I am a Keyboard Shortcut junkie because Keyboard Shortcuts save a tremendous amount of time! The great thing about Illustrator CS3 is you can customize your shortcuts. Some of you probably know this already, but it’s worth mentioning for you that don’t. Now you can create shortcuts for Illustrator’s Tools and Menu Commands and set multiple profiles!

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Creating type on a path is a great feature of Illustrator and is quite handy when sprucing up your typography or experimenting. Annoyingly, the Path Type object always seem to have inconsistent spacing and just doesn’t look right. Luckily, Illustrator has some Text On A Path Options! With these options, you can change the Effect, Alignment, Spacing, and Flip.

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This trick is similar to the Compliment Color trick, but I use it so much, I had to share it. I use specific color modes for different projects, and found myself more comfortable mixing certain colors in certain color profiles. A quick way to switch between profiles in the Color Panel is to press Shift and Click on the Color Ramp. You can easily swap between CMYK, RGB, HSB, Grayscale and Web Safe RGB.

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Illustrator has the ability to add raster effects to elements like outer glows, inner glows, and drop shadows. Vector art is great because you can scale them to any size. That is why I try not to use the raster effects in final output. One area this creates a problem, is drop shadows, but there are a couple of easy ways to add drop shadows using blends and gradients rather than raster effects.

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There are a great deal of vector tutorials, freebies, tricks, and tips out there on the web today. I would love to share some of the sites that I come across, but think a single post would be overkill. So I decided to create a Twitter account for Vectips. Follow Vectips to get some quick links of vectors around the web. You can also follow my Rype Arts account if you want.

I love the results you can get when working with meshes, but sometimes I don’t love trying to edit them.  When a path is converted to a Mesh Object, it is no longer a Path. This can get frustrating if you want the original path for other purposes. To extract the original Path, select the Mesh Object, go Object > Path > Offset Path and enter 0. Now you have a copy!

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I’ve made some changes to the site. Probably most noticeable, is the advertising. I have started using BuySellAds.com, check them out for more info on purchasing ad space. I really want to keep the advertising to a minimum, but still need some revenue to keep the site running. I have also added Email Subscriptions to the feed and added Related Posts for better browsing.