You just completed a complex design made up of hundreds of overlapping rectangles using just two color fills, red and blue. You save the design, but you would like to experiment with alternate colors. So you do a “Save As” and name your new version. You select one of the red shapes and use the Select menu to select the rest of the red shapes – Select > Same > Fill Color. You change the red fills with one click of a swatch. Now you’re ready to select the all the blue rectangles. You could first deselect all the “newly colored” rectangles and then click on a blue rectangle and use the Select menu to select all the rectangles with the same blue fill color. Or, even better, with all the “newly colored” rectangles still selected, go to Select menu > Inverse and every object that is NOT selected (all the blue shapes) will be selected and the “newly colored” shapes get deselected. Even faster!
Tip provided by Jeff Witchel, Certified Adobe Training Provider.
Author: jeff witchel
Jeff Witchel graduated from Pratt Institute in 1973 with a B.F.A. (Cum Laude) in Advertising Design and Visual Communications. He has been an award-winning advertising art director, writer, designer, illustrator, and TV producer ever since.
Before starting his own advertising agency in New Jersey, Jeff built his career at top New York ad agencies such as Young & Rubicam, Grey Advertising, and Wells, Rich, Greene. Over the years, he has created award-winning work for many clients including AT&T, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Jell-O Pudding, The Plaza Hotel, and Pfizer. His many prestigious awards include N.Y. Art Directors Club Gold Award, One Show Gold Award, N.J. Art Directors Club Award, multiple Andy Awards, Graphis Annual, numerous readership awards, plus an Emmy Award nomination.
Jeff is a self-taught computer artist with over 19 years of experience. His initial introduction to the computer was with PageMaker, but he switched to Quark 1.0 when it was first introduced in 1987. Having arrived on the desktop publishing scene so early, Jeff became the “go to” guy for answers when others started getting into computer graphics.
As an Adobe Certified Expert, he’s provided online support for Adobe and is now an Adobe Certified Training Provider for both Adobe Illustrator CS2 and Adobe InDesign CS2. Jeff is one of just a handful of Adobe Certified Instructors in the New York metropolitan area. He also is a Quark Certified Expert in QuarkXPress 6 as well as a master of Adobe Photoshop and related applications. He counts among his training clients ad agencies, design studios, magazines, illustrators, and photographers in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.
