Master Adobe Illustrator: 17 Pro Tips For Graphic Designers

hey guys today we're going to be diving back into Adobe Illustrator and looking at an assortment of 17 tools and techniques that I can guarantee will make using illustrator and your life considerably easier this video is also sponsored by skillshare but we'll come back to that in a bit so first up we're going to look at a technique that is perfect for adding both shadows and highlights to your illustrations so I have a piz graphic but it's looking a bit flat so I'm going to start by selecting the cheese which is its own separate object I'm then going to grab the blow brush tool and go down here and select draw inside you'll see these Dash lines appear and I can now go and pick a slightly darker shade of yellow and I'm going to use this darker color to brush in some Shadows which will hopefully give the illustration a bit more depth so let's just brush in a shadow there and as you can see because we selected draw inside everything we draw will never extend beyond the bounds of the yellow shape so no need to be super precise and if I scribble absolutely everywhere you can see it doesn't go outside of the yellow but just make sure you switch back to normal mode once you're done next I'm going to demonstrate two no that's four two simple steps that will make your graphics both look better and be far more impactful seriously this makes a massive difference well this is uninspiring red circle and yellow text let's fix that by selecting the circle and adding a zigzag effect first of all let's select smooth and then we can play around with the values until we get something kind of like this that looks good right now we need to add one more effect and that is going to be pucker and bloat bring the pucker down ever so slightly and you can see it changes into one of those special offer Starburst graphics and this is still fully editable so if you select the red shape you can go to the appearance panel zigzag pucker and blow they're both still there right now we need to change that font aerial not very inspiring let's go for Shaka pow now let's scale it up to get some extra pow and there we go two simple changes to make this look much better okay next we absolutely must look at the fastest most painfree way to draw a heart shape this took me ages to get this right and that's because there's so many different ways to create a heart so for this technique we're going to use the pen tool we're going to click then click and drag holding shift Loop it back round and then move ever so slightly to the right click and hold shift and try and line up the two blue dots at the top then all we need to do is click on that first Anchor Point to close the path and we now have half of a heart now let's select this half and press o for the reflect tool and then hold alter option and click on that bottom Anchor Point and reflect this along the vertical axis make sure you select copy now let's select both halves and swap the fill and the stroke and lastly with everything selected we can unite these together from the Pathfinder panel and a heart is one of those shapes that you can actually distort freely and kind of get away with it so just have a play until you get something you're happy with now if you've never heard of variable fonts before Oh you are going to love this one yeah these are amazing and you can get them from a ton of different places this one is from Adobe fonts just click on variable fonts and it will filter them out and there's plenty you can scroll and quickly install and the one I'm using here is called Ivy epic and if I click this icon here I can adjust the width the weight and the slant using just these three sliders so I can find you in the font to exactly what I'm looking for for this next one did you know the illustrator has a super secret library of patterns that is of course tucked away and honestly odd wager that a lot of designers don't even know about it but that's about to change and definitely let me know in the comments did you or did you not know about this one first of all go up to swatches down to open Swatch Library we're then going to go to patterns basic graphics and we have a few different options here I'm going to select dots and any of these that I click on will be added to my swatches panel I've also just added those as a stroke uh oops so we can't see them but if we select the text and go and switch over to the fill I can then click on one of these patterns and that gets applied as the Swatch I know it's literally that easy however if we go back a step and set the fill color to none and then add a new fill from the appearance panel let's paste in that yellow color again now I can duplicate this what I'm going to do with the top one is set that to be the dotted pattern and this will now sit over the yellow and I can even change the blending mode to get something more subtle and just before we move on to the next one a big thank you to skillshare for sponsoring this video and if you haven't heard of skillshare it's the largest online learning community with thousands of classes for creatives that are led by industry Pros across film illustration design freelance life productivity and a lot more and the classes are all on demand so everyone can learn at their own pace me for example I've used skillshare to get better at drawing and more recently have completed one of their learning paths which is essentially a handpicked curation of several related classes and the one I did was called creative productivity Kickstart and sustain any project and there was six classes in total and the one by Thomas Frank on building habits that last that one was especially helpful and this class is packed full of very actionable advice that has helped me build better habits and get more done in less time so if that sounds good and you'd like to start learning today the first 500 people to use my link in the description will get a one month free trial of skillshare now if you're like me and unfortunately you're not a freehand letter wizard well this new feature in illustrator will make drawing smoother letter forms considerably easier so you can see I've got some guides to help me with my lettering and I'm