I prefer to convert the text into shapes. I must warn you. If you convert text into shapes it’s a one way trip. You can’t convert shapes back into text.

You might be wondering if there are any other reasons why you’d want to convert Font text into shapes. Logo design is one of the main reason’s to convert a font you already have and tweak it to fit the project.

Here’s an example of converting Text into shapes:

Obviously W’s and g’s don’t look like this out of the box. By converting the word “Winning” and the thin black rectangles into shapes and then merging them. You are able to get something that looks completely different then the regular font.

Now that you know WHY you would want to convert text into shapes with Adobe Illustrator, let’s look at “how to convert text into shapes with Adobe Illustrator”.

First you want to make sure that the “Text” layer is meat balled. See red box.

Next you need to run the command “Create Outlines”. This is found under the “Type” menu. You can also use the keyboard shortcut “Shift+Ctrl+O”.

Once you do that. Go back to the layers dock. You will see something interesting. Each letter has become it’s own object. All the letters will be added to a new group.

Notice the “g” on the left hand side is now a compound path. You can now edit the letter even further if you wanted/had to.

It’ isn’t that hard to do the conversion but I find the “Create Outlines” for what ever reason doesn’t jump out at my in the drop down list. Now that your word is turned into shapes you can go in and do anything you can do with shapes which is a lot!

Hope you enjoyed the article on “How to convert text into shapes with Adobe Illustrator”.

There is one more thing I could have done  which I didn’t do at the the time. It’s to get out the trusty old “black” arrow. Select the item you want to scale. Then scale the item!

Again here’s the procedure on how to use the scale tool:

1. Draw an object
2. Use the black tool to select ALL of the object
3. Click on the Scale tool (S)
4. Check where the “Scale point” is. By default it’s set to the middle of the object. If that’s not where you want to scale the object from please move it to the spot by clicking on it and moving it to the new spot
5. Move the scale tool and now it will behave like you expected.

Other notes/tips

• Holding “Alt” allow you to bring up the dialog to copy the object and make it smaller/bigger
• Holding “Shift makes the object increase in the same ration in both X & Y coordinates.

Guide are no exception. I like to be precise when drawing. Since guides are something you should really rely on it makes sense if your guides are off, so will your drawing.

I’m going to take off from my last illustrator tutorial: How to make snap-able grid guides in Adobe Illustrator

• We’re going to create a guide both 224PT’s on either side of the center line.
• We’re going to create guides at 60Pt’s, 172Pt and 474pt

*Note* – You might see either one of these two option depending on the size of your computer screen.

If you have a high resolution screen you will see:

If you have a lower resolution screen you will see:

Go to the layer that has the horizontal guide and make sure to “meatball” the layer. Clicking the circle is what Adobe calls “clicking the meatball”. Stupid terminology I know. This will make sure that you actually have the vertical guide actually selected.

Go to the transform area and tell it 400+ 224. Hold down “ALT” and then hit enter. This will create a new guide.

Go back and meatball the original “V” later and then type 400-224 and then hold down “ALT” and then hit Enter. This will draw a line guide halfway between the top and the bottom of the drawing.

It should now look like this:

Adobe Illustrator allows you to reflect items. Reflecting an image can save time when drawing since you are able to do 1/2 the work and then get a perfectly identical second half.  The Reflect tool can be found in the same area as the “Rotate Tool” and is normally not selected by default. The shortcut key for selecting the reflect tool is “o”. You can remember it since an “o” is the only letter that is completely semetrical. That is each side (top/bottom and left/right) is exactly the same.

I really like this tool but I found it kind of hard to use just by clicking and trying it. What I had issues with is that the tool requires kind of a two step process. Once you know this process it is pretty easy to use.

1. Step 1 – Select the “Reflect tool”
2. Step 2 – “ALT Click” on the drawing where you want to reflect the image. When you do this you will create a VERY small circle. If you aren’t paying really close attention to things you will most likely not even see it. This was my issue. I didn’t see the reflect point.
3. This will bring up the relect options. Select vertical and then copy. If you don’t use “copy” and just click “ok” you will reflect the image but not make a second copy.

How to use the reflect tool in Adobe Illustrator to make a heart.

