[Music] [Kladi Vergine] Okay. Welcome, everyone. Hopefully, you all have your headsets, although I'm quite loud. So, hopefully, you can turn down your volume. And, welcome. I just wanted to make sure that you're all in the right session here. So we're going to be talking about Illustrator and some pro techniques and new features, hopefully, to speed up your designs. Now before we get started, talking about the topics of the sessions, I just want to do a quick intro about myself. My name is Kladi. I'm an Italian designer based in Manchester, and the weird awkward accent and sometimes made up terms and words that I come up with. This is my Instagram. I'm also a senior design evangelist at Adobe. And the part of my role, and I would say central part of my role is to connect with the community. So please feel free to reach out. I will cover many features. I'm an Illustrator girl. I love Illustrator. Hopefully, many of you do since you're here. So I might go a little bit fast because I want to show you a lot. But you have my Instagram as a place to reach out. I'm always open to conversation. As I say, this is part of my job, as a community advocate and evangelist here at Adobe for Design. So that's the place to find me.
Those are the features that I'm going to try to cover, as I said, hopefully, because there is a ton of there. I think there is three hours worth of content, but I'm going to try to squeeze and hope, and hopefully even add some more exciting shortcuts for you to make sure that you can work faster. We're going to start and building up by setting up for your success by building new document profiles to then moving on in creations and efficiency. So that tips to create faster, and then also some tips in typography, moving to complexity and texture. And then we have, a special guest, which is Michael Leagues, also senior designer evangelist at Adobe, Howard Pinsky, that will highlight Project Neo. So this is also to give you an idea. Hopefully, you're interested and you know what you're getting in this session. Real quick, so you know who is here on the podium talking. As I say, I'm an Italian designer, but I come from a PR background. So I used to work at the UN when I was quite young, but at the same time, I used to be a writer and graffiti artist. And I always say that graphic design, and in particular Illustrator saved my life. Because as you can imagine, working at the UN and painting trains and running, rattling, with my spray can. Either would get me fired or arrested. So I always say, I started to move from the wall to start tracing in Illustrator. And then, that's how I started my design career. So just to give a little bit of a background. And, if you're going to take anything in of the millions features that I'm going to start talking to you about in just a second, I really want you to think that those are just there for you to use them as you want. When I do demos, oh my god, you're a pro. You do this in a certain way. That doesn't really matter. What it matters is that you make it service for your own workflow and for your own creation. So you can translate your ideas into visuals. Okay. Let's get started. As I say, I have quite a lot. By the way, you can find these slides also on my website. iamkladi.com/max24. It's quite easy to find. You have access to the slides. There is also a little gift there. There is a script that you can download. You have the outline and we're going to talk about the doc profile in just a moment. So you'll find it on my website easy to copy and paste and as a reference. Again, iamkladi.com/max24. Nice and easy to remember for you, and to access afterwards as well. Okay. So let's go ahead. I'm going to just hop into Illustrator because that's where we're going to spend our time. And, when I talk about setting up, right, when I start any file, doesn't matter the intent if I'm looking to build for web or for print. When I start in a document and I go ahead and create a document, what happens is that the document in Illustrator come with not a very appealing set of default, that unfortunately have been there for quite a while now. And I'm talking about brushes, swatches, and graphic style, styles that are there. And it's quite time consuming, especially if you're a pro and you have a certain kind of tool that you build to try your career to start implementing, importing, copy and pasting, and rebuilding your assets from scratch over and over again. So what I want to show you is how you can add all your master assets. And, by the way, they're here on the artboard just to display, just to show you what I've got here. I've got some brushes that I've created for the illustration that we're going to work on now. Those are just some little vases that in reality, there are scatter brushes that I've created. Then we have some more brushes, but also some graphic styles and some icons, some patterns. So all the different things that you create, whenever you are working. And just to give an idea, I use all of them inside this illustration that we're going to talk about in just a moment today. So how do I retain all these amazing assets? Well, the root folder that you find on my website and that I mentioned a moment ago, that is the place where you can actually save an Illustrator file, as long as your file has already stored all the brushes. So you can see here the brushes that you see, they're all inside my panel, and the swatches and the patterns and graphic styles, everything is there. All you have to do is to make sure that you save your file on your computer following that particular path. I'm going to go ahead and highlight it for you so you can take a screenshot, but as I said, it's on my website. So usually, it's user, your name, and then you end up in your libraries, application support. And then from there, you find Adobe Illustrator 28. I don't know why it's 28. You probably find your version being en_us. As I said, I'm based in the UK, therefore mine is GB. It's Great Britain. And here you have the opportunity then to find the new document profile folder. Now this super cool folder is the place where you can hold a new document profile for your Illustrator software. That means that as you can see here, I have a couple. I have master, a couple of masters, and those are the files that I use. And this is amazing whenever you are working specifically with a brand. Because imagine you have all the assets that you have created. Imagine if you have a master file that you can start with. And let me show you what that means. So this is starting with any default profile. If I go ahead now and start a new document, because I've created my master on the web, I'll find that under the web intent tab. And here, you'll be able to see that I have my master that I saved. And once I click on it, it doesn't matter the number of artboards or any other details of your preset, the size, you can change the color and raster effect. But what matters that, look at that. Once I click on create, all my brushes, swatches, and graphic styles, and anything else that you want will populate automatically, giving you, very much speed and efficiency when you work. Okay. So that was my very first step in getting started. And I want to move forward to something else here, which is the toolbar. Not many yet to know that you can personalize your toolbar simply by clicking these three dots. And you know what happened? I don't have it here. I probably just already hidden because I'm not really friendly with the three degree grid that that is there the isometric grid that then you click and then it appears and then you have to go, view, hide, the perspective grid. So what I love doing is to make sure that I drag away any tools that I don't use. So I don't really use the knife. I don't really use the hand rotate tool. So what you do is just simply click and drag them inside the toolbar to remove them. And in that way, you can really be more efficient because you're just going to keep all the tools that you need. But you can move even faster because there is a little tab here, which is called new toolbar, that allows you to create as many toolbar that you want. I love drawing, so I'm going to have a drawing three, probably because