Day 41: More Adobe Illustrator

Today I continued working with Adobe Illustrator.  I started by exploring how to work with color (swatches, color, color guide).  Select, Same, Fill and Stroke is a useful way to select similar objects.

If you ever outline an image by mistake and need to change it back, simply right click on an empty spot on the canvas and select preview.  This will return the view back to normal.  Select, Inverse will select everything other than what is currently being selected.  Ctrl Alt Left Bracket or Right Bracket allows you to select items by moving up and down the layers, one object at a time.  Q is the shortcut key for the lasso tool.

Regarding the text tool, after you have typed some text, if you wish to deselect it, hold down ctrl and click elsewhere.  You are then able to enter new text elsewhere on the page. The upper right link in the characters panel allows you to access the superscript and subscript options.  When entering text, if you make a box with before entering text (as opposed to just clicking), the text will not be re-sized when you adjust the size of the bounding box.

Going to Type, Type on a Path, then Type on a Path Options gives you a panel which allows you to modify type on a path (text written on a line or shape, which follows the contours of that line or shape).  Type, Create Outlines turns text into shapes, useful for when sending a file which has text in it which the receiver's software may not have a font for.  Remember to use Object, Path, Outline Stroke when you add stroke to something and then need to scale it, to make sure the scaling is proportional.

When using the line segment tool, double clicking with the tool opens up an options menu which allows you to st specific values for your creation.  When making a grid with the line segment tool, before you release the mouse click, you can hit the up and down and side to side arrows to manipulate the number of rows and columns. The polar grid tool also features this functionality.  The instructor created a rectangle above an object, then selected botht the rectangle and the object (holding down shift) went to Object, Clipping Mask, Make, and this removed the part of the object that was over the rectangle we created.  The instructor then double clicked on the object, which activated the mask, and as he moved below the rectangle, the object disappeared slowly, it was masked.  

Object, Expand (object, fill, and stroke), makes an object group all the way down, which, in the instructor's example, allowed him to select individual grid squares.  The Select, Same feature came in useful over and over.  I started using the paint brush tool.  The paint brush tool and the blob brush tool seem similar, but the blob brush tool creates shapes, while the paint brush tool creates paths, then uses strokes to fill those paths.  Shift E and Shift B allows us to switch between the eraser tool and the blob brush tool.

SUMMARY OF CODING SKILLS

Total Treehouse Points: 3,400
Treehouse Points by Subject Matter: HTML 663, CSS 1,599, Design 1,107, and Miscellaneous
Treehouse Ranking (%): "You have more total points than 84% of all students."

Badge(s) Earned Today:
Adding Color and Type

Courses Completed:
How to Make a Website
HTML
CSS Foundations
CSS Layout Techniques

Aesthetic Foundations
Design Foundations
Photoshop Foundations

Books Read or in Progress:"Head First HTML and CSS," by E. Robson & E. Freeman (In progress, I've read the 37 pg. preface and the first 255 pgs. of actual content, which is the HTML section of the book)

Hours Spent Coding Today: 6
Total Hours Coding: 192