This is a simple trick, but it is much easier than placing them ourselves. The appearance of random is a little difficult for me, simply because I subconsciously try to create things with a certain level of order and organization.

An easy way to achieve a sense of random is to use a brush. Here, I took a simple star that I created and colored yellow. With it selected, I opened the brushes panel and clicked the flyout menu and chose new brush. Choose Scatter Brush and set all of the settings to random and chose Hue Shift as the colorization method. Then click ok. Then, simply click and drag in different directions in order to created randomly scattered stars (or the graphic of your choice). This gives the pattern a random feel … Read More »

You can control the opacity of each individual color of a gradient inside of Adobe Illustrator. This is fantastic for flexibility with colors. Simply click on the color swatch of the gradient, and there is an opacity setting on the gradient panel. You can also double click on the swatch to bring up a new dialog box, where the opacity is available there as well. You can do this for every single color in a gradient, no matter how many colors are there.

You can easily control the opacity of colors in Illustrator. You can Control the opacity of the stroke and the fill individually by using the appearance panel. Directly under each stroke and fill layer in the appearance panel, there is an opacity section, where you can set the opacity for one element, and you could leave it alone, or make it less or more for another. This means that you could have a 100% black stroke, with a 50% fill.

I got this question yesterday, and thought that it would be a good topic for the day. If you want to fit text to a certain shape, you have a couple of options.

The first option is to do what is called an envelope distort. First, you make your shape, and then take the type tool and type out whatever your message is. Select the shape and make sure it is in front by selecting Object> Arrange> Bring to Front. Then, choose Object> Envelope Distort> Make with Top Object. As you can see, your typeface has now become distorted in order to fit the contour of your shape. This would be used more for funky and wild type, as in a title, etc. This option will remain editable as well, so if you need to change the word or phrase, simply … Read More »