Posts Tagged keyboard shortcuts
If you want to be a design master, you must first master the Pen tool. The Pen tool is one of the most important items in your Photoshop and Illustrator toolboxes and learning how to comfortably use it will open up new opportunities and speed up your every day workflow. Here’s a couple of techniques I use when working with the pen tool that I hope will help you get to grips with your bezier curves.
The many faces of the Pen tool
The Pen tool comes with all kinds of options for creating, removing and tweaking bezier points and curves. All these options can be quickly selected using certain shortcut keys, or you can choose that specific tool individually from within the Pen tool stack.
Let’s look at the different variations and what they do:
Pen Tool
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Keyboard shortcuts are an essential time-saving tool for any graphic designer but often times the default settings can be inefficient and it is necessary to edit them in order to make the job much easier. In this brief video tutorial I will demonstrate how to edit your default Illustrator keyboard shortcuts so that you can select them much more efficiently.
Video Tutorial
Screenshot
Those of you who are familiar with Photoshop know that transforming an object’s perspective in Photoshop is quite easy; just go to edit > Transform > Perspective and then you can change the perspective of just about any type of object. Doing this in Illustrator however is not quite as easy; or at least straight forward. In this quick tutorial, I will show you how to use the free transform tool in Illustrator in tandem with a few simultaneous keyboard shortcuts to adjust an objects perspective.
Video Tutorial
It is a known fact that if you want to commit something to memory, continuous revision is the key. You read something every time you are at your desk and within days it becomes second nature.
To be able to revise quickly and often, it helps if the information is terse and to the point highlighting only the important aspects. Something like an application cheat sheet or a poster that you can print and pin to a board or keep on your desk.
Here are some application cheat sheets for commonly used software that will hopefully make you more productive.
Microsoft Office
Need to get that report typed and formatted quickly? Can’t find your way around the ribbon interface? Check these out:
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Explains the ribbon interface, smart shapes, which format to choose and how to do things like adding a digital signature, protecting the document and other little tips. (Download) |