I have already created a few, just for a test. And as you can see, despite the fact that you already have a toolbar, it allows you to create another toolbar. And I can even have the same tools. And again, all I have to do is to click and drop. Here, I'm going to zoom in so you can all see better. I'm just selecting, for example, the paintbrush tool and then I'm dragging it there. You see a little plus. And you can also nest them by simply bringing it on top of the tool that is already on the toolbar there. And I'll let you imagine, you can create as many toolbars as you want. You can duplicate it and just create groups of tool that allow you directly to tap in the tools that you use the most. Now, the beauty about that is that not only you can create all of these amazing things, but also you will be able to very, very quickly save them, thanks to the workspaces. So you can go ahead once you've set up your workspaces, your panels, your toolbars, the many toolbars that you want. You can go ahead and create a new workspace, call it whatever you want. I'm going to call this one Kladi tools, and then simply click on okay. Now bear in mind, whenever you're saving a new workspace in Illustrator, not only it takes the say, whatever you have, open in terms of panels, but also their position. So you might want to clear things up a little bit, and that's also a good way to quickly clean your desktop. Imagine your colleague, your client is coming, you got all these different panels around your screen, you can quickly reset it. And let me show you. So now, if I go back, I save this one with this bespoke little two panel that I have there that I've just created with you guys. Here it is. So if I now go ahead and change back to essentials, and then I go ahead and reset the essentials, so I bring back nice everything in clear. But maybe I want to keep working now. The client has gone away. I can go ahead and select my Kladi tools and to make sure that everything is the right place, I tend to reset it. And as you can see, not only all the panels come back, but even the new toolbars that I've created goes back with the same tools that I have tailored to and also in a very specific position. Okay, so, hopefully, that's another tool that helps you to set up for success and work faster. Something else that is a brand new feature that we have here now announced at these MAX. It wasn't on the keynote because it's what we call a minor feature, although it's quite cool and exciting, is the fact that we can now resize the artwork alongside the artboard. So once I go ahead and open my artboard tool, shift O is the shortcut. Otherwise, you have here the little tool. Inside the properties, old news, we have the move art with artboard tick box that allows you to decide if you want to move your art with or without the artboard. But that's we already had that. You can tick and untick it. What is new is the scale artwork with artboard. So now if I go ahead and tick this and I make sure that all my layers are unlocked here, because if layers are locked, things will not scale or move. I can go ahead and click and drag my artboard, so I select it and then click and drag one of the corner, making sure that I hold the shift key so it resizes proportionally. And as you can see, not only I'm scaling the artboard, but I'm also scaling the artwork. And I know that seems like such a small tee, but it's something that I'm sure many of us wanted for a very long time, and finally we have available. Although, there is something that I want to let you know because I've been playing with this for a while. This is a sticky option. Therefore, it happened to me when I was getting ready for these. Once I started to move around and scale things around, because I had these selected, I ended up making a mess. So I will strongly recommend you that whenever you're done scaling artboard and art, you want to go make sure to go ahead and untick it. Otherwise, it could be, it could happen the same that happened to me, and you start to scale things around and you don't know what happens there. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and lock my file. The last thing in terms of setup, and starting, and working successfully is, of course, the fact that we have improved performances. I'm not going to flash you like my colleague Michael did on stage with a little zoom that he had there at the keynote. But the way that we are working in Illustrator has improved us five times faster. But most importantly, there is something that I want to show you there. So I've got some little details in this illustration. This is actually resembled my desk at home. I have two cats. I have a dog, River. So I have all these different pictures here, and I have this little picture of one of my other kittens. But I want to show you how powerful is Illustrator and how much control you now have in order to work your illustration in the details. If I go ahead and I keep zooming in, it looks like there is something on the little flower. I don't know if you can start to see it yet. It looks like there is a caterpillar there that has been hidden and captured in that picture. And if I go ahead and zoom in a little bit more, it looks like that caterpillar is also doing something. It looks like it's got a little mobile there. Well, with these brand new amazing five more powerful performances, I can actually go ahead and see, yes, that she's having, she's on the phone. And she's actually she's on the phone. Maybe she's having a little date call or someone. Looks like there is a bow on the little caterpillar there. And just to give you an idea, we are still talking about some details that are invisible at the scale that I'm working at. So you can really build your story and build the details. Now, of course, I wanted to do something fun and cute for you to see and remember this. But imagine if you're working on an illustration with very small details, you can really go ahead and make sure that every single nano pixels, I don't even know how they're called, but you can really go ahead and have power in the details with these brand new performances in Illustrator. Okay. So hopefully those are exciting way for you to get started when you work. I'm going to now move into some little creation tips and some old or also cool news that we had within Adobe Illustrator. Something that I've noticed, as I say, I run a community online. Many of you, or many of my community, maybe a lot of you already know, is that the star tool is actually a live tool, which is a big change. Again, small step, but big steps for us creator. Because now once we go ahead and we selected the star tool, not only we are able-- I'm going to go get rid of this panel. Not only I'm able to click and oops, let's bring him back in. Not only I'm able to actually create a star. And if you wonder what I've done to move it before, I use the space bar. So if you're creating anything and even if you're creating with the pen tool, if you end up placing an anchor point somewhere else, like I've done now on a mistake, you can always press the space bar and you can reposition your anchor point. I'm going to show you that with some other shapes because I know I can be a little bit misleading with the star here. But let's go back to the star. Now that I have my star here, once I let go and I place my star. In the past, I would have had to press the up and down arrow to make sure that I got the right points and the star looks okay. Well, now the star is a live shape. That means that you can keep editing the number of points in the stars alongside the diameter of the center of the star as much as you want over and over again. And again, like every other shape, we also have access to the anchor point. So as you can see, you can really have fun creating badges and so many things just using the star as a live tool. And, of course, if you then want to transform it into a normal shape, you can always go ahead and object expand appearance and now is you basically transform the non-destructive live star in what we used to see before, just the path. The problem here is that you won't be able to edit it anymore, so make sure that you're happy with your decision before you go ahead