Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

This time, the fi nished piece isn’t really a piece of artwork—more

like a rambling collection of disassociated effects. But I guarantee

you, you now know more about art brushes and advanced methods

for creating type-along-a-path than anyone on your block. My hope

is that this knowledge will serve you well when you need to twist

and distort all manners of objects in the future.

Replicating, Updating,

and Replacing Symbols

Now we shift from the topic of brushes to that other method for

repeating and updating art in Illustrator: symbols. Whereas Illus-

trator presents brushes as creative features, symbols are a means

of effi ciency and automation through and through. Take the detail

from a map of Yellowstone National Park, featured in Figure 9-57.

(This fi le ships with Illustrator. To fi nd it, search for Yellowstone

Map.ai on the hard disk that contains the Illustrator CS5 applica-

tion.) This small detail contains nine repetitions of a picnic table

icon,

, with many others strewn elsewhere inside the map, all of

which are instances of a central symbol. This means I can change

the symbol’s fi ll to green, massage the placement of the table’s top

and benches, and update all instances in one operation, as indi-

cated by the nine updated (and circled) picnic icons in Figure 9-58.

Figure 9-57 . Figure 9-58 .

Details courtesy of U.S. National Park Service staff at the NPS Harper’s Ferry Center

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Lesson 9: Brushes and Symbols

The act of creating a symbol is as easy as selecting a piece of artwork

and dragging it into the Symbols panel. Which is why I devote this

exercise to tasks that are more likely to cause you confusion, that

is, replicating, updating, and replacing symbols. Along the way,

you’ll get a sense of how symbols work and what kinds of benefi ts

they provide.

1.

Open an illustration that contains symbols. Open the

fi le named 264 symbols.ai in the Lesson 09 folder. It

features an instance of a single symbol, called Florid

Strokes, which appears in Figure 9-59. But if you choose

Window→Symbols or press Ctrl+Shift+F11 (-Shift-F11),

then you’ll see a total of 264 symbols, starting with the six in-

cluded with a new Print document (both in CS5 and CS4), the

eighteen included with a new Web document (again in CS5

and CS4), and moving on to those included with other kinds of

documents, and a few excerpts of the most interesting symbol

libraries, whether from this or a previous version of Illustrator.

It’s a kind of one-stop department store for all your symbol needs.

2.

Delete the current occupant of the artboard. The Florid Strokes

instance is attractive to look at, but it’s merely a placeholder so

that your graphic doesn’t look empty if you should preview it

from the Bridge. We won’t be using it in this project. So press

Ctrl+A (or -A) to select all the artwork, and press the Back-

space (or Delete) key to get rid of it.

3. Place an instance of the Tiki Idol symbol. Click the Tiki Idol

symbol in the Symbols panel. (If you can’t fi nd it, see the next

page.) Click the icon in the top-right corner of the panel and

choose Place Symbol Instance to place an instance in the exact

center of the artboard. Or drag the symbol from the panel and

drop it into the artboard, as in Figure 9-60.

Figure 9-59 .

Figure 9-60 .

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Replicating, Updating, and Replacing Symbols