MAX SESSIONS Hi there, I'm Callum, and welcome to my Adobe MAX video, all about Adobe Illustrator's tips and tricks. Now, if you don't know much about me, I'm a freelance graphic designer. I'm based in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. I've worked with agencies and studios and big brands, and now I've kind of pivoted to do more educational stuff on social media. So, yeah, if you haven't seen my content, it's basically just like short, snappy tips and tricks all about Adobe programs and mainly just Adobe Illustrator, because I know that a lot. Yeah. Anyway, let's just dive straight into it. Just a PSA, I am working on a MacBook, so when I'm talking about certain key shortcuts, it will be Mac iOS. So if I say Command, I mean Control on Windows. If I say option, that's obviously Alt on the Windows machines. So, yeah, just to let you know that is kind of how I'm set up right now. Okay. So as I say, this is gonna be super-fast, quick. It's not really much order to it. I'm just going to share loads of tips and tricks and that's it. So let's just dive straight into it. So this kind of first section is all about typography. So I have this lovely title font here, but I want to basically take some of this body text and make it the title. As you can see, if I paste this in though, it basically copies this whole format and ignores this text here. And that's kind of annoying. Like, I could obviously just like type it in manually, as you can see, but it's not the best way to do it. So there's a little tip I found out, and interestingly enough, someone in my comments actually said that this works across loads different programs as well, not just Adobe Illustrator. So at this time when I go to paste N, which is the shortcut Command V or Control V, if you also hold the option key or the Alt, see, I'm trying to cover Windows and Mac at the same time. It's a mouthful. So, yeah, just hold the option key and then just Command V to paste in. And look, it keeps the format we're pasting into. It doesn't think that I want it to look like this. It keeps everything that I'm pasting into. Yeah, it's a total lifesaver. I love it. When I found out about it, I just had to share it because it's just so good and it's been something I've really wanted for a long time. Okay, moving on to another typography trick. So I've got some letters here. They've been outlined on groups and we're going to start looking at the Pencil Tool. Now we all know the Pencil Tool. You kind of use it to draw shapes just like this. Let's add a color, so you can actually see it. So it's more like illustration, but now people are starting to use it for typography. So, first of all, before you do this, you want to make sure that in your pencil settings, you have it like this. I don't have it smooth up fully just because sometimes you lose control. It's easier if it's a little bit less than 100% smooth. And then just make sure everything is looking just like this. Then click okay. So now what is so fun is, if you want to edit your typography anyway, say you want this E to kind of have a little flick or something, a kick, I don't know what the technical term is, I'm sorry, typographers, all you do is just draw it out. And look, it connects to the letter. It completely updates. This is just super handy if you have like a nice logo and you like the font, but you just want something a little bit more custom. Yeah, the Pencil Tool is your friend. Let's you just, like, draw if you want to connect to this M. And there you go. It's pretty cool, right? There's so many opportunities you can play around with this. This is just obviously a very simple way of doing it, but it's just a really great way to update your typography using something as simple as the Pencil Tool.

Okay, moving on, I told you this is going to be quick, so grab your notepad, take some notes. Get ready to pause or rewind.

So we have some nice type here. What I like to do is if I want to make this wider or tighter, I could obviously go over here and edit all these settings here or manually type in some numbers, but all you have to do is just hold the option key on Mac or Alt on Windows and then just the keys, left or right, will make it wider or tighter. And if you want to change the spacing of the lines, just press up and down. And then obviously, you can't see my fingers, but I'm pressing up and down, left and right. And it just changes things a lot faster than going over here and sorting all that out.

Okay. Another tip what I like to talk about is the Touch Type tool. So let me just get this like this. Right. It's inside your little type section. Here you can press shift and T to bring it up. If you're someone that doesn't like to outline text because you're just a bit nervous of committing straight away because it's like a destructive way of designing, Touch Type tool allows you to still play around with your live text. So all you do is just click on a letter and you can move it around. And as you can see, everything is still kind of adjusting to what I'm doing, which is really nice. You can obviously change the way it looks, you can rotate it, you can resize things, you can do kind of everything you want. But here is the magic part. If you go back into your Type Tool, you can still edit these letters. Obviously you couldn't do that if you had outlined it and you were just playing around with the shapes, which is not actually like a live text. So, yeah, you can change everything just like that. That's a live Touch Type tool. I love it. I thought it was a new tool, but I think it's actually been around for quite a while, but it's just really handy if you wanna be a little bit creative with your type but not committing to outlining. Okay, let's go. So next one is all about aligning objects with text. So before, if I wanted to send something, I would probably click the align on here and then...

