7 Illustrator Tips I wish I knew 4 Years ago!

In plain side all this time today I’m going to share seven different Adobe Illustrator tips with you that I wish I knew a lot sooner tip number one is a very simple text effect that you can easily apply using the appearance panel so first of all

Select your word then add a stroke head over to the FX panel right here and add a new effect go to path offset path and then hit ok now at first sight this looks very weird but if we go back to FX and then head over to the Pathfinder

Section and click add as you can see it creates a really nice stroke effect and this is also editable so let’s do fantastic instead there we go the stroke has moved with the change in text which is really really cool and makes for an interesting text effect

Is actually a really new feature within illustrator that enables you to recolor your tie design using Ai and you can find this feature under the edit menu down here click on edit colors and select generative recolor beta so this is currently still in beta probably going to get a lot better over the

Coming months or years you’ve got some sample prompts that you can select down here and it will open up some color variations or you can enter your own prompt at the top to generate a new color scheme so you could go for a monochromatic for example you could go

For warm colors you can enter various different things into here to get a variety of different results if you’re looking for a specific style a specific feeling with your colors then you can quickly generate them right here without having to go in and manually change everything so definitely a super cool

Feature sometimes the color schemes that come out are not perfect for the design you’re using and it kind of obscures the design but as you can see here most of these actually look really cool and give a good alternative to the original color scheme so here I’ve got two different objects

I’ve got some Christmas lights and I’ve got a type layer that says Christmas on it and I want to combine these two and add some depth to the design by having a few of the lights in the background and a few of them in front of the lettuce

And typically that process would take forever and be really tedious in illustrator but there is a cool feature to make this a lot easier so select all of your objects head over to the object menu go to intertwine and select make and now whatever you draw over will be

Hidden behind the other shapes so if I wanted to hide this section there we go it is now behind the letter c and also in Reverse if I draw over this again it will be revealed again so this is definitely really handy super cool feature that can quickly make a design

Look very interesting we also get these preset boxes that I get highlighted that you can just click onto and then again that will hide your shapes and yeah basically have to just go through design hide whatever you want to be in the background and then you’ll quickly

Create a super cool effect so let’s hide these two sections and that will make the s look quite interesting we can hide these two as well right here and a quick chip as well if you want to click out of this you can hold down control and click

On the outboard now this is back to the old group right here but if you want to go back to editing it select the group and click edit right here or if you want to release the intertwine and get rid of it completely then use the release

Button and there we go that’s definitely made the design look a bit more interesting I understand it’s hard to read but this is not just for Christmas and Christmas lights designs this feature can be super helpful in many different scenarios speaking of being super useful in many different scenarios

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It out and see if it works for you I’ve used skillshare many times in the past and definitely gained a lot of valuable skills so if you’ve got an arrangement of different objects within illustrator you can actually create a pattern very easily out of them so all you have to do

Is select all of the objects group them with Ctrl G then head over to object go to pattern and make and then this new window will open up right here you see a preview of what the pattern currently would look like if you saved it and you

Can change the result over here with these settings so the first thing I like to do is clicking on the pattern Tile tool right here and then you can drag this box out a tiny bit in the corners to make sure the spacing is a little bit

Wider so these objects are not touching there we go I think that’s all right then what you can do as well is change the type of grid so we can do Brick by row right here we’ve got various different settings for the offset as well you can mess around with that and

Another useful feature is the amount of copies you’re getting and which you can decide down here then once you’re done with the settings all you have to do is click done on and the pattern will be added to your swatches over here in the Swatch panel now how do you use the

Pattern let’s get rid of these shapes so let’s say you wanted to create a pattern in the shape of a rectangle all you have to do is select the rectangle tool from your toolbar draw out the shape you can also click on the outboard and enter the exact dimensions right here then what

You have to do next is head to the swatches panel and click on the pattern Swatch that we just saved and as you can see this pattern is quite zoomed in but a quick way to fix that is with this scale tool over here just double click

Onto this and then this window will open up the first thing you need to do in the scale window is actually uncheck transform objects and then we can sort of play around with the uniform slider right here to turn down the scale and percentage and as you can see now the

Pattern is repeating more nicely and zoomed out so we can easily apply this to different products tip number five is a quick and easy one regarding your default font so I’m sure most of you are aware that if you click onto the outboard with your type tool

Enabled you will get Myriad Pro which no one really ever uses so a quick way to change this default font is heading up to window scrolling down all the way to type opening the character Styles window and then here we can actually Define the character style options and if you head

To basic character formats right here this is where you can change your font as well as some other features like the actual default font size leading tracking and kerning and yeah this is pretty cool so once you’re done just hit ok now if I delete this and use the type

Tool again yeah by default it comes up with bearinger tip number six is creating a super cool layout in Adobe Illustrator that can help you whilst creating your designs so first of all head up to window and select new window and as you can see that has opened up a second instance of

The original document now if we go back to window to arrange and select tile we can actually see both of these documents next to each other the cool thing about this is we could have this one zoomed out on the right so we can see the entire design at full size meanwhile we

Can edit the design on the left and preview the changes over here so so let’s say we duplicate these Hearts right here there we go we can see what happened on the other screen which is super useful if you’ve got a lot of details in your design that you need to

Move around and change or maybe you want to get an easy overview of the design to see whether it is still easy to read once the edits have been applied here’s one of the most annoying things known to mankind about Adobe Illustrator I’m trying to select the black box to

Change its color but every time I try and click on this it selects never instead because the never text box is massive and that’s actually a very simple fix for this and it’s been hidden in plain side all this time so all you have to do is head to edit go to

Preferences select type and then you want to check this option right here that says type object selection by path only so now if we hit OK you can only select the type if you click on the actual path right here you can’t actually select it from any of the

Letters like this you have to be very specific but that means we can now select this box underneath very easily and we don’t have the other word getting in the way and now I can change this color to red super easily like that if you want to learn how to create this

Vintage text effect using Adobe Illustrator then just click the thumbnail and you’ll know how to do it in no time