595 Mastering Adobe Illustrator 88

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now, this week Adobe is celebrating the 30th anniversary of Illustrator, which is why I thought today we'd jump in the old time machine and we'd check out, not Illustrator 1.0, because it was boring. It barely supported color. It wasn't as good as CricketDraw when it came out, and then when FreeHand came along, it absolutely trounced it. But rather, the second version, Illustrator 88 which supported blends, and clipping masks, and repeating tile patterns, and all kinds of good stuff.

Now, I was originally going to treat this as a kind of parody piece. The way I did when my girlfriend Doris and I took a look at Photoshop 1.0 a few years back. That was Deke's Techniques episode 303 by the way. But over the course of a few days, I developed some real respect for this program. Now, it is weird, which is why I had to go back and consult my own book in order to figure out how the program works. For example, do you remember that if you wanted to insert an anchor point into an existing path outline you would Option + Click with the Scissors tool.

If you wanted to remove an anchor point, you wouldn't, because you'd create a hole in the path outline. There is no zoom in command. The Type tool is horrible, and so forth, but compared with today's version of Illustrator, and no offense Adobe, we all know it's powerful and awesome, and everything, but it is ultimately a giant cavern of complete and utter mayhem. Whereas Illustrator 88 is streamlined. It has a bunch of hidden features, so it's more powerful than it looks, and it has a real sense of purpose, which is why I suggest you grab the oldest Mac you can find, boot System 7, gather up all your MacPaint files, and join me as we take a look at Illustrator 88.

All right I'll just go ahead and boot up my Mac like I do just about everyday of my life. Then I'll go ahead and drag these hard drives a little bit away from the edge of the screen there, and I'll go ahead and open a couple of them as well. Then next I'll launch Illustrator 88. Now you have a couple different ways of getting started here. If you've already created some Illustrator 88 artwork, then naturally you can go up to the File menu and choose the Open command. Or you can create a new illustration instead. In which case Illustrator will offer to load a tracing template, and Illustrator supports two template formats, starting with MacPaint, and so I'll go ahead and open this guy right here.

You can see this thing that I drew pixel for pixel inside MacPaint many, many years ago, and if you want to see the artwork the way it really looks, then you can go to the View menu and choose Template Only. The other template format is picked, and to see it I will once again choose the New command, and I'll load this guy right here, which I created in MacDraw if you remember that program, and it looks something like this. Now one of the interesting things about working in this relatively ancient version of the program is that it doesn't have any zoom in or zoom out commands, and so you spend a lot of time using the Zoom tool which you acces by pressing the Command + Spacebar keys like so, or if you want to zoom out, you add the Option key.

All right now we can see a better view of this MacDraw file if I were to go to the View menu and choose Template Only, but we're still seeing a bitmap version of it. In other words, we're not seeing the actual gray values, nor could you convert these vectors to Illustrator vectors. Instead, what you had to do was trace them manually as I've done in the case of this artwork right here, and to see what that looks like, I'll go to the View menu and choose Preview, or you have that shortcut that still lives on of Command + Y, in which case we see this effect right here. Now the biggest problem with using this version of the software is that you cannot draw in the preview mode, so notice if I select the Rectangle tool and drag around, I do not create a rectangle, and that's because you can't do anything but view the artwork in the preview mode.

Now one of the things that really pitted artists against designer back in the days when it was Illustrator versus FreeHand, was that FreeHand provides straightforward controls such as Align tool and regular everyday average gradients. Whereas Illustrator 88 requires you to draw just about everything using the Pen tool, and instead of gradients, you have custom blends. I think the idea there was they were trying to attract a more graphic audience. The folks who could really draw, and so let's take a look at blends. I'll go ahead and switch over to this image that I've opened in advance, and you can see that it's just gorgeous by the standards of the day, and while it looks like it's a kind of radial gradient with a custom hotspot, it's really a bunch of shapes, and I can see what that looks like if I switch to one of the artwork modes.

So this program doesn't really offer automated gradients. Instead, every single one of these circles is filled with a different solid color so that each appears to blend in with its neighbors. Things get even more interesting if we mix in clipping masks as in the case of this gradient cube here. So in this case, we have blends set inside shapes. Let me show you what that looks like. I'll go ahead and switch to this drawing. You can see that we have an awful lot of stuff going on here. I'm going to get rid of these shapes for now, by selecting them and then going up to the Arrange menu and choosing the Hide command.

