Author: grant

Chapter 12. Working Toward Printing 4:42

  • Create documents with their intended destination
  • When your destination is a printing-press if you want graphics printed up to the edge of the final size of the paper you need to consider that printing presses can’t press up to the edge so you print to a larger sheet of paper that is cut down to the desired size. The bleed is the addition to the page size that will be cut down from.

Chapter 10. Generating User-Defined Workspaces 5:54

  • The workspace is the layout of panels in your application
  • Add, remove, drag off, tab together, stack and dock them in, next to, and on top of each other
  • Save your workspace with a name
    • Easily restore it
    • Love it
  • Implement your personal workflow here
    • Can’t wait for setting up a keycap workspace
  • Menubar lists all panels available
  • AI is so easy and nice to use

Chapter 9. The Illustrator Control Panel 3:29

  • That bar between the top section and the main area is called the control panel
    • Andy called it the control panel
  • You can let it float or drag it to the top or bottom
  • Provides context-sensitive information and control on the selected object
  • First part of the area remains the same
  • Second part of the area changes per-tool
  • Anything colored orange pops up a panel right there instead of on the right side
  • When you do a select all you can bulk transform all object fills and strokes mapping one color to another
  • Can add and remove controls from the control panel
  • Master this!

Chapter 8. The Illustrator User Interface 5:28

  • All about the user interface
  • Menubar: Pulldown menus
    • Click-and-do
  • Top
    • Bridge management
    • Arrange files differently
    • Workspaces: Pre-set screen configurations of Panels
  • Below-Top: Options Bar, for what you are doing
    • Configuration for the tool that you are using
    • Options bar: Possible things that can be on the bar
  • Left: Tools
    • Hover over a tool to get a popup with the keyboard shortcut for the tool
    • Arrow on lower right corners means that there is more to do
      • Access via
        • Click and hold
        • Option-Click cycles through the options
      • Can rip that off into its own menu to be positioned anywhere
  • Objects are composed of fills and strokes, that is the box and donut
  • Screen modes controls full-screen-ness
  • Panels
    • Pre-configured via Workspace
    • On the right side
  • Bottom: Artboard
    • Select them
    • Shows type tool
    • Customizable by clicking on arrow in the bar for each section

Chapter 7. Controlling Illustrator Through Preferences 11:03

  • Preferences make the program yours
    • More efficient
    • Faster because of hardware
    • Perfect your workflow
    • Change per workflow
  • Random valuable settings follow
  • Preferences key: Command-K
  • General
    • Keyboard increment
      • Arrow key moves by one increment
      • Shift-arrow moves by ten increments
        • Important for symbol placement on keycaps
      • Set to 0.1mm
    • Constraint angle sets the axis on which your tools draw
    • Precise Cursors sets default between gross and fine selection cursor
      • Hold caps-lock to access tool via hold-and-release
    • Scale Stroke and Effects controls whether or not effects resized when you resize the object with drag-and-resize
  • Sync Settings
    • Not on my box
    • Synchronizes between multiple boxes
    • Settings
      • How do we reset all of them?
        • Via here
        • Delete the Adobe Illustrator Prefs file, it will be regenerated on startup
      • Can we define different settings profiles?
        • Seemingly not
        • Could use Git
  • Units
    • Configured with: Millimeters
    • For everything
    • Identify Objects By: XML ID
      • Might make it easier to work with Inkscape/XML tools?
  • Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks
    • Can speed up image manipulation by dividing load between disks
    • Depends on disk speed
  • User Interface
    • Brightness themes
    • Custom: 64%
    • Tabs and not-auto collapse are good