This is what I created in Adobe Illustrator. It’s half a heart. I want to reflect the image to make a full heart.

Much like the instruction above make sure to:

1. Select the “reflect tool”.
2. Then “ALT CLICK” the spot you want to mirror from.

In our case let’s pic the top-middle part of the soon to be full heart.

NOTE – the graphic bellow shows the reflect tool’s reflection point. It’s super small even when you zoom in!!! You want to place that point right at the end of the line.

Do you see where that point is? You can drag this point where ever you want. It helps if you have guides so that it “Snaps” to them.

Now that we have selected the “reflect point” you need to “ALT CLICK” that point. That will bring up this dialog.

Here’s what you should have now.

You might notice that the bottom of heart is not at a point. Rather it is flat. To make the bottom point a point instead of flat you will have to join the item.

Now that we copy the half heart we are going to want to join line. We first need to select both sides of the heart (Ctrl + A). Then join them together. (Ctrl + J). You will notice the bottom will look like it is at a peak like so if you did it correctly.

The easiest way to do this is to:

select the “Rectangular Grid Tool”.

Drag the tool from the top left of the page to the bottom right. While still holding the left mouse button you will to need to use the arrow keys to add/remove lines in both the vertical and horizontal positions.

Right adds vertical lines. Left arrow removes them.

Up arrow adds horizontal lines. Down arrow removes them. Once you are done it should look something like this:

You can now change this drawing into guides that you can use in your drawing. To convert the image go to the View menu. Go all the way down to “Guides” and then select “Make Guides”. The shortcut as you can see is “Ctrl+5”.

Once you have made the guides most people like to lock them. To do that go back to “View”. Re-select “Guides” and this time Click “Lock Guides”.

The only way I have found to get rid of that error message “Adobe Illustrator has detected a problem in the windows registry which needs to be corrected to work properly. Would you like Illustrator to correct the problem now?” is to:

1. Close all CS5 applications
2. Right click shortcut to Adobe Illustrator Cs5
3. Tell it to run as Administrator.
4. This will give enough permissions for Adobe to fix the registry items that it corrupted in the first place!

As you can see when I right click “Adobe Illustrator” I am prompted with the “Run as Administrator”.

Let me know if this helped you fix the error “Adobe Illustrator has detected a problem in the windows registry which needs to be corrected to work properly. Would you like Illustrator to correct the problem now?”

The path finder tool seems like it going to be a VERY useful tool. It allows you to take multiple vector shapes and allows you to combine, subtract and oh so many other things.

First off you have to show the tool to begin with. The “Pathfinder Tool” is in the “Window” drop down menu. To enable it either click it with your mouse or use the shortcut key “Shift+Ctrl+F9”.

Once you do that you will see this box on the screen:

I will go over what each of these items does. I will start on the first row and go right. Once at the end I will start on the second line and make my way over each icon and what it does.

Adobe Illustrator Pathfinder Shape Modes

1.) Unite – Much like the name implies all objects selected would be joined. If the items are filled with a color the item that is at the top of the stack will be the fill color for the merged shape.

2.) Minus Front – This tool will take anything that is on top of the back most item and remove it. If part of the back most object is covered by part of one of the other layers it too is removed.

3.) Intersect – This tool will can only be used on two objects. I decided to select the Red and beige colors and then hit the button. As you can see the object that is left is the parts of the two objects that were overlapping each other. The top most layer always wins.

4.) Exclude – This tool only removes the parts of the objects that were touching. All items that were selected will end up using the top layer’s fill.

Adobe Illustrator Pathfinders

1.) Divide – This tool will break up the object into smaller pieces but will not remove any parts. I moved each piece away from each other just to show you how it cut things up.

2.) Trim – This tool will remove anything that is being covered by an object in front of it.

3.) Merge – This is much like unit but it removes the stroke around the objects and then combines them all into one shape.

4.) Crop – This will allow you to put an object overtop of another one. When you hit crop it will only show the items there were underneath that top most object.

5.) Outline – Will remove the file and turn the outline into open vector lines. To change all three objects black and white I just hit “D” while they were all selected.

6.) Minus Back – Keeps the the front most object but subtracts the object behind it.