May 2009 Archives

Contributed by Brenda Sutherland, Illustrator Team Geologist
Isn’t it a great feeling when you set out to do something and find that it’s already been done? I’ve got that feeling now thanks to Mordy Golding’s instructional video’s currently being offered for FREE on Lynda.com.

You see today was the day I was planning on wrapping up my series on Pathfinder and all the great features that use it with an article on Live Paint. But it turns out Mordy has just completed a series of 10 videos that go into depth describing the benefits of Live Paint and how to use it. Whew, my job is done!

Well, almost. . .

While I don’t want to spend too much time covering the nuts and bolts of Live Paint, as you can get that from watching the video’s, I’ll spend a little time talking about the development of the feature, since many of you have told us that you enjoy hearing the behind the scenes stories of how features evolve.

The motivation behind Live Paint was to create a more intuitive drawing and coloring environment in Illustrator. While Ai is the industry leader in vector graphic programs, the learning curve is pretty high, and it pains us to see new users create shapes by overlapping strokes then struggle to find a way to fill the object they’ve created with color. This is something that is easy for them to do in pixel based painting programs, even the educational software for children makes it easy to draw and paint this way, so it’s understandable that new users would expect to find a method of working like this in Illustrator.

But vector paths don’t work that way. The paint attributes are part of the geometry of the original objects. Spaces between these objects are just that, spaces, empty spaces, negative space . . . It’s kind of like holding your hands up and making a rectangle with your fingers. You can see the shape of the rectangle, but you know it’s not a real object, it’s more of an optical illusion. Well that’s the problem we had to solve in Illustrator. Objects can be close together and the spaces between them can look like objects, but there is no object there. So how can a user fill it with paint?

Contributed by Terry Hemphill, Illustrator Product Marketing Manager

Illustrator CS4 includes three free online services: Adobe Kuler, Community Help and Share My Screen.

Kuler lets you explore, create and share color themes, and is available through the Kuler website; via an Adobe AIR application; through ColorSlide, an IPhone application; and directly within a panel in Illustrator CS4. To access the Kuler panel in Illustrator CS4, just go to Windows>Extentions>Kuler. The English versions of Illustrator CS3 also offer access to Kuler; go to Windows>Adobe Labs>Kuler.

Community Help provides instruction, inspiration, and support and lets you find them via Custom Search, a Google enterprise tool that delivers indexed content chosen by experts at Adobe and others in the design and developer communities, meaning you find the answers you need faster than with any standard web search.

But my favorite is one of the least known of the new services: Share My Screen, which gives you direct access to the Acrobat ConnectNow web conferencing service for you and up to two other users.

Original image in Illustrator being shared

Image seen as shared through Share My Screen (ConnectNow)

ConnectNow isn’t your father’s web conferencing service, but delivers the conferencing via a sleek interface for screen sharing, video and audio conferencing, a chat pod, whiteboard tools and even remote control, letting you take over another participant’s screen, with their permission, of course. To access Share My Screen, from the Illustrator CS4 main menu, go to File>Share My Screen.

We use Acrobat Connect constantly here at Adobe. It might be used to formally deliver a presentation, but more often it’s to jump into a Connect “room” to visually share information, review work in progress, or to get feedback on a shared project. And of course, our own IT support loves Connect to take over the user’s computer and directly deliver the tech support needed.

All it takes to access any of the new services is an Adobe ID, which is free, and is used for all kinds of access to everything Adobe—the Adobe Store, Adobe Labs, Acrobat.com, and many more.

These three free services are available in many CS4 design and web products, including Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Flash, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver. You can get more info on these and other online services in Creative Suite 4 here.

This section of Multiple Artboards Tips and Tricks is about use of crop marks.

Q: In Illustrator CS3, if you choose Object>Crop Area>Make, you get a Crop Area and Crop Marks at a distance of 9pt by 9pt from edges of the Crop Area. Now that Crop Area is not present in Illustrator CS4, can we still get crop marks in an EPS or PDF file without any offset error?

A: Yes we can still get the crop marks in an EPS or PDF file without any offset error by leveraging the Crop Marks Effect functionality.

In Illustrator CS4, create two rectangles, both these rectangles should have "No Fill" and "No stroke."
The dimensions of first rectangle are equal to that of crop area you want. The dimensions of the second rectangle are less than the first rectangle by 18 pt by 18 pt. Both are placed concentrically, i.e., have the same center point. Select the first rectangle and choose Object >Convert to Artboards to create a new artboard. Then select the second rectangle and apply crop marks effect using Effect>Crop Marks. Crop marks will be created at a distance of 18pt by 18pt from the corners of the second rectangle and 9pt by 9pt from first rectangle, which you originally wanted for a crop area.

