Illustrator Essentials

Resources

There are both exercise and completed files.

Cheat sheets (and PDF) are also available. (bringyourownlaptop.com)

There is a Getting Started exercise file that you can open.

The request is to reset the sidebar to Essentials (and reset them).

Some handy shortcuts that came up:

Note: You can have more than one page (artboard).

If you double click and things gray out, you are likely in isolation mode.

We want to first use "place" to import a image file to be used as the example layer.

You can use the shape builder to combine/subtract shapes.

Hold alt down with the tool.

The is a point-type box and a second area-type type box.
We can also type along a path.
We can break apart and distort text by converting a text into outlines and using the Direct Selection tool.

RGB vs CMYK: most of the time you will want to represent things using RGB.
We can use the color picker to get image colors.
Window > Color theme and click explore to see some. This is being deprecated though, so you can go to Adobe Colors. Use the Graident tool to edit.
There is a cool website for gradients call Grabient.
You can aso do gradients by text.

You can mask the images by using a mask.
For complicated images you want to mask, you need to make shapes into a compound path first and then it can operated as a mask on an image.

Libraries on the right hand panel allows you to do many things.

Libraries are cross-app (you can put them in Illustrator, Photoshop, etc).
Drag + drop saved assets with option on Mac to "unlink" the assets from the library and edit without changing the library.

Go to typekit.com and pass in a screenshot.