The Graphic Mac

If you work with complicated artwork in Adobe Illustrator, you’ve no doubt come across the task of having to select many objects that contain similar attributes, such as same color fill or stroke, Appearance attributes, etc. Thankfully, Illustrator has a few tools that can make your job much easier. If you select an object and visit the Select>Same menubar item, you’ll find several methods to accomplish your goal.

Select similar objects in Adobe Illustrator

If the design you’re working on requires a rectangle with rounded corners, don’t use Adobe Illustrator’s rounded rectangle tool. Instead, use the regular (square) rectangle tool, then go to Effect>Stylize>Round Corners in the menubar. From there, you can set the exact roundness amount you want, as well as enjoy the option of adjusting it later via the Appearance panel. One more advantage of doing it this way is that you can stretch the rectangle box later without altering the roundness of the corners.

Adobe Illustrator offers a simple tool to quickly apply colors, strokes, fills, effects, change fonts, and more to every item on a layer at once. The Target icon, the little round icon displayed at the far right of each individual layer in the Layers panel, is used to select every item on the layer. Click the circular Target icon, then apply a stroke, change a color, or apply a style to all the objects on the layer. This can be particularly useful if you organize your Illustrator documents as I do, putting all type on separate layers, backgrounds on another layer, etc.

If you’ve ever tried to align two objects in Adobe Illustrator, you may have noticed that when you select the two objects and click the align tool; the objects align, but do so by moving both objects. Not an optimal situation. Wouldn’t it be better if you could tell Illustrator to not move one of those objects? Thankfully, Illustrator CS4 allows you to do so. Shift + click both the objects you want to align so they’re both selected. Now, click one of the objects again. You’ll notice that the selection points and outline get a little thicker. This indicates that this object is now the key object that Illustrator will use to align the second object to; in other words, the key object won’t move when you click one of the alignment tools.

Creating custom views in Illustrator is a great trick you can use to save time. Custom views are great for viewing complicated illustrations and documents with many Multiple Artboards, or sections of an Illustrator document you are constantly revisiting. Vectips has a great little tutorial to show you how you can use Illustrator’s Custom View capability to your advantage.

If you’re an Adobe Illustrator users and you aren’t familiar with designer, Von Glitschka, you’re in for a real treat. George Coghill has an excellent interview with this talented designer and Illustrator user. Von Glitschka shares some insight on the techniques used in his vector creations. You can read the interview at GoMediaZine.

LifeInVector has a great Adobe Illustrator Gradient Mesh tutorial available. The tutorial is a downloadable PDF/Illustrator file combo, and covers the use of the tool quite well. If you’re looking for more, check out this list of 40 great Illustrator tutorials at Smashing Magazine.

Vectips has a quick tutorial showing you how to create gradient strokes on your type in Adobe Illustrator. This super simple technique use the Appearance panel and effects to create editable gradient strokes in Illustrator. As a bonus, you can add transparency for a very cool effect as seen above.