Adobe Illustrator

**A good way to review the following is to time yourself doing the exercises you have done (Wheel spoke, heart shape, ...)

**Look at an already done illustrator art and guess where the anchor points are for an interesting shape.

While selecting a shape, hold down alt and drag it to create another copy of it.

To select using direct selection tool, drag a rectangle out or click on the point.

Click P to use Pen Tool. Hold down Ctrl to get into Direct Selection temporarily (actually it activates the most recent tool). Hold down Alt to get into Convert to Anchor point.

Try this: While drawing a curve or line segements with Pen, hold down Ctrl to directly select the anchor point, or switch over to Convert to anchor point using Alt (so Ctrl, Alt, Ctrl, Alt).

The arrow key is useful for certain shapes (for example, use it to change the polystar's tips, to change the corner radius of a rounded rect)

Hold down ctrl while doing star will change the outer radius. It will affect future stars!

When using align, click on one object to use that as a key object (you won't see any visual indication that it's being used for such purpose)

Use group to help make selecting objects easier when you have a lot of it on screen.

Use View Outline to pick any selection.

Use Group Selection tool to select within a group. Clicking on the same object multiple times to make it select more and more sub groups in the same group.

To see the direction handle of objects, use Select->Object->Direction Handle.

Use Preference to set Keyboard Increment (default is 1pt). Use 0.1pt if you want finer control. And change general unit to Point if you are doing typography, use pixel for art on screen, use Inch if you are doing print. You can go back to a larger increment holding down shift while nudging something.

Selectively select the points to manipulate them with direct selection using lasso tool. When the pen is showing a solid square, you are dragging the segment.

To continue on a path previously drawn, in Pen Tool, when you see / under the pen, click and it will select the most recently drawn line segment. Click somewhere to continue on. If you want one path selected and you go to another open path, you can join them up ( -o- appears below the pen tool )

Snap to Grid
Snap to Point - useful when you are moving paths around to them snap to each other.
Object->Path->Join to join paths
Object->Path->Average

* Very useful shortcut: alt shift ctrl j (average (vertical and horizontal), and join all at once)

The transform box accepts calculation as well.

x to switch foreground/background
/ to use transparent stroke or fill
\ (backslash) to use Line Tool