10 Illustrator Resolutions for 2009

A while back, I started putting together a list of the features I thought that Illustrator users didn't use enough. When Illustrator CS4 came out, that list was somewhat modified, and this list is one that I've built from what I've seen out in the field. Whether it's doing onsite training at a company, reading emails that folks send to me, comments from users on forums, from attendees at conferences or seminars, or what I see being passed around on Twitter (follow me!), i've noticed certain questions that always come up -- ones that can easily be solved by learning a little bit more about the application you already know and use.

I had originally built this list under the title "10 features most people don't use in Illustrator, but should", but in the spirit of the new year, I've modified it to instead reference 10 possible resolutions for the new year. In other words, you don't have to do them all -- just pick one! That's right, pick one! I guarantee you'll be a happier Illustrator user for it.

1. USE THE APPEARANCE PANEL

You knew this one was coming, right? The Appearance panel is "the source" of all things about modern Illustrator usage. IT is the path to righteousness. If you aren't using it yet, you need to get with the program. Especially now in Illustrator CS4, the Appearance panel is even more central to your Illustrator experience, with its ability to apply attributes and effects directly from the panel. In fact, the Appearance panel's new functionality has opened more screen real estate for me, as I no longer need the Color, Swatches, Stroke, or Transparency panels on my screen anymore.

2. CREATE YOUR OWN NEW DOCUMENT PROFILES

Illustrator comes with four NDPs (New Document Profiles) plus two generic ones (Basic CMYK and Basic RGB), but those profiles are really all generic. Do you need all the color swatches that the Illustrator team put into each of the profiles? Are you always creating documents with just one artboard? How about symbols and graphic styles? You need to create your own New Document Profiles, with YOUR custom settings, colors, and content. I have NDPs set up for specific clients, for specific jobs (preset ad banners or ad sizes, etc.) and more.

3. CREATE YOUR OWN CUSTOM WORKSPACE

Adobe Illustrator CS4 ships with several wonderful workspaces already preset - such as "Like InDesign" and "Like FreeHand". There are also ones like "Web" and "Printing and Proofing". But again, these are general settings that aren't optimized for the way that YOU work. The point of Adobe including these workspaces isn't so that you should actually use them. It's so that you should be inspired to create your own. For example, I've created my own "Web 2.0" workspace for the way I like to work with web graphics in Illustrator. The Web workspace that Adobe made simply puts every single web panel on my screen. Make Illustrator your own by making your own workspace.

4. TRULY UNDERSTAND LIVE PAINT

Ever since Live Paint was introduced back in Illustrator CS2, I've been praising the feature. The problem? It's a horrible name to give a feature, considering that painting is only the least of what it does. Live Paint changes the way you THINK about Illustrator, and when you truly understand what it does and how it works, you'll find yourself in a whole new world, where vector artwork is pain-free. I even got Deke McClelland hooked on the feature a while ago.

5. LEARN LIVE COLOR

Much like Live Paint, Transparency, and the Appearance panel, the Live Color feature in Illustrator is a game-changer. It allows you to completely control color in your document, no matter how that document was created. If you are in prepress or are in art production, where you handle other people's files all day, you have GOT to learn to use it. I've always said that Live Color wasn't a specific feature, but more of a color "engine" that enables color editing in a whole new dimension in Illustrator. It seems Adobe listened because in CS4, the word Live Color appears nowhere at all. In fact, Adobe renamed the Live Color dialog to the Recolor Artwork dialog. Now THAT's a descriptive name. Now, if they could only make that dialog easier to use...

6. EXPLORE ILLUSTRATOR'S FREE CONTENT

Many Illustrator users are aware of the "annoying" standard swatches and symbols that appear in every document. Remember that Adobe provides these to help others learn how to reverse engineer them and create their own. But Adobe DOES ship with plenty of cool content that you CAN use. For example, Adobe includes some pretty cool brush and symbols libraries, features some great graphic styles, and comes with some really great templates (choose File > New From Template). And before you start rambling about how you're a real designer and you don't need templates, Adobe also includes a collection of helpful blank templates that make pretty good use of the multiple artboards feature.

