Here’s the lousy photo I based the texture off of:

And here’s a screenshot of the textures, including complimentary “grout” colors that I added to each of them with an additional fill, located below the pattern in the appearance panel:

And you can click here to download the .ai file containing the pattern.

If you ever open up Illustrator and instead of File, Edit, Object, etc… menus, you see something like “$$$/_MBAR/Mnu/VisibleMenuBar/” for each of the menus, it’s because unless you have the ME (Middle Eastern) version of Illustrator, there are a few languages Illustrator just can’t handle.  Hebrew and Arabic.  They can’t even be on the list.

It looks something like this:

To fix this – open up your System Preferences and go to the international preferences.  Click Edit List to adjust what languages are active, and make sure that there are no Middle Eastern languages active.   Not being a Hebrew reader, I’m not sure which ones are which, but I know that one of the two in the middle of my list here causes the problem with Illustrator. Here, they are checked and therefore active:

And after unchecking to remove them from the list:

If you have Arabic languages active, you’ll have to remove them from the list as well. Click okay, close your preferences and restart Illustrator and you should be back in business.

Anyhow, it actually is pretty easy to do in Illustrator, just not as straight forward.  You need to use the power of the appearance panel (which you can read more about here, here and here) and you won’t technically be putting a gradient on a stroke so much as you’ll be making a fill behave as a stroke and giving that fill a gradient fill.  Yeap.

So we take a basic rectangle shape to start with.

I made an object with a dark green fill and no stroke, placed over a red background shape.

Now, with your object selected, go to the flyout menu of the appearance panel, “Add New Fill”  This will become our stroke.

Right now, all that we have is two overlapping fills, exactly the same.  Select the lower one by clicking on it in the appearance panel.  With the lower fill selected, go up to your Effects menu and go to Effect->Path->Offset Path…  The distance you choose is how far out it will offset your path so choose a distance that is half of what you wanted your stroke width to be. (since your stroke would normally straddle the bounds of your object)  You should be looking at something like this:

All that’s left now is to color the fill that you offset with a gradient.  With that fill still selected in the appearance panel, make it a gradient by choosing a gradient out of the swatches, clicking on the gradient swatch in the gradient panel or by using the gradient tool (if you’re on cs4 or above)

Note that the “stroke” is left blank.  The only thing extending beyond the bounds of our object is our offset fill.  This trick can be applied to any other object, including text.

(on this, I also put an inner glow on the main fill to cut it out of the offset fill)

See how those blue points make it hard to adjust the feather and transform on the highlight and shadow fills?  Hide them by hitting command-h or under the view menu “Hide Edges”

Much easier to see now.

You can also use this tip in conjunction with the previous post on showing and hiding the bounding box to leave you no indication that you have anything selected while still allowing you to adjust your art.

It’s a simple toggle – Command-Shift-B (control-shift-b on windows) or from the View menu choose “Show Bounding Box” about 2/3 of the way down the menu.

What’s a counter?

First off, a counter is the opening in a letter; The center of an “o”, the opening in an “e”, those are counters.  This trick will also serve to fill in any spaces in a fill such as those created when a “stroke” in text meets between 2 lines of text.

What’s the trick?

There’s no trick to it – it’s just a simple trick.  I put stroke in quotes up there because this is one of the places we use the Offset Path effect to fake a stroke to add capability not allowed on an ordinary stroke.

Here’s the file, if you want to play along at home.

Apply all of your attributes at the Type layer, leaving your character level with no fill and no stroke.

Add a fill, in this case a red fill.

Add a second fill, and move it below the red fill.  Apricot, in this example.  With that lower fill applied, apply the offset path effect to it by going to Effect -> Path -> Offset Path… I set mine to 3.5 pt, rounded.  This should get you to the upper version of the text – with all the holes in it.

Next – the trick.  Still on that lower fill, after the Offset Path, apply Effect -> Pathfinder -> Divide to it.  Nothing should happen just yet. Now in your appearance panel, click on that effect to edit it.  UN-check “Divide and Outline Will Remove Unpainted Artwork” so that your Pathfinder Options look like these:

Easy-peasy.

I should add that this will also work in any circumstance where Effect -> Offset Path leaves holes that you want to fill, not just with text, though that is where I see the need most often.

Once you’ve read over those 3 posts, download this file and have at it.  You might like to adjust the stroke some to make the “holes” a bit more realistic.

This is live editable text, made awesome, by the appearance panel.

• If you are unable to get Illustrator to boot and see that Illustrator is crashing as it shows “loading fonts”.
• If your font list becomes filled with font names that look like they are combinations of other font names.
• Other weirdness with the behavior of your fonts.

