“Can’t make the selection into guides. Guides cannot be created or released within the selected object types.”

Didja know you can turn any vector shape in Illustrator into a guide?

Yeah…you can. Select what you want to turn into a guide and then go to View>Guides>Make Guides in the top bar menu. Your selected shapes will be treated as guides exactly like the horizontal and vertical guides that you get by dragging the pointer out of the ruler bars.

What if I get the above error message?

Notice I said you can make any shape into a guide. Type objects are not considered shapes, at least not in the same way as squares, circles, triangles and other vectors are. If you have type objects in the group of objects that you are trying to convert to a guide, you will get the above error message.

Resolution

If there are one or two type objects, resolving this is as easy as selecting everything, holding down Shift, and clicking on each separate type object to deselect.

As the set of objects becomes more complex and harder to work with, try this: Go to Select>Object>Text Objects. This will select only the text. Now hold Shift while drawing a box around everything you want to convert to a guide using the Black Arrow tool. You will select “everything else” and deselect the text objects at the same time. Now convert to guides.

I’m currently working with a converted AutoCad file which I am using to build a map of campus in Illustrator. The file looks right, but none of the vectors are continuous paths: they’re line segments that look like continuous paths. In this case, it’s really difficult to draw a box that selects only what i want to select so I’ve fallen back on a Select Same Stroke Color to grab just the line segments that have the same stroke color as my selected line. This can be accessed through Select>Same>Stroke Color. Also notice that you can (naturally) indicate a selection by Fill color in the same sub menu.

The good people at Camp Tannadoonah who always accept everything I say from a design consulting perspective with absolutely no hair pulling, wailing or gnashing of teeth recently directed me to “draw a Polar Bear for a T-shirt design.” Projects like this remind me of why I enjoy being a designer. Whether or not it’s the best single-color vector Polar Bear you’ve ever seen is, in this case, subordinate to the fact that it was really really fun. I can’t wait for these shirts to come out so I can proudly wear one around until I wear holes in it.

The design was done in Illustrator. I built from this pencil sketch:

I generally sketch on a section of a long roll of cheap tracing paper. It takes the pressure off to come up with a perfect sketch because you can always rip of another sheet and trace over it if you mess up. Also the paper kind of carries with it the idea that, under no circumstances are we producing a show piece here. It’s crappy paper, it’s not going to last. That reduces some of the pressure to be an anal perfectionist as well.

I don’t have a scanner so I literally took a snap with my Nikon D40, used Photoshop to convert to grayscale and then used adjustment layers to lighten the image up and bump the contrast a bit. I save files like this out as .tiff when I’m going to be using them in Illustrator. I’m pretty sure I do this because .tiffs end up full resolution when placed in Illustrator. (The truth I do it because that’s how I’ve always done it, but I think that resolution is why i started doing it).

Clearly, the sketch is too detailed (even as loose as it is) to make a good t-shirt. I’m going to be relying on a screen printer to reproduce this, and I’d prefer not to give the poor guy a migraine, so my illustration has to be designed with screen printing in mind. That means no little tiny hair lines, no gradients, etcetera. One ink, big thick lines.

I drew the basic outline shapes with the pen tool and bumped the stroke weight up to thicken them, then drew in the white area of the bear behind the stroke outlines. I expanded the strokes. This is the result in outline preview:

The thick, double outline is the expanded stroke. The rough, jagged line that runs all the way around the bear shape is the white fill area in the background. I can further refine this shape, so that I’m providing one, easy to print vector to my printer though. Ideally, I want to send him one solid white shape with no extra vectors to add complexity. The first step is to use the Pathfinder to merge the ice cube shape and the white background of the bear into one shape. Then I select this newly created white shape and the blue expanded outlines (making sure that the outlines are on top). Use pathfinder one more time to take the expanded outlines and use them to clip the white shape underneath. Below is the result:

Much simpler. Much easier for anyone with a basic knowledge of Illustrator to open and immediately understand. A designer’s life is made so much easier when he isn’t putting unnecessary hurdles in the path of his production vendors. At this point, if you’re really anal (as I am) the one thing that’s left is to use pathfinder to take the eyes and nose and clip them out of our white shape.

Here’s another in a long string of “things I’ve learned about Illustrator by accidentally turning essential settings off and then having to figure out how to get them back.”

I was working away just now, minding my own business when I no longer had visible anchor points. The shapes were selecting as usual. Using the white arrow tool even made the anchor points select as usual, I just couldn’t see them. Turns out I had accidentally hit “Ctrl+Tab” which cues Illustrator to do something called “hide edges.” Among other things, it turns off the visibility of Anchor points.

It’s easy to fix, just go to “View>Show Edges.”

I used the techniques in this post from Spoon Graphics yesterday to create a pattern background for a poster design (an element of which is pictured above). I found the tutorial to be very informative. Two slight efficiency improvements occurred to me while working through the posted steps.

The First

The author instructs us to Group our objects and then Copy and Paste into a new location, aligning the objects as we go by zooming in on them and moving them into place. I found that using the outline preview made this step much easier because the objects I was trying to copy had strokes applied to them. Outline preview (which can be toggled by hitting Cmd+Y) removes all styling to reveal the basic structure of the shapes on a page. I found that aligning the objects with these simple thin black lines allowed for a much more precise alignment then moving them into place with strokes turned on.

The Second

The author suggests that we overlap existing elements with our copied elements in order to align everything. This alignment is what creates the repeating pattern effect. To do this he has us Select All and Copy everything, Lock the selected elements, then Paste the new elements into the document and align as described above, and, finally: delete the overlapping page elements.

This works, but I had trouble remembering which copied elements where overlapping. The trick is to delete only the elements that are overlapping the originals without accidentally getting rid of other elements. In order to make this easier to do, I suggest changing the stroke color (or fill color I suppose) on the copied elements and turning down the opacity. In the illustration, I have changed the outlines on the copied elements to blue and made them 50% transparent. Now, when these elements overlap the original elements it’s immediately clear which need to be deleted:

In this case, all of the black shapes are locked, so all i need to do is draw a Selection Box with the Black Arrow around the darker shapes in the center of the illustration and hit “delete.” Once this is done, Cmd+A will select all of the blue transparent shapes in one step where I can then return the transparency to 100% and change the stroke color back to black.

Note

The author of the original post uses a combination of strokes and fills to create his shapes. For cases such as this, and for cases with far more complicated shapes, you would want to turn down the transparencyon both sets of elements. If the original set is (for example) 50% transparent and the copied set is also 50% transparent, the overlapping elements will appear at 100% opacity and will be easy to select and delete. Remember to lock your original elements, or it will be impossible to get a quick, easy selection of the overlapped elements in order to delete them.

Transparency works as an efficient marker in this case because it is a change that can be made globally to all selected shapes and returned to the original settings in one easy step.