There you go, I've already lost my line. This shows that that you shouldn't be doing it this way because now I've already lost my line setting somewhere. There they are. So, what is the best thing to do here is if you want this to be aligned with something else... It could be anything. It doesn't have to be text. You could obviously grab your ruler as well and create like a little center point, so you know you can drag this to stay there. But we don't want to do that. So all we do is just select both objects, and now we click onto the object again, and it creates a key object, which is this kind of like highlighted stroke around them. And then now anything that you've selected will center to this. So now I just press center align, and there you go. It center aligns to that. Super easy, right? Like, if I want to do it horizontal as well, just select both. Let's do that again. Select both. Click. And then click horizontal center align. That's it. Just a warning for a pro tip. We need to have a little star popping up saying that. You want to make sure that your text is outlined to be fully accurate because right now it's aligning to this full text box. Obviously, there's a lot of space here. So if you go to outlining the objects, outlining your text, sorry. Now, when you go to connect it together and align it, it'll be more accurate. That's just a pro tip to make sure that your text is outlined when you go to fully aligning stuff.

Okay. Moving on, this next section, we're moving away from typography now is more about quality of life, how to make things a little bit better when you're working with Adobe Illustrator. Now, before, I'm a bit embarrassed to say this, when I wanted to see how my artboard looked trimmed, I would create these little gray boxes just like this, just to kind of see how my artwork looked. As you can see, you know, what I'm doing, I'm just covering it up. That is obviously terrible. It is not right. It works, but it's just not the best way to do it. So all you do is just go to View and click Trim View. And now you can see your artboard trimmed. Very simple tip, but still a lot of people don't know about it. I keep on talking about it with people I work with and other designers. Still lots of people don't know about it. And why would you use Trim View? It's for things like this. Like I've just noticed, this doesn't look good. This gap here, let's make it bigger or let's take it away completely. It's just a great way to see how your artwork will look when it's exported, when it's printed, and you're not kind of looking at the whole thing outside the artboard. So that's the Trim View. I really love it. I use it all the time. While we're here talking about me being a messy designer, if you press Command Z or Control Z, you're going back. You're undoing things you've done. But sometimes you can reach a limit where you can't go back anymore. And for me, that makes me panic because I'm like, "Oh, my God, I need to get back to that thing that I've just done. And I can't because I haven't saved it." But you can change that. So if you go into Preferences and then go all the way down to Performance, as you can see here, History States, I've got it set to 200, which is the max States. So you can go back 200 times. I think when you get Adobe Illustrator, I think it would probably be set at 50, maybe 100, but I whack up to 200 just so I can go back as much as possible. Just a warning, though. If you don't have like a pro, strong high spec laptop, it might slow it down a little bit because Adobe Illustrator is remembering all these different States and you can go back a lot more. So if you do struggle with like the spinning wheel of death when your thing is freezing, when you're designing, maybe don't do 200, but maybe 100, maybe 100 will work for you. So, yeah, you can go back a lot more now, which is really great, and just saves you if you make a mistake and want to go back. Okay. Another quality of life things to talk about. Now, stroked objects. So if I just draw this lovely circle, actually I'm quite impressed I drew that circle without it looking terrible. If I want to resize this, you can kind of relate to this, right? Your stroke stays the same size and now it just looks terrible. It looks squeezed and squished. But there's a way to stop that from happening. Obviously, sometimes people can just expand the object and it will remove it from being a stroke. But we don't want to do that because it's nice to still keep these stroked effects and be able to edit them later. So what we're going to do is go back to our Preferences, but this time click on General and then you'll see this little option here, Scale Strokes and Effects. If you click that on, now when you go to scale something, it will automatically adjust to kind of the size you're scaling it. So now it's not all like bunched up and too thick. Yeah, just a really handy trick. If you're an illustrator or you draw lots of shapes and things and want to resize things for different formats, that is a good thing to make sure is pressed on.

Okay, this next section is kind of all about things you should start using.

Things that I've discovered that I really love that maybe other people will find useful. So first of all, we're gonna look at the Join Tool. So let's get this Pen tool out and draw some lovely shape. Now, let's pretend I wanted to connect this all together, but when I go to zoom in, I see that actually it's not connected. And I could obviously use the Selection tool and drag this to kind of make it look right. But that's not the best thing to do, is it? So I'm going to introduce you to the Join Tool. So I've already got it up here. Click here. And then it's as simple as just circling around the points you want to join. Just like that. Can you see? It's now joined. And this works with the most complicated shapes you can imagine. Let me just do something really messy like this. And let's pretend that I thought it was joined, but it's not. Yeah. So again, we just get the Join Tool. It's this little icon here, if you're wondering. And then just circle it. And there you go. It joins. It's pretty amazing, right? Super helpful if you're someone that draws lots of shapes and then you realize that something isn't connected. Okay. We're going to jump over to this beautiful piece of artwork that I've got on Adobe Illustrator's Beta. I'm just going to put it back to this color that I had originally. Now, as you can see, we have this Recolor option pop up. Now, we have this little wheel that probably some of you have seen, it's been around for a long time. But we're not gonna be using that today. We're going to be using this Generative Recolor section. Now, say I have this artwork and I really like the colors, but the client comes to me and says, "No, I want it to look warmer and pink and pretty and feminine." I can just type anything in, like, warm, pink, sunset, and then click Generate. Now by the power of AI, I will have all these color suggestions sent to me, so now I can just click and just see exactly how it's going to look and all these different colors. It saves me so much time because if I wanted to find all these colors that look really nice together, I'd have to go into my swatches and just find all these colors. It would take a long time. But with AI, these new features on Adobe Beta, I can just do all these different color options straight away. I love it. I hope it moves over to the standard Adobe Illustrator because I use it all the time. Just saves me so much time when I'm working with clients that want different things and want to see different options with different colors. Okay, back into the standard Adobe Illustrator. Now, I want to show you the Repeat tool now. This one is a really fun tool because I think a lot of people would get a lot of benefit from using it. So normally when you repeat an object, I just kind of hold the Alt Option key and just drag things. But then I have to make sure that the spacing is correct between all of them. But we don't want to do that. So let me show you to Repeat tool. You have all these options here. I'm going to go through them really quickly for you. The first Grid is probably my favorite because, as it says in the name, it just creates a grid of your shapes. You can just pull these kind of little tabs down and then you can also adjust the spacing as well. It's just so much quicker than doing this manually. That's what I want to share with you today. If you get anything out of this is just you're saving time because manually it's just not fun. So that is the Grid options. There is obviously the Radial one as well. Works exactly the same. You have just this little bar here where you can just adjust or make only a few. That's the Radial one. And then what is really great is the Mirror option. If we go back into Repeat tool, first we have to select our object. Very important. And then Mirror. And as you can see, you now have this little line that's going there and that is kind of your Mirror line. So now when I copy anything or move it around, resize, it just mirrors it. It's that simple. It's really handy if you want to make cool patterns or shapes. That's it. That's the Mirror Tool. Okay, moving on. I told you we're going quick. I hope you're taking stuff down in your notebooks. Okay, so if you know me in real life, you know, I've got a little bit of shaky hands. So when I'm drawing stuff by hand, it can look a little bit like this, it can look a bit wobbly, a little bit messy. And that is where my best friend, the Smooth Tool, comes in. So it depends how you maybe have your Toolbar set up, but mine is under the Pencil Tool. Smooth Tool here. It's kind of a little pencil with some lines through it. And then all you do, it's in the name, you just drag and rub. Rub, is that a technical term? I don't know. Sorry if it's not. You just rub along the lines and as you can see, it eventually just gets smoother.

So you don't have these kind of jagged, ugly edges anymore. It just creates a nice, smooth path. Obviously, you still might need to go into it and clean it up a little bit using other tools, but it's just an easier way if you scan something in and live trace and you want it to look a little bit smoother. I also use it as well if I'm just drawing a shape like this. If I'm not too good at kind of doing these nice curved edges. All I do is just use the Smooth Tool and it kind of just softens things up, makes things look a little bit smoother and a little bit kinder on the eye, if that's the effect you're going for. So, yeah, that's the Smooth Tool. I really love it.

