- Adobe originally designed the subject
of this chapter, symbols, to serve Flash,
the Internet's original multimedia platform.
You remember Flash, right?
Not a happy ending, but I digress.
Now that Flash is destitute and without a friend,
Illustrator's symbols panel might seem
like the cobwebiest corner of the program.
But it's a corner worth sweeping out
and shining a big old halogen lamp into.
First, the symbols panel lets you save an often used
design element that you can replicate in a single gesture.
Second, if you modify the symbol,
all of it's so called instances update in kind.
Together, these first two items are huge.
Let's say you have a document that contains
repeated instances of an app icon, or a logo,
or an ornament, what have you.
Why then, save the element as a symbol.
Drag and drop to create instances of the symbol.
And that way, if you decide to update the original symbol,
then all of those instances are gonna update in kind.
I know, I'm repeating myself, but here's why.
Illustrator lacks master pages.
There's no page behind the page that contains the headers,
footers, and other repeating stuff
the way there is in, say, InDesign.
But for certain kinds of documents, symbols are better.
They allow you to replicate forever dynamic design elements
across multiple art ports.
Plus, you can change the position and size of those objects
as much as you like, without breaking the link
to the original design definition.
Which brings us to the third bit of magic,
which I call the arrowhead factor.
Hard as it is to imagine now,
the Illustrator team used to delight in adding
top secret features to its software.
And some of those features were dependent on symbols.
One of my favorite surviving examples is,
drum roll please, custom arrow heads,
which can be tinted or multicolor.
They can even serve as line caps.
But no sense in dwelling on that now.
After all, we'll have plenty of time
to dwell on all of it in the future which begins now.