: Confusion about deleting parts of an graphic with pathfinder I'm trying to create a rubber stamp effect on a logo and am following this tutorial that has me use a combination of Live Trace

Posted in: #AdobeIllustrator #LiveTrace #Pathfinder

I'm trying to create a rubber stamp effect on a logo and am following this tutorial that has me use a combination of Live Trace and Pathfinder to accomplish the effect. Here's my interpretation of what the author is suggesting:

Live Trace on a complicated texture (e.g. zoom in picture of stone or concrete);
delete the white space from result;
copy my logo behind this layer;
make sure my logo is selected;
Pathfinder -> Subtract.

The result is various objects (e.g. the letter "T") gets deleted, and those deletes do not align with the Live Traced texture.

My logo has a layer that has several different objects within it (e.g. text object, some lines, etc.).

I suspect (based on my very limited understanding of Illustrator) that I need to combine all the objects/layers of my logo into one object. I could be completely wrong though, and can't figure out how to do this combining in the first place.

Regarding this subgoal, perhaps it's worth noting that if I resize this group of objects I call my logo, the stroke size remains unchanged. I'd prefer these to scale w/ my resizing.

So, 1) how can I convert my logo so that it behaves as if I converted it to a PDF and then imported it?

and 2) For the rubber stamp tutorial, if I'm wrong about this missing step of merging my logo's objects, is there some other step that I'm missing?