going to select the pencil tool now I'm going to start drawing some letters and I'm doing this with a mouse and I'm doing this very very badly and honestly this isn't what I do however using an existing cursive type face as a reference I can at least create something as a starting point and what I'm going to do now is Select everything thicken up that stroke weight a bit so we can see it and then I'm I'm going to change the corner type to round and this will get rid of those spiky points and now I'm going to go to object down to path and select smooth and if I crank the slider up you can see it fixes a lot of my dodgy curves lastly let's round off that cap and of course this will need to be tweaked and refined further but this is a good starting point okay have you heard of the twirl tool because it's not something that I use very often but sometimes it can be exactly the right tool for a very specific purpose and that purpose in this case is to add milk to my coffee so first of all I'm going to create an ellipse or a circle whatever you like just make sure that it's round and let's just change that fill color something a little bit lighter like this and let's go and position said Circle in the middle of the coffee and now it's time to grab the twirl tool so it's hidden under the width tool click and hold there you go and you can click and drag over shapes to twirl them but as you can see whatever that mess is isn't ideal so let's double click on the twirl tool and increase the size so we have a larger brush and now let's try that again let's just twirl it around and you can see it Twirls it and swirls it very nice and if I distort this into more of an ellipse and position this here in the coffee and there we go we now have a latte lovely next up this is another technique that you can use to add more precise highlights and shadows to an existing shape without having to draw it freehand like we did before which let's be honest was Highly Questionable yes Dan Highly Questionable indeed so here I have a slice of pepperoni that again is looking a bit flat so I'm going to copy and paste in front and then hold shift and use the right arrow key to nudge this out now let's use the direct selection tool to just get rid of these inner circles there we go select them all and hit delete or backspace now let's switch into outline mode and again use the direct selection tool to delete bits of path leaving only the path where we want the shadow to appear so in this example that's going to be all the way around that right Edge so if we switch back to preview mode I'm going to select this shape swap the fill in the stroke and then increase that stroke weight let's bump that up there we go and I'm now going to pick a darker color for the Shadow and if I hold shift and now use the left Arrow key I can nudge this back into the exact same place but as far as the shadow goes um as you can see we've uh we've still got some work to do so next up we need to go to the stroke panel and we need to select a width profile let's go for this one at the top that tapers off at both ends and as you can see that is considerably better and we could leave it there however as you can see the edge of the Shadow doesn't line up with the edge of the original shape so to fix this we need to select the width tool and then hover until we find the halfway point on our line there we go and whilst we can click and drag the control points to adjust the width we can also hold down alter option and adjust one half so let's bring that outer half in and if I just nudge this out you can see the shadow sits flush to the edge of the pepperoni now there's no doubt that the Pathfinder panel is incredibly useful but there's one option that I didn't use for the longest time and it's perfect for trimming off the excess around your design so I have a checkered pattern and I'm going to grab the rectangle tool let's just create a rectangle over here there we go and effectively I'm defining the area that I would like to keep and let's just pick a bright color just so it makes it easier to see there we go and if we switch into outline mode you can see what this feature does let's select everything and then from the Pathfinder panel click the three dots and I'm going to select this option here crop and what this will do is it will trim off everything around the outside of that square which can be a lot cleaner than using something like a clipping mask now this next tool is an absolute Banger especially if you like to get creative and customize existing fonts so grab a letter I'm using the letter a and I'm going to create outlines which effectively turns this into a shape and then under the pen tool I've got the Anchor Point tool now I can click on any of the paths that make up this letter or shape and I can now just distort them freely so let's pull this up into a bit more of an arch and then if I grab the direct selection tool I can adjust these control points just to pull that in a bit and this technique is great for logo designers because you can take an existing font and customize it to make it feel more unique right now let's look at masking which is very useful indeed however I avoided this for years because I kept making the same mistake over and over again like a lemon so first of all add some text and with this selected I'm going to grab the reflect tool and then hold alter option and click down here and reflect this along the horizontal axes just make sure you select copy as well and then holding shift let's drag this up until these butt up together now it's time to go and grab the rectangle tool and we'll draw a rectangle over this bottom text now from the swatches panel you should have the default black to white gradient and then from the gradient panel we need to start by selecting the black and changing this to super pure RGB black also known as proper black now we need to change the angle so the gradient runs from top to bottom and we want the white on top so let's click this button here and because we're going to be using this gradient as a mask the areas that are white will be kept and the areas that are black will be hidden now we need to select the rectangle and the bottom text only if you struggle