Adobe Illustrator CS

Designers starting out know Adobe Illustrator as “that program for designing logos,” but it’s capable of so much more: ads, illustrations, page layouts, and Web graphics, to name just a few applications. It’s the industry-standard application for vector graphics.

You don’t even have to be a virtuoso at drawing to create good Illustrator art. It helps, of course. But many designers who are not skilled illustrators are able to harness the program’s drawing, selection, color, and effects tools to create powerful and detailed artwork.

Adobe Illustrator started as a simple drawing program intended to automate technical drawing tasks. Today? Illustrator has come a long way, baby. Its raison d’être is still illustration, the creation of line art. But along the way, its developers have added in a host of features that make it sophisticated and flexible enough for a range of applications.

Mastering Illustrator certainly isn’t easy. The program’s tough learning curve—compared with that of its ubiquitous pal Photoshop—is daunting to many who are most comfortable with the latter’s painting metaphor. But for any serious graphic designer, Illustrator cannot be ignored.

Digital illustration is called for when a designer is looking for digital art with the special quality that only drawn art can impart. To produce an annual report, for example, an art director might commission an illustrator to create a set of icons and illustrations that run throughout the document, identifying chapters and reflecting its major themes. (more…)

Adobe Creative Suite makes it easy to reuse text created in Adobe Illustrator CS. Now, with Adobe Creative Suite, you can edit Illustrator text directly in Adobe Photoshop CS, so that you don’t have to switch applications just to tweak the text. And by using the Edit Original and Update Link commands in Adobe InDesign CS, you can change the text as often as necessary, without needing to reimport the Illustrator file every time.

1. Create the desired text in Illustrator.

In Illustrator, choose one of the type tools to create the text. You can create editable vertical or horizontal point type, path type, or area type. Select the desired color from the Swatches palette, and select the desired font and size from the Character palette.

2. Export the file to Photoshop format.

Choose File > Export. Select a file location, type a filename, and choose Photoshop (*.PSD) as the file type. In the Photoshop Export Options dialog box, make sure that Photoshop CS is selected in the Export As menu. Select Write Layers, select Preserve Text Editability and Maximum Editability, and then click OK.

When you preserve the layers in artwork, all top-level layers are converted to Photoshop layers. To preserve nested layers, select Maximum Editability. The Preserve Text Editability option is available only if preserving the editability won’t compromise the quality of the artwork. Text in nested layers is always rasterized.

3. Open the file in Photoshop.

In Photoshop, open the file you just exported. If you want to move the text into an existing Photoshop image, select the Move tool, and then drag the text into place.

4. Edit the text in Photoshop.

You’re now ready to edit the text. Select one of the type tools, select the text you want to change, and then type the new text.

You can also adjust any character or paragraph attributes using the Photoshop Character and Paragraph palettes. In this example, we changed the size and color of the text. (more…)

System requirements

This update requires Adobe Illustrator CS (International English, U.S. English, French, German, Danish, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, or Swedish versions). Illustrator CS Japanese customers should update to version 11.0.1, not 11.0.2. For additional information, refer to the current system requirements for Illustrator CS.
Installation Instructions

After downloading a DMG file on a Macintosh, double-click the file to mount the disk image to your desktop using Apple’s Disk Utility.

1. Quit Illustrator CS.
2. Open the Adobe Illustrator CS folder (to locate this folder, search the computer for a folder named Adobe Illustrator CS).
3. In the Finder, choose View > As List, and locate the application file. (The Finder lists the application file as an Application by Kind.)
4. Control-click the application icon and choose Show Package Contents.
5. Navigate to the Contents/MacOSClassic folder
6. Create a new folder and name it AICS 11.0.2 backup. Then copy the AGMCarbonPrint+PSInjLib and the BibUtilsCarbonLib files by holding down the Option key and dragging the files to the new folder. This creates copies of the files for backup purposes.
7. Copy the newly downloaded AGMCarbonPrint+PSInjLib and the BibUtilsCarbonLib files to the Contents/MacOSClassic folder. When Mac OS returns the message The files already exist in the location. Do you want to replace it with the one you are moving? click Replace.
8. Close all open windows.
9. Start Illustrator CS.