and expand it. Otherwise, command 0 always save our life. Okay, so hopefully, that was some new tips for you. Now with this path, I'm going to try to create some, a lease. And as I said, I'm going to drop some little tips here for you to create faster. As you can see, this is just a path, and what I'm looking to do here is to show you some superpowers of the pen tool and also, how to create smoother line. So this is quite a wonky line that I've created with the pen tool. Again, if I'm going to go ahead and select this so you can see all the different anchor points. Now, once I go ahead and select the letter P in order to activate my pen tool, you can press the minus to enter that delete mode of the pen tool. That's not a big news. But what I want to show you is that, if I go ahead and delete the anchor point, I'm going to zoom in so it's nice and clear. Once I deleted, as you can see, the curves just bounces back. So, yes, we have deleted the anchor point but we lost the curve. So how do we make sure that we simplify our work by deleting the anchor points without losing the curve? Well, you will use the pen tool with the delete mode, so pressing the minor, and also having the shift key, holding the shift key. So as you can see here, I'm going to click and hold shift. And even if I get rid of the anchor point, I still retain my curve and it's nice and smoother. So hopefully, that would be so much useful for you as well when you create. Another tool, if you have not encountered that I absolutely loved is the smooth tool. The smooth tool allows you not only to reduce the number of anchor point, but of course to make your curve smoother. There are different ways in which you can approach it. The nude bar is that that we have here allows you to change the way of the smoothness of your curve with the sliders. We also have a little button that allows you to auto smooth it. The way that I love it is just to go ahead and paint on it. I think that's much, much more nicer and it just gives you a little bit more control in the way that you want your curve to behave. Okay. There is another little tip that I'm just going to make up in here. I just moved the anchor point. So imagine, you're drawing and now I want to go ahead and just use the mirror tool. I just want to rotate and mirror this image so I have to work faster and I don't have to create all the other side and I have this perfect lead that looks like a heart. But in order to use the mirror tool, we want to make sure that the two anchor points that are the end point of the curve are aligned. So what I will usually do is go back to my ruler, make sure that my smart guys are active and then click and drag until I see that magic purple line. Well, there is another way in which you can quickly align anchor point, which is simply treat them like a shape. So you go ahead and use the direct selection tool to go ahead and select your anchor point. And then with the properties panel or wherever is your preferred way to use the align tool, you simply align them. And now you know, without ruler, without any other precision tool that they are aligned because our align tool has helped us to do so quickly. So now, I can confidently move into the object and then, we can go ahead and repeat and repeat mirror. And here it is. And once we repeated mirror, we can now move it a little bit further. So now, it perfectly mirrors it. And because everything that happens within the first shape will happen to the second shape, I can use my shortcut to quickly swap from stroke to fill and then change the color. And, of course, everything that I do on this side will quickly mirror on the other side. Okay. So that was another quick tip to help you create faster. That's just more like of a fun things that I'm moving to, and it's just the tilde key. I don't know if you're a fan of spirograph. I come from math and that science. I love spirograph. There is just a very quick way of creating spirograph with any shape. I have a star there, but I love to do it with circles or even rectangles. I think it's very interesting. So if you click and drag, you create your shape. But by simply holding the tilde key, you have this super cool effect in which you can create these crazy, crazy shapes. And, of course, I'm going to move it into a stroke rather than fill, so you can see how many shape I've created there. This is just like a fun little shortcut if you ever need to create this spirograph. And again, you can really go crazy with it because it's super, super fun to use. Okay. So that was the tilde key to create spirograph, and we move quickly into the pathfinder tool and how to use the pathfinder tool non-destructively so you can make sure to create, perhaps, variation of your design. Also, to make sure that maybe if you're not sure of what you're going to create, you still have time to change your mind. So I'm going to go ahead and mimic those little container that I have there. Just going to make the stroke a little bit bigger so we can see them. So I'll build these little bottles just by using rectangles. Let me go ahead and create another one here. And, here it is. Maybe a little bit smaller. Now I want to make sure that I line all of these together. And then the way that I would have used it in the past. Here it is. The way that I would have used it in the past, you just simply select the shape and then use the Unite option of the Pathfinder tool that I'm sure everyone is familiar with. But what happens? If I go ahead and click on it, all the shapes go away and if I want to create variation or if I want to, perhaps, change my mind and make a taller bottle, it will change the way that the corners are shaped, and it will just take me time maybe to rebuild it all together. So if I undo that and instead hold the alt key on the Windows, that's option on a Mac, while I press any of the Pathfinder options, we work non-destructively. That means that the appearance, it will look exactly the same as if I've used the Pathfinder tool destructively. But in reality, the shapes are still live and still there. That means that I can edit them. I can move them around. I can just change their shape. And you can imagine with these, you can really create many, many variations of the same design. And then, of course, once you're ready to go and you're ready to use them as a proper shape and for them to be having a shape because remember, this is a compound path. That's what we have done in order to work non-destructively. You can always go to object and then expand appearance and boom, here it is. You actually turned the compound path into a shape and you're ready to move that forward with your design. Now, something else quicker. So that was the pathfinder in a non-destructive way. Something quicker here is that, I don't know if it happens to you, that sometimes you need to rotate an object. And then once you rotate it, it becomes drama to try to align it everywhere because the bounding box is now whatever. And again, you're going to have to go back to the rulers and all that waste of time. There is another hidden trick here. So select your object after you rotate it and that was the original bounding box, by the way. So as you can see, we have like a vertical bounding box and then we have the tilted bounding box. So how do we bring it back so we can just leave drama free and just quickly go on with our work? If you go to object transform and then reset bounding box, that's one of my best easier when I work. In one click, you keep the image as it is and you reset the bounding box so it's ready to go and for you to work. And now, one of those last little tiny tips before we move into the appearance panel. The appearance panel is one of my beloved favorite tool, extremely underrated tool inside Illustrator. Actually, it's a panel, not a tool, but it's filled with tool. I'm going to show you real quick how I've created all these little labels and, of course, this is just simple text and you can edit it because it's flexible and it will change depending on the change on the type that I have in and it's light type with a shape behind it. How do we create that? So with the appearance panel, we can quickly manipulate different fields for our text. I'm