Lorem Ipsum Blvd A Graphic Designers Personal Bag of Tricks

The Scribble Effect

A new effect that was introduced to CS4 is the scribble effect. It's nice if you want to take an .eps and give it a hand quality feel. Also you can combine the scribble with a hard outline to have a nice type effect.

Create your type and fill with the desired scribble color.

Next select Effect>Stylize>Scribble

You can play with the various settings until you have the effect you are going for. There is a ton of flexibility in this filter.

Once the scribble effect is applied, place another layer of the text with a solid stroke.

You'll find a lot of fun uses for this treatment. I've created this one to have a drafted look for "fine homes"

Create a Dieline and Measurement Spot

When working with Dielines and Measurements it's good to get in the habit of setting your files up correct. One trick I learned is to turn your dielines and measurement colors into a cmyk spot color. Simply make your color 100m and click the spot color type.

The advantage of this is that your printer would need an extra plate to actually mess up and print your dieline. Notice the separation preview below.

Additionally, you can double click the layer in which the Dieline is on and unclick the print button.  The layer will look italicize in the layer window and will not print.

Since I repeat these steps often I create a default document.ai and begin all print jobs from it. Proper file structure helps eliminate costly errors.

Creating a PDF action in Illustrator

If you are contently repeating the same steps it's worth this time to create an action. An action will record anything you do to a file and repeat the steps on any future files. Today I'm going to create a very simple action for saving a PDF as smallest file size on a folder on my desktop called "PDF".

First, select the actions panel. (Window>Actions) Click on the Create new action button. We'll name this action "Save PDF Smallest File Size". Hit Record.

Now the Action is recording any changes that occur to the file. You could add a copyright symbol, text, resize, or pretty much anything else repetitive you would like to do to future files. We are going to simply select save as and set out PDF settings to smallest size. Make sure you save the file within the folder you want all future files to be within. I created a desktop folder called "PDF". Once you do this you can close the file.  The Action will pick up on the closing of the file and do this to future files. After closing the file hit the stop button. This helps when you want to open 10 files and click the play button on each one and have them close as they are re-saved to PDFs.

Now you can open multiple projects and simply hit the play button to make them save as a pdf on your desktop in a folder called PDF without seeing any prompts. Creating actions of redundant tasks will save you an incredibly amount of time!

Quick Web 2.0 Illustrator Effect

This is an incredibly fast way to make any shape have a web 2.0 feel. First take the shape you would like the effect to be applied to and draw a half circle into it.

Next, Separate the circle shape and overlay this on the background shape. Make the top shape be a linear gradient from 20% cyan to 100% cyan. Make the background shape 100% Cyan to 100% cyan, 50% magenta.

Finally, insert and image in white over the background you created. You should have an incredibly fast web 2.0 icon.