Once you’ve created the opacity mask, you can use the thumbnails in the Transparency palette to work with both the mask and the artwork beneath it. Instead of one thumbnail as you saw before, there are now two thumbnails: the one on the left is the artwork, the one on the right is the mask. To edit the artwork, click the left thumbnail. If you look at your Appearance palette, you’ll notice that the object you have selected is a normal path that has a solid fill attributed to it. The name of the path displays with a dashed underline in both the Appearance palette and the Layers palette, indicating that it has an opacity mask applied. At this point, the mask itself is not editable, nor can it even be selected.

Clicking the Invert Mask button reverses a mask and, rather than having the color black appear as transparent, the color black represents areas that are opaque. The Transparency palette menu also has an option to set all new masks to be created so that they are inverted.

Clicking the right thumbnail selects the mask, allowing you to edit its attributes. Take a look at the Layers palette; doing so reveals something very interesting. Instead of displaying all of the layers and objects in your file, when you click the mask thumbnail, the Layers palette switches to display just the opacity mask. The title bar of your document also indicates that you are editing the opacity mask and not the art. These visual indications help you easily identify when you are editing art and when you are editing an opacity mask. To return to artwork editing mode, simply click again on the left thumbnail icon.

When you are editing either the artwork or the opacity mask itself, using the selection tool to move items will result in both the artwork and the mask moving together. The reason for this is that by default, a mask and its artwork are linked with each other, indicated in the Transparency palette by a link icon that appears between the two thumbnail icons.

Clicking the link icon allows you to move the mask and artwork independently of each other, and clicking between the thumbnails toggles the link behavior.

For this exercise, imagine you want to create a gradient that fades from 100-percent color to none (which is not currently possible as you can’t assign the None attribute to a color stop in a gradient). Begin by creating a rectangle and fill it with a solid color. Next, select the rectangle and copy it by pressing Command-C (Ctrl-C). Now paste it in front of the first rectangle by pressing Command-F (Ctrl-F). Fill the second rectangle with a regular black to white linear gradient. You now have two objects, stacked on top of each other, with the gradient visible on top.

Use the Selection tool to select both objects and open your Transparency palette. In order to create an Opacity mask, you have to expand the palette to show all of its options, so click the triangles to the left of the Palette tab or choose Show Options from the palette menu. You will see a thumbnail of your selection in the Transparency palette. Finally, choose Make Opacity Mask from the Transparency palette menu. The result is a mask that uses the values of the gradient to define what parts of the object are visible below it—an object that effectively fades from 100-percent color to transparent (feel free to create an object that appears beneath the rectangle if you don’t believe me).

A layer clipping mask is very similar to a clipping mask, with one main difference: instead of masking another selected object or group of objects, it masks entire layers. In reality, layer clipping masks are far easier to control and work with because you aren’t constantly selecting and deselecting objects to define what is or what isn’t in a particular mask. Instead, you use the Layers palette, which you use to organize your artwork anyway, to create these kinds of masks.

To create a layer clipping mask, place the vector object that will be your mask at the top of the layer’s stacking order. Click once on the layer name in the Layers palette, which selects the layer (you don’t want to target the layer, just select it in the palette). Then, click the Make/Release Clipping Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. The topmost object in your layer now becomes a mask for all objects in that layer. The mask appears listed in the Layers palette with an underline, giving you a visual indication of its behavior. With layer clipping masks, you can easily drag items into a masked layer to have them affected by the mask, and vice versa. To release a layer clipping mask, select the layer and click the Make/Release Clipping Mask button.

A clipping mask can be made up of any vector object, including editable text. To create a clipping mask, you select both the path that will be the mask and the art that you want to appear inside of the mask. The path that you want to use as the mask must be the topmost object in your selection. Choose Object > Clipping Mask > Make, and only art that falls within the boundaries of the mask object will remain visible.