going to go ahead and add the black field for the entire text that will be the color of my text. And then I'm going to go ahead and add another field. I'm going to change the color, give it a pink just so we can see it, and bring it behind. This is going to be our box. Make sure that we select it and then we head to the effects. And from there, we're going to go ahead and transform it into a shape. So convert to shape and then round and rectangles. And here you get different, you can choose from rectangle, ellipse, around the rectangle. Make sure that you select relative there, and, of course, you can choose how big you want the width outside your text. And also the radius of your corner. Make sure to hit preview so you can see it actually happening live as you edit. And now that you've done that, you can go ahead and edit your text and write whatever you want and the text box will expand. And, of course, you can use that, especially if you're creating buttons. And it's so easy because you can still change your font, you can resize it, you can scale it, and most importantly, you can change the colors as many times as you want. So I think that's a really, really, cool tip. Okay. Let's move more into creation and a little bit more of complexity. I want to give a shout out to, of course, object on a path, that we probably all of you seen already on the keynote. That's a brand new tool that has been introduced inside Illustrator. Amazing time saver. It works really nicely. Select your objects, hold shift, select the path, and then this is the way that it looks like, if you want to get familiar with it. It's like a semicircle stroke with then some object around it. Once you select it, you will be able in just one click to choose the path that you want to distribute your object on. And in just one click look at that, like, we used to take time. Maybe use the radial tool, maybe whatever. Everybody's got on their own techniques. And the beauty here is that I can also go ahead and reorganize, and if I had time, I could have probably put that in the right order. But you can go ahead and reorganize and swap around every single items that is distributed on the path. You can also change the distribution, so change the spacing between the element. And, of course, if you want to go a little crazy, you can rotate them. I love to rotate them. I mean, maybe not in this case of the clock, but I love to rotate them because it gives it a little bit more of an organic feel. It's not like just everything distributed within the same direction. So I will always recommend you once you get familiar with it to use the rotation, to have fun with it. Now the beauty is that we can keep the path there. Maybe we can make it transparent if we want, so nobody's going to know that it's there. But also you can delete it. And if you delete it, so if you leave the path and you make it transparent, it will remain editable. So you're working non-destructively. If you delete it, nothing happens, but you will not be able to go back and edit it again. And I don't know why but everybody like, I know I've seen it like demo it with circles. I think that it's just nice to see things getting nice in a circle. But what I love about this is that it works with any path. So I have a little, fun reel on my Instagram to demo this. I just created a path, pen tool. No matter what, you create a path even with a brush tool. Once you have your path there, all you have to do is to select any other object. I have my little Happibo's cool bear here. And again, with the object tool on a path, I can go ahead and select my path and here they are. And because I have this little pink bear on the pink background, as I said, we have the widget tool inside your object that will allow you to redistribute your bears. And as you can see, they're all like leaning in the same direction. That's what I mean when I say give it a little turn because it makes it feel a little bit more organic. My path was transparent to start with and therefore, we don't even see it. We don't even need to know that it's there, but it's there and allow us to, of course, distribute our object. Okay. So let's move to the appearance panel. This is one of my favorite part. I love it. As you can see here, we have some complex designs but they are in reality very simple shapes. So if we go back here, the speaker is actually only two shades and the candle is only one shape. Despite the appearance, so the way that they look, make us think otherwise. So how do we create these things? Again, the appearance panel allow us to include multiple tools and multiple, different appearance to our objects. So starting with these two circles, I'm going to go ahead and add another field, and it looks like I already done this. So let me go ahead and delete it, so we can build it together. So I'm going to go ahead and click on the add new fill to add a new fill. Of course, I'm going to give it another color so it stands out. And you want to make sure that also you layer in order because the order of these layers here inside the appearance panel establish also the hierarchy. So whatever is on top will be in front. And, I'm going to go ahead now and apply an effect while we will use path and offset path that we usually use with shape because those fill are literally a replica of the shapes that we already have. I'm going to give it a negative value, maybe negative 40. And look at that. It would just distribute the fills within your shape and then offset the path inside. But what about the shape outside? Well, it will work exactly like we did for our text box. I'm going to change the color. Maybe let's make it white or gray. And then, as I said, I'm going to bring this to the back because this is going to go ahead and up here at the back. And, by selecting it and apply an effect, which is the convert to shape, run the rectangle like I've done before. You can change the radius just like so. You will be able to create this very complex illustration just by starting with two single shapes. This also makes your file much lighter and allows you flexibility when you are creating many of these. When I was creating this file, I was at home, my boyfriend was like, I know, but like, that's just a rectangle and four circles, you know? You can just do that quickly. Yes, that's fair enough if you're just creating one speaker. But imagine when you are creating many instances of a design. So, for example, you need many of that specific shape and you also you need to change and color variate them. Well, in that case, you'll have to go and select each single shapes to change color. While here, with the appearance panel, all you have to do is to select any of the shape and simply change the fill. It will change the color to all the different shapes that you have already applied it to. So this is to work faster and to work in larger scale. And I'm going to go ahead and do this candle quite quickly. That's just a rectangle with the corner, with some rounded corner at the bottom. I'm going to change its color, and then I'm going to go ahead and start building it. I'm going to go ahead and add maybe a white fill to it. I'm going to change the opacity so it looks nice and transparent like it actually has a little glass on top of it. And I'm going to make the candle a little bit smaller because we want to respect the thickness of the glass. So just like I've done before, I'm going to go ahead and offset the path. So it just, I'm going to give it a negative value so it's a little bit smaller and you can see the thickness of the glass there. But how do we make the little stem coming out outside at the back? Well, that's actually another feel. So I'm going to go ahead and add a new feel over here, and I want to make sure that's, that is it. Okay? So you can always toggle visibility. That's another beauty of working with the appearance panel. Everything is non-destructive. So even here, you can go ahead. If you go back to our speaker real quick, we can simply toggle it off because everything is non-destructive. So here we have this black shape. In this case, instead of using offset, I will use the distort and transform and then transform option. And in this case, I will make sure that