All right, it's advanced tips and tricks work flow... 1
speed up your daily stuff. 2
There's lots in this whole section on work flow... 3
but this particular one is lots of little bitsy things... 4
that don't deserve their own video. 5
They're lumped together in this one, there's some good stuff though. 6
First thing we'll do is, 'File', 'New'... 7
and you can do Math in any of these fields. 8
Let's say I want to go to Print, I use the A sizes because I'm in Europe... 9
and I want A2, but they don't have it as a preset for some reason. 10
So, I know A3... 11
and if I go to centimeters, I can times it by 2. 12
And all I do is put in '*2'. 13
And you click in here, and it times it by 2, it gives me A2. 14
Times it again, and I can get A1 and then A0. 15
Cool. You can do Math in any of the fields. 16
You can divide by... 17
by typing a forward slash, then 2, '/2', and it will do that. 18
You can add to inches by typing it in. 19
If you want it the other way around... 20
you can add centimeters to your Imperial Measurements. 21
It will do all the Math in any field in Illustrator, not just a new document. 22
The reason we did it here though, is I want to save it as a Template. 23
So that's what I want. I'm going to have my Template be RGB as well. 24
I'm going to click 'Create'. 25
Once you've got this document... 26
you're like, "I won't have to do that again"... 27
I go to 'File', there's 'Save as Template', it's another little trick. 28
I'm going to put it into my blank templates... 29
and this is going to be called my A-- 30
What did I get up to? I think it was A2. 31
Hit 'Save'. 32
Now when I'm making a new document, it's not in that window we just saw... 33
but you go to 'File', 'New from Template'. 34
There's that list again, and I can say, you guys, let's get going. 35
Awesome. So it's picked the right sizes, it's picked RGB. 36
And we learned how to do Math... 37
and we learned how to do Math in the fields. 38
Next thing I want to do is finding stuff in Help. 39
This is for Mac only, sorry, PC people. 40
There's lots of time you're like... 41
"Hey, where's that filter thing Dan talked about?" 42
"I remember it was called Half Tone, something, or other." 43
So I've got this, and I go to 'Help', and I just type in 'half'. 44
The cool thing about it is that Max goes, "You mean these two?"... 45
and you're like, "Yes, I do." 46
And if you hover above it, it even points to it with a big black arrow. 47
And you come down. 48
You may actually just click on it here... 49
or sneakily come down, and just click on it. 50
And I've got my awesome Half Tone. 51
It's probably making your screen go crazy on the video, that's all right. 52
Next thing we're going to do is cleaning a Path. 53
I'm going to go out to this document I've got ready. 54
Now there are times where-- 55
If I go to 'Command Y', or 'Control Y' on a PC... 56
there's a star there, a star there, but look when I switch it back. 57
They've got no Fill, no Stroke, I want to get rid of them. 58
There's a couple of other things. 59
That there is a text box that has no text in it. 60
That there is-- 61
I've used the Pen Tool, clicked once... 62
forgotten what I was doing, and left it there. 63
So if you want to clean up these things... 64
you can go up to 'Object', 'Path', and there's one that says 'Clean Up'. 65
It goes through and asks you what you want to do, I'm going to do-- 66
All of those sound good, click 'OK'. Now if I go to 'Command Y'... 67
the stars are gone, the random dots are gone. 68
Just good for pre-presses, just cleaning everything up. 69
Especially good when you're kind of, like Compound Shapes and Clipping Masks... 70
and you've kind of unpicked all of that, you can clean it all up using that trick. 71
The other things that happens is Gradients. 72
Gradients are awesome, they're back in fashion... 73
they are on my head anyway. 74
But often they end up bending when they go to print. 75
Often digitally it's fine... 76
but they can bend badly when they go to print. 77
There's a couple of ways of doing it. 78
So, I've got this Gradient selected here. 79
I can go to 'Object', I can go to this one that says 'Rasterize'. 80
Basically what it's going to do is... 81
turn it from this lovely Scalable Vector thing to a Raster Image. 82
