By Aimee Streicher, Carolina Chapter Member

On a recent window shopping excursion, I came across an antique shop. This massive cubical metal box stared back at me through the display window. It had to have been something out of the 50s!

It was about 2 feet on each side, light red in color, except for its front window (or surveillance eye). Immediately below the eye, a 4-barred horizontal chrome grill grinned at me, and two hexagonal cylinders on either side of the grill must have been added for punctuation, like the circles on a clown’s cheeks.

Strangest of all, two metallic rods attached at the cube top extended upward, making an approximate 30-degree “V.” Black spheres were attached to the ends of the rods. The entire structure was supported by 4 conical struts. Got the picture?

I didn’t think so. Here’s how to put some “2-D clarification” into your documents and really get your point across. Last November, I presented at STC Carolina’s monthly meeting, “Adobe Illustrator’s Tips for the Technical Communicator.” During the presentation, I went over a number of topics, including color models, exporting raster images, saving and opening a document, layers, the use of text, arrowheads, symbols, shapes, and other items. This article is a brief follow-up to a few of the topics in that presentation.

Let’s start by opening Illustrator. A window will appear where you will have a choice of opening a recent document or creating a new one. If you are creating a new document, there are choices to make as well. Under the “Create New” column choose “Print Document”. In the Units drop-down menu, choose “inches” and name the document.


You should see several things in your workspace. The center is the working area with the dimensions of 8.5" x 11" or letter size. To the left, you should see the tool box. To the right should be an assortment of panels. All panels can be moved around, sized, added, and removed from your view.

If the tool bar is not visible, go to the drop-down menu and check the Tools menu. Do the same for Layers, Align, Stroke, Swatches, and Color panels. You can add new panels at any time.


Illustrator Tools menu

Toolbar

These are some of the basic shapes you’ll be trying out:{SPLIT()} {SPLIT()}

Click on the Line tool {SPLIT()} {SPLIT()} with your mouse.

Hold down the Shift key to constrain the line in a horizontal or vertical position while dragging the mouse on the work area. Once you let up on the mouse, zoom in closer to your line by holding down the Command/Control key, “z,” and “+“ keys to get a closer look. You may need to pan around on the screen by holding down the space bar and scrolling with the mouse in order to view the image. You will see the cursor turning into a hand icon.

Make sure that your line is still chosen. If it is chosen, you will see a blue box around it. Use the pointer {SPLIT()} {SPLIT()} for selecting items on the work area. Look over at the Stroke panel. From here, change the weight to 1.0 and choose the center corner option.

With your line still chosen, go over to the Color panel and choose a color of your liking. From here, we will add an arrow head. Go up to the Effect drop-down menu and navigate to Stylize and then Add Arrowheads.

Tools bar

In the Add Arrowheads panel, add a check mark in the Preview box and click on the little arrow facing the right under Start. Keep clicking it until you see an arrowhead you’d like to use. Do the same for the End of the arrow. Click OK.

You will now see a line that has a color and arrowhead(s) that you designed. Now locate the Stroke panel that should be off the right hand side of the working area. Make sure the line is chosen, and play with the weight variants by typing in a number or clicking on the highlighted arrow to the right of the window that shows the weights. Tapping on the up/down arrows to the left of the box is another way to increase or decrease the size.

Checking the box for applying a dashed line is another design attribute to experiment with. Unfortunately, there isn’t a preview choice before applying the attributes though it is simple undo by using the Control/Command “z” keys or to keep playing within the Stroke panel. Another way to change the attributes is to find the Appearance panel and make your changes.

In the Tools panel located to the left of the work space, experiment with the different shapes available by adding a fill color, line thickness and colors. The shapes are all together in a fly-out menu with the default rectangle as the tool in view. By having an actively drawn shape, toggle back and forth from the fill and outline at the bottom of the Tools bar to manipulate.


See if you can recreate my funny looking TV set. It has been created all by basic shapes. I used gradient fills, color, line weights, and arrowheads. I also used the reflect and direct select tools from the Tools panel and the alignment tools in its own panel. Create your very own crazy TV set, and, most of all, have fun!

To learn more about Adobe Illustrator, please visit www.adobe.com/products/illustrator

Aimee can be reached at aimeeow1 at gmail dot com.