I do not have the constraint proportion, so I will unlink this feature and I'm going to start to scale it horizontally. And then I'm also going to start to scale it vertically, so I'm just going to make that smaller now that it's sitting behind. I'm going to bring it to the front just because I want to show you what is happening there. Otherwise, you don't see it and then we'll bring it back again. So, by the way, because those are non-destructive. As you can see, I was working MIDI, then I closed it. But because it's non-destructive, I can always double click on it and go back and edit it. So my panel will pop up and I keep going here. So I'm going to make these even a little bit thinner, smaller, just like that. And then all I have to do is to move it vertically. So I'm just going to move it up a little bit more. And if I need it to be a little bit taller, I can always change the scale to move it horizontally. Now once I'm done, all I have to do is to bring it to the back and our candle is nice and ready to go. Now the beauty of this is then on not only as I said, you can work it, of course, you can apply stroke and give it even more of whatever look and appearance you want. But the beauty of these is that you can also save that as a graphic style. So here, I'm going to go ahead and just because I have one purple there, just for the sake of making something different, I'm going to make it pink. And as I said, I'm going to add the stroke real quick, put it to the very top, and maybe just keep it white, a little bit bigger and white, so it looks a little bit nicer. And now that I'm ready and that I'm happy by the way, this is still always just one single shape. I'm going to go ahead and click and drag and bring these inside my graphic style. So again, yes, you can do that by adding different shapes. But what if now you can create all these different shapes and then very quickly and simply by the way, those are all pink because I have my pink filled color here. But we can change it to whatever we want. But what if now we select them and we simply click on the graphic style that we just saved right now, which was the candle that we made, and we have created candles that go on and on repeating our graphic style. And, of course, this is just what I love and what I created candles, music, and little bear, Happibo's, gummy bear. Of course, you can imagine, you can take these and just apply to anything you want. And, of course, those are editable shapes. So if you want to create a rounder corner effect, this is just a square. So you can go ahead and manipulate these as much as you want. And because they are independent, if I just want to change the color of some of these, all I have to do is to select the one that I want to change different effect. Maybe for this one, I don't want any glass effect, and you can go on and on and edit them as much as you want. Okay, so that was some highlight on the appearance panel. I'm going to move in into that gen shape fill. This is quite a relatively new features that we have within Illustrator. And, Michael showed us how to use this feature within Illustrator, maybe to experiment. There is another way in which I use it, which is I use it to speed up my workflow and to create little stuff that maybe I can, don't have time to create on the spot and then I can go back and revisit. But in the meantime, I have a visual there that matches my illustration. You know, when you get one of those clients or bosses for example, give you real example here of this illustration. Someone told me, yeah, the plant is nice, but it's just very simple. It's not very, there's not much foliage on it. We want more leaves. Okay. And then other real example, I had to create I had to fill in these two pictures. And because I was traveling from the UK, I just physically didn't have the time to build some cute illustration to fill in this desk and have this little Polaroid. So I have used gen fill to implement this detail within my design and to work faster. And, of course, before I publish these on my website or on my Instagram, I will take my time to recreate that myself. But in the meantime, I can leverage the power of the gen shape fill and simply create a path. This is just a path that I've created before, I created here. I'm just going to go ahead and show you. Here it is. I usually don't draw much when I'm on stage because my hand shakes a little. So it's just a path that I created with a pencil or a pencil. But the beauty of this is that once we selected, we have the amazing taskbar here that is the contextual taskbar. Whenever we have something selected, it tell us what are the suggested steps that will allow you to work faster with that specific tool or graphic. So now that I have my shape, I have here say, hey, listen, you can edit the path if you want. You can change the color. You can lock it. But most importantly, you can also experiment with gen shape fill beta. So Monstera leaf is what I want, so that's where you can type inside the field. You can type whatever you want. I like to keep it simple. And then, of course, you can use the slider in order to have how much you wanted to adhere to the shape. My illustration are quite minimal, so I really work that slider to the left. And also, it gives you quite intricate shape. It's not a secret. We are taking images from Adobe Stock and then tracing them, so that's why they're quite rich in terms of shape, although, there has been an incredible improvement. Have you seen on stage with the image trace? I will still like to keep a minimal just basically because that's more of my style. And then, of course, you can use images as reference, so I can choose an asset if I really wanted to mimic this leaf of mine, and I can move forward either from these little wheel there or here. I can access different effect. If I move here, I can access the workspace when you have even more option. For example, adding color and tone. In this case, you can add as many colors as you want directly from your saved swatches that you have very neatly, already opened directly with your new document preset. And now that I've added exactly the same color of my leaf, all I'm left to do, I have the Monstera leaf, I have my style as a reference, I have my color. All I'm left to do is to click on generate and let Illustrator do its job and fill that shape with a vector that mimics my style, uses my colors, and reads the text in order to inform the image that it's going to be to displayed there. And as you can see, he's created a leaf. I'm just going to go ahead and select the part that I need and then place it there. He's actually swapped the color, but that's probably a cool idea, but otherwise, this is a vector. I can go ahead and select the blue and go back to my properties panel and choose all my swatches and just simply choose the green that I want, the blue that I want, you got the gist. The beauty here is that I've created just a little filler that allows me-- I might want to hold shift when I scale. That's a blow bit bad base tips. The beauty here is that allows me to create another shade that I can go ahead and implement in my illustration. And most importantly, it saves me from repeating the same shapes over and over again because usually what happens is that you have the same shape and then you tend to have the same shape and then you copy and paste and maybe you flip it so it looks a little bit different. Maybe you scale it so maybe they don't notice. Well, like that, you have actually the opportunity to create these little fillers. They don't make a great impact on your design and that's why I rely on this technology just to quickly skip past it. And same for the images. To be completely honest, for the images, because it's a more complex piece, I would definitely go back and just give it my own style to it. But just for the sake of time, because I didn't want to show you that desk with just like empty Polaroid, it just, who hangs empty Polaroid on their desk? So I just used shape fill to just create something. I think I had a-- I typed something like a pic, I have a Aussie Shepherd at home, so I have a picture of an Australian Shepherd. I'm dyslexic, so apologies if I misspelled Shepherd.
