Real World Print Production with Adobe Creative Suite Applications

Using Symbols

What if you needed to create a school of 100 fish in Illustrator? You could draw 100 individual fish, which would be exhausting (but great for billing). Or you could draw one fish, and then copy and paste 99 duplicates; that’s much faster, but still tedious. And what do you do when your customer says the fish should be sharks rather than the 100 flounders you’ve just finished creating? You scream a lot, and then you start over—unless you were clever enough to use Illustrator’s Symbols tools.

A symbol is a special species of artwork that solves the need-a-lot-of-fish-in-a-hurry problem and makes it painless to change all those fish simultaneously. (The alliteration is intentional: It will prepare you for the stunning selection of ...