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- Adobe originally designed the subject



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of this chapter, symbols, to serve Flash,



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the Internet's original

multimedia platform.



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You remember Flash, right?



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Not a happy ending, but I digress.



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Now that Flash is destitute

and without a friend,



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Illustrator's symbols panel might seem



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like the cobwebiest corner of the program.



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But it's a corner worth sweeping out



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and shining a big old halogen lamp into.



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First, the symbols panel

lets you save an often used



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design element that you can

replicate in a single gesture.



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Second, if you modify the symbol,



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all of it's so called

instances update in kind.



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Together, these first two items are huge.



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Let's say you have a

document that contains



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repeated instances of

an app icon, or a logo,



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or an ornament, what have you.



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Why then, save the element as a symbol.



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Drag and drop to create

instances of the symbol.



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And that way, if you decide

to update the original symbol,



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then all of those instances

are gonna update in kind.



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I know, I'm repeating

myself, but here's why.



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Illustrator lacks master pages.



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There's no page behind the

page that contains the headers,



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footers, and other repeating stuff



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the way there is in, say, InDesign.



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But for certain kinds of

documents, symbols are better.



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They allow you to replicate

forever dynamic design elements



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across multiple art ports.



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Plus, you can change the position

and size of those objects



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as much as you like,

without breaking the link



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to the original design definition.



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Which brings us to the third bit of magic,



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which I call the arrowhead factor.



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Hard as it is to imagine now,



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the Illustrator team

used to delight in adding



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top secret features to its software.



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And some of those features

were dependent on symbols.



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One of my favorite surviving examples is,



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drum roll please, custom arrow heads,



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which can be tinted or multicolor.



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They can even serve as line caps.



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But no sense in dwelling on that now.



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After all, we'll have plenty of time



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to dwell on all of it in

the future which begins now.