3 ms·
So for what it’s worth here’s the three rules of thumb I’ve followed for about fifteen years in Illustrator: 1. Pull curve handles out to about 1/3 of the curv
by egypturnash 9y ago
So for what it’s worth here’s the three rules of thumb I’ve followed for about fifteen years in Illustrator:
1. Pull curve handles out to about 1/3 of the curve segment they control.
2. Don’t turn more than 90° between two control points.
3. Avoid S-curves between two control points.
Following these generally results in nice-looking curves that are easy to edit
A lot of “designers” these days like to present a rule of “only put your control points at 0/90/180/270° and keep your curve handles axis aligned”, which makes some degree of sense in the arena of making fonts, but results in incredibly hard to manage curves as you get further away from circles.
- hbosch 9y agoOne great way to handle editing of complex shapes that use 90° extrema is to lean into Tunni lines[0] as a manipulation tool. Unfortunately these aren't present in Illustrator either, as far as I know, and is yet another reason why Illustrator's dominance as a bezier drawing software is less than warranted. Most font design software is better for drawing almost anything in bezier. 0. http://help.fontlab.com/fontlab-vi/Tunni-Lines/ http://help.fontlab.com/fontlab-vi/Tunni-Lines/
- egypturnash 9y agoI’m gonna have to disagree with your last sentence. I’m pretty sure there isn’t any font design software out there that would let me draw an entire full-color comic page. (Which I mostly do with AI’s pencil tool - but when I need to get my hands dirty with the raw paths, I use the rules of thumbs mentioned above.)