Snap to Point and Show Center Point

I know, you want to get down to the point?!? Well in earlier versions of Illustrator, as I recall, any object showed it's center point with a small blue box that sort of looked like an anchor point in the center of the object. In CS2, that little blue box went up in smoke (or so I thought). It turns out that the option to show the center point appears in a palette that I never use: the Attributes palette:



Why is so important? Well when you want to align the center of a polygon or star to the corner of a rectangle, if you can't see it's center point, it gets really hard to do that. In the View menu there's an option, that's on by default, called Snap to Point. When this option is enabled, your cursor will change when your moving the center point of an object on top of an anchor point of another object. It changes from a black triangle, to a white triangle. This visual cue is an important aid in letting you know that you've achieved proper alignment.

Get the point?

Scale Strokes & Effects

Applying transformations to objects that have strokes or effects applied to them can either just scale the object or scale the object and the strokes and effects. There's two ways to turn this option on. The first is a local method. Take a look at the Rotate dialog box:



At the bottom, there's an option for scaling strokes and effects. If you have an object that has patterns applied to it, you can turn off Object and leave Pattern on to just scale, shear, or rotate the pattern.

A global solution for scaling strokes and effects can be found in the preferences dialog box:



Turn on the Scale Strokes & Effects option and it will be turned on in any transformation dialog.