Adobe Creative Cloud Design Tools All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 3: Using the Selection Tools

In This Chapter

• Knowing the anchor points, bounding boxes, and selection tools
• Working with a selection
• Grouping and ungrouping selections
• Constraining movement and cloning objects

If someone has been coaching you in using Adobe Illustrator, you may have heard the old line “You have to select it to affect it,” meaning that if you want to apply a change to an object in Illustrator, you must have that object selected or no change will occur. Although making selections may sound simple, it can become tricky when you're working on complicated artwork. This chapter shows you the tools that will help save you editing time when working in Adobe Illustrator.

Getting to Know the Selection Tools

In the following sections, you take a quick tour of anchor points (integral to the world of selections), the bounding box, and, of course, the selection tools. (Yes, Illustrator has several selection tools.)

See our website at www.agitraining.com/dummies to find files that you can practice with in this section.

Anchor points

To understand selections, you must first understand how Illustrator works with anchor points, which act like handles and can be individually selected and moved to other locations. You essentially use the anchor points to drag objects or parts of objects around the workspace. After you place anchor points on an object, you can create strokes ...