Copyright (c) 2009 Mandi Pralle

While it's hard to remember the days of doing paste up and
layout with X-Acto Knives for most people under 40, there
are still a few industry professionals who DO remember
them, and there are graphic artists who have to do
something comparable with mat cutters for framing artwork.
As much of an improvement as Adobe Illustrator is over the
old ways of doing a lot of artwork, many people barely even
touch the tip of the ice berg in the ways this software can
speed up their art and design process.

There are two broad categories of ways that Illustrator can
speed up your art flow and approvals processes: The
blazingly obvious ways, and the not so obvious mechanisms.

The obvious mechanisms stem from being able to undo and
re-do various elements of your graphic design process.
When you can drag and drop a line segment, or use the
Bezier curve tools to adjust elements, you save time. The
non-obvious extension of this is that many of these
exploration tools can be automated, for example, use of the
pathfinder and align tools can save a lot of nitpicky work
in laying out design elements. Likewise, Adobe Illustrator
has excellent 'snap to grid' and 'snap to baseline' tools,
and allows you to create guides that are, for a lack of a
better term, 'magnetic'. If you drag an element near a
magnetic guide, the element is pulled towards the guide -
snapping it in place. This allows a lot of the 'fiddly
stuff' that used to be done by hand to take a fraction of
the time. Likewise, by using the Ctrl-M command, after
selecting an element, you can specify how many points (or
fractions of a point) something moves, including rotations,
copying and more, by entering the numbers in - anyone who's
ever had to 'move that element 7 inches that away..." where
the element is a multiple object mess can see the benefit
of this, and it's one of the most commonly used Illustrator
time saving tricks.

Another area where Illustrator can save you a great deal of
time is through careful and creative use of layers. For
example, in complex, technical illustrations, you can make
the line work a separate layer from the color work, and
have the line work 'overhead' - the easy way to do this is
to do the artwork as you normally would, then copy and
paste to a new layer, using Ctrl-C, shift to the new layer,
and hitting Ctrl F. This lets you paste in place - now, on
the topmost layer, turn the fill to 'transparent', but keep
the lines, and on the next layer down, turn the stroke to
transparent. By separating each color onto a separate
layer and doing this, you can rapidly change colors on,
say, a company logo, or put in effects on a specific layer
and see how they work.

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Your designs can be award winning creative masterpieces
that don't have to take forever to create when you know HOW
to use the right tools effectively. Learn more about the
Adobe CS4 Creative Suite. http://vpclasses.com

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