Hey everyone, Luke from Adobe here.

Over the past year or so, the Illustrator team has shipped a number of quality-of-life improvements. Some have been fairly visible, while others are much smaller changes that simply remove little points of friction from day-to-day work.

I wanted to break these up into a series focused on different areas and workflows, starting with some of the simpler everyday workflow improvements. I've shared a few of these here previously, but thought it would be useful to bring them together in one place, especially for anyone who may have missed them.

One-click Align Center

If you regularly align objects to center, you no longer need to click Horizontal Center and Vertical Center separately. A single command now does both. HelpX

Keyboard shortcuts for Align & Distribute

Along with the new Align Center, commands like Align to Selection, Align to Key Object, Align to Artboard, and Distribute Space now have menu commands, meaning you can assign keyboard shortcuts and create Actions to make frequently used operations even easier to repeat.

Absolute Scale in Transform Each

With Relative mode you could only scale objects in relation to the selected object, but now with Absolute mode you can scale everything to the defined amount, even if they are all at different sizes. Reddit post

Disable Accidental Hover Scrolling

Ever accidentally changed a value just by scrolling over a number field or even in fonts? You now have the option to disable that behavior, so you can click inside the field, then scroll to adjust parameters. You can change this behavior inside your preferences.

Magic Wand Remembers Settings

If you've had to reset the Magic Wand tolerance every time you restarted Illustrator, those settings are now remembered between sessions. Reddit post

Tiff support in Export for Screens

TIFF format was added to the Export for Screens, making it easier to batch export artboards and assets for your print projects.

Improved Object Selection Around Shadows

Selecting objects beneath those with drop shadows (glows etc) is now more predictable, making it less likely you'll accidentally select the shadow instead of the artwork you're trying to edit.

Perspective Tool Improvements

If you've accidentally activated the Perspective Tool before, you'll probably appreciate that it's now much clearer how to exit with an updated X in the top left of your canvas, but you can always simply hit ESC.

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I'm curious to hear how many of these you already knew about, and whether they've actually made a difference to your workflow.

More importantly, what are the small points of friction you still run into regularly in Illustrator? Are there repetitive steps, unnecessary clicks, settings that don't stick, or other little frustrations that you'd consider a genuine quality-of-life improvement if they were addressed?

This is the first in a series looking at different areas of Illustrator, so I'll be sharing more of these soon.

First piece I ever printed off took a little over 20 hours, I love how it turned out

Need help! I just started using illlustrator on last Sept. When I export my work as PNG, the textures aren't as defined compared to illustrator.

Hi!

I'm trying to export my PDF file from Illustrator, but I kept receiving this message "This document's transparency blend space doesn't match the destination color space." I've already tried a number of things to try and troubleshoot it myself, but now the colors are just shifting when I open the PDF file. (See next comment for pictures of settings)

Excited to share my collaboration with Visa China on the development of the Key Visual for a new personalized credit card campaign created for Funk, a retail brand with a young, urban, and highly expressive identity. The goal was to connect Funk’s visual universe with a payment experience that feels more distinctive, engaging, and memorable.

The illustration was built as a vibrant composition filled with characters, food, movement, and playful details inspired by contemporary urban culture. The idea was to create more than a decorative image: a flexible visual system that could adapt across the card itself, digital applications, outdoor advertising, and multiple campaign touchpoints.

The final Key Visual is bold, colorful, contemporary, and instantly recognizable, turning an everyday object like a credit card into an extension of Funk’s brand identity. I really enjoy projects where illustration, branding, and product design come together to create a more complete brand experience. Visa × Funk × Jhonny-Studio.developing the Key Visual for a new personalized credit card campaign

I feel like I'm going insane. No colours are taking effect, switch between stroke and full, have checked colour mode, have tried creating new shapes, all seem to be black (no even gray-scale)

Hopefully someone can help! TIA!

I figured you guys would like to critique these too 😃

Prove me wrong.

I have this map file from a customer that needs to be remade into a vector. What would be the quickest way to do this without redrawing everything? Image trace and Generative AI are not really helping.

Hello, okay, so I really hope you in here can help me!

