To make more instances of a symbol, you can drag one out of the Symbols palette onto your artboard, or you can simply duplicate one that already exists. If you are using “ticks” or other markers that are colour-coded to the route lines, you’ll have to make symbols for each colour and variation needed. STEP TWO: Picture 2 shows the Symbols palette with three different station marker symbols set up and ready to use.

If you’re creating a symbol for a “tick” mark, then use a registration point that matches where you’d like the tick to attach to its route line. For an interchange symbol, the centre point is best. In the resulting dialog box, give your symbol a descriptive name, and choose a registration point. With the Symbols palette open ( Window menu > Symbols or Shift-Cmd/Ctrl-F11), simply select your artwork and choose “New Symbol…” or click on the “New Symbol” icon at the bottom of the palette.

STEP ONE : Defining a symbol couldn’t be easier, as seem in the first image above. Super powerful and not used nearly enough by most. Which means that when you edit the symbol’s artwork, it instantly updates all the duplicates (or “instances”, as Adobe likes to call them). Put simply, the feature allows you to define Illustrator artwork as a “symbol”: every duplicate of that symbol is linked to that original artwork. Symbols were quietly introduced into Illustrator way back when Adobe acquired Macromedia, and are a feature lifted directly from Flash. However, if you’d used Illustrator’s Symbols feature, then this request would be an absolute breeze. If you’ve used standard Illustrator artwork for each of your interchanges, then you’ve got a frantic afternoon of finding, deleting and replacing every interchange marker on the map ahead of you.

And they’d like to see the revised version in an hour. They love it, except they’d like the circular interchange markers you’ve used to be square with rounded edges instead.

Imagine this scenario: you’ve been working for months on a complex transit map – lots of interchanges and routes – for a big-city transit agency and you’re presenting it to their management team for approval.

Creating symbols in illustrator