did you know that in adobe illustrator you can adjust any numerical values simply by hovering
them over with your mouse and then by really going to town with that mouse wheel this is great for
moving a single digit at a time or go crazy and hold down shift while you're doing it to move in
increments of 10. this works literally everywhere in adobe illustrator and it's super cool
that is until you need to buy a new mouse after having worn out the wheel that's not so cool and
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so here we have a fresh looking gorilla who quite frankly is managing to rock the sunglasses better
than i ever could but behind him is a circle and we can easily go ahead and click that circle but
sometimes in adobe illustrator we end up having complex designs with many objects stacked on
top of each other if you want to easily click the object below hold down the command or the ctrl key
click just once and then click again to select the object below you can then make adjustments
in terms of color rotation size location and everything else that we like to do as designers
you'll find that it's pretty handy in a lot of different situations in adobe illustrator
so here's a great trick that will save you time in adobe illustrator and will probably reduce
stress helping you to live a longer more healthy life a longer healthy life is not guaranteed by
stool graphics the annoying problem is that when we are working on texts say for example here i'm
reducing the spacing between my letters by holding down the alt option key and nudging the characters
to the left or right what if i want to navigate to a different place on my artboard well normally we
would hold down the space bar and then click to drag which is making use of the hand tool
but in this situation pressing the spacebar just adds a space to my text so instead we
can hold down the alt option key which will switch to the hand tool while working on text
you can then hold down the command or ctrl key to access the selection tool this one really does
help in a lot of different workflow situations and i use it all the time here's a time saving trick
with the pen tool of course we need to press p for the pen tool first and foremost and then let's
draw out a path like so now as you probably do know holding down the shift key keeps my path at
straight horizontal vertical lines if we hold down the alt key on a pc or the option key on a mac
we can turn this a bland and boring anchor point into a more interesting and more useful one that
now has bezier handles again if you hold down the shift key you can keep things to those constrained
45 degree angles so i have two objects here on my artboards and let's go ahead and group them
with command or control g also then i'm going to apply a stroke to the entire group
let's make use of that mouse wheel once more to jack up the stroke weight in an instance wonderful
okay so now you'll notice that this stroke has covered each of the two shapes individually and
that might be what you want but it's not what i actually want today i want the stroke to move
around the edges only of the group and to do that we need to come into the appearance panel
in the appearance panel you need to move the stroke down to below the contents tab
that's right bring it all the way down and just like my future back balance during the
upcoming recession and like promised that mouse wheel technique works just about everywhere
okay adobe illustrator tip number six that you might not know is based around the type tool
so let's press t for that one and no that's not a tip of course the tip here is that if
you hold down the alt option key as well as shift you will notice the type tool changes
to the vertical type tool we can then switch between the awake type tool and the unconscious
type tool back and forth i don't really use vertical type all that much on my designs but
it's there if you need it and the shortcut is one that few know about or few remember so yeah thanks
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out envato elements linked down in the description box below if you want to learn more about adobe
illustrator just click a video on screen and until next time design your future today peace