The Smart Guides will tell you where the two objects intersect. With your Smart Guides on, you’ll notice that when you roll over objects, the lines highlight and the words: path, anchor and center appear. To turn on your Smart Guides, go to View > Smart Guides or Command/Control U. The Align tools are useful, but they only do so much. If you hold down both, it will make a copy that is lined up horizontally or vertically. This time, hold down the Shift key and you’ll notice that the shape is constrained to moving only on a horizontal or vertical plane. Select a shape and start moving it to a new location. Some of the more commonly used keys on the keyboard are the option/alt and the shift keys. This will make a duplicate in the same location. Select your object and double click on the rotate tool in the tool bar. Another option is to use the Rotate tool. The keyboard shortcuts for these are: Command (Mac OS)/Control (Windows) F for Paste in Front and Command/Control B for Paste in Back. These will paste the object in the same place. You can use the Paste in Front and Paste in Back for that (located in the Edit menu). The only problem is sometimes you want to copy things in place. Some examples to start you off with are V for the Selection tool, A for the Direct Selection tool, R for the Rotate tool and Shift + E for the Eraser tool.Ĭopy and Paste is probably one of the most used features in Illustrator. Learning the one-letter shortcuts for changing tools on the Tool Bar will also save you time. You don’t have to learn all of them however, think about which commands you use often and learn those.

Keyboard shortcuts can save you a lot of time. This is a fairly obvious tip, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Here are a few tips to help make your designing a little easier. Luckily, you don’t need to know every little feature to make great designs and illustrations. Adobe Illustrator is a powerful program with a ton of features, and learning them all can be a daunting task.

Adobe illustrator shortcuts