I’m not that great at math, but luckily, Illustrator is. Illustrator uses points, lines, curves, and shapes all based on mathematical equations to create artwork. Even with its complicated computations on the back-end, Illustrator also has some basic mathematical functionality to adjust objects within panels and dialogs.

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I love coming across a plugin or script I haven’t used before that really solves a problem for me. I figure if I get frustrated with something in Illustrator, there is probably someone else out there that has the same problem. A recent frustration of mine was selecting Effects in Illustrator. Luckily I stumbled across the Select Effects Plugin from Worker 72a.

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If you have read some of my Tips & Tricks before, you know that I am all about saving time and increasing productivity when using Illustrator. Creating custom views in Illustrator is another trick I use to save time. Custom views are great for viewing complicated illustrations, documents with many Multiple Artboards, or sections of an Illustrator document you are constantly revisiting.

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Looking through some of my past work, I noticed I used the font Myriad a lot. At first I wondered why, then I came to the realization, it might be because Myriad is the default font in Illustrator. After that, I changed my default font for new documents. It is really easy to do, so read on to find out how.

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The 3D features in Illustrator come in handy when creating logos, illustrations, and other graphic elements. I’ve found experimenting with different settings within the 3D Options dialogs, can yield some unexpected but welcoming results. When experimenting with the 3D options, sometimes it is frustrating trying to get back to the original settings without closing the dialog. But there is an easy answer!

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Here is another quick tip when using Multiple Artboards in CS4. When you Select All (Command + A), Illustrator will select all the artwork in every artboard. This is great in some situations, but sometimes you want to select all artwork in an active artboard and not in others. No problem! Simply use the keyboard shortcut Command + Option + A (Mac) or Ctrl + Alt + A (Win)!

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I have been using the new Multiple Artboards feature in Illustrator CS4 more and more lately. I use it for setting up identity packages, multiple logo options , illustration variations, and so on. One thing that annoyed me, was using guides with multiple artboards. By default, guides span all artboards. Luckily, there is a simple solution to set guides to only span a particular artboard.

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