I’m always amazed when I get Photoshop files from colleagues or clients that don’t use layer effects or styles, combined with vector shapes - resolution independence is somewhat achievable, and they make automation simple, simple, simple.
IMHO Everyone should have a solid (and flexible) button-style in their toolbox, here’s one of mine - changing the color is as simple as changing the vector shapes color, enjoy.
Jump into illustrator go Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts
Select Tools from the pull-down menu.
Scroll down to where “Opacity” starts in the tools options (see picture above) - you may notice that yours don’t have key commands by default (mine in the picture do) — so the question you need to ask yourself is what to change them to that makes sense and that you’ll remember…matching Photoshops numeric keypad shortcuts makes the most sense to me, but do what works for you. On a side-note the keyboard shortcuts dialog box is most interesting - notice it has a export button, but no import or open button, that’s hugely intuitive — anyway to get you started I exported my keyboard shortcuts (see below) with the above mentioned tweaks, although you’re on your own importing them :).
This is always the first thing I change in Illustrator - I know it saves me a ton of time, maybe you’ll find it helpful…
Sometime it’s the simple things, I needed to markup a pile of layouts for a team of developers - and my handwriting is highly questionable - simple enough, 5 minutes later and I had a simple Adobe Illustrator symbol library with all the needed HTML tags - a few minutes of drag and drop and there was no doubt what the markup should be, and it has pretty colors too. Anyhow maybe it will be helpful to someone out there.
The library includes
(h1 — h7, ul, ol, and a blank id tag):
Now if Frank Sinatra had that nickname it’s doubtful he would have gone very far, believe it or not Resene Lochmara is a fancy-pants name for a very specific shade of blue, one of the millions of meaningless names for that specific shade of blue - my industry (the graphics industry) standardized colors years ago, but of course our clients (the unwashed and color loving masses) still refer to colors by their crayola/sherwin williams/glidden/vegetablesque/celebrity eye/M&M colors - and honestly I thought I’d heard them all - I have an endless array of email asking for a certain red to be more ‘Plum’ or for a certain blue to be a bit less ‘Sharky’ (as opposed to a blue being much too ‘Dolphin’) - GOD I WISH I WAS MAKING THIS UP -
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