8 Must-Know Tricks to Master Adobe Illustrator in 2024

today you're going to learn eight tricks that professionals use to help you master Adobe Illustrator in 2024 and all of these techniques will save you huge amounts of time and make your life considerably easier and uh this is a bit embarrassing but despite me using illustrator for the last 17 years one of these tricks I learned just a few weeks ago so see if you can guess which one it is because uh it's probably not the one you think so first up let's take a look at how to merge overlapping anchor points so you can see I have a corner here and if I select the direct selection tool I've got two anchor points that are on top of each other whoa don't know what's going on there come on illustrator calm down and this happens a lot when designing with illustrator and it is a problem and whilst there isn't a native way to merge overlapping anchor points in illustrator there is a script that can do that for us so switch to your main selection tool and just make sure the shape is selected then download the script Linked In the video description and then go to file down to scripts and here you'll see a few defaults go down to other script and select the script you downloaded merge overlapped anchor. jsx let's open this up the number of anchors before after path item 1 4 3 and this popup will very kindly tell us how many anchor points are left after removing all of the overlapping points so let's click okay and now with the direct selection tool you can see those two overlapping anchor points have been merged together and I have no idea what this weird thing is illustrator what on Earth are you doing what's going on hey all right Dan calm down and next up is a super easy way to slice up shapes into multiple pieces so this one is short and sweet as you can see I've got a circle with some lines cutting through it and if I hop into outline mode with command or control y you can see this is what it looks like and I'm going to use these lines to cut this circle into multiple segments to do this it's really simple let's just select everything and then from the Pathfinder panel let's click the three dots and select the bottom left option here divide now if I switch into outline mode again you can see we have five different segments and all we need to do is select the shape command or control shift and G to ungroup everything and now I can separate all of these pieces now let's look at how to create custom guides from an existing object so you can see I've drawn a bunch of lines and shapes and I would like to convert these to guides and the main advantage to having these as actual guides is the illustrator will recognize them as guides so you can snap to them a lot more easily now this is all grouped together so let's select everything go to view and then all the way down towards the bottom go to the guides menu and then go make guides and you can see these are now converted into guides which make snapping and aligning things to the guides much easier and I can also use keyboard shortcuts like command or control semicolon to hide or show the guides and here we go this is the one that I learned recently from someone on one of our streams and that is how to consistently extend multiple anchor points this one this is a gem so this technique is something that I actually learned very recently on one of the streams and whilst this bunch of lines might look a bit random it's a technique that I can guarantee will come in handy for pretty much everything so if I wanted to extend the length of all of the angled lines so they touch the vertical line I would use the direct selection tool select all these end anchor points and even with my smart guides turned on you can see the angle shifts and changes and even though it does Snap I've lost that angle which when designing logos can be a bit of a problem so let's undo that one way around this is you can switch into outline mode with command or control y this makes it a little bit easier because we don't have the styling of the stroke to contend with but if I drag them again you can see we still get that that movement and ideally we don't want to eyeball this so once again let's undo that and the way around this is to do this staying in outline mode let's do the first one and if I extend this in outline mode you can see it stays on that same angle and I'm going to follow that up until it meets so there we go that's a perfect extension with the smart cides actually being useful and whilst we could go and repeat that on the two lines below there's a much quicker and easier way to do this so now we've done one let's go and select those two anchor points below and then go to object down to transform and select transform again and there you go it's repeated that last action and moved those two bottom anchor points in exactly the same way that we did the top and I can now come out of outline mode and we've extended all of these lines with maximum Precision next is a useful technique to square off sharp corners and I did a shorts video for this a while ago where loads of people said hey look at this guy doesn't know what he's talking about before obviously providing their own Superior Solution of course and uh I tested all of them and to date no one has provided a better working solution so if you're into designing type faces or drawing letter forms and you'd like to maintain the ability to edit all of your stroke properties then this technique is one that I use all the time to square off those angular Corners yet still keep everything fully editable so sorry if that sounded a bit ranty oh felt good to get that one out so yeah put that in your pipe and smoke it you mean comedy people you so here you can see I've drawn a letter N but the problem is I get these spiky bits at the top which is fine if it's a heavy metal font but if you'd like something a bit more sensible a bit more akin to your standard letter N what we would normally have to do is grab the rectangle tool and then draw these ridiculous boxes at the top and at the bottom and try and block it off using white obviously this isn't ideal and there is a better way of doing this so let's get rid of those ridiculous white boxes and I'm going to select the pencil and then make sure that the shape is selected and then I'm going to add a couple of extra anchor points let's add one here and we'll go and add one down there now I'm going to switch to the direct selection tool with a on the keyboard and I'm going to drag this first additional Anchor Point on top of that top left one and of course don't worry that it looks the same what I'm going to do now is simply press the right arrow key on my keyboard and move this Anchor Point one pixel to the right there we go we have a flat top and if You' like that top to be a bit wider you can press it more times so let's go for a few more there we go and let's do the same with this bottom one as well drag it on top left Arrow key make sure you press it the same number of times so the top and bottom are identical and then all you've got to do is line up these other parts of the letter N so I'm going to select this point here hold shift and select this point here and I would definitely recommend using some guides for this next step but if you press s for the scale tool what we can do now is drag this very carefully whoa not like this not to the side make sure you hold down shift and it will snap it to that vertical axes hopefully it will anyway and let's go up like that there we go and this technique is especially useful for letters like n and Zed or Z for my American friends right this next one should be easy but it's not because uh reasons and that's how to correctly apply gradient to some text so you can see I've added some text with the word Panda don't ask why it was the first thing that came into my head and if I select this and then try to apply a gradient you can see it does absolutely nothing why this doesn't work who knows but there is a work around so let's undo that and the first thing to do is remove the fill so let's go and remove the fill and then go up to window and open up the appearance panel now from the bottom of this panel let's add a new fill and then from the drop down up here I can then go and pick one of the default gradients and you can see using this technique it lets me apply gradient to the text and if you'd like to change the colors just open up your gradient panel you can see I've got mine docked here and then you can change the colors to something you like and there we go our text has a gradient and the best thing about this technique is the text is still fully editable there we go panda panda panda now if you find yourself getting carried away designing things like icons and suddenly realize oops these all need their own artboard let's say you want to export them all in one go this trick is a huge timesaver so you can see I have a rather cutesy icon that I've created and this technique is especially useful if you have more than one object so first of all I'm going to zoom out and I'm going to move this icon off of the current artboard so let's pop it in this space here and let's just shimmy over to the right there we go and the quickest way to create an artboard to the exact size of the selected object is to go and select the artboard tool and then hover over the object hold down shift you can see the cursor changes and then click and you can see the artboard is cropped perfectly to The Graphic and as you can imagine this is a massive time saer especially if you've got a ton of different Graphics that all need artboards and finally another artboard related trick can you rotate the artboard view in Adobe Illustrator yes yes you can so you can see I've still got my cutesy Ginger icon so the cutesy ginger icon is now back on the Main artboard and I can rotate the view for this artboard by going to the hand tool click and hold and then under here we've got rotate view tool hiding away there you sneaky little tool so let's select it and we can now freely rotate the view of the artboard who round and round we go right calm down down now obviously I've kind of messed up the view here and I don't want to keep working with everything looking a bit wonky so I can go up to view down to rotate View and then I can choose an angle or I can just select reset rotate view ah there we go back to normal and if you'd like to master a illustrator and Kickstart your career as a designer you'll find a link to my full master class in the description below but as always take care and I'll see you next time

Channel: Dansky

Views: 66,965

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Id: b62JxpVye-k

Length: 10min 9sec (609 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2024