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Adobe Illustrator: Fiddly And Frustrating?

25th February 2008

New users to Adobe Illustrator often complain that they find the program "fiddly" and frustrating. When we run Adobe training courses, we recognise that part of our job is rid people of this perception of Illustrator as a difficult program to use. We have identified three main elements to making people aware that Illustrator is no more difficult or frustrating than any other program.

Firstly, we point out to people that they must be on the right tool in order to carry out a given operation. Secondly, we teach them to observe and interpret the rich visual feedback provided by the program as you carry out various operations. Thirdly, we always remind new users of the ease with which you can revert your drawing back to a state prior to the point where something has gone wrong.

New users to Illustrator will often attempt to manipulate elements within their drawing without first activating the Selection tool. For example, they will create a shape with, say, the Ellipse tool and then, while the Ellipse tool is still active, they try to move or resize the shape they have just drawn or click on the page to attempt to deselect the shape. They then get puzzled and annoyed when little ellipses keep appearing in their drawing or Illustrator's shape dimension dialogue box keeps on appearing.

Avoiding this problem is simple. Always ensure that you are on the right tool. So, if you wish to manipulate an existing element, you must have the Selection tool highlighted. One of the first shortcuts that we teach people who attend our Illustrator training courses is that you can temporarily activate the Selection tool by simply holding down the Control key (or Command on a Mac).

Another thing that new users find is that they are unable to carry out a certain operation because it is not permissible under the current circumstances or at that point in time. For example, you want to resize an object and you end up rotating or moving it instead.

The best way of avoiding these types of mistakes is to keep an eye on the various signals that Illustrator provides, particularly those relating the appearance of the cursor. Thus, for example, if you are trying to resize a rectangle, you can only do so when the cursor changes to a diagonal line with an arrow at both ends (indicating that your cursor is in the correct position).

If you a new user to a program like Illustrator, it is inevitable that you will make errors: things may go slightly wrong or even get completely messed up. The key thing here is to learn the Undo habit. For example, if you accidentally move an object don't try to manually put it back where it was, simply choose Edit - Undo or use the shortcut Control-Z (Command-Z on a Mac). If you Undo too far back, you can use the Redo command to come forward again. (The shortcut for Redo is Control-Shift-Z.)

If your effort to create a drawing has gone horribly wrong, the best thing to do is to bite the bullet and choose Revert from the File menu. This is a way of saying "OK, this isn't working. I give up!" The Revert command discards all of the changes you have made to the document since it was last saved and can be another useful way of avoiding unnecessary frustration.

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