If you want to move these crop marks to a custom distance from second artboard, select the second rectangle and choose Object>Expand Appearance, or after drawing the first rectangle, use the attached action (Download file).

The Crop Marks Effect will be expanded, and using the Direct Selection Tool, you can move them wherever you want. The new artboard you created will work as a crop area (please refer to the previous section of Multiple Artboard Tips and Tricks) and the crop area effect will be used as crop marks. Caution: the length/width of crop marks created using the Crop Mark effect will be slightly more than what one would get in CS3 using Object>Crop Area>Make.

Please watch out for our next edition of Multiple Artboards Tips and Tricks to learn interesting ways of emulating Page Tiling in Illustrator CS4.

Contributed by Brenda Sutherland, Illustrator Team Rowing Captain
I know we’ve all had this experience. You take on a project that looks so simple you’re confident you’ll knock it out in no time. Then it turns out to be far more complicated then you ever expected, and you realize that to do it well is going to take a lot more time and effort. That’s exactly what happened when we implemented the Blob Brush in CS4. We thought it would be a pretty simple thing to do, as we had already implemented the Eraser tool back in CS3, and the idea behind the Blob Brush was to use Pathfinder to create shapes like the Eraser does, but instead of erasing them, fill them with color. What could be simpler than that?

I suppose if we had left it at that, it just might have been that simple, but there was another piece that seemed essential to making this tool complete, and that was merging. If you’ve been following my series on Pathfinder and the features in Illustrator that use the Pathfinder Engine, then you’ll recognize the connection here. The Blob Brush works in a very similar way to the Eraser tool in that is starts off by creating a Calligraphic Brush object, expands it into simple paths, then runs Pathfinder to create either a simple or compound path, eliminating all the overlapping brush strokes as well as the original path.

Because it starts out as a Calligraphic Brush object, it has all of the same functionality available that Calligraphic brushes have. If you are using a pressure sensitive tablet, you can even vary its settings just as you can with a brush. And like the Brush and Eraser tools, you can increase and decrease the size with the square bracket keys.

So one question you might have is, if the Blob Brush is so similar to the Calligraphic Brush, why did we go through all this trouble to create a new tool in the first place? The answer is that as cool as brushes in Illustrator are, there are times when all you want to do is create a simple path, a blob so to speak, that doesn’t have editable brush attributes after it’s been created, but can easily be erased, have gradients or live effects applied, and if it’s not the right shape, can be added on to without having to expand and then run pathfinder on.

We’re going to devote a few blog posts to help you understand how to use Multiple artboards and how they replace older features like Crop Areas and Page Tiling.
Q: How can I specify crop areas, especially when saving as EPS, PDF, or other graphic file formats? What about printing?
A: Use Multiple artboards.

By default, you have an artboard on which your artwork will be present. Now just draw an artboard equal to size of the Crop Area you want.

How to do this: Select the Artboard Tool from the toolbox and bring it over the artboard.

Hold down the Shift key. Immediately you will see that the cursor has taken the shape of Artboard Tool. Now click and drag to create an artboard equal to the size of crop area you want.

Or draw a rectangle equal to the size of the size of crop area you want, select the rectangle, and choose Object>Convert to Artboards. Once the new artboard has been created inside your original artwork you will have two artboards--one that was originally present, and the one you just created. (Select the Artboard Tool or press “Shift +O” to see this). The part you wanted inside the crop area lies inside second artboard and the part of the artwork you didn’t want lies inside first artboard.

If you want to export or print only the content of the second artboard, do the following:

For saving to EPS/PDF format: In the Save As dialog, check the “Use Artboards” option, select the Range radio button and input a value “2” in the Range text box, click Save and then click OK.

Save as EPS dialog with “Use Artboards” checked on, and second artboard saved to EPS.

Similarly, for exporting only the cropped content to other graphic file formats: In the Export dialog, choose the file format you want, check the “Use Artboards” option, select the Range option and input a value “2” in the Range text box and click Export.


Exporting a second artboard to PSD will only export the cropped content.

If you are saving to the web and want only the content lying inside second artboard, do the following: Using the Selection Tool, click anywhere inside second artboard to make it the active artboard. Then choose File>Save for Web & Devices. Inside the Save for Web dialog, go to the Image Size tab and make sure that “Clip to Artboard” is checked. Then press Save.

If you want to print just the cropped portion of your artwork, do the following: Invoke the Print dialog using File>Print, select the Range check box and input a value “2” in the Range text box, choose the Media equal to the size of the paper in the printer and click Print.


How to print an artboard inside another artboard. This works similar to printing the crop area in CS3.

