Fan of creative technology, elearning, instructional design and a little geeky

Isolating Groups

September 25, 2005 Leave a Comment Written by Cari Jansen

Digitip 036 – Adobe Illustrator CS2

(Revision 1.1)

You might have wondered about this grey box that appears around your artwork occassionally in Illustrator CS2. Well, it is a new feature included with Illustrator CS2: The “isolate selected group mode”. It works on any group, clipping masks, blends, pathfinder (unextracted) and much more.

The group

Ok, so you’ve got a (bogus) group and have it selected with the selection tool.

the original group

The isolated selected group

To isolate the selected group and see the grey bounding area either double click the group or click the isolate selected group button in the control palette, which incidently is only visible when the Focus Mode features are enabled as part of the Control palette features that are displayed isolate selected=.

isolated group, move individual object

Isolating a group enables you to move individual group components without the need to select the direct selection tool.

Amend blending modes, transparency settings

Other than moving group components, you can use the isolate group feature to easily amend blending modes of individual group objects, transparency settings etc.

amend blend mode

Adding components to group

Whilst working in isolated group mode any object that is added to your artwork either falling within the marked group area or outside it automatically becomes part of the selected group.

object added to group

Group exit

To exit the isolated group mode and return to your grouped object double click outside your artwork or click the exit isolated group button exit isolated group buttonin the Control palette.

new group

Other uses

Try some of the other uses. They are amazing, you can for instance apply 3D Effects to objects in a blend, and extract the blend, then generate animations in .SWF from that using an Adobe Bridge Automation link to Illustrator (See Tip 38).

Adobe Illustrator
Similar posts
  • How to create a tint for a colour in Adobe Illustrat... — How can I make a tint for a colour in Adobe Illustrator? It’s a question I’m asked regularly by Illustrator users. There are two issues with the default settings when defining new colour swatches in Illustrator: When you apply the default colour swatches in Illustrator to your artwork, the swatch colour is not associated with the [...]
  • Illustrator CC (2014): Rectangle tool and Transform ... — On June 18, Adobe released #CCNext. One of the applications updated in this release is Adobe Illustrator. We’re up to version 18 now with the Illustrator CC (2014) release. Renewed Transform panel and live shapes The renewed Transform panel contains a Rectangle Properties section that is active when you have a rectangle or rounded rectangle shape selected in [...]
  • Illustrator: Patterned Gradient Stroke Effect — Illustrator CS6 introduces the ability to apply a gradient to a stroke. This means we can now create tubular looking line effects, without the need to use more complex blending techniques. In addition, Illustrator CS6 provides strongly improved pattern controls. We can now create not only rectangular pattern tiles, but also hexagon shaped tiles, and [...]
  • Creating PNGs from Illustrator — We all get this question as designers: “Can you provide us with a copy of the logo or masterhead design in a format that we can use in Microsoft Word”… or “PowerPoint”? Illustrator CS, released back in 2003, introduced the Save for Microsoft Office command. (File menu), which converts your Illustrator artwork to a 150ppi [...]
  • Vertical Type from Illustrator to InDesign — In my previous post I provided a solution for setting type vertically in InDesign. Illustrator in contrast to InDesign actually has a Vertical Type tool, and the close integration between the two applications means we can opt to set our type in Illustrator instead and bring it into InDesign as a [...]

No Comments Yet

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *