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About the Author
Lawrence Carriere
Lawrence is freelance Web developer residing in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, who works as a Continuing Education Instructor at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in the New Media Production & Design program. Lawrence also works as the Technical Services Director for a successful business solutions company in Calgary.
Illustrator for Flash and Director
I don’t know about you, but I’m not a big fan of the tools that Flash provides for creating vector graphics. It’s not that the tools are no good -- they’re fine; but I’m simply more comfortable using Illustrator.
So you can imagine my excitement when I was shown how to export my Illustrator graphics as SWFs that I could import and use in Flash! Then I learned that you can take Flash and import it into Director, and was accordingly ecstatic!
So, today, I’m going to share the joy! Here, I’ll illustrate how to create slick vector graphics that we’ll draw in Illustrator, build in Flash, and then import and use in Director. Let’s get started!
Mouseover
In the image below, I’ve created a rectangle in Illustrator, copied it and reversed the colours for a mouseover effect.
Now, one thing we have to do before we export our button is ‘create outlines’ on our text. We can do this in Flash with the ‘Break Apart’ function, but I always do it in Illustrator.
To do this, select the text on both buttons: click on one of the text fields, hold down the ‘Shift’ key, then click the second text field. When you’ve got your selections done, your graphic should look like this:
Excellent! Now click on the Type menu, where, a little less than half way down, you should see ‘Create Outlines’. Select this option, then zoom in on your graphics a bit (leaving them selected). They should look something like this:
We’ve just converted your text from a text element into a graphic element. The benefit of this lies in the eventual Flash output. If the end user of your Flash file doesn’t have the specific font you used on their system, it won’t matter: the file will display the way you want it to, as the text is now a graphic, not a font.