Watch out for our next section on Multiple Artboard Tips and Tricks on how to create and preserve crop marks in EPS using Illustrator CS4.

Contributed by Terry Hemphill, Illustrator Product Marketing Manager

The complexity of the important issues of today and the reduction of these topics to sound bites, invective and the outright misrepresentation of facts by print and broadcast media, as well as blogs and other social media, is so commonplace today it’s a cliché, a banal sideshow that we’re bombarded with at most every turn in our modern lives.

But we are still faced with the issues, and no matter how involved and convoluted, we still struggle to extract the facts and craft our own opinions, at least those of us who care or who are threatened in some way by either the issues themselves or their possible outcomes.

Good graphic design can make these complex subjects more clear. Just as a good teacher can make even the most difficult subjects exciting, thoughtful graphic design can combine the mediums of print, motion graphics, video and interactivity to bring clarity to convoluted problems, and be visually elegant, entertaining and downright fun as well.

Two cases in point:

Jonathan Jarvis, and his video The Crisis of Credit Visualized, is an ingenious explanation of how our credit markets ended up in the mess we’re still struggling to understand and dig ourselves out of today.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

In addition to being a lively thinker and dissector of issues, Jonathan’s a wonderfully talented designer. Check out his Process as Drawing, where he’s captured 24 30-minute illustrations created using Illustrator and Photoshop into lively 90-second videos that are just pure fun to watch. His inspiration for these exercises came from participating in the Cut & Paste Design Tournament last year. Cut & Paste 2009 is just wrapping up in Europe before heading to the Asia-Pacific, and back to New York City for the final, global championship June 20.

Jonathan evolves this rapid illustration technique in The Stimulus: Unpacked to deliver an on-the-fly analysis of a speech by President Obama.

Jonathan’s work in The Stimulus: Unpacked called to mind sosolimited, a group of designers and artists who used their custom software to remix the 2008 presidential debates into Reconstitution 2008, a live performance that deconstructs both the spoken words and the body language of the candidates. And does so beautifully.

We may face a noisy, often hostile world of “news” and “entertainment,” but it’s a delight to discover designers and artists who are turning this media barrage inside out, in ways equally thoughtful, provocative and beautiful.

Contributed by David Macy, Illustrator Sr. Product Manager

I sometimes think of the job of Illustrator Product Manager as being Mayor of a great city. This city has millions of residents, some in affluent neighborhoods and others not, we have local small business owners as well as large companies who are headquartered here and others who have satellite offices. Each of these groups has their own reasons for living or being located here and their own desires to see the city improve in different ways. Like all great cities, we have visitors who come to us for our tremendous variety of cultural events and beautiful scenery. We also have an aging infrastructure with subways and sewer lines to be updated, streets to be maintained and parks to beautify. Some of these infrastructure projects are clear winners because they are relatively low cost and the benefits will be easy to see. Others are much harder because they will involve shutting down areas of the “old city” for some time and may even cause permanent damage to some of the historic buildings. In addition, we growth potential, which if managed right can both improve the quality of life for our citizens and stimulate prosperity for the business which rely on our city.

Of course we have an annual budget which is funded by taxes collected from most of the groups that I mentioned. In good times, this budget is enough to go around while in lean times it is very difficult and we have to drastically cut city spending. Additionally, for many of our residents the tax is voluntary, and if they don’t feel the city is providing services that are valuable to them, they may choose to keep their money. There are many city council and planning commission meetings where there is a lot of debate over how to spend the budget and there are obviously conflicting interests involved.

Now this is all just the first layer because one thing that makes our city great is that we are at the center of a greater metropolitan area, surrounded by a number of other cities (other Creative Suite applications), both large and small. Some of these have similar issues and concerns as ours, while others are more modern planned communities without the burden of aging infrastructure. The citizens of many of these cities move freely from one to another throughout the day, and several years ago the leaders of these cities got together and agreed to try to share resources in areas where it was feasible and made sense. For example, we are all part of the same electric grid, but we need to maintain our own sewers. Sharing as many resources as we can has benefits, but it also means that we need to negotiate with each other in order to make upgrades and ensure that everyone’s needs are met. The second layer of government that we have formed to oversee these shared activities often petitions for its own initiatives for the benefits of citizens across the region, but these initiatives usually need to compete for the same budget as the local growth or infrastructure projects.

This metropolitan area is not an island of course, we are part of a larger state, with its own government and budget to balance. Our great Creative Suite metro area is a huge contributor to the state budget, but even so there are times when the state faces a deficit and needs to pull funds from the local coffers.

So, you can see that it is quite a balancing act to manage the budget, define the feature set, develop the product as part of a set of suites, and focus on continued quality improvements and try to make this all fit into a longer term vision. All this makes for a job that I love!