On holiday, I think that's what I picked. The difference here is that I'm going to go ahead and replace the assets because I want to make sure that this one actually takes in account the entire illustrations because it's going to sit on my desk. So what I do, I tend to click and drag and scribble around all the different things that I created. So it picks up different elements of my illustration, and then I want to move forward here and also, I would probably go in the color and I will remove these colors. I can go ahead and simply clear all, and they're all gone. And now I-- Let me go back into my design. I'm just going to go ahead and click generate. Sorry. Just I moved the artboard away, but in the meantime, up there, inside the Polaroid, it's actually filling the little square with the image that we are going to see in just a moment. Now you can see we have here the variation that are populating. You can start to see a very cute Australian Shepherd coming up. Here it is. Let me find it again. So this is what was creating, we have this really fun Australian Shepherd. And I love that he actually, because I brought a picture of, it just give you a portrait picture of the dog. But also because he reads the style of my illustration, it just brings elements like the plants that I had, the shelf. And this is nowhere near as good as we could make it. But that's definitely, first of all, an idea for a layout that I can go and quickly then recreate myself. Or as I said, for a detail that is so small on my desk, I can definitely just quickly use it here. While I was getting ready for the presentation, I had these on my website. I just didn't want to leave it empty. So that was a quite way to move quickly with it. Okay. So that was a gen shape fill. I'm going to move into a very quick feature. Probably many of you know draw inside and not draw behind. I think that those are as well very understated feature in Illustrator, and I believe that they're so just because their icon is so small, is just sitting here at the bottom of the toolbar. So draw inside pretty much allows you to create a clipping mask, without creating a clipping mask. Again, just a way of speed up your workflow. You select your object and then you want to make sure perhaps you selected one more time. Here, I'm going to go into isolation mode and you see that this little icon called draw inside, you can also shift the way that you draw by command, using the shift D shortcut. So once I go ahead and select the draw inside, I can use anything, even one of my brushes to go ahead and start maybe if I activate the brush tool, here we go. We can go ahead and start painting inside, and I can add shapes. I can do whatever I want here. And those are, by the way, they do exist outside. So they do exist outside my vase, but because I've used the draw inside mode, they are contained as if I created a clipping mask to start with. But again using way less, less steps. And you get the gist, of course, that's how I placed the little bears inside the arable bags. I'm going to move forward because there is more stuff that I want to show you before, of course, we pass it on to Howard. The intertwined tool is something that has been greatly improved. Many of you probably already familiar with the intertwined tool, which allow you to overlap different lines. I'm going to go ahead and select both this grid and my lovely plant here, which by the way is just a brush. So again, if you go and see that it's just a line that I've applied my little flower brush on it. And then once I select it, I'm going to go ahead and select object and then intertwine and make in order to create a group. Remember, whenever you intertwine object, they are automatically grouped. So if you have to-- If you want to intertwine many objects together, like in this case, I have many of these flowers, you want to select them all at once, with the items that you want to intertwine. What I love about this is the improvement that has been made. Look at the interface now. In the past, you had to awkwardly circle and it was not too precise, but they were just the engineers starting on it. They've been working hard and they delivered this beautiful interface that allows you to clearly see what is going on there. There is even a little arrow that is telling you, okay, I'm bringing this back and I'm leaving that up and I'm bringing this back and look at that, it's even so smart that understand that the flower is made by two different parts. So I can send back just the flower and then I can send back just the stems in two steps. And, of course, you can do the other part. You can bring it, you can move it and undo it as many times as you want. And I think that that's a very, very nice tool to play with, especially if you're working maybe with type. I think that's really, really exciting to have lines and types and really have fun with it. And again, we're still talking about vector illustration and non-destructive. Something that I don't mention very often, I want to mention now, is that you can always move out of these simply by selecting and then using intertwine. And maybe you're not happy with it. You want to start again. You can either edit it or you can release it. Let's say that you forgot to add an element to it, so you will release it and then use edit to bring it back again. And those are just different example. By the way, I'm going to make these available on my website as well so you can have a play using the same and look at this. It's quite fun to intertwine as well. Okay. Before we move into 3D, I have about some type tips, which I think that they're really, really exciting. This is one of my favorite, is about aligning text. I always add a Niimer aligning text inside Illustrator because we don't align the text unless you outline it. So how many of you had to type, outline, so you know that you actually align it perfectly or maybe make this magic square that you know is going to actually match your text and then you align that and so on. What a waste of time. Because if we select it and maybe we want to select it to make sure that it's, centered to the sticky note, it will not center it because it takes in account the bounding box of the text. So this is what aligning, not the actual text. And in this case, we have a point type. We can recognize it because we only have a little handle there, instead of two. We're going to talk about point type and area type in just a second. But how do I make sure that this text is actually aligned within the center? Well, in order to do so, you want to make sure that you head to your align panel, okay, available. Whatever you prefer, I love to use it from the properties panel. So select your text, go to align, select the three dots where you can access more options. And from here, we have a very, very tiny talking about performances, these tiny menus that allow you to have more options. In this case, we're looking for align to glyph bounds, and you can either choose between point text on area text depending on the box that you're using. In this case, as I mentioned, we have a point type and point type means that is, contains actually the same size of the text. And when you stretch it, you will stretch the text. So it's a fixed box around your text. I'm going to go ahead and select point text, zoom out, and show you that now that option is being selected, always like double check and make sure that it stick there. Perfect. If I go ahead and now add my sticky note to the selection and then click it one more time to use it as an object reference to align and I go ahead and align my text, boom, it actually align my text and my text is still live. That means that I can still edit it. I can still do whatever I want and it will still be aligned by the actual text and not the text box. The text box seems off good because I don't want that to be aligned. I want my text to be aligned. And that happens also with area types. Again, the difference between point types, as I was trying to say before, is that whenever you resize a point type, you're actually resizing the actual text. If you want to change into an area type, you want to double click on this side arrow and you can quickly recognize them because the area type has got an arrow at the bottom as well. And once you click and drag, it will allow you to just open up and change the size of the text. So again, imagine this box. If I go ahead and by the way, those are also sticky options. So always remember to go back and tick or untick. Otherwise, it will always stay ticked. So once I go ahead and have this area type, same thing. I want to align it to this sticky box. You don't look at that. It's going to make a mess of it because it's going to try to align it to the text box. Again, in this case, all I have to do is to make sure that I select the area type and you get the gist. It's going to go ahead and do its magic by simply changing that option to area type. So this is why I was going to tell you the difference between area type and point type because it does make a difference the option that you want to select whenever you're aligning. Okay. So real quick, we're going to move into another tool which is called retype. Retype will allow you to match text of graphics. In this case, we're moving into a raster image. So none of these is a vector. This is an actual picture of one of the show that I used to