Note: A clipping mask uses the vector path as the boundary for the mask, even if the object has an appearance applied to it.

When Illustrator creates a clipping mask, the mask and the art are grouped together, making it easy to move them around as a single unit when you’re using the Selection tool. However, you can use the Direct Selection tool to select and edit just the mask, or just the artwork independently. In truth, because the masked art is still selectable, it can make life difficult when you have a lot of masks in a file, because you can easily select masked artwork when you don’t intend to do so. At the same time, this behavior does make it easy to edit artwork within masks. Getting into the habit of using the Layers palette to lock the art that you aren’t working with for a particular task helps avoid this.

Masking in Adobe Illustrator CS is a way to define parts of your artwork as being hidden from view. Rather than having to delete unwanted parts of your art, you can use a vector shape to define an area that acts like a window: Anything that appears within the borders of the shape is visible, and anything that falls outside its boundaries is not visible. The main benefit derived from using masks is that you aren’t deleting anything from your file, and once a mask is created, it’s possible to change the mask or the artwork behind it, as well as reposition the mask to show or hide different parts of your artwork.

When you use masks in a file and are required to make changes, you’ll never have to re-create art that you’ve already deleted. Instead, everything that you create is always in the file, and you simply choose what is or isn’t visible. Additionally, a mask allows you to instantly clip parts of an image or an object. By using a mask, you can do with one click what might take tens of clicks if you use pathfinder functions to chop up and delete parts of objects.

There are three different kinds of masks that you can create in Illustrator, each with its own benefits. A clipping mask allows you to specify a certain vector shape as a mask for other individual or grouped objects. A layer clipping mask allows you to specify a certain vector shape as a mask for all the objects within the same layer. An opacity mask allows you to use the luminance value of any object to create a mask for other individual or grouped objects.

Now that you understand how path type works, you’re ready to learn how to work with path type on a closed path. When you convert a path to a Path Type object, the point at which you click the path becomes the start point. On an open path, you can easily see the start and end points because they are on opposite sides of the path. However, when you are working with a closed path, the point that you click becomes the start and the end point (a closed path is continuous).

If, for example, you want to place text on a circle, click the top of the circle to create the start point and the end point; if you center your text, it actually aligns to the bottom of the path. To get text to align to the top center of a circle, either click at the bottom of the circle when you’re creating the Path Type object, or adjust the start and end points so that the center of the text rests at the top of the circle. At first placing text on a circle seems non-intuitive—clicking at the top of a circle centers your text at the bottom of the circle. Changing the position of the start and end points can make it easier to center text at the top curve of a circle.

Positioning text on a path—especially a curved path—can be difficult because the spacing can look irregular. However, you can adjust these and other settings by selecting the Path Type object and choosing Type > Type on a Path > Type on a Path Options. The following settings are available in the Type on a Path Options dialog:

Effect. The Effect setting controls the orientation of the text relative to the path. Prior to Illustrator CS, all Type on Path objects used the Rainbow setting, which rotated each character to be tangent to the path. Illustrator now allows you to also choose from Skew, 3D Ribbon, Stair Step, and Gravity.

Align to Path. The Align to Path setting determines which part of the text actually lines up with and touches the path. You can choose from Baseline (the default), Ascender, Descender, and Center.

Spacing. You can use the Spacing setting to help get consistent spacing between characters on curved paths (the setting doesn’t do much on straight paths). Where paths make sharp curves, the spacing between characters could appear at odd angles or with inconsistent spacing. Specifying a higher spacing value brings characters closer to each other and corrects the spacing issues.

Flip. The Flip setting allows you to control the side of the path on which the text appears.

If you want to apply an appearance to the path itself on a Path Type object, click just the path with the Direct Selection tool (it might be easier to do this while you are in the Outline view mode). You can then apply attributes to the path as you would normally. To offset text from the path itself, use the Baseline Shift setting, although if you’re working with wavy or curved paths, using one of the Align To Path settings offers better results because it takes advantage of the Spacing setting.