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Stopped losing my pen tool paths after a designer in Chicago told me to hit the tilde key
I kept redrawing the same curves in Illustrator because I couldn't see what I was actually selecting, and it was eating hours every week. A designer in Chicago showed me that holding the tilde key while dragging with the pen tool previews the exact path before you commit, so you stop guessing where the anchor lands. Took me about 15 tries to get the feel for it, but now my logo curves come out clean on the first pass instead of the third. It only works in certain versions from what I can tell, so your mileage might vary. Anyone else got a weird keyboard trick that saved their workflow?
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phoenix8451mo ago
My buddy was fighting the same thing with his pen tool, redrawing logo curves for a client every single day, and his art director finally just grabbed his mouse and showed him the spacebar trick where you hold it down to reposition an anchor while you're still dragging it out. He said it felt weird for like a week and then suddenly his hands just knew what to do. The tilde thing sounds like a cousin of that, same idea of previewing before you let go so you're not cleaning up messes later. He still swears the version of Illustrator matters too, his old laptop wouldn't do it but the new one will. Stuff like this makes me wonder how many of these shortcuts are just sitting there while we waste hours doing it the hard way.
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