The font caches are temp files that both your computer and Illustrator cooks up to keep track of what fonts are active and where they are located. There is no danger in deleting them, they will be recreated the next time you restart Illustrator in the case of the application level caches or by the finder in the case of the system level caches. Office also creates its own, which behave the same way, but, well, for Office.

How?

You can do this a few ways, but the easiest is to use the free app FontNuke on the Mac or CCleaner on Windows.
The functionality is also built into FontExplorer which used to be free, but now costs about as much as its competitors.
You could also do it manually, but why, when there are all the free apps to do it for you safer and easier?

To do it manually:

If you insist…

On the Mac.

Shut down all Adobe apps and do a search for “AdobeFnt”  There ought to be a bunch of them, most with a 2 digit number (eg.: “AdobeFnt56″) after them.  Any of them that have the .lst extension can be safely deleted.  Do not delete AdobeFnt.db or FontNames.db!! Those are not caches.

That takes care of the Adobe caches – now onto the OSX caches – and there’s a few of them.

OSX 10.4 and later has the capability built in to clear them itself – Just restart holding the shift key to boot into “safe mode” which will also clear out all your caches. After that, restart as usual and you should be back in business.

If that fails or you really want to do it yourself, here’s the list of OSX’s font caches:

• com.apple.ATS.System.fcache
• com.apple.ATSServer.FODB_System
• /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS
• /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/501/Classic.fcache
• /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/501/Local.fcache
• /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/501/System.fcache
• /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/501/FondResourceCache
• /Library/Preferences folder: com.apple.ATS.plist
• /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS.System.fcache
• /System/Library/Caches/fontTablesAnnex

Any time you delete the system caches, you must restart your computer.

On Windows

The Adobe caches are located at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\TypeSpt and delete any AdobeFnt*.lst files. Do not delete AdobeFnt.db or FontNames.db!! Those are not caches. As with the Mac, make sure that no Adobe apps are running when you delete them.

The Windows caches are

Windows NT, 2000, XP and Vista C:\WINDOWS\system32\FNTCACHE.DAT

Windows 95, 98, and Me (you pour soul) C:\WINDOWS\ttfCache

Yeap, one file.  Restart if you delete it.

Don’t go yet!

If after trying all of these options it’s still failing, let me know below in the comments (I really do read them) or try the links to the right.  And if it does work for you, let me know and don’t forget to check out the rest of the site.

Quit Illustrator and as you are restarting it:

On the mac – hold option-command-shift or on the PC – hold alt-control-shift

Some versions will bring up a dialog asking if you want to delete your prefs, some versions just delete them.

If this fails to solve your problem you can manually remove the preference folder (yes, folder).  It will be recreated the next time you start Illustrator.

On the Mac, it’s located at HD\Users\your_username\Library\Preferences\Adobe Illustrator CS# Settings\(localization folder)\

On the PC, C:\Documents and Settings\your_username\Application Data\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator CS# Settings\ Or something close to that, based on your version of Windows.

You can throw away the entire folder there, or rename it if you prefer, and Illustrator will create a new one in place of the old one the next time it’s started up.  Renaming it gives you the option of trial and error’ing the old files back in place if there are certain preferences you’d like to keep.

If all this fails, you can bring out the big guns and try the Cleaner Tool, provided by Adobe.  This will require you to uninstall everything from the creative suite and will require a re-install, so make sure you have some spare time (and your install discs) before you go that route.  It will remove all the cache files and additional noise installed by the apps to be sure that none of them have gotten corrupt.

If after trying all of these options it’s still failing, let me know below in the comments (I really do read them)  or try the links to the right.  And if it does work for you, let me know and don’t forget to check out the rest of the site.

Make the guides:

To make an object into a guide is really simple.  Just select the object you want to be a guide and from the View menu go to Guides->Make Guides.  It’s default keyboard shortcut is command-5 on the mac.  Poof – you have a guide in the shape of your object.

Tie that in with offset path and you have a really speedy way to build margins. As long as they are not locked, you can use them with the align panel and smart guides.

The minor issues:

Even though it shows as a guide, (that is, just a stroke) it can have a fill. That might come in handy in some cases, but so far has only annoyed me as I try to click through them. Easy enough to remedy, just set them to no fill (which can be done even after the objects are converted to guides).

Every time you hide and then show your guides (command-;) it locks them.  That means you can’t select them to use with the align panel.  Easy enough to remedy, just hit command-option-; to unlock them again.