Illustrator has an absolute plethora of tricks that it can perform, provided the user knows some of the basics about using the Appearance Palette and Effects menu. Today, I’m going to illustrate one of the many magic tricks you can pull off using some very simple techniques in tandem.

Step One

First off, you’ll need to open up Illustrator, and create a new document (use whatever size you feel like, since this is just to show a new technique). I used regular ol’ letter size for mine.

Step Two

Next, grab the Type tool, and click on your artboard to start a new type object, and type ‘Illustrator Magic Text’ and set it to something like 72pt to make it nice and big, and set the color to something other than black (I chose a light green) if you want to follow along with me.

Step Three

Here’s where the fun begins: Go to your Appearance Palette (Window>Appearance if it’s not already open), click the palette options icon in the upper-right corner of the palette, and choose Add New Fill. Drag the newly-created fill underneath the ‘Characters’ line in the palette window, and make it whatever color you like, as long as it’s different than the text color (I just stuck with black, but I made mine a rich black since Illustrator’s version of black is more of a dark grey, to be honest. We’ll cover how to do that in another post).

Step Four

Now, select the new fill that you just moved under the ‘Characters’, and go up to the Effects menu, and choose Convert to Shape>Rounded Rectangle. A settings dialog box will appear. Make sure it’s set to ‘Relative’, and choose any size you want for the ‘Extra Width’, ‘Extra Height’ and ‘Corner Radius’ values (for mine, I chose .3in for ‘Extra Width’, .2in for ‘Extra Height’ and .25in for ‘Corner Radius’). Hit Ok to complete the changes.

Step Five

Ok, so now you’ve got this big text with a rounded rectangle behind it – what’s so great about that, you ask? Double-click on the type, and add some more text/line breaks/etc.

Now do you see?

The fill you added to the characters is still acting like it’s part of the text, only it’s been converted to a shape instead of conforming to the character shapes. So technically, you now have a live, fully-editable text box that magically resizes itself as you type, and keeps the same spacing around your text as you go! How awesome is that!? Thanks for reading. Please subscribe if you want to be kept up to date when I post new magic tricks for you to amaze your friends with…

Okay, so I thought that if you’re anything like me, you probably pay hardly any attention (if any at all) to that weird little squiggly key on the far upper left corner of your keyboard. Then I thought to myself, “Self, there MUST be something that this stupid button is good for!” Since I’m not very fluent in Spanish, I figured that my next option was to find some uses for the tilde within my favorite trio of programs: Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign…

Well, I did some research, and dug through some of my mountains of books to come up with as many functions as I possibly could for that previously-useless little plastic cube. Here’s what I found:

Illustrator

• If you’re using any of the shape tools (the Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon, Line tools, etc.), while dragging out a new shape, if you hold the ~ key, Illustrator will create tons of progressive copies of your shape.

• This next trick is one that I’ve only seen in one other place. Everyone else seems to not know about it… so here we go: If you’ve selected a shape that has a pattern fill, then you can modify that fill independently of the shape that contains it by holding down the ~ key while using the Rotate, Reflect, Scale or Skew tools. How awesome is that!?

Here’s the shape with a regular pattern applied (the pattern is Bamboo, from the Nature_Foliage pattern swatches library that comes with Illustrator) before I modified it:

Photoshop

• While any image is open, you can hit Ctrl/Cmd-1 to view the Red Channel, Ctrl/Cmd-2 to view Green and Ctrl/Cmd-3 to view the Blue Channel. If you want to see the composite RGB image again, all you have to do is hit Ctrl/Cmd-~ and voila! Your image will be full-color once more, rather than grayscale.

Red Channel (Ctrl/Cmd-1):

Green Channel (Ctrl/Cmd-2):

Blue Channel (Ctrl/Cmd-3):

Composite RGB (Ctrl/Cmd-~):

InDesign

• If you (like me) often tend to have multiple files open at once in InDesign, these next two shortcuts will be real timesavers. Hitting Ctrl/Cmd-~ will take you to the next open document’s window, while Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-~ will go to the previous document’s window.

First document that’s open:

Then, after hitting Ctrl/Cmd-~:

I just recently (and by ‘recently’ I mean ‘about a year ago’) learned about a fantastic site that does free hosting for designers’ portfolios called Carbonmade.com. The UI is super-simple, but also highly-intuitive. They allow up to five projects and/or 35 images to be posted for free (after that, you pay to upgrade), and have a host of stylish tweaks you can apply to your portfolio, text, and thumbnails.

You can get pretty creative with it, even though you’re pretty limited in terms of how you can edit things. For instance, when re-designing my portfolio, I noticed that some people have come up with pretty creative uses for their thumbnail images (I’m thinking about writing a tutorial about how I did it), and thought I’d give it a try. All I know is, when you’re a freelancer, if you can find a high-quality, super-useful service, and then find it for FREE… well, you’ve struck gold, my friend.

When I first joined Carbonmade, I had a job interview that same afternoon, and they had asked to see a digital portfolio of my work. I thought I was royally screwed until I did a Google search for ‘online portfolio’ and Carbonmade came up as the very first result. I clicked the link, decided to join (the clock was ticking, remember?), and created my portfolio. The best part about the site is that it takes very little effort to get your work looking super-professional. After I’d added a few projects and put some of my work into each of them, I headed off to the interview; thanks to Carbonmade.com, I ended up landing the job. That’s my story – what’s yours?

As always, if anyone knows of any other resources for designers like Carbonmade, please don’t hesitate to share them. Thanks for reading!

I’ve come across many, many amazing websites and blogs in the time since I began my interest in graphic design. Some of them are long lost to the murky mire of Google’s archives, some are hidden away in the catastrophic cacophony of clutter that is my bookmarks collection, and some are just plain gone. Of the ones that I DO still have, I’d like to share them in bite-sized chunks here and there, in order that the list doesn’t become too overwhelming, and so that you can start cluttering up YOUR bookmarks, too

I decided that I ought to break this up into categories to make it easier to figure out what would be more to your tastes. If anyone has more links that they’d like to see added to the list, please leave me a link in the comments. Otherwise, I hope you can make some good use of these resources… Enjoy!

Blogs

• Designfruit

• SpoonGraphics

• Vectips

• Abduzeedo

• Tutorial9

How-tos/Tutorials

• PSDtuts

• Vectortuts

• PShero

• Smashing Magazine

I have tons more… but I have plans in store for them. Hope this list was helpful!