You can then position these additional tool sets right over your work area. This panel can be moved anywhere on the screen and arranged into vertical or horizontal orientation. Click that area and the tool drawer is released into its own panel. When you press to open the additional tools, there is a thin area to the right of the tools. Illustrator has two other features for its tools that are not always obvious to folks used to other programs. Press and hold on the tool for a moment-you don’t have to hit the triangle exactly-to see what else is in that tool’s drawer. The Eyedropper in InDesign has the same alternate tool in Photoshop and Illustrator. However, the engineers for each program have done a good job in making these tool sets consistent. But others are less obvious, like the Eyedropper under the Measure tool. Some are related to the visible tool, like the various flavors of the Pen tool. See that microscopic triangle next to some of the tools? That triangle indicates that the spot in the tool panel is shared by other tools. Look carefully at the icons in the Tools panel. Here are the widgets and icons that appear in all three programs. I’ve always told my students that nothing is in the interface for decoration. Meanwhile, Photoshop’s black hole of an interface makes it instantly obvious where I am. So I still use a double column Tools panel in Illustrator to help differentiate the two programs. As you can see, Illustrator’s Medium Light is a quite similar to InDesign’s Light. With each application using a different color theme, it’s easier for me to recognize where I am. You only have the interface swatches as controls there isn’t any slider. Then click on one of the four interface color swatches. You can set the slider anywhere along the path.įinally, in Photoshop, choose Preferences > Interface. However, the slider in Illustrator has little tick marks to indicate the amounts shown in the menu. This is exactly the same functionality as InDesign’s controls. You can then choose one of the four Brightness settings or use the slider to set a custom shade. To set the interface theme in Illustrator, choose Preferences > User Interface. You can choose one of the four pre-set colors or use the slider to set a specific level of brightness. To set the interface theme in InDesign, choose Preferences > Interface and then set the color theme. But each engineering team has its own ideas of what makes the best controls. You would think that all three programs would use exactly the same controls to set the interface appearance. You can set the interface to whatever shade you want for your favorite program. InDesign gets the lightest shade because I use it the most Illustrator gets the next lightest and Photoshop gets the darkest. I put InDesign’s tools on the left Photoshop’s tools on the right, and I set Illustrator’s tools in two columns.īut now I simply set the color theme for each program to a different shade. Yes, there are plenty of clues, especially in the tools, to tell you which program is which, but Adobe has done such a good job of standardizing the icons for various panels, that it isn’t always immediately obvious.īefore I could set a custom interface color theme, I used to play with the Tools panel to let me know which program I was working on. When switching back and forth between the three programs, it is sometimes a little confusing to tell which program you’ve jumped into. I’m one of the latter, which is surprising since I live in New York City, where everyone wears black. There are two types of InDe-Illu-Shop users: those who love the dark interface and those who can’t see anything in the dark. You just have to know what’s similar and what’s not. However, that’s not to say that the applications don’t have their similarities. But as Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” It’s just not possible for the three applications in “InDe-Illu-Shop” to work exactly the same, despite the best intentions of the Adobe software designers. When Adobe first created the concept of a “Creative Suite,” they wanted to make all the applications work and look as much alike as possible.
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