Basically like a Photoshop document. 83
Set the Resolution to the ppi, the pixels per inch that you want. 84
If you want it to be really good quality, just leave it at 300, click 'OK'. 85
And this thing now is, it looks the same... 86
except that it is made up of little pixels. 87
I get to zoom in as much as I like... 88
and it doesn't really show up because it's so dense. 89
But trust me, it's now pixels, and not vector. 90
And it has the tendency to print better if you're running into problems. 91
If you're not having problems, don't do that. 92
Another thing you can though, if you're running into-- 93
Say you got lots of kind of banding Gradient problems. 94
Especially with, say a Gradient Mesh, instead of rasterizing it... 95
you can go to 'File', and during the printing process... 96
there's an option in here under Graphics. 97
You get to say, Compatible Gradients Mesh Printing. 98
It gives you a bit of a warning. 99
When you hit print now, it will do the same thing... 100
but it will just kind of go through and do it on the way through. 101
All right, Gradients. 102
Next thing I'll show you, quick little shortcut is... 103
if I delete this thing here... 104
sometimes you're working, and you're like, "What is white, and what is see through?" 105
Is that white, or is that see through? 106
There's text in here somewhere. 107
'Command-Shift-D' is the shortcut. 108
It shows you your Transparency Grid. 109
It looks like Photoshop. 110
And at least now you can see... 111
that's a hole, and that's actually white text. 112
That's white, and not a hole. 113
So just really handy sometimes... 114
when you're, maybe using the Shape Builder Tool... 115
or the Path Finder. 116
You're just working out who's white, and who's blank. 117
That is a nice one. Another one is Select Similar. 118
Let's say that, we've got all these stars, and we want to change the color of them. 119
I'm going to click this one, hold 'Shift', grab them all. 120
And go insane from clicking stars. 121
There's not that many, but if I click on one, and go to 'Select', 'Same'... 122
and you can pick any of these. 123
Often Appearance just works... 124
but anything that has the same Fill color, right? 125
You can see, it's gone through this document, and selected everything. 126
And I can go, actually I want to turn those to... 127
Ugly pick, or black and white. 128
That's an easy one, I found that's really useful if... 129
say this is a stock library, Icon Set, that I brought. 130
Let's say I want to adjust the colors... 131
so I'm going to click on one of these colors. 132
Say the 'White Arrow', click on this green one. 133
So I want to find everything. 134
You can see how useful this is going to be. 135
Everything has that same Fill color. 136
It goes through the whole document, even inside Clipping Mask, and stuff. 137
You can go through and say, I'm picking a new color. 138
You see, the whole document changes. 139
Awesome! It could be Stroke Color, you could use Appearance. 140
Real handy one. 141
Maybe not so handy feature, but useful to know... 142
under 'Select', I can go to 'Object', and there's a bunch of options in here. 143
Like I can select everything that has a Bristle Brush Stroke. 144
Not sure why that's handy. 145
The one that's probably handy is... 146
I can select everything that has a Clipping Mask... 147
this one here, All Text Object. 148
I've only got two, but I imagine... 149
if you had a really long document, or a big document... 150
with lots of text boxes, you just want to select them all, change the font. 151
That could be an easy way to do it. 152
Another little known feature is, say I do select all of these guys... 153
and I either 'Shift' click them all, and spend ages doing it... 154
or we use our trick, select 'Same', 'Fill Color'. 155
Unfortunately my white is the same as the rest of it. 156
Anyway, so I've got all of this, including these guys down here. 157
So we spent ages making that selection. 158
What I can do is select it, and save that selection. 159
So I can go to 'Save Selection', give it a name, let's call it 'Stars'. 160
The difference between that, and say, something like, if I grouped it now... 161
they would be kind of fused together... 162
but what I can do is, I can start adjusting these things... 163
