The Designer’s Apprentice: Automating Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign in Adobe Creative Suite 3

10. Beautiful Geometry: The Illustrator Projects

If the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

—Buckminster Fuller

I remember the exact moment I discovered the possibilities afforded by automating Illustrator: I had opened version 10 and found that I could name objects in an Illustrator file—exciting stuff. While earlier versions had let you refer to objects by number (using a command like “Move path item 10 over to the right”), this quickly became confusing since adding a path item to the document meant that item 10 would become item 11 (and so on). This made it impossible to keep track of objects and made the process seem hopelessly frustrating.

With Illustrator 10, however, for the first time I was able to name my object something ...