New Adobe Illustrator CC Creative Tool: the Shaper Tool (2015.2)
Late in 2015, Adobe released the lastest version of Illustrator CC. One of the new features is the Shaper tool. This tool will help you create complex designs by drawing, merging editing and removing parts of shapes. In this blog, I will highlight the key features of the Shaper tool.
Shaper Tool Overview
Using a mouse to draw a shape can be difficult and frustrating compared to a touch device. Adobe’s new Shaper tool allows you to draw shapes like you would with a touch device. To do this, draw shapes of what you need and Illustrator will use Shaper to transform it into perfect geometric shapes. These shapes are fully editable and you can combine, merge, edit, move, delete or fill to reach the final desired design. All of this is done with one tool and there is no need to switch to the direct selection tool or other tools or panels.
The Shaper tool recognizes rectangles, squares, ellipses, circles, hexagons, equilateral triangles and lines all as horizontal, vertical or at 45 degree angles.
Scribbling
With the Shaper tool, you are able to create complex shapes by merging and editing combined shapes. This is known as “scribbling”. Simply put, it is like drawing a scribbled line with your mouse pointer.
If we have three different shapes with three different color fills and no borders crossing, the scribbling result depends on where you scribble.
- If you scribble inside one shape, the fill area will be removed.
- If you scribble inside the intersecting areas of two or more shapes, the intersecting areas are removed.
- If you scribble across a non-overlapping area to an overlapping area (the scribble originates from the shape in the front), the shape in the front is removed with the intersecting area.
- If you scribble across an overlapping area to a non-overlapping area (the scribble originates from the shape in the front), the shapes are merged, with the color of the merged area being that of the scribble origin point.
- If you scribble across a non-overlapping area to an overlapping area (the scribble originates from the shape in the back), the shapes are merged, with the color of the merged area being that of the scribble origin point.
Summary
Adobe Illustrator’s development teams are surprising us with new tools in each update that facilitate the designer’s job and help nonprofessional designers to create creative designs.
GPI’s Multilingual Desktop Publishing Services
Globalization Partners International provides many services with document translation and website translation that involve multilingual desktop publishing services. This list below highlights some of the more common products used in such projects:
- Adobe InDesign Desktop Publishing and Translation
- QuarkXPress Desktop Publishing and Translation
- Adobe Acrobat Publishing and Translation
- Adobe Photoshop Publishing and Translation
You may also find some of our previous blogs on desktop publishing useful:
