200 words on Design… by Andrew Shalat

Combining the power of OSX’s ability to print directly to PDF with Illustrator CS3’s fluency with PDF is a guerilla designer’s dream. Everyone knows that any document you can print from your Mac you can instantly make into a PDF. That’s easy stuff. But it really becomes interesting when you realize what you can do with that PDF once you’ve captured it from the world wild web. Using Adobe Illustrator, you can then open your PDF as a native .ai file. Within that file all the objects from the page you captured are now separate objects in your new ai file. So you can take out the banner ads, put your own in, rearrange or edit out fields and elements. Why do this? Well, for one, it’s an easy way to prepare mockups for design. For another it’s a nice way to study different approaches to composition layout. Mind you, all the objects are flattened, non-animated versions of their former selves, but they are great for comping designs, as FPO (for position only) elements. So all in all, that simple save as PDF command in your print dialog is more useful than you might think.