Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[♪upbeat music♪]
[ADOBE TV Presents Colin Smith in...]
[NO STUPID QUESTIONS] [♪♪] [robotic voice] No Stupid Questions.
All right. Time to make a business card,
something that everyone does in Illustrator all the time.
Illustrator's got some great tools to copy and paste,
but chances are, if you're doing multiple business cards
like for a whole corporation, it's a lot of copying and pasting.
I'm going to show you how we can use Dynamic Effects
and make this so that when you change one card, you change a whole page.
You can make a 20 foot by 20 foot Illustrator file,
so you could fill that up with quite a few cards.
Let's go have a look.
So here we have a business card--very typical.
Here's our name, logo, and here's the size of the business card,
and it's grouped together in one.
Typically, you'll just hold the Option key, Alt on Windows,
drag down here, duplicate, duplicate.
The problem with that is when you go to make the next card,
you'll select these, throw them away, and do it all again.
So instead of doing it that way,
there is an effect in the Effect menu
where we can Transform.
This is a Dynamic Effect, and I'm going to move this vertically.
I'll just type in -200 and we'll turn on Preview
and we'll turn on the Copies.
So I'm just going to turn the copies up--1, 2, 3--
and make sure that it is not -200.
There we go. Just 200. Okay.
I have four copies.
Click OK. Obviously, I need to duplicate these and put them over here on the right.
You can't do this with one Transform operation. You need two.
So we'll go back to the Effects, we still have that one card selected,
Effect, Transform again, and it will warn us, saying,
"Are you sure you want to do this, or do you want to edit the previous one?"
We don't want to edit the previous one. Yes, Illustrator, I know you're smart but I'm smarter.
Let's try Apply New Effect.
This way we're going to go horizontal and turn on the Preview button here,
and we want this to be 300 to the side and 1 copy. Okay?
Click OK. Now if we just look at this in our Outline mode,
you can see that Illustrator still thinks we just have one business card here,
and this is all a Dynamic Effect.
You can see that over here on the right-hand side in the Appearance panel,
Transform and Transform.
In fact, if you click on one of these words and open it up, you can make changes.
So if you found later you didn't want 300 points--you wanted inches,
centimeters, and something else--you can go back and change this.
All right. So there's our business card. We print it out.
Now we need to make a name change,
so instead of this name, you'll notice that if I'm double clicking on this,
I'm getting inside the group, all the way inside the group.
And I can edit it this way, but I think it's more fun
to leave it exactly like this, grab this Text tool.
Watch what happens when I select this and change this.
So let's try Davy Jones.
You'll notice the names have changed in all of the cards at the same time.
This is the exact same thing you would do manually.
You would copy and paste, copy and paste, and put them in here.
Make sure that you're working this with a Dynamic Layer Effect like this,
and it's going to be even easier.
One last thing to show you is that let's say that we're going to do another business card,
and we don't have to set this up more than once. Watch this.
I'll take this business card--the first one that's actually there--
and drag it to my Graphic Styles.
It makes a copy of all the settings that we've got.
I'll turn off this particular layer, load in my second business card,
click on it here, and watch what happens when I click on Graphic Styles.
Boom! It makes it that easy.
So not only can you make one business card,
but you could sit there and be churning these things out hour after hour after hour
and saving yourself tons of time.
The computer knows how to copy and paste
so much easier than we know how to copy and paste,
and it does it all with amazing mathematics.
So let Illustrator work for you.
For crying out loud, stop doing that manually.
Thanks a lot.
[Presenter/Music - Colin Smith] [Executive Producer - Bob Donlon] [Producer - Karl Miller]
[Director/VFX - Kush Amerasinghe] [Post Production/DP -Erik Espera]
[ADOBE® TV Productions] [♪♪]
