When Good Illustrators Goes Bad

My first semester teaching Illustrator was rough going. I knew the program well enough to convince the tools, menus and palettes to do my bidding, but when it came to identifying the mistakes my students were making, I was a total loss. Within 2 seconds after they began working on an assignment, there would be a frenzy of frantic hand waving and gasps of dismay as a multitude of students experienced Illustrator breakdown.

"There is something wrong with my computer," a student would cry out.

"Oh, dear," I would respond, "Whatever is the matter?" (Nice,natural flow to my dialog, huh?)

Then the litany of complaints would begin:

"The menus disappeared!"

"The drawing tools are broken. I have drawn the star 47 times and it is STILL NOT THERE!" ( obsessive, older student)

"I have picked a color from the Swatches palette, but it's not working, the square is still white."

"My screen is all white--everything is gone."

I would stare dumbly and their screens and ask "What did you do?"

Their responses would range from "I don't know," to "I followed the steps exactly--The directions are wrong," to my personal favorite "Nothing."

At this point, I would nod sagely and say "hmmmm, I see."

But, I didn't see. I simply didn't know Illustrator well enough to determine where they had gone wrong. As a result, I would tell them to shut the program down and start over again. "Well," I would say, "there must be a bug in the system." (*see below)

After a few years of watching students repeat the same mistakes, I began to recognize their errors and, after a moments glance, could set them straight. After a few more years of watching students make the same mistakes over and over again, I began telling the them what they were going to do wrong before they even started. Once duly warned, they go gleefully on their way to making said mistakes and then expressing surprise at the subsequent outcome. Hmmmm.

Here are some of the more common mistakes students make:

• They don't select the object they want to work on. This is the most common mistake I see. It's a great program, but Illustrator can't read our minds. Just staring at an object and wishing hard isn't going to make it happen.


• They work in outline view without realizing it. Outline view is handy if you want to work with points and paths without the distraction of colors, but otherwise, stay in preview mode (View>Preview). If you are in Outline mode, you are applying the colors, you're just not seeing them.


• They have accidentally clicked the Full Screen Mode button. This one is fun--the entire menu bar at the top disappears. There are three buttons across the bottom of the Toolbar: Standard Screen, Full Screen with Menu Bar and Full Screen. Save yourself some grief, stay on the Standard Screen Mode.


• Those 47 invisible stars were drawn with No Stroke and No Fill. Switch the view from Preview to Outline and tra da...there 47 stars are in all their glory!


• They try to make a pattern out of another pattern. The close cousin to this mistake is accidentally applying a pattern to the stroke instead of the fill of an object. If the stroke has a heavy weight, this works out nicely, but if it is 1 pt weight, the stroke just looks like a lousy try at making dots and dashes.


• They type in the dimensions of a shape and are using the wrong unit of measure. For instance, they think they are creating a square that is 1 inches by 1.5 inches, but in reality they have made world's tiniest square--1 pt by 1.5 pts.


• Some students accidentally scroll totally away from the page and end up lost in a world of scratchboard white. A quick solution to this is to double-click the Hand Tool in the Toolbox. The Navigator palette is also useful for finding your way back to the page.

The longer I work with Illustrator, the more convinced I become that there are logical reasons for all the problems we meet. I certainly know enough now to state absolutely that there are no such thing as "bugs in the system." It is well known that they were wiped out years ago by the little purple computer gremlins.

*Yes the bugs in the system is a lame cop-out and makes absolutely no sense. But I grew up listening to my grandmother's excuses. Example: When asked to do something she didn't want to do, her pat response was "I'd like to help, but I am an old woman and I have a bone in my leg." People would take that as a viable excuse and apologize profusely for having taken up her time.

Little late for Halloween, but here is a fun tutorial from n. design studio