Tool Time: Creating in Illustrator CS2
- Photo Inside of Type
- Start with a Font
- Mapping Made Easy
- Find Your Favorite Logo?
- Change Star Shape, Part One
- Change Star Shape, Part Two
- Send Up a Flare
- Permanent Pathfinder
- Spray On, Spray Off
- Years in Graph Data
- Thats Out of One Hundred
- Edit Graph Designs
- Sliding Graph Designs
- Drag-and-Drop Instead of Copy-and-Paste
- Change Tool Settings on the Fly
- Make Your Own Spirograph
- Convert to Shape
- Let the Blend Tool Do the Math
- More Blending
- Yet More Blending
- Bend the Blend
- Shapes Around a Circle
- Change the Blend
- Outline Stroke
- Live Trace Not Working How Youd Like? Try This
- Is Live Trace Still Not Working How Youd Like? Take It a Step Further
- Viewing Reference Photos When Using the Mesh Tool
- Gradient Brushes
- Divide Objects Below
- Change Grids on the Fly
- Live Interlocking Objects
- Live Interlocking Objects, Part 2
- Creating Wireframes
- Add to a Shape to Create a Shape
- Move Points as You Draw
- Auto Add/Delete Getting in Your Way
- Multiple Objects as a Mask
- Round Those Corners
- Same Width and Height
- Changing Arcs
- Close a Path Automatically
- Preserve Brush Stroke Options
- Disable Auto Add/Delete
- Split into Grid
- The Perfect Star
- Target Practice
- Opacity Masks
- Vintage Texture Effect
Tool Time creating in illustrator CS2
You can never have enough tools. The more tools you have at your disposal, the more options you have for constructing your job. Just the other day, Matt was at The Home Depot considering what tools were missing from his collection—tools that would make his life easier. You’re probably expecting me to cleverly relate this to using Illustrator’s tools, but I really wasn’t planning to. I just wanted to talk about our fascination with power tools and the tools we hope to get someday. In fact, just in case you’re feeling generous, I can happily provide our wish list of dream tools. Meanwhile, I guess we’ll have to make do with this collection of tips on using Illustrator’s tools to create stuff (as I imagine, I can hear the sweet sound of a radial saw and smell the aroma of freshly cut pine).
Photo Inside of Type
To fill text with a photo and keep the text editable, place an image into Illustrator (File>Place), then create some text with the Type tool (T) and position it on top of the photo. With the Selection tool, select both the photo and the type, and from the Object menu, select Clipping Mask>Make, or press Command-7 (PC: Control-7). (In our example, we added a stroke by selecting the text with the Selection tool and changing the Stroke color in the Toolbox to black to make the type easier to see.) Use the Type tool to edit the text or the Direct Selection tool (A) to move the photo. To cancel the effect completely, select the photo and text, then go back to the Object menu and choose Clipping Mask>Release. Let’s review the most important aspect of this technique: The masking object (in this case, the text) needs to be on top.