Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

Designed for

Illustrator

Repurposed

from

Photoshop

What I love about dynamic effects—also known as “live” effects—

is that very few Illustrator users know they exist. And even those

that do have only the sketchiest idea of how powerful and fl exible

they can be. My hope is that once you try them out for yourself, it

won’t be so much the effects that come alive as your imagination.

The Best (and Worst) Effects

The Effect menu contains more than 120 commands, all of which

produce different results, nearly half of which were designed for

Photoshop (and have little practical application in Illustrator), and

some of which refuse to work except under very specifi c conditions.

In other words, they’re not the friendliest bunch.

Fortunately, Illustrator does a nice job of dividing them into cat-

egories. And a few of the effects are exceedingly useful. Here’s how

the Effect menu (pictured in Figure 10-2, with the best submenus

highlighted in red) breaks down, from most useful to least:

•

Effect→Distort & Transform→Transform lets you nudge, scale,

rotate, and otherwise transform whole objects (or individual

stroke and fi ll attributes) from a single dialog box. Transform

is heads and shoulders the most practical of the dynamic ef-

fects, which is why—if you loaded my dekeKeys (see page xviii

of the Preface)—I’ve assigned it a keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+E

(on the Mac, -E) for Effect. You’ll be s ...