Illustrator tip: Symmetric drawing.
Here’s a way to quickly do repetitive designs with Illustrator. The examples and directions are for a kaleidoscopic effect; you could also use it for a simple vertical or horizontal mirror.
1. Make a big rectangle. No fill, no stroke. Like, really big, bigger than you intend to ever let your design get and then some. Put its center wherever you want the center of your design to be.
2. Click on the circle beside the layer’s name in the layers palette.
3. Effect->distort and transform->transform. Choose a rotation value (something like “360/5” will work if you don’t want to bother doing the math), type a number in the ‘copies’ box (say, “4”).
4. (optional) Lock the rectangle you drew.
5. Deselect all, appearance palette->flyout menu->clear appearance.
6. Draw some shapes, watch them be automatically duplicated. You can make something super complicated very quickly this way!
Step 1 is the key to this; if you don’t draw the giant rectangle, the center of everything on your layer may shift every time you draw a new path.
You could do this on multiple layers with different repetition settings. You could also do this on a layer with sub-layers inside it, to make working on different parts of a complex design easier.
You can edit the repetition settings by repeating step 2, and visiting the Appearance palette.
If you want to define this more interactively, you might enjoy Astute Graphics’ Mirror Me plugin. I have it and I never use it, because they tend to only provide video tutorials of their stuff and I am very much a RTFM sort of learner.
Originally published at Egypt Urnash. You can comment here or there.