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[♪♪] [ADOBE TV Presents]
[Rufus Deuchler in...]
[♪♪]
[CS Insider Design] [♪♪]
Hi there. My name is Rufus Deuchler, worldwide design evangelist at Adobe Systems.
In this episode of CS Insider I wanted to show you a few tips and tricks
in Adobe Illustrator CS5.
But I will start with an older feature.
That's a feature that was introduced in Illustrator CS4, actually.
What I'm going to talk about right now is transparency and gradients.
So what I want to do here is to actually use a drawing that's already inside of Illustrator.
Here if we go to the Symbols panel,
inside of the menu I can open a symbol library,
and there's a whole bunch of symbols that are already there inside of the application.
The one I'm looking for is actually here in the 3D Symbols.
Let's take this bottle of wine here and drag and drop it on my artboard.
I'm going to make it slightly bigger.
As you can see, this is a line drawing that actually leverages the 3D features
in Adobe Illustrator.
But what I want to do here is actually use the gradients
with some transparency applied to them.
So first of all, what I want to do is create some sort of a stronger shadow to that bottle,
and I will do that simply by taking my Pen tool,
and I will start clicking and dragging and creating a shape
that will more or less cover the left side of my bottle here.
Let's go all the way down here and close that object like so. Okay?
Then let's take out the stroke of that drawing here.
And inside of the Gradient panel what I'm going to do is choose a linear gradient.
As you can see, the gradient gets applied immediately.
What I want, though, is the gradient to go from black to white,
so let's reverse the gradient so that we have the darker side on the left side of the bottle.
If I double click on that little gradient slider, I can actually go right there into my swatches
without necessarily having to drag and drop swatches from the Swatches panel.
But the other thing that we see also is that I can go from a color to a different opacity.
What I want here is to go to the same color, which is black actually,
and turn the opacity down to 0.
So basically what I'm doing here is adding a gradient that goes from a color to transparency.
And this was actually new in Illustrator CS4.
Let's do another example, because we have another type of gradient
that was introduced again in Illustrator CS4.
Let's just simply create an ellipse here to create some sort of a little shine here
to make that shine a little bit bigger.
If we go back to the Gradient panel, we're going to choose the radial gradient here.
And instead of using black, double clicking on the colors, I will be using white.
But again, I will leave the opacity of the outer color to 0
so that we go from the white color to the transparency of that white.
And if I choose my Gradient tool in Illustrator,
I can also change the gradient directly from here.
So I can change the size of the gradient, I can change the shape of the gradient,
and I can also change the position of the points inside of the gradient
right here with the Gradient tool.
So with very great precision I can define a gradient that goes from a color to transparency.
So that's a really cool thing that was introduced in Illustrator CS4.
Let's go to Illustrator CS5 for a second.
Here I have a couple of pages that I'm working on.
But one especially that I wanted to show you
and that may have been overlooked in the past
is the fact that when you do a shape using a line that has actually a dashed line,
you see it's not very clean.
If you look at the corners here of that object, they're all different.
Well, you know that InDesign has solved that problem a long time ago,
adjusting the width and the strokes themselves so that the line actually adjusts to the shape.
In Illustrator CS5, this is now also possible
because with this new button here I can actually align the dashes to corners
and paths to ends and adjusting lengths to fit.
So if I click this button here, check out the dashed line
and see how immediately Illustrator corrects all of these errors that we had before.
So this is a really, really cool feature that was introduced with Illustrator CS5.
Another thing that was introduced with Illustrator CS5
is the ability to really control arrowheads if you're using arrows in your designs.
So for example, I can choose arrowheads for the left side of that arrow
or for the right endpoint here.
I can choose from various types; for example, arrow 4 with the little curvy arrow here.
But more importantly, what I can do now is actually scale the arrow
depending on the size of the line.
So I can make the arrowhead bigger or the arrowhead smaller,
really defining how I want that arrow to behave in my design.
One last thing we can do is to actually simply switch the direction of the arrow
by clicking on this little button here.
And then I can also align the arrowhead outside of the line that I've drawn or within the line.
Right now it is within the line that I've drawn.
But if I click on this button here, I can align the arrowhead
just outside of the line that I've drawn.
This gives me great control over how the arrowheads actually are applied
on lines that I draw in Adobe Illustrator.
Let's go back a few pages here,
and let me show you another thing that was introduced in Illustrator CS5.
That's the possibility to actually work much, much better with brushes.
Let me show you how brushes actually work.
Let me just make a brush out of one of those palm trees.
Basically what you need to do to create a brush is take the palm tree itself
and drag and drop it inside of the Brushes panel.
Then Illustrator will ask you, "What type of brush do you want to create?"
And in that case, what I want to do is an art brush, all right?
So let's say OK to this.
And here is my art brush. I can also see the direction of the brush.
