After four years of creating tutorials, tips, and hunting for vector art inspiration for Vectips, I’m taking a break and putting Vectips on a hiatus. I didn’t come to this decision easily and below I outline some of the reasons that I made this decision. I also talk about the future of Vectips and other possibilities. I really have enjoyed creating and maintaining Vectips. My career path is changing but I hope Vectips will still have a bright future!

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The Vectorian Vintage Vector Pack is a mammoth pack including 930 vector ornaments, 465 vintage frame borders, and 92 antique illustrations. Vectorian is giving away 5 packs to 5 lucky Vectips readers! You really need to check out the site to see all the elements.

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Nathaniel Kelso created a couple of really handy scripts to fit text boxes to their content. This might seem like a really basic problem, but these problems are usually the most annoying. There is a script for a text box’s Depth and a script for the text box’s Width. If you work with a bunch of typography in Illustrator I’m sure they will come in handy. Thanks to John Wundes for pointing it out. Download the script here (you need to scroll down a little ).

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Illustrator CS6 is shipping! I’m sure most of you know and have already downloaded the the trial version, but if you haven’t, go and get it already! In the following post I breakdown some of the new features in CS6 and it’s not quite a review, just an overview at what is new. I want to use CS6 for a solid month in production work before I put up my review.

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I get some great email questions from Vectips readers and sometimes they even answer their own questions, making for great tips! Which leads me to… you can use the tilde (~) key to mannually move pattern tiles. For example, select an object with a pattern tile applied to it, hold down the tilde key, and move it with the arrow keys or one of the selection tools! Pretty handy.

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I love using Illustrator’s Width Profiles (CS5 and up) but I hate accidentally deleting the custom widths I’ve created. There’s no great way to save custom profiles like you do when saving other custom libraries like brushes, swatches, and graphic styles. The best way I’ve found to save them is by applying the custom profile to an object and saving a graphic style. From there you can save a custom graphic style library.

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Thanks to John Wundes, I learned Matthew Erickson created an awesome Artboard/Layers exporter script called MultiExporter. The script handles exporting of selected layers, artboards, or a combo of both into PNG, JPG, PDF, and EPS formats. This script is a little more extensive than other exporting scripts and worth checking out!

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