7. USE ISOLATION MODE

There was a time (back in Illustrator CS2), when I hated the isolation mode feature in Illustrator. However, that's changed. Now, Isolation mode is a beautiful thing. Most Illustrator users are familiar with the whole "lock, unlock, lock, unlock" game that you play constantly when editing artwork. It isn't easy working on art when you've got tons of paths and objects all overlapping each other. In Illustrator CS4, you can even isolate individual paths. It's too powerful a feature to ignore.

8. TRY SMART GUIDES

With the updates in CS4, Smart Guides has a lot going for it. If you find the feature annoying, that doesn't mean your only course of action is to turn it off. Rather, learn how to control it. Smart Guides bring a new snapping behavior to CS4, and I suspect you'll like it.

9. GET ORGANIZED WITH LAYERS

I've always said that there are two kinds of people in this world: people who use layers, and people who don't. It's not much different than the clean desk/messy desk thing. But in reality, while using layers was just a "nice" thing in the past, there are just too many benefits to working with layers now to overlook the feature. Especially when you consider that now more than ever, we're repurposing art for so many different needs. In addition, so many other applications now recognize Illustrator's layers, including Photoshop, InDesign, Flash, Fireworks, Acrobat, the new Adobe Flash Catalyst, etc. That list will only continue to grow. Getting comfortable with creating layered documents now will only make things better for you now and in the years to come.

10. THINK ABOUT WEB SLICING

OK, I'll admit it, this one took me by surprise. Are you kidding me? Web slicing in Illustrator? But the truth is, I just finished recording a new Lynda.com title covering using Illustrator for the Web and as I was messing around with a few concepts, I realized just how useful slicing can be. I'll plan do write up a blog post on this specifically, but unlike multiple artboards, you can create multiple-sized slices in a single document and name them all, and export them to a web format all in one step. And I've found that Illustrator is most useful for those one-off web graphics -- the banners, the buttons, the art elements, etc. Generating lots of those, if you use slices right, is not only easy, it's been there for so many years. And we've never used it. It's worth another look.

Getting Pantone support with kuler

It's often that I hear folks talk about how wonderful kuler is, but it's also often that I hear print designers complain that they wish they could also find Pantone colors with kuler as well. After all, getting RGB or even CMYK values doesn't help them when they need to assign a Pantone color to a logo or a job they are working on.

Well, if you have Illustrator CS3 (and my survey says that more than half of you do), then you'll be happy to know that your worries are no more. The Live Color feature in Illustrator CS3 can easily provide that information. In fact, with kuler also available from within Illustrator, it's literally a few clicks of a mouse to turn any kuler theme of colors into Pantone equivalents.

I've recorded a video podcast over at Terry White's most excellent Creative Suite Podcast site, that shows the exact steps you need to follow to:

1. Use Illustrator's kuler panel to find color themes
2. Add kuler themes to Illustrator's Swatches panel
3. Use Live Color to convert kuler themes to Pantone equivalents
4. Export Pantone kuler themes from Illustrator as .ASE files
5. Import Pantone kuler themes into InDesign

In somewhat related news, X-Rite has recently announced that they are acquiring Pantone. X-Rite has been pretty successful in the digital color space, while Pantone is considered by many to be the standard system used not only in the print world, but in textiles and even interior design as well. Time will only tell what this means for designers moving forward, but it's certainly something to keep an eye on. More info here.

Lite Brite Art (Part 3 of 3)

Are you ready for the grand finale? Make sure you buckle your seatbelt though -- this third and final segment of our Lite Brite project dives headlong into the Live Color feature in Illustrator CS3 -- a fun ride indeed, but it's head and shoulders above the child's play we spoke about in parts one and two.