Okay. We're now jumping into things, I'm going to say, what the pros use. I'm not going to call myself a pro. Maybe you are a pro already. But, yeah, when I found out about this, I shared it on TikTok and Instagram and everyone was really shocked. And then they were checking it out. And, yeah, people are saying they can't believe they didn't know this existed this whole time. So I presume most of you know that these little dots here, you can make your shapes have like soft curved edges. But did you know, as you can see, there's kind of like this little curved circle icon underneath my cursor, if you hold Option or Alt, this magic key that I always use and talk about, you can now change the corner settings. So you can do this kind of like indented or just straight lines. And it gives you so much options now to kind of make different shapes. Like I've got a little kind of diamond here now. Yeah, now I've got this shape, whatever you want to call it. Like, it's like kind of like a hexagon or something. But, yeah, that's it. Just press the Option, Alt key and you can do all these different shapes. You don't just have to do this curved edge. When I found out about it, it was very exciting. Shows that I'm a sad little graphic designer that gets excited by those things. So we're moving on to some guides, rulers, grids, kind of section now, because when I'm ever dragging a ruler, I always hate that it overlaps and goes on to all my other artboards. Like, as you can see, it's on here. And if I want to do stuff on this artboard, this is getting in the way. So let me just drag some more in.

There we go. So there's a few ways to sort this out. You could use the Scissor Tools, which I like. So you just click and it basically does what scissors do is cuts it off.

Sometimes you have to be very accurate where you're clicking. There we go. And now all you have to do is just delete these little points that you've cut off just like that. So now it stops it overlapping. But there is an even better way. I like to feed you of lots of different options of how to do things. If you hold Shift and O, you now select your artboard. Now, if you drag on your rulers or guides, I never know if they're rulers or guides, but you know what I mean. If you've had your artboard selected, now when you come out of it, you can see that it just stays inside that artboard. So you don't actually need to use the Scissor Tool to get rid of it. Yeah, I love that tip. It's very helpful if you work with guides and grids a lot because, yeah, you don't want overlapping things. I will also show you another little handy trick. I don't use this too often, but some of you might find it useful. If you make a shape, any shape at all, let's just give it a color, so you can see, if you press Command or Control on Windows and then press 5, it'll turn that shape into a guide. As you can see, this is a guide. I don't know how often you'd want to use this, but it's just handy to know if you want to make a shape, a guide, just press Command or Control 5. Okay, moving on. I know we spoke about the Repeat tool earlier, but I thought I had to speak about the Blend Tool because they're kind of similar, but you can use them in different ways. So if you have the shape here, and let me remove this guide that's haunting me. So if you have this shape here and you want to have it here, you can basically make them blend and you can duplicate the shapes here, and you have just a little bit more control than the Repeat tool. So if you go into the Blend options, and I always do Specified Steps, basically this number here is how many you want to go from here to here. So if I press 20, okay, when you press okay, by the way, you think that is when the tool start. But no, you have to go back into Blend and click Make.

