Illustrator Tips

Trips, tricks, techniques, and short tutorials on all the tools integral to the modern design workflow to help get you through a deadline a little faster, more creatively, and with more fun.

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Watch Out! Illustrator Breaks Em Dashes

Illustrator (CS2 and CS3) has a text rendering engine nearly as advanced as InDesign’s…

Stop Unembeddable Font Warnings

Despite the near impossibility of extracting embedded fonts from PDFs, some type foundries still prevent their fonts from being embedded in PDFs…

Align or Distribute Relative to the Key Object

The Align palette has an array of buttons to align and distribute a group of objects…

Join and Average: What’s the Difference?

I’m often asked: What’s the difference between Join and Average?
To set the stage, Join and Average commands are on the Object > Path menu…

Rapidly Apply Sampled Colors

Everyone knows that the Eyedropper Tool picks up or samples color, but did you also know it will apply color…

Appearance Drag Apply

Want to quickly copy an appearance, no matter how complicated, from one object to others?
Select the source object, the one with the appearance you want to share with the rest…

Fixing Ruler Offset

Changing the document size in Illustrator via File > Document Setup does not update the rulers to accommodate the new document size…

Revise Paths with the Pencil Tool

Need to change the shape of a path? Click somewhere on the path with the Pencil tool, and begin drawing. The path will incorporate your revision.
This is also a gotcha…