Quick Tips

Flash has the ability to import native Adobe Illustrator (AI) files but there are a few quirks to be aware of.

First, it imports every layer, including every sub-layer, as a separate symbol. That means every single component of your artwork will end up as a separate symbol. Completely unworkable. To get around this, anything that you want to be a single symbol in Flash needs to be converted into a symbol in your Illustrator file. Here’s the trick though: after converting it to a symbol, delete the original artwork and then drag your symbol to the artboard. That symbol will exist on one layer with no sub-layers.

Second, Flash will tell you that it can import native Adobe Illustrator files up to version 10 but it will happily try (and fail) to import your CS3 file. Do as it says and not as it does. Save your artwork to version 10 before importing.

You can’t import an Illustrator symbol library directly into Flash, at least not in CS3.

Steps

1. Create your artwork in Adobe Illustrator.
2. Select the elements you want grouped as a symbol in Flash.
3. Drag those elements to your Illustrator symbol library.
4. Repeat until you’ve created all your symbols.
5. Select all. Delete all. (Clear your artboard.)
6. Drag each symbol back to the artboard.
7. Save as an Illustrator 10 file.
8. In Flash, choose File => Import to Library.
9. Select your Illustrator file and you should be done.

A note about color: if you’re experiencing the classic Adobe color shift, open up your Illustrator artwork and manually assign it your monitor profile (Edit => Assign Profile…). Re-save your artwork and re-import it to your Flash library and the color shift should be gone.

If you have a website you should be keeping track of who’s visiting it and what they’re doing while they’re there. Google Analytics is a great tool for doing just that. If your site is built with WordPress, like mine is, you can also install a plugin like Site Stats, which will create a new page for your dashboard full of useful information like:

• Who is sending you traffic (referrers)
• Which posts and pages are the most popular
• What search engine terms are leading people to your site
• What sites are linking to you

If you want to grow your audience this is essential information to have.

Let’s kick off a new section, Quick Tips, with one about blogging since, well, guess what I’m doing right now?

Tips will feature short snippets on a wide variety of topics. By keeping them short, hopefully I’ll be able to update several times a week as things come up during my day-to-day work. I’m easily in front of a computer 12 hours a day and this is a way to integrate blogging into my day, provide useful content and meet one of my goals for this year. (This does not absolve me from writing longer posts.)

Quick Tip: Figure out what you want to say.

One of the biggest reasons why blogs fail is because the author doesn’t know what he wants to say. He’ll flounder about and write a variety of posts on a variety of topics. He has no goals for his blog and, consequently, finds it easy to post with random and ever decreasing frequency.

Before deciding to create a blog figure out what you want to write about and who you want to write it for. Be specific. Is there a topic where you have something meaningful to contribute? In my case, web design was too broad and other areas were already too well covered. I didn’t feel I could make enough of a contribution. In my case, it ended up being less about the topic and more about the audience.

Two great sites that helped me figure this out (and that I now follow) are ReadWriteWeb and Copyblogger.

For a long time I had an ongoing problem optimizing PDFs in CS3 (I believe the problem occurs with CS2 and possibly other versions too). After a file had been optimized it wouldn’t display or print properly from Apple Preview. Elements of the PDF would either be missing or only partially displayed. I found documentation of the bug online but in each case the person said there was no known workaround.

In my case it was happening with sales documents. They had to be optimized because they had to be small enough to send via email or for people to download from our website, so “no known workaround” just wasn’t acceptable.

I spent a few hours playing around with different optimization settings, different ways of saving the files, basically anything I could think of that might possibly have an effect and by not doing a few things, I hit upon a fix:

• Don’t optimize transparency
• Don’t discard unused objects
• Don’t perform a “clean up” on the document

You can still optimize the PDF and reduce the file down to 20-40% of the original size without performing those actions. You’ll retain print quality and the PDF will view and print correctly from Apple Preview.