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There are many functions and techniques that speed up the workflow in Adobe Illustrator. In today's article we have put together the most efficient ones. Hopefully here you will find tricks that will be useful and help make your work easier.
Create Custom Workspaces
Adobe Illustrator has many panels and tools. The amount can be further increased if you use plug-ins in your work. A workspace is a complex of open panels, windows, bars and their arrangement. If you do not use order here, then you will spend a lot of time looking for the desired element of control. There are 9 types of workspaces, designed to solve common problems. You can select one of them in the Workspace switcher menu.
An experienced user needs his own combination of elements of workspace. Think about how to conveniently group up panels that you use frequently and save your own workspace by selecting New Workspace in the switcher menu.
Customize the Tool Panel
It is unlikely that you use all 87 native tools from the Tools panel every day. Therefore you can create a custom tools panel (Window> Tools> New Tools Panel). Drag a tool from an existing tools panel into a new tools panel.
Now the standard Tools panel can be closed. Note that the current workspace will remember this configuration of the Tools panel.
Create keyboard shortcuts for your most used tools, menu commands and panel buttons
Keyboard shortcuts significantly speed up our actions in Illustrator. But some tools and menu commands do not have keyboard shortcuts by default. If a tool or command is frequently used, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to them (Edit> Keyboard Shortcuts).
You can define your own sets of shortcuts, change individual shortcuts within a set, and switch between sets of shortcuts. For example, you can create separate sets for different workspaces.
In addition there is one trick that allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts to commands from panels, for example Pathfinder or Align. You need to select the objects that we will work on, create New Action in the Actions panel, assign a Function Key in the New Action dialog box, for example F2 + Shift.
Now press the Record button and perform the required action, for example, click 'Minus Front' in the Pathfinder panel, then click the Stop button.
Now F2 + Shift will execute the command you recorded
Create actions for repetitive tasks
Quite complex actions of the same type that are time-consuming, can become automated using the Actions panel. For example, you can automate the process of creating isometric objects. For more information, see 'Create an Isometric Icon Action'.
Now scripts in the Actions panel are preserved when you relaunch Illustrator CC (version 22.0). Many designers have been waiting for this for many years, so I think it necessary to mention about this here.
You can read full version of this article on AstuteGraphics.com....
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