Ai Artwork question

[Retrogrphx]

I received a Ai file today from a customer, after i opend the file to send to cutmaster i doubled check the file in wireframe mode for unwanted cut paths and i came across this(picture attached). I tride to selecting the paths and could not, but for some reason i can select the font outlines..it seems to be locked. What is this or how can i get grid of it? Thx

 

[neil_se]

It's just the graduations of the gold gradient. See if you can release the clipping mask and delete them.

 

[SightLine]

I see that a lot.... typically from design agencies. Rather than fill the shape with the gradient the want they make a ginormous square, fill that with the gradient, then put the shape they really want on top and make it a clipping mask. Then they put a hundred other things all separately masked into multiple individual "groups', then some other unnecessary shape under that group gets masked to the group, then a group of these groups are grouped and masked and made into compound paths.

 

[Morkel]

Yeah, the file was obviously originally created in a program that can't process a true gradient, so it splits the colour band in to heaps of tiny strips, each incrementally changing from one colour to the other.

The long-winded process I would follow would be:

* Lock all the items that are correct, ie, everything except those two shapes (Object - Lock Selection)
* Select the two shapes, and go Object - Clipping Mask - Release
* Still in wireframe, Ctrl+A (select all).
* Now while holding shift, try to click on the edges of just those two curved shapes. So holding shift, click on one of them, then the other. You should then have just the tiny colour strips selected, so hit Delete.
* It's likely those two shapes will be invisible in Preview mode (as they were simply a mask, not an object unto themselves), so assign them just a simple solid fill, any colour.
* Object - Unlock All. You can now select everything.

That should be all you need.

 

[Retrogrphx]

Thanks

Thanks for all the inside info..much appriciatedc.f.

 

[J Hill Designs]

In these instances I usually release the mask, delete the crap, and recreate the gradient

 

[oksigns]

if you're lucky and if it is the original native file, you can double check the visual styles in the document to see if they applied a gradient style that they had saved. I have only been lucky once.

Someone people will "expand" everything, releasing all style effects in to separate pieces which would cause this too.

 

[Bobby H]

Modern Adobe Illustrator files should not have objects with "expanded" gradient fills like the example in the top post of this thread. Illustrator files made correctly will not have clipping masked groups of many hundreds of slivers of solid filled objects pretending to be a gradient fill. Somebody somewhere, who didn't know what he was doing, goofed up.

There are various ways how Adobe Illustrator .AI artwork can get infected with faked gradient fills. The two easiest ways to make it happen is saving the artwork in early versions of .PDF or .AI. Illustrator will automatically expand those gradients and other new features to ensure compatibility. The resulting flattened/expanded artwork is often a hopelessly uneditable mess. The only thing worse is a freaking JPEG image. Edit: sometimes there's no choice in saving some Illustrator artwork down to an early version, like v8 or even v3, if you need to port the artwork in some other application. But it's generally better to make all the fills solid prior to export and re-build the fills in the target application, provided the artwork isn't crazy complicated. That circumvents having to carefully delete lots and lots of those object slivers and other digital trash.

PDF files generated by other programs (such as CorelDRAW) and brought into Illustrator may have the same problem of auto-expanded fills. This is another reason why I run both CorelDRAW and Illustrator. Neither program really truly knows how to handle art files from their rival app with 100% accuracy.

Finally, the "artist" may simply have the habit of flattening and expanding artwork when finishing a logo design. I believe in expanding/flattening some items, such as pen strokes on paths and any live shape pathfinder effects to make things ready for vinyl cutters and/or routing tables or just to ensure the artwork maintains its proper appearance when scaled. Selecting everything and checking "flatten transparency" can have kind of a crude nuke effect on the artwork globally.