Graphic design help

[oyceter]

Does anyone have favorite Illustrator tutorials? Bonus points for things that are insanely easy and yet possibly unintuitive to someone used to Photoshop. I.e. when you have a ton of outlined shapes and just want to select one shape, how do you select just one when clicking with the black arrow selects everything? Why do I not have a nice box-y select tool? (Or do I?)

Also, general tips and tricks for vector graphics highly appreciated.

(Basically, I opened Illustrator, played with a file, then promptly freaked out and closed it, which seems to be the way I react to all Adobe products I meet for the first time.)

Comments

Frex--

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

Here is something really annoying which happens sometimes for no obvious reason that I can discern, in CS2: you can click on things but you can't resize them, or highlight text. Not with either arrow/the text tool. It's not locked, you can still move things, just not adjust them (the handles are gone, too.) It is very Hulk-smash-making.

But! CTRL-SHIFT-B usually makes it stop, whatever "it" is (the explanation was "blah blah blah handles muddle tweetle-beetles battle" as far as I was concerned.)

Re: Frex--

[oyceter]

Huh, thanks for the tip!

You're welcome,

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

I suspect it's caused by a combination of keyboard shortcuts + keyboard lag on the older, slower computer at work - there are so many bizarre features buggy annoyances that are very difficult to find in Help indexes (another one, in Photoshop, is that caps loc can disable your brush size choices!) because you don't have any way of knowing how the writers chose to describe/index what it was that happened!

My favorite way of avoiding the "grab too many things" problem with Illustrator wireframes, btw, especially when there are lots of overlapping bits, is to put all my elements on separate layers, just like in Photoshop, and lock the ones I'm not using at the moment. It is less frustrating for me, tho' of course YMMV.