7. As we last left things, we had some artwork that had been successfully converted to rows and rows of colored circles, giving the appearance of Lite Brite pegs, on a black background. However, Lite Brite only came with pegs in 8 different colors. Right now, the artwork uses many more colors than that. So we'll need to reduce the artwork to use only the 8 Lite Brite colors. Our first step in doing that will be to create a new group of colors that contain these 8 colors. We'll also add a black color to the group (for a total of 9 colors), as this will allow us to make certain pegs "disappear" into the black background, giving the appearance as if there was no peg. You can either create a new color group on your own (I found some references to the 8 colors that Lite Brite uses on the web), or you can download one that I created.

Lite Brite Colors

Once you download this file and unzip it, you'll have an Adobe Swatch Exchange file (.ASE) which you can load into Illustrator, Photoshop, or InDesign. Simply choose Open Swatch Library > Other Library from the Swatches panel flyout menu and choose the Lite_Brite.ase file. Once you've opened it, drag the folder icon of the color group into your swatches panel to add the group to your document.

Disclaimer: Being color retarded as I am, I didn't do that great of a job creating all of the Lite Brite colors. In fact, I even saved them as CMYK (what was I thinking?). In any regards, feel free to edit my colors to make them more bright, vibrant, and glowy (I just made up that word, but I like it).

8. Now that we have our color group, choose Select > All and then choose Edit > Edit Colors > Recolor Artwork. This opens the Live Color dialog box, with the Assign panel chosen. Click on the Color Reduction Options button (it appears right beneath the Edit and Assign tabs) and specify the Lite_Bright library in the Limit to Library setting. Choose Hue-forward for the Sort setting (the Lite Brite library of colors that I created were also arrange in a hue-forward order), and for the Colorize Method, choose Exact. This is important because by default, Illustrator uses tints or shades of colors to simulate other colors. However, Lite Brite pegs can’t be tinted, they are always one solid color. By choosing Exact, you’ll only get solid full color pegs. Finally, uncheck the Preserve White, Black, and Grays options. Click OK.



9. At this point, Live Color is remapping every color it encounters with a color from the Lite Brite library, but to make things easier to edit, we’ll want to combine all of these colors to create 9 distinct rows of color (8 for the colors, and one for black). Click on the Lite Brite color group in the Live Color dialog, and all of the current colors will now be grouped nicely into the 9 rows we need, each mapped to a single Lite Brite peg color.



However, we have a problem. As you'll notice, we lost a lot of white color in the area of the clown's face. This happened because we didn't preserve white or black, and Illustrator ended up grouping the black and white colors together, mapping them both to black. You can clearly see this by scrolling to the bottom of the colors. The last color contains similar shades of black colors, but also has two white colors as well (see area circled in red in screenshot).



10. We can fix the problem easily though. Holding the Command key (Control on Windows), click on the two white color to select them. Then, drag both of them up into the color row that is currently being recolored to the light color, near the top (see screenshot).



Now, the clown's face contains the detail we're looking for. Click OK to accept the colors.



11. As a final step, in order to make this really look like Lite Bright, we'll need to adjust the pegs somewhat. Upon closer inspection of the grille on a Lite Brite, you will notice that the holes aren't stacked perfectly in a vertical and horizontal fashion. Rather, they appear offset. Depending on how many rows of pegs you've created, this can be somewhat tedious to adjust, but it makes a huge difference in the final result. Use the Selection tool to select all of the pegs in every other row in your illustration. This might be easier to do in Outline mode. Once they are selected, use the arrow key on your keyboard to nudge them a bit to the right or left to create the offset appearance.



And that's it! You've created a fantastic illustration that simulates Lite Brite art! Now I know that it’s rare you would ever want to create this kind of look to begin with (watch, now every ad and website I’ll see for the next month will use this effect), but it goes much deeper than that. The techniques you learned in these three segments ARE things you'd use often. Hopefully, you can take things from these techniques that I've shared and do some wild things on your own. If you do, share them with me! I love seeing what people who are really creative (not fakers like me) do with Illustrator.

Enjoy!