and say, you're over here now. 164
And now I can go to 'Select'... 165
I want to select on 'Stars', and it grabs them all again. Cool, huh? 166
Next super shortcut is... 167
on the Layers panel, which is handy, to know that... 168
if you click up here towards this, just in this area here... 169
you select everything on that layer... 170
just have to go anywhere in that layer, goodbye. 171
Just easy to select everything on the layer... 172
rather than maybe a Select All, it grabs everything. 173
Also the thing about the layers is, let's say you're working down here... 174
My fox, it's a pretty good contrast, if I'm looking on these Anchor Points here. 175
The blue lines and the handles... 176
they are pretty good and contrasting, right? 177
I did that earlier in this tutorial when we were doing a Gradient Mesh. 178
It was on kind of a blue color, and these guys were blue. 179
And it's just really hard to see them. 180
So what you can do is you can actually double click on the word... 181
actually anywhere above the word, that's what I meant. 182
And you can say, actually I want this one to have a bright green. 183
That means, nothings has changed, it just means that... 184
it's a little bit easier sometimes to see these handles... 185
against the particular graphic you're using. 186
A somewhat useless next feature, down the bottom here, there's this thing. 187
You can say, actually I don't want to show the name for my Artboard. 188
I want you to show that current tool that I'm using, Direct Selection Tool. 189
I want you to show me the date and time. 190
I want you to write it in a really cryptic way that makes it useless. 191
Month too. 192
Number of undos. 193
I feel there should be some good stuff in here. 194
Document Color Profile, maybe that might be useful. 195
Anyway, let's finish on a really good one. 196
This Tool panel over here is full of stuff that you never use. 197
And after this advanced course, you'd be like... 198
"Ooh, that's my new favorite." 199
But say you get to a point, you're like... 200
"Actually just get rid of this stuff I don't want." 201
So it's really handy to go to 'Window', go to 'Tools'... 202
and we're going to make a 'New Tools Panel'. 203
I'm going to call this the... 'Dan is Awesome Tool Panel'. 204
Give it any other name you like. 205
Basically just gives you the core, that thing there. 206
Anything else, you drag on as you want. 207
Let's say I do use the Black Arrow and the White Arrow. 208
Even though I know the shortcuts... 209
I don't use the Lasso Tool, I use the Pen tool a lot. 210
I use the Curvature Tool a lot, the Type Tool, awesome. 211
Edit these guys, you can decide. Actually I just want the Line Tool. 212
So I don't use all the other junk. 213
Yes I'll use you, but I'm going to keep this. 214
You can skip on in this video now, well actually... 215
I'm going to go and show-- do you want more? 216
I just want to build my own Tool Panel, don't know why. 217
Once you've finished it, you've got to do a couple of things. 218
You don't want this guy anymore. 219
So you've got everything out of this, I'm just going to drag the top of it. 220
It's that, like little gray that you need to drag out, close it down. 221
Grab this tiny gray bit. 222
Dark gray bit, and kind of push it to the side, and it goes blue. 223
Then you go to 'Window', 'Workspace'. 224
And if you haven't already created a new workspace, give it a name. 225
I've given mine a name, called Dan. 226
Actually I want to save over the top of this, so I want to reset Dan. 227
So a new workspace, I'm just going to call it Dan. 228
It already exists, by clicking 'OK', it's going to overwrite. 229
So now when I'm kind of opening up my-- 230
I'm working on Layout for some reason. I can go to 'Workspace', go to 'Dan'. 231
And it's back to this, and if I accidentally get everything mixed up... 232
that drags out, and this ends up popping out. 233
Everything goes wrong. I can go to 'Window', 'Workspace', 'Reset Dan'. 234
Everything will be back except these guys. 235
So that is it for these kind of... 236
like little short tasty work flow advanced things. 237
There's a bunch more in this kind of section, so carry on with the videos. 238
We'll do some more tricks. 239
All right, next video.