# Adobe Illustrator Speed Course: Increase Workflow & Efficiency - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/adobe-illustrator-speed-course-increase-workflow-and-efficiency/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Graphic Design · Quick win · Rated 6 /10 # Adobe Illustrator Speed Course: Increase Workflow & Efficiency Updated August 2026 Jon Brommet · Crusoe Design Co. Intermediate · 78 min A working designer hands over specific speed hacks that actually cut Illustrator busywork, if you can tolerate rambling delivery. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fadobe-illustrator-speed-course-increase-workflow-and-efficiency%2F10567140) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. Jon Brommet's speed course is exactly what the title promises: a grab bag of workflow shortcuts for people who already spend real hours inside Adobe Illustrator, delivered in under an hour and a half. There's no single throughline or project being built across the 78 minutes. Instead it's fourteen discrete lessons, each a self-contained tip, stacked one after another like a highlight reel from someone's own daily practice. ## What actually gets taught The strongest material clusters around setup and reuse. The workspace and toolbar lesson walks through stripping Illustrator's default panel clutter down to only the tools used daily (color, swatches, stroke, character, transparency) and shows how to save that as a named custom workspace. The swatches and symbols lessons follow the same logic: build a personal library of colors and reusable logos, mark them persistent so they survive a restart, and stop re-copying artwork from old client files every time a job repeats. The global colors lesson is a genuinely useful payoff for that setup work, showing how converting a swatch to global lets an entire multi-layered illustration get recolored by editing one color rather than hunting down every stroke and fill by hand. The Appearance panel lesson is the clear standout. Using a simple "A POOP" text example, it demonstrates stacking multiple stroke and fill entries on live type so the final effect stays fully editable, letters can change, kerning can shift, and nothing needs to be rebuilt from scratch when a client asks for a revision. It's a genuinely clever piece of instruction that rewards viewers who think they already know that panel. Two lessons lean on third-party plugins from Astute Graphics: the Dynamic Measuring Tool for pulling precise real-world measurements onto a vehicle wrap template, and the Smart Remove Brush for cleaning up excess anchor points on hand-drawn line art. Both are shown clearly enough to be useful, but neither works without buying the plugin separately, which the course does not flag clearly upfront. ## Where it falls short The pacing is uneven. Some lessons, like custom templates, trail off mid-explanation with loose ends about preset sizes never fully resolved. The image cropping tip, despite being the second lesson, is explicitly called out as version-specific to Illustrator CC 2017 and won't apply to current CC users the same way. The instructor's delivery is casual to the point of rambling, with tangents about disc golf and merchandise that pad the runtime without adding instructional value, and the closing "Message From Future Jon" lesson is pure self-promotion with no course content at all. The course also undersells its own difficulty. It's billed as intermediate but folds in genuinely basic material, like the Command+Zero shortcut to fit an artboard to screen, alongside content that assumes fluency with groups, clipping masks, and swatch libraries. That mismatch means true beginners will get lost in places while advanced users will find long stretches obvious. Taken as a whole, it earns its "speed course" label: efficient to sit through, uneven in depth, but genuinely money in a few specific spots, especially the Appearance panel and global colors lessons, that alone make the runtime worthwhile for the right viewer. The standout The Appearance panel demo, building a fully editable double-stroke text effect that a client can still tweak after delivery, is the one technique alone worth the runtime. ## What you will learn - · Crop images destructively with the Crop Image tool to shrink file size before sending to clients - · Build a personalized workspace and toolbar by hiding unused panels and tools - · Make fully editable layered text effects using the Appearance panel instead of rasterizing or manually duplicating shapes - · Create, save, and reload persistent custom swatch and symbol libraries across sessions - · Use global colors so an entire artwork's palette can be recolored by editing one swatch - · Apply Astute Graphics plugins (VectorScribe measuring tool, Smart Remove Brush) to speed up measurement and point cleanup Best for: Working intermediate-to-advanced Illustrator users who already know the basics and want workflow shortcuts, not people learning the program from scratch. Skip it if: Total beginners to Illustrator, since several lessons assume familiarity with panels, groups, and vector concepts the course never explains from the ground up. Clarity of Instruction Helpful Examples Actionable Steps Engaging Teacher [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fadobe-illustrator-speed-course-increase-workflow-and-efficiency%2F10567140)