My second tip on Blend is to learn a few keyboard shortcuts. It’s not that hard. Honest.

I don’t mean that you have to sit down and religiously learn them all. There’s quite a lot and they’re well documented in the help ( Blend Help is good by the way ) and there’s even a menu option to jump straight to them;

which drops you out here;

Now I’m naturally lazy and so I wasn’t going to sit down and learn all of these but I learnt a few and the ones that I learnt are mostly from the Artboard, Pen tool and Direct Selection sections.

The ones that I find are really, really useful?

Hit the V Key

If I’m in Blend and I’ve just drawn some buttons like these ones here;

then ( although you can’t see it on the screenshot ) Blend is all set up to let me draw another Button. I don’t know what Blend calls this but it’s in some kind of “draw another instance of the control that you’ve selected” mode.

But,what if I want to quit drawing more buttons and switch into selection mode?

Hit the V key.

Change the Text with the F2 Key

Now, if I wanted to change the text of the Button that’s selected I could go searching off into the Properties window and try to find the Content property but that’s a bit tedious to have to do for such a common task.

So, to change the text of that Button I just hit the F2 key.

Zoom the Artboard with CTRL+0

My other favourite shortcut is using CTRL+0 to zoom the Artboard so that it perfectly fits the available screen space. So, for instance if I’ve got my artboard zoomed in;

then I can just zoom it back using CTRL+0;

and CTRL+1 is also there in order to zoom the artboard to its actual size but I use CTRL+0 almost exclusively.