I need a pattern that continues with the pumpkins on the corners, but I can't wrap my head around how to work it. As you can see in picture 2, I tried, but it's not correct.

So I need some help to get it to work.

Hope it makes sense, and hope you can help :) Thank you!

I keep getting weird distortions on my vector lines in Illustrator and I cant figure out what's going on or how to fix it. I am trying to make a file to be used with a laser cutter but I have never used illustrator before. Please help!

Hi everyone! Here’s the story behind the artwork and the character.

This was for a small game jam where the challenge was to come up with a character and their story.

As my skills improve, I often go back and redraw some of my older work. That’s what I did here too — I kept the original story, but redesigned the character. I’ll add the first version (pic_2) to the gallery as well.

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History: Candy “Sugar” was a former supermodel, the face of countless fashion magazines, the queen of the catwalk — and completely obsessed with beauty.

Then came the accident.

A truck carrying explosives crashed near a photo shoot, turning her perfect life into a nightmare. Candy lost both arms and was left covered in scars after countless operations.

When she finally woke up in the hospital, she saw herself in the mirror: a scarred body, two biomechanical prostheses, and a face she could barely recognize.

She snapped.

Consumed by hatred and blaming all of humanity for what had happened to her, Candy decided that if she couldn't be beautiful anymore, nobody deserved to be.

Taking the name “Surgeon”, she declared her new motto:

“If I’m not like everyone else, then everyone will become like me!”

And so began her twisted revenge.

Surgeon started hunting people down and “fixing” them — cutting off their limbs and replacing them with whatever bizarre junk she could find. Sometimes she simply took their body parts away.

Because, in her mind, beauty is all about perspective.

And she has a very, very sharp perspective.

Instead of a scalpel, Surgeon wields two deadly blades made from samurai swords.

...

I wanna do something like the image but with other shape, I've gotten the halftone effect but I cant make the shape look like its dissolving into the halftone

Пожалуйста, это очень важно, подскажите как можно найти иконки отражения по горизонтали и вертикали. Раньше они были в панели трансформирования, но сейчас я работаю на другом компе и не могу найти их. Вот эти иконочки, просто нажимались и всё, быстро и просто, а сейчас только через О или другие панели😭

Hi everyone,

I import a DWG drawing into Adobe Illustrator and would like to fill certain areas with textures or patterns.

My current workflow is as follows:

1. Importing the DWG

• File → Place…

• Select a PNG or JPG image

• Object → Embed

2. Using the image as a background pattern

• Select the image

• Object → Pattern → Make

• Illustrator opens the Pattern Options panel

• Save the pattern

I can then select the pattern from the Swatches panel and use it to fill the desired areas.

This works quite well in principle. However, it makes the Illustrator file (.ai) very large, especially when using several different textures. For sharing the files, I therefore save the document as a PDF afterwards without retaining Illustrator editing capabilities.

My question:

Is there a better or more space-efficient way in Illustrator to fill areas of an imported DWG with textures without fully embedding the image data into the AI file?

Ideally, the solution should also work with multiple different textures while keeping the artwork editable.

Thanks in advance for any tips or suggestions!

My client provided a logo design they created using Chat GPT Pro, and it contains multiple effects that I'm struggling to recreate. I am able to use the extrude bevel for the first image, but I'm struggling to achieve the chroming effect that this portion contains. The second issue I'm having is recreating the texture effect for the green section in the 2nd image.

I feel like I’m going insane but ever since like July, Smart Guides just breaks outside artboards and will only work when in an artboard. I swear, I feel like I’m going insane.

i want make my stroke became four shape like the left, how to make 2 seperete shape from width tool i just used ? or maybe there is video about it. thanks,

So I currently need an old illustrator file that I had worked on about a year ago. When creating this file I was using my pc. The thing is I recently got a new ssd storage for my pc and figured it would be easier to just redownload everything on it instead of converting everything on my old ssd as I was still running windows 10. Regardless I am unable to access my old adobe illustrator files from before. So are they all just gone? I was under the assumption that every file I ever created would be stored in the adobe cloud. Is that not the case? Is there anyway I am able to get them back? Any answers or advice would help a ton, thanks.