Over the years, I've been passionate about teaching others as much as I can about Adobe products, mainly around the use of Illustrator and other design products and workflows. I've been extremely fortunate to work at great design studios and at Adobe as well. I'm also thankful for the tremendous support I've received from the overall community as an educator and trainer -- covering books, white papers, Fridays with Mordy, and most recently, video training over at Lynda.com. Thanks to all of you -- my dedicated fan base -- for all of your amazing support.
By far, the video training I've been doing at Lynda.com has been the most exciting, as it allowed me to present material in a fashion similar to what I have offered in my live seminars and to my clients. This was especially evident to me in my development of the Illustrator Insider Training series at Lynda.com. Truth be told, there's a lot of innovation at Lynda.com around education in general.
With that in mind, I'm thrilled to announce that I've accepted the position of Director of Content at Lynda.com, covering the Design, Web + Interactive, and Developer segments. In this new role, I believe that I can extend innovation in training across more than just one or two Adobe products.
You'll still be hearing plenty from me... of that you can be sure :)
November 8, 2011
September 13, 2011
Building A Better Pathfinder
It's true. Many of you have heard me utter the words "Pathfinder is dead to me". I'm surprised I haven't even received death threats from the Illustrator faithful for making such a remark. In all honesty, I made that remark when I discovered the power of the Live Paint feature that was added to Illustrator in CS2.
But then Adobe added the Shape Builder tool in CS5. And while I was initially unimpressed with it, I have come to love it. To the point that I've designated it as the surprise sleeper feature of CS5. It gives me the visual aspects of Live Paint, but the edit-friendly paths of Pathfinder without the need for group structure. And I'm able to apply variable-width strokes and brushes (something that Live Paint doesn't support). At the same time, I've been using the original Pathfinder commands every once in a while too.
But I still have a workflow issue with both the Shape Builder tool and with Pathfinder (they both use the same technology to work), and that is that once you use the Shape Builder tool, or once you apply a Pathfinder command, you lose your original paths. All you are left with is the result of the Unite, or the Minus Front, or the Divide (the three most-used Pathfinder functions). This is problematic when you need to reuse one or more of the original paths for other Pathfinder functions, or for other tasks.
Anyone who relies on Pathfinder is probably very much aware of this issue, and it's why many have trained themselves to always copy, paste, and hide, or lock the original paths before applying the Pathfinder. This way there's an original unscathed path that you can always go back to. But because I was away from Pathfinder for so long, this really stood out as an issue for me (this problem doesn't exist with Live Paint).
So I set out to build a better pathfinder -- specifically for the Divide function -- as it is the worst offender when it comes to this issue. My goal was to avoid adding tedious steps, but to make Divide into a non-destructible function so that I wouldn't lose my original paths. I call it "Super Divide" and I employed an Action to make it work. Here's what I did:
1. Create two overlapping shapes and select them. In order to record the Action, we'll need to have something to apply the commands to.
2. Click the Create New Action button in the Actions panel, and name the action (I called mine Super Divide). You can also assign a keyboard shortcut to make life easier if you're into that kind of stuff. Then click Record.
3. Choose Edit > Copy.
4. Choose Edit > Paste in Front.
5. From the Pathfinder panel, click the Divide button.
6. Click the Stop Recording button at the bottom left of the Actions panel.
That's it. You're done. Now, if you need to apply the Divide function, simply press the keyboard shortcut you assigned to the Action. Or, you can choose "Button Mode" from the Actions panel flyout menu and just click the Super Divide action when you want to apply it. It's the exact same click as clicking the button in the Pathfinder, only you still have your original paths to work with.
If you like this technique, then you might also want to create additional Actions for Super Unite and Super Minus Front.
But then Adobe added the Shape Builder tool in CS5. And while I was initially unimpressed with it, I have come to love it. To the point that I've designated it as the surprise sleeper feature of CS5. It gives me the visual aspects of Live Paint, but the edit-friendly paths of Pathfinder without the need for group structure. And I'm able to apply variable-width strokes and brushes (something that Live Paint doesn't support). At the same time, I've been using the original Pathfinder commands every once in a while too.
