Today, I have some amazing tips and hacks inside of Adobe Illustrator that you probably didn’t know existed. You don’t miss out on another video. The first tip is Rich Black. Now on first look, you may think that this circle here is just completely black, but in reality, it’s quite different. In fact, this circle here is rich black; maybe on the recording, you can’t see it. But what’s happening here is the way the illustrator is showing us how blacks are sort of rendered out to us.
There’s a huge difference in tone between this black and this one. This looks like a grey. This one is just black. Now, there is a setting that the best customer support cv writing service needs to change and tweak to our own preference to make sure that we’re outputting the blacks correctly. So go to Preferences, go down to Appearance of Black, and we’ve got a couple of these selection boxes.
Display All Blacks Accurately
Now, I’ve got to display all blacks accurately, and I’ve got to output all blacks accurately. This means that the blacks that are going to be printed as seen or as accurately as possible. And we have two examples here. One example of 100K black, an example of a rich black. If you’re working on a digital platform and you just need everything to be rich black, then you can go ahead and make sure that this is all turned onto display all blacks as rich black and output all blacks as rich black.
If you are doing print work, then I think it’s really important to be able to determine these. Here we have two examples. We’ve got 100% black and rich black. You can see here on the 100% black, on the CMYK options, we’ve got 74, 65 and all this is a bit hit and miss. On the rich black, though, we have a bit of a more tonal difference here.
CMYK Form A Bit Different For Everyone
To get rich black, it’s essentially in CMYK form a bit different for everyone. But I go for 50, 50, 50 and then like 100 And that gives us that the most prosperous black. That gives us all the colours in one. As well as having the key in there to make it black. The next tip is about Anchor Point Displays. Let’s say we’re working on an illustration and trying to mess around with it a little bit. And we’re trying to get this point over here. This is quite a small point to try and grab and look at.
Little Anchor Points
Looks pretty when we’re selecting all; we get these nice little anchor points and everything, but they look a bit small. Maybe you want them bigger. Well, again, go to Preferences and go to Selection and Anchor Point Display, and we can change this to the max, and we can also change the style of the handle. When we change it to the max, we use an anchor point for selection. We can actually see them a lot clearer. We can drag them a lot clearer.
It’s Easier To Hit
Just gives you a bit more freedom. When selecting things all the way around. The next tip is one that you may not have seen before. But it’s very helpful. It’s all about increments. Let’s say we want to move this hair slightly to the left. So we use our arrow keys, but the problem is, as you can see, when we use them. Even if I’m just clicking once, they move quite far. It’s a bit too far. It’s not very accurate. Well, again, go to Preferences. We’re going to go to General and then Keyboard Increment. We’re going to change this to 0.5 Now when we use the arrows.
0.5 Increments
It’s more accurate than it used to be, which allows you more control over your design work. Before I go into the next tip, I want to thank the sponsor of this video, SQUARESPACE. You’re a designer, and you need a portfolio. This is the number one thing that you need. It’s the way that you get your branding to the world. It’s also a way for clients to come and contact you and see a little piece of you. Well, with thousands of templates that are fully customisable.
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Proof Setup
Well, an easy way to check this is to go up to View, and we can go down to Proof Setup and choose one of these colour blindness types; if I click that, you can see that the whole colour scheme has changed dramatically. These are the two main colour blindness, I believe. And we can change them. Make sure that our work is working well. Even when people with colour blindness are viewing it, it gives you a little insight into how effective your design is for everyone.
Also, Read; This STOPS 90% of designers getting CLIENTS!
If your design works well in all colour areas, we go to Proof Set up, choose colour blindness and then go to Proof Colours. And you can see here that it’s still visible. And still got good contrast relative to what it did before. Even without the colour blindness filter over the top of it. This next tip will actually make your life so much easier. If you’re a designer and you struggle with colour theory, and you don’t know which colours to use, and you’re using websites all the time for inspiration.
A Sort Of Background
Let’s say you like this, like purple colour here. So maybe you have this purple colour as a sort of background. We could choose white over the top if we wanted to for the main headline text or body text, but whatever you want to add more colours here. How do we know very easily which colours to use? What we can do is we can go to Window. We can go to Colour Guide or Shift + F3.
When we go to Colour Guide, open up this box here, and we can click on this button here or select a colour like so. Change the harmony rules, and we can get complimentary analogous. Analogous? Is that how you say it? Analogous? Monochromatic shades, triad, high contrast compound. We’ve got everything in there, so we can go to high contrast.
Start Making Other Shapes
For instance, we can start making other shapes here and start to change the colours based on what we think will work. And it gives us nice high contrast and allows us to change the colour perfectly without having to know much about colour theory. This is just a little trick that’ll help you with any colour that you’re struggling to capture within your project.
Say you need a brand colour or brand colour scheme. Well, you can easily just start to choose them through this. You could choose a complimentary set just like that. You’ve got a brand colour scheme with dominance and tertiary and secondary colours. I hope you found these tips super useful. Let me know in the comments if there are any tips that you would like to share. Or any tips that you think I’ve missed, or let me know just your thoughts on which is the best tip.
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5 Must Know Illustrator Tips 2022
In this blog, I have compiled five super useful Illustrator tips that will aid you in your Logo Design and Graphic Design processes.