First time users, you'll understand that is like a thing. You're like, "Huh, you have to press Make manually?" Okay. And then you just press Make and it does that. So it basically just copies it all the way to your new shape over here. And you're probably thinking, "Why would I need to use that? That looked really weird." I'm just showing in a very simple way. So, for example, you can use it with typography. So if I just duplicate this, I'm going to copy it. You'll see why in a second. Go back into your Blend settings, Blend Options. I'm going to do a higher number this time just to make it more obvious what I'm doing. Go back into Blend, click Make. And look, it automatically creates this kind of 3D stack shape. If I paste my text on top and make it white, you can start to see kind of what fun things you can do. I could add maybe a stroke to this object just so it kind of stands out clearer. Let's try and make that black or something. There you go. So it just kind of shows what the Blend Tool can do for typography. Obviously, this is a very simple way of doing it, but, yeah, have fun and play around with it because you can really do a lot with it. And while we're on the Blend Tool, I just wanted to mention that you can also do fun color gradients. So again, we're on Specified Steps, but we're going to do a very low number here like four. And then we're going to go back into this Make option. And look, it takes this color and this color, and kind of creates a little stepped gradient. It's very handy if you just want to find some colors that work in between, but you don't want to do it manually because, again, we don't like doing things manually. We like machines and Adobe to do it for us. So, yeah, that's another way to use the Blend Tool. I really enjoy it. Okay, we're getting near the end. We've covered a lot. I hope you're not... your brain isn't too fried with everything I'm saying and I'm not going too fast. This one here, we're gonna talk about something that really excited me. And when I shared it online, I got a lot of messages and they said, "Where has this been all my life? I've been using a clipping mask." And, yeah, I will show you what I used to do. So, basically, if I wanted to draw inside this object, I would, yeah, draw the thing I wanted to do. I would then copy this background object, paste in place, select all those bits I've drawn and then make a clipping mask. And that's just so many steps, and sometimes the clipping mask just doesn't work the way you want it to work. So let's go back to the original state. Now I'm going to introduce you to a tool that hopefully you don't know about, so you get very excited by it. Here, if you can see where my cursor's shaking, you have drawing modes. And what we're going to look at today is Draw Inside. And it says it, it's in the name. Basically now I'm just going to get a stroked pencil ready. Let's bump up this stroke, so you can see what I'm doing. And now, look, I can draw inside the shape straight away. It just automatically clips into it without having to do all those extra steps, without having to paste on top, clicking on clipping mask. It just does it for you automatically. It's so handy. Like, I know a lot of people like to add like grungy brushes and textures over their illustrations, and you can do that just by doing this Draw Inside mode. Yeah, I absolutely love it. Okay, we're moving on to the final one, but this is still very important. I haven't left the boring one to the end. So when you're working with different shapes, we have some are strokes, some are filled. If I wanted to make this stroked object the same color as this blue, I could obviously go into this blue, find the Hex code, copy it over like this. Obviously it works, but there's a better way of doing it. And that's why we're here today to do things in a better way. So if I make sure that my object is highlighted, I've got the stroke kind of on the top layer here. I'm going to go into the Eyedropper Tool. Now, before, I would just click it and it would copy this whole filled object, like, exactly copy it. And that's not I want because I lose my stroke. So what we're going to do this time is make sure the Stroke is selected, but now we're going to hold shift. And when we click, look, it now just copies the color. It keeps your stroke, just copies the color. It is so good. Like, every time I'm working with typography and I have some kind of stroked type and I want to make it the same color as something on my artboard, it will get rid of the stroke and now it doesn't, just by holding shift, that's it. It's super handy. It's a very simple trick. But, yeah, the simple tricks are the best sometimes. And that's it. We covered a lot today. I'm looking at the clock. It's 25 minutes, so I've reached the max amount of time I can speak to you today. With everything that I've covered, I think there's a lot for you to take on and use. I would love you to let me know if you found this useful. By the power of editing I'm sure my handle is going to be popping up somewhere on social media. As I said at the beginning, if you need extra help with anything, if you want something explained in more detail, just reach out. But, yeah, I've loved this. I've really enjoyed sharing these tips and tricks with you. And, yeah, I hope to see you soon. And enjoy the rest of your Adobe MAX. Bye.

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Tips, Tricks, and Secrets Every Illustrator User Should Know - VS301

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ABOUT THE SESSION

Technical Level: Beginner to Intermediate

Everyone loves to learn new Illustrator tips and tricks and hidden gems. Join short-form video creator and graphic designer Callum McHugh in this fast-paced rapid-fire session as he dives into his most popular tips and tricks that will help you get the most out of your time with Illustrator.

This session will cover a wide range of Illustrator topics including:

  • How to use tools you may never have used before
  • Ways to speed up and simplify your workflow
  • How to tackle common design issues and fix them

Technical Level: Beginner, Intermediate

Type: Session

Category: Inspiration

Track: Drawing, Painting, and Illustration, Graphic Design

Audience Types: Art/Creative Director, Graphic Designer, Illustrator

This content is copyrighted by Adobe Inc. Any recording and posting of this content is strictly prohibited.


By accessing resources linked on this page ("Session Resources"), you agree that 1. Resources are Sample Files per our Terms of Use and 2. you will use Session Resources solely as directed by the applicable speaker.

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