We can always bring them back of course, and in my case this leaves this one shape in the background, just so that I have something to work from. Now let's say I want to draw a straight line along this edge. There is no Line tool, so I'll just grab the Pen tool. What's great is that the Pen automatically snaps, which was a major innovation on the part of Illustrator the day it came out. Which means that to this day, we have the option of creating artwork without a bunch of maddening gaps inside of it. All right now I'll go ahead and switch to the Arrow tool. Now even though this looks like a black arrow, it's actually a white arrow, meaning that it selects independent points and segments.

I'll go ahead and move that guy back by taking advantage of my one and only undo, and then I'll select the entire thing by Option + Clicking on it like so. All right now I want to rotate a copy of it. Now the interesting things about Illustrator's transformations is that every one of them includes a dialog box. To get to the Move dialog box, you Option + Click on the Arrow tool icon up there at the top of the toolbox, and then you could enter a Move value if you like. I'm just going to cancel out of there. To bring up the Rotate dialog box, you select the Rotate tool, and then you Option + Click on the point around which you want to rotate.

I'm going to go ahead and change this angle value to 120 degrees, and click the Copy button in order to create a copy of that path. Then I'll switch back to my Arrow, and I'll marquee these two points, and even though there's a third point in back that's selected, that doesn't create a problem. I can just go ahead and join these two points right there by going up to the Arrange menu and choosing the Join command. Or we have that forever keyboard shortcut of Command + J. That brings up a dialog box. I'll just go ahead and click OK to dismiss it, and now notice if I were to Option + Click on this path right here, and drag it away, that we have a single joined path.

All right I'll go ahead and put that guy back there. All right now what we want to do is flip a copy of this path. Now this is the kind of thing where Illustrator makes it look like it's unnecessarily complicated. After all, a flip is a flip. You just want to flip something horizontally, or you want to flip it vertically, but what if you want to flip it at an angle? That's when this Reflect tool right here becomes absolutely awesome. So rather than Option + Clicking to bring up the Reflect dialog box, and then selecting Horizontal if you want to flip vertically, and Vertical if you want to select horizontally. I'll go ahead and Cancel out of there.

Instead, I'll just go ahead and click at this point, and then I'll press the Option key and click at this point, and the reason I'm pressing Option is that ends up creating a duplicate. Now I can switch back to my Arrow tool. I'll go ahead and marquee these two points right there. Press Command + J, that brings up the dialog box, that's good news. That tells us that we have two coincident points that are going to be fused into one. I'll click OK. I'll go ahead and marquee this anchor point. Press Command + J. I don't get the dialog box, which is bad news, and so I'll press Command + Z to undo.

The reason that's a bad thing is it means that we still have two anchor points. After they're joined they just get a straight segment between them. In which case what you want to do is just move that point away, and then drag it back until it snaps into alignment, and then marquee those two points and press Command + J. At which point I see the dialog box, which is great. All right now I'll just go ahead and Option + Click on this guy in order to select the whole thing, and I'll press the Delete key to get rid of it, because we don't need it anymore. Now I'll draw a big rectangle. Let's say right about here, and this is going to be the first shape in my blend, let's say.

Now I want to grab my Arrow tool and I want to marquee these two points and drag them down a little bit. Can't do that however until I go up to the Arrange menu and choose Ungroup in order to ungroup this rectangle. Now notice I can marquee those two points and drag them downward. That does have the unfortunate effect of leaving the center point behind, so I'll go ahead and select it, and press the Backspace key to get rid of it. All right now I'll select that guy. Now notice we don't have any panels, which means if you want to fill and stroke the shape, you have to go up to the Style menu and choose Paint, or you've got that shortcut of Command + I.

That will bring up this Paint dialog box right here. I'm just going to go ahead and select a custom color which are the same as modern swatches, and then I'll just scroll down the list until I see this guy right there, vivid red, which I've created in advance. I don't want any stroke so I'll just go ahead and click OK, and I have now filled the shape, and to confirm that's the case, I'll press Command + Y and you can see that it does indeed have a red fill. All right I'll go ahead and press Command + E to switch back out, and then I'll create a copy of this guy by dragging it down while pressing the Shift + Option keys. The Shift key is going to constrain the angle of the drag.

The Option key is going to create a copy. Now I'll press Command + I to bring back that Paint dialog box, and I'll switch to very dark red, and click OK. Now we want to blend between these two shapes, and you do that by Shift + Option + Clicking on this guy, so that the entire thing is selected, and you're adding it to the selection, and then you want to grab this tool that looks like a gradient, but it's actually the Blend tool. So I'll go ahead and select it, and this is a two-click operation, so you click on an anchor point in one shape, and then you click on a similar anchor point in the other.