with this as I clearly am go into outline mode and make sure they're both selected and then click on opacity and select make mask now to actually change the reflection we need to click on the mask here and with the mask selected if I try and drag the text around you can see it's only affecting the mask and I can adjust the reflection either by going to the gradient panel or by pressing G which is the shortcut for the gradient tool and I can now adjust the position of the black and the white as well as the midpoint to fine-tune the reflection but just remember once you're done that you must go back and select the original object so you can move it around again and this is a mistake I made I kept forgetting to do this and it caused all sorts of problems and lastly you can also reduce the opacity which is a quick and easy way to make the reflection a bit more subtle now this next shortcut is the fastest way to switch from point type to area type so I have some point type here and if I try and resize this well you can see it skews it out of shape which isn't ideal however by double clicking the circle to the right of the text object this will convert it to area type and I can now adjust the text box and the text will wrap over multiple lines now this works in Reverse as well or from the type menu we've got some area type options or you can convert to point type from here as well and now that I've switched it back I can scale this holding shift to scale it up or down or skew it out of shape all right Dan steady on okay so if you've ever tried to create precise grids and guides particularly if you're designing for print this feature is a quick and easy way to set them up so first of all I'd recommend grabbing a square or a rectangle essentially make it fit the entire size of your artboard go to object down to path and select split into grid and from this window we can Define the number of rows the number of columns and the gutter which is the space in between them so in this example I could be dividing a landscape page into three separate columns maybe it's a leaflet for example and I can check this box here to create some supporting guides as well or what I can do is select all of these shapes go to view all the way down to guides there we go and select make guides and now that these are actual guides you can hide and show them with the keyboard short short cuts now let's look at another tool that is great for making tricky selections ho sorry I don't know what that was about anyway I have lots of dots and I can grab the lassu tool and use this to make slightly tricky selections and I can even add to the selection by holding down shift and dragging around additional objects or hold down alter option and drag to remove an object from the selection and there's also another feature that is a must know when it comes to making selections that are based on a shapes properties right so again we're back to the pizza and you can see here I have a stroke color but lots of different pieces and if I want to change that stroke color well I have to select all of those pieces manually which isn't ideal however using one of the selection tools I can select one piece of that path and then go to select same and I'm going to choose stroke color now every stroke in the document with that same color will be selected I could group them together or for example change that color to something else and if you have a complex illustration this is a massive time set Flor now if you've ever tried adding a gradient to multiple shapes I think you'll find this next trick very useful indeed okay so we have the power text again first of all let's convert this text to outlines and then ungroup a few times so that they are individual shapes um as you can see it's lost a color but not to worry simply select everything and then pick a new color or reapply the previous color from the bottom of the toolbar however this is where the problem happens so if we go and apply a gradient you can see the gradient runs through each object individually and if that's not what you you'd like go to object down to compound path and select make and as you can see the gradient now runs through everything as one and lastly this effect is a great way to make your text stand out or perhaps give it a more 3D aesthetic whilst also keeping the text fully editable so you can see I have my PO text this is a text object and is still fully editable and for this technique we'll need to open up the appearance panel and I'd recommend copying the six-digit hex value for that color and then removing the fill now let's add a new fill from the bottom of the appearance panel and if we hold shift and click on the Swatch we can then paste in that six-digit value for the red now let's go and duplicate the red and then if I hold shift and click on the bottom one I can then change this to a darker color and if you don't see the HSB sliders just make sure it's selected from the top right corner so for this fill we need to pick a darker red for the 3D Shadow and I'm now going to add a transform effect and honestly this panel is incredibly powerful uh let's just move move it out the way first there we go that's a good start and the first thing to do is go to the bottom and add a bunch of copies and then I'd recommend playing around with scale and move and seeing what kinds of effects you can create and as you can see this can be used to create Long Shadows uh you can create pretty cool 3D effects as well and if you do get these Jagged edges don't worry just bump up the number of copies to something ridiculous there we go 270 that should do it now let's play around with the scale value and set that to 99% and there we go it does look a lot smoother now and if I bring the number of copies down I get a more subtle 3d effect and remember the great thing about using the appearance panel is the text is still fully editable so hopefully you enjoyed the video and learned something new and lastly thanks again to skillshare for sponsoring this video I hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Dansky

Views: 91,203

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Id: B4cjD-DKOnY

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2024