In this tutorial you will learn everything you ever wanted to know about one of the most powerful Adobe Illustrator Tools - Transformation. Discover how it works, learn multiple ways of transforming objects, study the tools of transformation, and many other useful techniques.
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- Program: Adobe Illustrator CS3
- Difficulty: Beginner
- Estimated Completion Time: 30 minutes
Illustrator has plenty of tools, panels, and commands that make our work much easier. Among them, however, there are several outstanding ones that I personally consider the most important features of this program. They include brushes, the Appearance panel, Effects, and, of course, transformation.
Knowing transformation is knowing a lot - it gives you power you may never even thought about. So today we'll try to learn everything about transformation in Illustrator. This topic is especially useful for beginners, but intermediate users may also find interesting facts here.
Section 1. Transformation Terms: What is...
Before we learn how to transform, let's first understand what every term related to transformation means. This way we'll better know how every tool works.
The term transformation originates from the late latin word "transformation" (metamorphosis). Transforming an object is typically changing its position or shape, or both. Of course, it seems obvious and easy enough, but this simple operation is capable of altering your image drastically.
There are many types of transformations altering various parameters (position, size, angle, etc.), they can be performed both separately or together at the same time. Transformation applies to one or more objects that are already selected with the Selection Tool (V).
The object in your document may be of diverse shapes, but the algorithms of transformation apply to all of them equally. It is because the program has a unified system of transformation, whether we speak of ellipse, spiral, or rectangle. Every object has a so-called bounding box, which is the area with borders drawn around it.
The borders touch the left-most, right-most, top-most, and bottom-most points of an object. It includes four corner points and four sides, equally important in transformation. The bounding box allows to easily transform any object. It is usually visible by default, but you may want to turn it off (Shift + Command + B).
Point of Transformation
The bounding box usually includes a central point indicated - it is not necessarily the central point of an object, as it is calculated from the box borders. If you don't see the center, try opening the Attributes panel (Command + F11) and click the Show center icon. By default, this central point of an object is considered a point of transformation, or reference point. This means, that when an object is for example scaled up, the center will remain in place, while all other points change position.
Still, while performing transformation, we can change the transformation point. In this case the new point we choose (in relation to the initial shape of an object) will remain in place. I want to emphasize, that a reference point may be assigned in any part of your document, not just within your object.
A major type of transformation is moving. Although many Illustrator users don't even know about it, move is a transformation. Moving an object means changing its coordinates, so the position is altered - hence, moving is transforming.
This is the most popular way to transform, as we always move objects from one place to another. Moving is usually based on the central point of an object, and the transformation point is not changed. Moving is measured in points, pixels, or other distance units that are set in Preferences (Command + K).
Scaling is altering the size of an object. There are many ways of scaling an object in Illustrator, but all of them change the size of an object. Any transformation point may be assigned while scaling. On two-dimensional