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Industry Insight

Top Illustrator tips

Offering a wide-range of intelligent vector illustration tools, Adobe® Illustrator® is an essential app for any creative professional. Here, three top UK-based designers – James Wignall, Aaron Miller and Gav Strange – offer their invaluable advice on making the application work a little harder for you.

The power of symbols

"I find the ability to create “Symbols” extremely useful when using Illustrator. You can draw anything you like and simply drag it over to the Symbols panel – hey presto you’ve just made a Symbol! This comes in very handy when duplicating lots of the same thing. If you need to make a little adjustment you can just double click the Symbol, edit it and it will affect all of them... great!"

James Wignall, illustrator and animator

Smooth mover

"The Smooth Tool is a hidden gem in Illustrator – great for quickly cleaning up your linework without using the Direct Selection Tool. Simply click and hold on the Pencil tool in the main tool box to reveal the Smooth Tool – the second icon down in the flyout. Now drag along your path to tidy up the line – repeating as necessary. You can quickly adjust tool settings by double-clicking the Smooth Tool icon and using the slider-based dialog that appears"

Aaron Miller, character designer and illustrator

Pathfinder perfection

"For me, the Pathfinder panel is brilliant. This little treasure trove of shape modifications, combined with the power of Smart Guides gives you the ability to take basic shapes and create something custom yet pixel perfect, The ‘expand’ button also helps to keep your artwork nice and tidy. My illustrations just wouldn’t be the same without ‘Add to Shape’, ‘Divide’ and that underrated timesaver ‘Minus Back’."

Gav Strange aka JamFactory, Senior Online Designer, Aardman Animations

Industry Insight

The changing face of broadcast graphics

Thanks to the Adobe® Flash® Platform, Creative Suite 4 Production Premium and first person media's ibs animate, broadcasters no longer have to rely on expensive, proprietary systems to create eye-catching animated on-screen graphics and play them out on AIR.

The challenge? Reduce costs for broadcasters, enhance quality of broadcasts, provide more creative freedom for branding graphics and animations, and ensure reliable delivery of content via TV, the web and mobile devices. The solution? ibs animate from first person media, the Adobe Flash Platform and CS4 Production Premium.

ibs animate is essentially a single box solution for integrating real time Flash animations within a broadcast stream. It enables you to design graphics and animations in the familiar environment of Creative Suite Production Premium and then insert content in the swf format directly into the broadcast stream for delivery to your chosen output media. An easy to use, simple interface enables Flash animators to change and update graphics as often as they like without the need for additional technology.

In this economic downturn, this method of delivering broadcast graphics and animations offers substantial savings (not to mention creative freedom). For instance, broadcasters can reduce costs considerably by leveraging the same designs across multiple delivery channels – and off-the-shelf hardware and software (rather than proprietary systems) saves even more cash. "In every industry in the world, there is a shift towards open systems and standard off-the-shelf tools," says Daniel Mueller, managing director of first person media, the company behind ibs animate. "The same is true in broadcast, where companies are moving away from proprietary systems and toward the Adobe Flash platform, standard desktop hardware, leading Adobe creative applications, and systems such as ibs animate to engage with audiences across platforms and channels. It's a new model that has countless benefits for broadcasters."

Find out more on ibs animate and how it works with Adobe tools

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