run on Adobe Live. What if I'm on the go and I created this probably three years ago, and now they want me to throw another episode. I have no clue where that file is sitting. How do I edit the text? Now they want me to design a logo. They don't want me to design a pattern. And this is an image. There is no chance I can move that, and I've got zero time to redesign it. Well, with retype, we have the option. And by the way, retype is also available here in the contextual taskbar. We have the option once we select our image, and let's make sure that we embed it. Because if you do not embed your link and you can embed your link from the link menu here, links menu directly from the Window menu, you can go ahead and we retype beta. What it does, it looks at all the phone. Look at that. It's even trying to find my bespoke font that I've created. But we have these little dotted lines that allow you to navigate and choose the font that you want to, look for. So in this case, I'm going to look for that font. It's going to give me options. If the option is not on your computer, so it's looking directly into fonts at adobe.com, not your local one. So you also have the opportunity to see which one do you actually have active on your computer or you can actually activate them live directly from this amazing workspace. And once you have them active, all you're left to do is to perhaps double click on it. So in this case, I downloaded my file, which it was already there. My phone. Sorry. All I have to do is to click on edit text. Again, he's looking at the text. I want to edit this little word and I can double click on it. Now I used to spend a lot of time when this tool came out just double clicking and be like, okay, I want to type now. Like, how do I edit? This is not very intuitive but it's good to mention that after you double click to make the text live, you must click on exit to be able to go then and do the magic. And as you can see already, this became some live text from the image which I think is super, super cool. Now we can double click on it and I'm going to just change into the word logo and then we can just use it as a box to move around as much as you want. And real quick, I was able to change my image, a raster image into a different asset matching the font. Boom. Ready to export and ready to go for my next show. Okay. So, I'm going to move real quick into 3D. I'm so sorry. I'm bombarding you with a lot of stuff really quickly, but hopefully, you get whatever is useful. I also want to try to cover as much feature, because there's so many of you and remember, I'm always one message away, one diem away if you have more questions. So two more features before I pass it to Howard, because I also have a gift for you, which is a script that allow you to recolor randomly, which is super cool. So we have a lot of option to recolor our art, but a lot of these option, you need to have already something some colors in there. You cannot recolor from scratch. So what happens here? Let's say that I'm creating this little calendar, so I need to split the shape into different days. I'm going to start by going into object, path, split into grid, and real quick, I can use this little window to choose the number of rows that I want, make sure to hit preview so you can see up and alive. I don't remember how many rows and how many columns I was supposed to have, but you got the gist. I'm going to make a few of them, and then you can also get, change the gutter and change which is the space between the column or the rows. You can make it whatever you want. And then once you're ready, you click on okay. And now we have transformed the first shape into many shapes and those are literally independent shapes that are ready to go. So those are all the same colors. That means that if I go and I use our beautiful recolors or generative recolors, all the option that we have here, they're like, okay. Yeah. We recolor. We recolor the entire thing. Yeah. But how do I quickly apply color so I'm not there clicking one shape, clicking one swatch? How do we do that? Well, there is a script, which is an automation that is available within the slide that you find on iamkladi.com/max24. That's where you find my slide and also the script that you can download. That's super quickly to use, super quick to use. You open your swatches panel here. Here it is. And you want to make sure that you select your shape. I'm going to go ahead and select them all, and then you want to click on your folder that contains the swatches that you're going to use. If you don't do that, it's not going to work. So once you have the path, the shapes and the color selected, you want to go ahead and make sure that you go under file and scripts. Now, you can save the scripts within your machine. I left it out because I wanted for you guys to download it and to see it. I have it on my desktop here. It's called Random Swatches Fill. It's a JavaScript. You don't need to know. We don't need to know. I don't know any of these things. Maybe you're clever than me and you know about it. But all I know is that if I click on the swatches, I click on the shapes and I run this script, in one click, boom. My art has all the different colors, saving me a ton of time and I can move forward and do some other cool stuff. So I know I say two features. I'm actually going to squeeze one in just because it's so easy and again, underrated stuff that is so cool to use. Within the type two, we have the option of using the touch type. Also, you can access this with the shift T. Again, mega underrated feature. This is live editable text. I can change the font. I can retype size, whatever you want. But in one click, you can also access each single character. And then you can do things like rotate them, resize them. And as I said, this is still live. That means that even if I went and changed the character, I can still go ahead and retype and do whatever I want. And, of course, you can even do that with all different character. As you can see here, that was just one line, and then I created this little fun composition just by using this tip. Okay. So one more, and then it's to Howard is 3D, and that's an introduction to 3D because Howard is going to talk to us about Project Neo and the amazing 3D features. So as you can see here, I have just one path, one line, and then one heart. I don't know what we're going to do with this little bear. Maybe we don't have time. But the beauty of using 3D in Illustrator is that we have this amazing 3D technology preview that allow us to use tools such as rotate or inflate, some of the most popular one. And you'll see in just one click, I transform my path into a 3D shape and all I've done, I've rotated it against their axis. If you sometimes see things that are upside down is because maybe you're going through the other edge. So depending with edge, you're rotating it around, you actually see a different shape. So go ahead and experiment if you have never worked with this before. This is a full 3D shape, by the way, which is super awesome and so satisfying to rotate around. And, of course, I can offset it. I can make a nice little vase. I can go ahead into materials and use any of the amazing materials that are available for you as a default, but also you have access to all the substance and materials if you have a subscription. Or if not, there are many free materials that are available for you here. If you click on this link, you can access the community of Substance. They upload some many cool, lovely materials that are available for free. Also, you can do things like adding metallic. Maybe let's do it with a heart. You can change the lighting. And, of course, this is just the preview. I'm going to talk-- I'm going to show you the rendering in just a second. I want to do it with a heart. I'm going to go ahead and use one of the most other very popular one which is inflates. In one click, we right away transform a flat image into 3D properties and you know what makes 3D is lights and shadows. That's what it gives the idea of a 3D. And again, you can fully rotate it. In this case, if you want to see both side of the arch, you want to make sure that you inflate both sides, so you tick that box and you will be able to inflate both sides. Of course, if you don't want any seam, you just can get rid of the stroke and now it's seamlessly a 3D heart. And something that I love doing is, for example, maybe add a little bit of a shine on it. If you head into materials, yes, we have the material option, but also we have this lovely metallic that adds you this little shine to it. And as I said, this is just a preview because look at that. Once I go ahead and hit my render, we really have this gorgeous metallic look that it just and remember, we're still in Illustrator. That means that you can scale it, you can edit it. These are still anchor points. And, by the way, since I told you how beautiful is the anchor, the appearance panel, you can always take them off and go back to your vector in just one click because this is a technology preview. So it looks like it's a 3D, it behaves like it's 3D, but you're still playing with vector. And I think that's a perfect introduction from Project Neo, so I would love to invite, my colleague, Howard, to come forward here. And thank you so much, by the way. You've been so patient with these many tools that I throw at you.
