Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

can appear as a waving design, a distorted graphic, or even

a new variety of text along a path. Text expressed as a brush

goes well beyond standard path type, with letterforms folding

and splaying as they round the curve. Naturally, I’ll show you

a few examples in the forthcoming exercises.

Symbols and Instances

The Symbols panel allows you to collect graphics and icons that

you use on a regular basis in your artwork. You then drag and

drop clones, or instances, of those graphics into your illustra-

tion and position and scale them to taste. All instances remain

linked to the graphic in the Symbols panel. So if you change

the graphic, all instances update in kind. For example, if an

architect wants to update a Vermont fl oor plan to suit Hawaii,

then it’s a simple matter to replace all the pine trees with palms.

Symbols are also well suited to Web graphics, especially Flash-

based content. Because instances are just phantoms of a graphic,

they save on fi le size. Repeat a 20K graphic ten times, and it

compresses down to just the core 20K.

At this point, you might be thinking that symbols and brushes

seem like strange bedfellows. But remember that both art brushes

and symbols rely on an original graphic, one that remains linked

to either a brushstroke or an instance. Plus, as with brushes,

you can paint with symbols using the symbol sprayer tool.

That may sound trivial if n