Hello my name is Christian and I am a graphic designer based in Massachusetts. This post goes over my notes for Chapters 9 & 10 of Deke McClelland's Adobe Illustrator One on One Mastery. The chapter covers typography effects and libraries within Adobe Illustrator.
To work on dynamic typography effects you will need to use the appearance panel. By dynamic I mean that you will preserve the editability of the letters and effects. This is great for reusing assets or tweaking a design.
With your type selected go to the Appearance panel which can be found under Window > Appearance. Double click on Characters within the Appearance panel and set the Fill and Stroke colors to None. Double click on Type to exit the Characters styling.
Next add a Fill with the Add New Fill Button in the appearance panel. Also, add a Stroke with the Add New Stroke Button. You can add multiple strokes and fills to create appealing visuals. The stacking order of strokes and fills in the Appearance panel is similar to the Layers panel.
Some effects that you can apply to the fills and strokes are gradients, blurs, warping, sizing, position, etc. You can test out different effects.
Another way to manipulate typography is through use of the Touch Type Tool. This tool is found under the type tool (Shift T). With the Touch Type Tool active select a letter. A bounding box will appear around the letter. The corner points allow you to scale the letter. Top Left is Vertical, Top Right is Uniform, and Bottom Right is Horizontal. The Bottom Left point is unique in that you can reposition the letter. You can also reposition the letter by click inside the bounding box. Lastly, there is a rotate point above the bounding box that can be used to rotate the letter.
Libraries allow you to save and reuse assets across different computers, users, or cc applications. You can work from home, collaborate with a friend, and take things from Illustrator into other programs like Photoshop or InDesign with libraries. With libraries you can save paths, graphics, text, fill and stroke colors, color themes, character styles, and paragraph styles.
The original object that was saved into the libraries is not an instance of the asset in the library panel. You will need to drag the asset from the libraries panel into the artboard to add an instance to your current document. Libraries are not like symbols in this regard.
To add an object into libraries you just drag the object and drop it into the libraries panel. A secondary way to add something to libraries is to click on the plus icon in the libraries panel to add the currently selected object.
There is a drop down menu for all your libraries. You can add, delete, duplicate, and rename libraries or any items within the library. You can also share a link to libraries or select collaborate with others. If you accidentally delete something within the libraries you can select View Deleted Items. You will be directed to an adobe webpage from which you can restore the deleted items or confirm the deletion of items.
Swatches panel you can add swatches and color groups to Libraries. 1-5 swatches can be added as a color group.
You can place a copy of a library asset by dragging it onto the artboard while holding alt (option on mac) or by right clicking and selecting place copy.
To edit an asset from libraries double click it. This with bring you into the isolation mode of the file located in the Cloud servers.
To share an element use the Share Link command in the Libraries panel. You will be directed to an adobe webpage. Make the elements public and copy and paste the link to anyone you choose.
To relink an asset go to the link panel and click on relink from cc libraries button. You will be brought into the libraries panel. Select the new asset and click on the relink button at the bottom of the libraries panel.
When working with a linked image in illustrator adding it to the libraries will create an issue. The issue will be that the library asset will be a linked file that is linking to your local version of the image. The best to get around this is to work with the image directly say in photoshop and add the file to the libraries from photoshop.
To play a single step of an action Cntrl (Cmd) double click on the step. This is great if you want to check what a step is doing.
Actions have a Button mode which changes the action to a one click affair. This is great for playing actions and nothing more. A great way to set up actions for other designers. Unless they turn off button mode they cannot edit the actions.
You can assign a keyboard shortcut to an action.
There is a convert selected anchor points to smooth button appears in the control bar and properties panel.
The move menu will show the distance of the last moved object. This can be used to measure distances.
There is a Select > Inverse command that will select all other objects.
Ctrl + Alt (Cmd + Opt) click Create New Layer button to create a layer underneath the active layer.
In the Appearance panel there is a Duplicate Selected Item button. This can be used to duplicate effects, strokes, or fills.
Effect > Document Raster Effects Settings allows you to adjust the resolution of the effects.
To add ligatures or other typographic styling go to Window > Type > Open Type
The current selection descriptor in the top left under the Ai icon for a linked file when clicked will release a drop down menu of the links panel.
Within document setup you can change the grid size and color of the transparency grid.
That's it for this post. Hope you enjoyed and found it useful. Coming soon is a video tutorial of this post and the next set of Adobe Illustrator Mastery One on One Notes for Chapter 11 covering 3D effects. For now check out my previous blog post that covers Symbols and Graphs here: Adobe Illustrator One on One Mastery Notes 04
Please check out Deke McClelland's course here: Adobe Illustrator One on One Mastery.