But I still have a workflow issue with both the Shape Builder tool and with Pathfinder (they both use the same technology to work), and that is that once you use the Shape Builder tool, or once you apply a Pathfinder command, you lose your original paths. All you are left with is the result of the Unite, or the Minus Front, or the Divide (the three most-used Pathfinder functions). This is problematic when you need to reuse one or more of the original paths for other Pathfinder functions, or for other tasks.
Anyone who relies on Pathfinder is probably very much aware of this issue, and it's why many have trained themselves to always copy, paste, and hide, or lock the original paths before applying the Pathfinder. This way there's an original unscathed path that you can always go back to. But because I was away from Pathfinder for so long, this really stood out as an issue for me (this problem doesn't exist with Live Paint).
So I set out to build a better pathfinder -- specifically for the Divide function -- as it is the worst offender when it comes to this issue. My goal was to avoid adding tedious steps, but to make Divide into a non-destructible function so that I wouldn't lose my original paths. I call it "Super Divide" and I employed an Action to make it work. Here's what I did:
1. Create two overlapping shapes and select them. In order to record the Action, we'll need to have something to apply the commands to.
2. Click the Create New Action button in the Actions panel, and name the action (I called mine Super Divide). You can also assign a keyboard shortcut to make life easier if you're into that kind of stuff. Then click Record.
3. Choose Edit > Copy.
4. Choose Edit > Paste in Front.
5. From the Pathfinder panel, click the Divide button.
6. Click the Stop Recording button at the bottom left of the Actions panel.
That's it. You're done. Now, if you need to apply the Divide function, simply press the keyboard shortcut you assigned to the Action. Or, you can choose "Button Mode" from the Actions panel flyout menu and just click the Super Divide action when you want to apply it. It's the exact same click as clicking the button in the Pathfinder, only you still have your original paths to work with.
If you like this technique, then you might also want to create additional Actions for Super Unite and Super Minus Front.
June 1, 2011
ASK MORDY: Eyedropper Tool Woes
This question comes in from Dan:
If I have a white rectangle with some transparency applied and it sitting directly over another rectangle with a red fill, what you end up seeing where they overlap is not red, not white but pink. Not rocket science....I know. However if I want to use the eyedropper to pick up that pink color....I cannot do it. I've been researching and fiddling with eyedropper settings but no matter what I do, eyedropper only picks up "white"; it sees the objects, not the color. If I take a screen shot of Illustrator and place that flattened 2-dimensional image back into Illustrator, now eyedropper "sees" the pink and picks it up if I shift-click. How do you make eyedropper pick up the resulting pixel color....not the fill color when you're dealing with transparencies?
That's a great question, Dan. Just to illustrate the "issue" here, say you have two shapes -- a yellow and a blue rectangle -- that overlap. The blue shape is set to multiply, so where the two shapes overlap, you see green. If you use the Eyedropper tool to sample the area that "looks" green, you'll actually pick up blue. That's because the Eyedropper tool is picking up the fill attribute of the rectangle -- not the final color that's a result of the transparent effect.
 |
| Sampling from the "green" area will actually result in a blue color. |
May 2, 2011
Why Slicing in Illustrator (Still) Matters
In 2001, Illustrator 10 was released with a feature called Slicing. For the most part, slicing is a way to "chop up" a large graphic or parts of an overall design into rectangular regions. These regions are then "sewn together" on a web page using HTML tables, where each rectangle -- or slice -- represents a single cell in the overall table. At the time, building HTML content with tables was a common technique.
These days however, the majority of web pages are built with the far more versatile CSS standard. It's also rare that anyone uses Illustrator to assemble full web pages (graphics are usually created in Illustrator and then exported and assembled using CSS in a program like Dreamweaver for example). So the slicing feature in Illustrator today goes unnoticed for the most part.
In truth, those who use Illustrator for interactive design more often create individual art elements such as various-sized banners for ad campaigns, buttons or graphics for web pages, or icons for apps. Even those who design entire web pages in Illustrator usually end up rebuilding them with CSS, and export individual graphics as needed.
So when it comes to using Illustrator for this type of work, a valuable feature would be one that allows a user to easily define multiple areas within a single document that could each be exported in a variety of formats (PNG, JPG, GIF, etc). When the multiple artboards feature first appeared in Illustrator CS4, and when the feature was enhanced in Illustrator CS5, many thought it was a perfect fit for this kind of work.
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