Working with Spot Colors in Adobe Illustrator

An eye-opening material on issues with spot colors while using royalty free vectors from iStockphoto. "Picture this: You need an image for a project, and the deadline is looming. You download a cool illustration from iStock, place it in your layout and send it off to the printer. An hour later, the printer phones you back.

“Excellent,” you think, “my print job is done!” But nooo, the printer is calling to let you know that your file contains 15 spot colors, and if you really want 15 different plates made and run through the press, it’s going to cost you at least ten times more and take a whole week to finish. There goes your budget and your deadline.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!? Spot colors? How did those get there? And what are they, anyway?" Continue to full article.

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Working With Layers. Vector Tips by Cheryl Graham

Every major vector program has the ability to create files with layers. Some artists use layers copiously, others not at all. Layers help organize a file, and provide some pretty nifty editing options. A well-organized file benefits the contributor as well as the designer...

In the example below, the three layers contain the three major elements of the file. It is logically organized, and therefore easier for the buyer to edit. If the designer just needed the dart, for example, she could simply delete the other two layers and use the dart by itself. Continue to full article.

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Working with Clipping Masks and Free Transform in Adobe Illustrator

"You’ve probably heard of a Clipping Path in Photoshop. Well, a Clipping Mask in Illustrator is pretty much the same thing (Corel Draw calls it a “Powerclip,” and in Freehand, “Paste Inside”). It’s a vector path that masks, or “clips” out part of the image. Clipping Masks provides vector artists with more flexibility when building and organizing files. For designers, they can be scary at first, but are easy to de-mystify... Here we go:

In Photoshop and InDesign, Clipping Paths are often used to isolate an irregular shape in a photo to create a “cutout”. Since irregular vector shapes can be easily made, why would you need to use a Clipping Mask in Illustrator? Most of the time, they’re used to crop a set of irregular shapes into a neat, simple shape. In this regard, it can be helpful to think of them as “cropping masks.” Except with one benefit: the cropped or excluded part of the image doesn’t really go away, it’s just hidden. Let’s have a look. Full Article (via iStockPhoto)

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