them on the web or even edit them right now for my workflow i
often do add them to my swatches library and then i can just you know use them on my design as i go
but yeah there are some things you probably didn't know about
illustrator and of course if you do also want to improve your workflow when designing check
out millennial linked down below also click a video on screen to learn something else today
until next time guys design your future today peace
you