Adobe Illustrator CC Digital Classroom

Lesson 10: Working with Symbols

 

Symbols make it easy to repeatedly use objects throughout an Illustrator project and even across multiple documents. Symbols can be imported, transformed, colored, and edited with the tools built into the Symbols panel, which you will discover in this lesson.

What you’ll learn in this lesson:

• • Creating and editing symbols
• • Importing a symbol library
• • Using the symbolism tools
• • Editing nested symbols
• • Saving symbol libraries

Starting up

Before starting, make sure that your tools and panels are consistent by resetting your workspace. See “Resetting Adobe Illustrator CC Preferences” in the Starting up section of this book.

You will work with several files from the ai10lessons folder in this lesson. Make sure that you have loaded the ailessons folder onto your hard drive from www.digitalclassroombooks.com/epub/illustratorcc. See “Loading lesson files” in the Starting up section of this book.

Cleaning out the symbol library

When you create a new Illustrator document, the Symbols panel is automatically populated with a group of default symbols. These symbols are useful for certain applications, but not for the purposes of this lesson, so you will remove them and import a group of symbols provided in the ai10lessons folder.

1 In Adobe Illustrator CC, choose File > Open. In the Open dialog box, navigate to the ai10lessons folder and select the ...