Then you enter the number of steps. Now you're always working blind inside of Illustrator 88. It didn't have any previews, which is why I'll just throw a ton of steps at this, and click OK, and we end up with this effect here, and to see what it looks like, I'll press Command + Y once again. Now the problem at this point is the blend is just sitting out there. It's not masked inside the shape, and so I need to create a clipping mask, and you do that by pressing Command + E to switch back to the artwork mode, and then I'll select the Arrow tool and I'll carefully click on this background shape.

But it's not working, so I'll zoom on in, so that I have a better chance, and then I'll Option + Click on this guy to select it independently of the rest of the artwork. Then to turn it into a clipping mask, this is positively weird in my opinion, but you go to the Style menu and choose Paint, and then you turn on this Mask checkbox. So it's not an especially discoverable feature, and most features weren't inside Illustrator 88, but it's a very powerful one. We can see what I mean by clicking OK, and now I'll go ahead and zoom out from the image, and the best way to do that at this point is to double-click on the Hand tool here inside the toolbox.

That's going to zoom you out so you can see the entire artboard, or if you want to zoom in to actual size, you Option + Double-click on the Hand. Now to see what the mask looks like, I'll press Command + Y and you can see that the blend exists entirely within the left side of the cube. All right I'll press Command + E to switch back to the artwork mode. Now the problem is when you select that Mask checkbox that the shape ends up masking everything in front of it, which might include those other sides of the cubes. To constraint the mask, you need to group the objects by entirely marqueeing them, so that you select every point, and then going up to the Arrange menu and choosing Group.

Now notice if I return to the Arrange menu and choose Show All, and then press Command + Y, that we have a nicely shaded object. Now there is some clunky stuff. For example, working with text is pretty grim. I'll go ahead and switch back to this guy right here which has a kind of marquee down here at the bottom, and I'll press Command + E to switch to the artwork mode. I'll grab my Type tool. The only purpose of the Type tool in Illustrator 88 is to create text. So notice when I click, I bring up a Type dialog box, and I'll just go ahead and enter some text here, such as Welcome Illustrator 88, not that I'm welcoming it.

You'll see where I'm going in a moment, and I'll change the type size value to 28 points, which is not a screen font size, which means we might not see a very good representation of the type on screen. Then I'll increase the Leading value to 45 points. You can't enter auto. I'll select Helvetica Bold from my super long list of fonts right here, and then I'll click OK in order to select that text, and I do have one problem. I want the text to be centered, so you might expect you might click, but if you were to do so, you'd create a new text object.

So what you do instead is you go up to the Style menu and choose Type, or you can press Command + T, at which point I can select Center alignment and click OK. All right here's something else that's interesting. I'll go ahead and grab my Arrow tool and I'll drag this guy up here, so that it looks like it's more or less centered, because here inside Illustrator 88, you have no automatic alignment options. All right so I'll just go ahead and nudge this guy from the keyboard a little bit, and then I want the word to in a smaller type size. Well a single text block can accommodate one set of formatting attributes only, so I'll just go ahead and create a copy of this guy while pressing the Option key, and then I'll press Command + T to bring up that dialog box.

I'll change the text to to, and I'll reduce the size value to 18, and instead of Helvetica Bold, I'll select plain Helvetica and I'll click OK, and then I'll just go ahead and nudge this guy up a little bit, and I'll press Command + Y to preview the effect, and lo and behold, it looks just like it did in the artwork mode. It doesn't look any better whatsoever, and we have some big chunky, blocky type, and that's because we're working from screen fonts, and there is no such thing as antialiasing on screen.

But I got to say, I spent many, many happy hours inside this program, and created a lot of artwork as well, including stuff for clients, such as this interwoven logo. This by the way is in the days before you could convert type to outlines, so I had to trace these paths by hand using the Pen tool. I also have some personal stuff as represented by this grayscale image right here which includes a repeating tile pattern in this guy's hair. We'll end things with some color art, which Illustrator 88 handles very nicely indeed.

Even though at the time it relied entirely on CMYK values, and yes indeed, I did create every single one of these pieces in Illustrator 88. That's how powerful it was, and obviously continues to be, despite three decades of progress. Kind of makes you want to go back in time, doesn't it? Life was simpler back then. We had less technology and it misbehaved much, much more consistently, by which I mean nearly all the time. If you're waiting for next week, we're going to take on a thoroughly modern conundrum, and I'm going to show you what to do when you get jagged edges around your Illustrator smart objects inside Photoshop.

Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.