Design Workflow Techniques - Illustrator
March 16, 2018
This blog is for designers. Adobe Illustrator is a phenomenal drawing program for designers. However, it can be tedious to use for more complex designs. So I thought I’d share with you my top tips for better workflow in Illustrator to be more efficient and productive in your work. Here are the Top 5 Tips in Adobe Illustrator.
1. Know your keyboard shortcuts.
If you are still using the mouse to select tools then it is time to graduate to keyboard shortcuts. Using the mouse is slow and therefore not efficient. The best way to remember a shortcut is when you are doing a repetitive task. Learn one shortcut at a time and use it often. In no time at all you will build up your speed. For example selecting all objects on a page is faster by clicking 'Control + A' (PC) or 'Command + A' (Mac) rather than selecting everything with your mouse.
2. Go global.
Design your work to utilize global colour swatches and symbols in Illustrator. Look at your design and see what objects and colours appear most often. Then create symbols for those repeat objects and build swatches for commonly used colours. For example, a button for a web page can easily be turned into a symbol. When you want to change the style of the button you simply modify the original symbol. All instances of that button will be updated automatically.
Global colours link to a swatch in the swatches palette and include a white triangle in the colour icon. An example of using a global colour would be to set your line colours to a particular grey. If you wanted to adjust the lines to be darker you just need to adjust that global colour instead of all instances of the line.
3. Use actions.
Any task that you repeat often can have an action created. For example, when you need to scale objects to a certain percentage you can record your action. This will allow you to use that same action on other objects even in other documents.
4. Use the Appearance Panel.
This tool is not only great for efficiency but also for creating interesting adjustable effects. For example, if you want to have type that has 3 different kinds of strokes you would be limited with the text tool because it only allows one fill and stroke colour. That would mean you would have to create layered type objects to achieve that look. Instead, use the appearance panel to add multiple stroke colours and effects like opacity.
5. Use the Blend tool or Transform effect.
There are better ways to create patterns from repeated shapes than 'copy+paste+duplicate'. Use either the blend tool or transform effect. The blend tool will fill in the shapes from point A to point B. You can specify how many shapes you want in between. The transform tool also gives you the option of how many times to repeat the shape as well as previewing what it will look like when it is done.
Hopefully you can incorporate these into your workflow and be more efficient in Illustrator.
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