I guess we're here. Sorry. [Howard Pinsky] Sweet. Thank you, Kladi. You went through a ton. All right. Who saw the Project Neo demo during the keynote yesterday? All right. Good. Because all of that, you can disregard because it's completely changed since then. The team has packed so much into this new update, and I have about eight seconds to show you some of it. So we're going to go through. On the surface, Project Neo is a 3D design tool. And I know probably a lot of you are thinking, why do we need another 3D design tool in our lives, especially a web based one? I want to show you something really unique about Project Neo that's going to hopefully make a lot of you excited. Here's a lot of the projects I've been working on lately. And some of them are great and some of them are whatever this is, right? Some of your designs work, some of them don't. But I want to hop into this one here. It's a UFO I've been building. And by the way, we finally got dark mode, which is amazing. Let me turn off the frame. So UFO that I've been building. And very quickly, I'm going to just dive in and maybe I'll delete a few of these objects just to show you how all of this works.
So over to the left, we have some of our tools, and I'm going to grab a sphere. Maybe I'll snap it over here.
And we've got some different controls. We can scale our tools. We can also snap by holding the shift key.
Beautiful. So I'm going to scale that up. And very similar to some other applications like Illustrator, we have over to the right in the properties what you would all probably be familiar with like Pathfinder tool. So I'm going to go ahead and carve this out. There we go. So it carves a hole in our 3D objects, and it goes by layer stack. So if I move this down, it will not affect the objects underneath it, which is great. Just like that. Beautiful. I can duplicate this, make it smaller, add. We've got some appearance options, so I can change this color to blue. Maybe I can make it metallic or reflective to make it extra fancy.
And then I can duplicate this again. And down at the bottom down here, we've got repeat options. So I can repeat it radially, choose a different direction.
Beautiful, distance. Now it's obviously way too large, so I can shrink this down.
Right? Now we have fancy lights going around the UFO. But what I really want to get to in my limited time here is that's not the greatest looking thing in the world, but we have our styles at the top left hand corner. We just added an illustrative style, which give it a second and right? So we can really make this look like art, which is wild. But we have our vector art style. So and you might be asking, well, this is a 3D object. How is this vector? So we can dive in and we can change the appearance of not just the base color, but the shadows, the midtones, and the highlights of these particular layers, right? And the team is working hard to make that process even easier. So I can change this to the yellow, right? So you can see the shadow is changing independently of the other colors. But what I want to really get to is how this can benefit all of you. So we're at the point in this project where it's looking great. I'm going to change my artboard to maybe 2,000 by 2,000, just so I can center this in here. And then at the top right hand corner, we have our share button and we have a download button. And here we can send this directly to Adobe Illustrator. And a new window should pop up in a second, ran into a bug yesterday. It looks like we're going to probably run into that bug again, so I'm going to hard refresh it. Give me a second. And we're going to do that again. You can also download this as an SVG as well, fully vector. So let's try this one more time.
Seems to be working. And may, oh, wait. Hold on. That might be it.
Done. Let's try it again. Otherwise, we'll download an SVG, and I'll show you that way.
Got to love beta software. All right. Here we go. So it's opening up a new window. The first time, it'll prompt you to open up the Creative Cloud desktop application. And in a second, Illustrator is going to open.
And what I want to show you is all of this is completely vector. The shadows, the highlights, the whole shebang, completely vector. So you can imagine a world where you're designing a UFO or whatever it might be for a client, and the client come back to you and they're like, you know what? I love the design, but I want to see more of the bottom of the UFO or the top of the UFO. You have to go back and redesign the entire thing from scratch. But if you're working in a 3D environment, you simply switch back over to Project Neo, you rotate it a little bit. Obviously, I didn't line things up properly, but you go back to share, send to Adobe Illustrator, and then send it to your client. So that benefit alone, I'm really excited about within Project Neo. And the team is working very hard to not only add additional features to the 3D tool, but also to the vector and three workflow as well. So that's a very quick overview of Project Neo. I don't want to keep you too long, but big round of applause for Kladi. And thank you, everyone. - Good job. - Thank you. Thank you so much, Howard. That was very, as you say, limited time for a very powerful tool that hopefully all of you are going to go ahead and enjoy. As I said on my slide, you'll be able to find all these amazing tools that we talked about even a little bit more because if it was for me, I would talk about Illustrator for probably three hours in a row. And if you want to learn more, Instagram, I am Kladi is the place where you find me. And please don't forget to submit your survey after. And thank you so much for joining me here. Appreciate you. Thank you.
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