brushes and swatches keep dissapearing

[roland300d]

Hi I hope someone can help me with a persistant and increasingly becoming irritant problem.

I use Illustrator CS (academic version). Every time I start up illustrator I have noticed that all my brushes and swatches have dissapeared. The pallets are just empty. I have looked in my setting, but can't see anything wrong.

Everytime I want to use illustrator i have to reload swatches and brushes which is an absolute pain.

Hope anyone has some tips on how to sort this out.

 

[jmgalvin]

The palettes are empty until you create a new document or open an old one.

When you launch ILL are you creating a new doc?

 

[itchybug]

It may be that there's a problem with one of your startup files, either the Adobe Illustrator CMYK_Startup.ai or the Adobe Illustrator RGB_Startup.ai in the C:\Program Files\adobe\Illustrator CS\Plug-ins folder. What you can do is to open all libraries you want in a new document, then overwrite the startup file of your choosing (Save a backup first, of course), and next time you run Illustrator the new startup file will be read and all should be well. There are some color palettes (like PMS swatch palettes) that have a little toggle in the flyout to make them persistent, otherwise they won't come up by themselves, so check for that... Standard swatches should automatically load, though.

HTH

Bert

 

[roland300d]

hi jmgalvin and itchybug,

thanks for the replies. I have now found the problem and solved it, it was pretty simple really and i have been kicking myself for it.

At college we are told to reset illustrator by deleting the prefs via find, prefs and then trashing the ill prefs. this to make sure we all start with the same set up as they can be different when so many people do work on the macs. I had done this at home too as i thought it was normal working practice, but i have changed my mind now.

I had deleted the prefs while in illustrator and hadn't restarted my mac since. I have been away a few days and shut down my mac. have since returned and have been working fine on my mac, with all brushes and swatches there as usual. Don't know for sure whether this was the cause, but i will keep an eye on it.

Thanks for posting back with hints!