Right now if I start drawing from the top to the bottom,
that's how the brush will be drawn.
But let's change that for a second so I can start from the bottom to the top.
And let's say OK to this. All right?
So now the next time that I actually draw with my Brush tool
and select the brush that I've just created, I can really draw these palm trees
in ways that were previously impossible.
But there is one thing that you notice here,
and that thing is that the heads of the palm trees actually get distorted.
Why is that? Because brushes actually are applied on lines that I draw on my artboard.
So whatever the length of the line is, my brushes get taken
and get distorted within that line.
So new in CS5 is the ability--and if I double click on that art brush again--
to actually stretch a brush between guides.
If I select this, we have 2 guides here which allow me to define what areas of the brush
do not get distorted. All right?
So I could say I don't want to distort the head of my palm tree,
and I don't want to distort the end of the palm tree,
which would actually be the root of the palm tree.
And then if we go back here, let me see.
This is the drawing that I created.
I can go into Preview and, boom, now I have the exact same size for my palm tree heads
and the same size for the root area here.
And the only thing that is stretching inside of my brush stroke
is actually the part that I centered here inside of my art brush options.
That's pretty cool.
Let's apply that to the strokes. Okay. And let's make another example.
Let me zoom out of here and delete that bottle that I've just shaded in Illustrator.
Let's delete that.
I want to show you another tool that's really, really cool,
and that's actually the Shape Builder tool.
To do that I will actually create a rather complex drawing.
Let's make a drawing that has no fill and just the outline to it.
What I want to do is to create a yin and yang symbol.
I have my guides on here, and if I create another circle
I can actually align that to the center of that drawing--perfect--
and then create another circle here--all right--
and then maybe align all of these using the Align features, centered like this.
And then what I'm missing here now are just the little dots in here.
I'm going to create one here and then simply by selecting it
and pressing down the Alt or Option key, I'm going to position that here
in the intersection of the second circle.
In the past, I would have had to use the Pathfinder
to actually create the yin and yang symbol. But check this out.
With the new Shape Builder tool in Illustrator CS5
I can now simply select this object--let's select it all--
use the Shape Builder tool, and as I hover over it, you see that the areas get highlighted.
And now to create my complex shape all I need to do is to click and drag.
Boom, done. Click and drag. Done. And I've created my symbol.
Now let's say that this one I want to actually remove.
All I need to do is press the Alt or Option key,
and you see the little icon actually turns into a minus sign,
and if I click on it, this is now becoming a hole. All right?
At that point I can go back into my drawing and say that this is the dark area.
So let's do like this, and let's take this object here and do it like that with the hole in it.
So very, very quickly using the Shape Builder tool
I was able to create a complex shape such as this.
This was previously almost impossible to do at such speed.
One last thing I want to show you,
and that's 9-slice scaling and symbols in Illustrator.
That's kind of very useful.
Actually, let's take another symbol here.
Let's go here in my symbol library and take a button.
Let's see here if we can find some Web buttons and bars. Perfect.
And let's take this button out here and make it slightly bigger. All right.
So the problem here is that if I--and it already happened here since I moved it.
If I try to make that button larger or smaller, you see that it actually distorts the size. Okay?
And if I make it longer here, it actually distorts the roundness of here. All right?
And that's wrong. We don't want that.
I'm actually going to unlink the symbol from its definition,
Break Link to Symbol.
I'm pressing Control and clicking on the symbol itself so that I have access to the shapes
so that I can actually select each part of that button.
And what I'm going to do now is take that shape created in Illustrator
and drag it back into the symbols.
At that point I'm going to give that new symbol a name.
Let's call it Button.
Let's leave the Type to Movie Clip.
And, very important, I need to Enable Guides for 9-Slice Scaling.
Let's say OK to this.
At that point this object became a symbol again.
And if I double click on it and we go into isolation mode,
we now have access to these 9 slices. Okay?
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
That's why it's called 9-slice scaling.
At that point I can move those guides to the areas that I don't want to be scaled,
a little bit like the brush concept that I've shown you a few minutes ago
where I can define areas that will not be stretched. All right?
So let's do it like this. Let's go back out of isolation mode.
And at that point if I take that symbol and make it larger,
you see that the symbol itself remains round on the edges.
So I used this 9-slice scaling technology on a button in Illustrator,
but of course you can use that on any drawing you do in Illustrator.
All you need to do is to create a symbol with it,
enable 9-slice scaling, and you will be able to distort it
without altering rounded corners, for example.
Thank you for following this episode of CS Insider.
See you soon.
[♪♪] [Executive Producer - Bob Donlon] [Director/VFX - Kush Amerasinghe]
[Producer/Offline Editor - Karl Miller] [DP/Online Editor - Erik Espera]
[ADOBE TV Productions - tv.adobe.com]
