Case Based Critical Thinking

Mark’s design team has taken on a number of projects that involve display text and gradients. Mark considers typography to be a fine art, and he thinks that gradients are often a very effective component of good Illustrator design, so he is excited to take this opportunity to put his team through typography and gradient boot camp.

One of Mark’s designers is having difficulty with tracking and kerning - specifically, when to use tracking and when to use kerning. Mark asks four other designers to provide an analogy for tracking and kerning. He is pleased with all four analogies, but he says that the best of the four analogies is that tracking is to kerning as ________.

The specification for all body copy in a series of ten related fliers - all designed in Illustrator -   calls for 11pt type with 12.5pts leading and -10 tracking. One of the designers flows body copy text into the main text box on flier number five, formats it, then realizes that one paragraph is overflowing the text box. He tells Mark how he solved the problem, and Mark tells him that, of all the choices he had for fitting the text, he chose the worst option in terms of the overall design of the total project of ten fliers. The designer’s bad choice was to ________.

Mark knows that his designers aren’t programmers, but he feels it’s important that a designer has some amount of understanding of how a program works. He asks his team that, working in Illustrator, if they wanted to create a linear gradient but couldn’t use any of the  gradient tools, they could create the gradient with which of the following ________.

Mark considers gradients to be an important design component for many types of Illustrator artwork. He tells his team that gradients can be ________.

One project that the team is working on involves display type that will appear very large on a billboard. Mark tells the team that, of all the ways to modify text in Illustrator, ____________ is the most essential for perfecting large display type.

When text on a path is "flipped," it does what?

Locked objects can be selected, but they can't be moved or modified.

Once text is flowed onto a path, only its typeface and type size can be modified.

Positive tracking or kerning values move text characters closer together.

You can turn any object into a guide by clicking which command?

The command to show the Character panel is on the ____________________ menu.

When text is flowed into an object, which alignment often is the best solution?

Hiding objects is one way of making it easier to select objects on the artboard.

By default, guides in Illustrator are blue; you cannot change their color.

When you click a type tool cursor on text, then apply the Select All command, ____.

You can modify the tracking between letter pairs.

Which of the following is the best comparison to a radial gradient?

You can change the stacking order by moving objects forward and backward through the stack, one object at a time.

Guides preferences are listed under which category?

When you click the Gradient tool, the gradient control bar appears in the object itself.

To move text along a path, you use the start and end bracket, and midpoint bracket.

The Hide Selection command and the Show All command are both on the ____________________ menu.

Text preferences are listed under what category?

When locked objects are unlocked, they are all selected.

The midpoint is identified on the gradient slider by a triangle.

Once a word has been tracked, you can no longer apply kerning.

You can define the angle of a radial gradient in the Gradient panel.

Text in Illustrator can never be positioned upside down.

When you click the Show All command, all the hidden objects are selected when they are revealed.

In a radial gradient, the starting color appears where?

Text is flipped across a path by doing what?

The location of a midpoint in a gradient can be changed.

The midpoint, by definition, must be positioned evenly between the starting and ending colors of a gradient.

The Stroke panel is where you move sliders to mix new colors for fills, strokes, and gradients.

In typography, the term for the vertical space between baselines in a block of text is called what?

Text flowed on a curved line will often require kerning, especially when it is set at a large point size.

You can quickly change font, type size, kerning and other text attributes where?

When text is flowed on a path, which feature of the Character panel allows you to increase or decrease the distance of the text from the path?

The Unlock All command is under which menu on the menu bar?

Even after text is converted to outlines, you can still change the typeface.

When you copy text on a path, ____.

In the above figure, a 50% vertical scale has been applied to the text. This means that the text was shorter before the scale was applied.

Text generated by the Type tool is positioned on a path called what?

A linear gradient can be positioned from left to right, top to bottom, or on any angle.

An imported Swatches panel is editable.

When you float your cursor near the endpoint of the gradient control bar, the ____ icon appears.

The point at which two colors in a gradient meet is called what?

The order in which objects on the artboard overlap - from front to back - is called what?

A blend is a graduated transition between two or more colors used to fill an object or multiple objects.

Once text is flowed into an object, you can no longer manipulate the object as you would have previously.