There are sooooooo many tutorial out there on Adobe Illustrator! Now is the best time to jump into this program and learn it. If you are 100% new to the platform then please take the time to use Adobe’s built in learning tools to walk yourself through the tools, and windows. I am writing this blog for the folks who know how to poke around and make some things but perhaps you want to level up a bit.

Here are some things fun illustrator chops i use often

Logical Layers Palette

To be a designer one has to wrap one’s head around layers and how they function. In Illustrator, the layers palette is a little different than Photoshop. Each time you create a square or a circle each is going to be in an individual line but not in its own layer. It is important to first organize your layers and build your file structure based on what you are creating.

For example, you are building an illustration of a person, with text and a background color. It would benefit you (so you don’t drive yourself crazy) to put these elements in different layers named “person”, “text” and “background” or you run the risk of an eye on the face being in the background layer, or your text being in the person layer or or some other goofy file build that will be difficult to work with. If you are a working professional and you hand these files off to a printer or another professional it can make you seem disorganized and reflect poorly on you.

Artboards Are Powerful.

Art boards are about speed and efficiency more than anything. Say you are designing for social media. You can rapidly create for Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, etc if you create multiple art boards in one file and work on creating a visual rhythm across all platforms.

Another way to use art boards, say you designing a logo and you haven’t quite figured out which one you are going to settle on. Build a file where you give yourself a couple art boards to work through your ideas. Type Shift-O to activate the art board tool or Window>Art boards to open the side panel, and hold Option+drag and the art board tool to drag a copy of a single design and tweak the copy’s color as an exploration or it is a quick way to copy your original idea. Essentially, it is really effective in doing side-by-side comparisons. Because you can think of one art board being a single idea and other art boards being different concepts. Which lead to the next point…

Export Feature

Once you have all your awesome art boards and design strategy in place then….. EXPORT Y’all! Export ALL art boards!!! This is the happy result of planning and bundling work. It is so FAST to create several assets all at once and then rapidly export all art boards into a folder. You can do this twice, three times, delete everything, export a 4th time! It doesn’t really matter. If you are working for a client who needs jpgs at various sizes 72dpi, 300dpi or even 600dpi. It’s a great control feature to export into a folder titled “low-res” and “high-res” with the different settings.

Other Non-Pen tool Drawing Tools

While most people known the good ole pen tool in Illustrator for creating images, I have found more joy and functionality lately by using the BLOB tool and Pencil Tool. I recommend the purchase of a Wacom tablet in order to get the best out of these tools because they work well with fast paced drawing. The complimentary tool with this is also the Smooth tool which helps reduce excess points on a vector curve.

Masking with command 7 - I always associated masking with photoshop, but as I have worked along side other designers and looked at their file builds I have come to appreciate the power of a mask in Illustrator. Masking is easy. Place a photo in the file. Create a shape on top of that photo. Select photo + the shape and hit Command+7 and Illustrator will knock out the rest. Once you begin to use this feature the possibilities are endless.

So these are some of my favorite features in Illustrator and ones that I do not necessarily see in many lessons out there so I thought I’d bring them up in this blog post. Enjoy!!

Please reach out to me on LinkedIn if you have any questions or would like to connect!