Lets take a closer look at the appearance palette and revisit the old “symbols” trick for those who missed it. Update: Eureka! I was just shown something I should have figured out for myself: you can change the color of a symbol just by using the appearance palette (no need for the boolean trick I’ve [...]

Okay folks, now that we’ve got a basic idea of how this kind of thing stacks up, we can look at some alternative methods, and time-saving tricks. One of the most powerful features in Illustrator is the largely-ignored “symbols” palette. They bill symbols as a cutsie way to get lots of hokey stars all over [...]

NOTE: Some of the techniques in this tutorial are now out of date. Most of what is done as separate objects here could be done with the appearance palette as a single object. Illustrator is a great tool for very tight rendering rendering if you know what you’re doing. In this tutorial we’ll go through [...]