Recently, a lengthy and at times very funny thread on the Illustrator User-to-User forum (at Adobe.com) had people chiming in about how aggravating Illustrator's new Gray Box from Hell feature is, with a small number of Illustrator mavens arguing for the defense.

I'm referring to the gray box outline that Illustrator CS2 automatically puts around a group (items you've previously selected and grouped together via Object > Group) when you double-click any item in the group with the Selection tool.

Once the gray outline appears on your screen, it feels like a piece of Scotch tape stuck to your fingers. Try as you might you just can't shake it off. Select another item outside the box confines and the box just gets bigger. Double-click something inside the box, no change. Switch to a different tool, draw out a text frame, choose Deselect All, select another layer, that box ain't moving!

What is that thing and why is it there? How can you make it go away?

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Group Isolation Mode
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Illustrator's Help file has no name for this box, but Illustrator guru Mordy Golding has a great term for it, he calls it being in "Group Isolation mode." I suppose the gray outline itself should be called the Isolation box.

If you just click once on an item in a group with the Selection tool, all items in the group become selected. (Well, that's the purpose of grouping, after all). Drag any item and all the grouped items move in unison.

But if you put the group into Group Isolation mode first (by double-clicking on a grouped item with the Selection tool, or selecting a group and clicking the Group Isolation icon in the Control palette at the top, to the left of the Opacity field) then you can use the same Selection tool to drag individual items (or nested groups) around without ungrouping them first.

Is that the point of the Isolation box? No. But Illustrator newbies who haven't mastered the Direct Selection tool may find it useful. (Newbies: Forget about the Selection tool or Group Isolation mode for this. Just use the Direct Selection tool, the hollow arrow, to move individual items in a group without ungrouping them first. Click on an object to move just that object, or Option/Alt-click on a selected object to select its nested group, then drag that sub-group around.)

Another feature of Group Isolation mode is that while it's active, any new object you draw is added to the group automatically — that's why the gray box expands. I can't figure out a real-world scenario when I'd need that facility, though. Usually I create all my items first, then group them. If I want to add another item to the group, I shift-click the new item and the group and choose Object > Group again.

So what's the point? Mordy says it was added "mainly to assist in the creation and editing of Live Paint groups" in his post about Isolation mode in his Illustrator blog here:
http://rwillustrator.blogspot.com/2006/03/i-so-hate-isolate.html

I haven't been able to figure out what Isolation mode adds to the party as far as Live Paint groups is concerned, though, and he doesn't go into any detail about it … well it was already a long blog entry. Illustrator's Help file says double-clicking while in Isolation mode is a "handy way to select objects (as opposed to faces and edges) within a Live Paint Group," but you can use the Direct Selection tool to do the same thing. Hmph.

But as I said, a couple of the posters in the forum thread said Group Isolation mode "was one of the best new features in AI" and that it saved them hours of time. From their comments, I believe they mainly used it for the second purpose outlined above, where new objects automatically became part of a selected group.

For example, designer James Talmadge posted a link to a helpful PDF he wrote on how to create your own Airbrush tool in Illustrator, which relies in part on Isolation mode:
http://www.illustrationetc.com/AIbuds/AIrbrush.pdf

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Make it Go Away
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The easiest way to get out of Isolation mode is to double-click outside of the Isolation box. Poof, it's gone.

If you're zoomed in and you can't find any "outside" area to click in, try clicking the Isolation icon in the Control palette (the one to the left of the Opacity field I mentioned earlier … it looks like a rectangle with arrow heads on the corners). The icon is a toggle button. With a group selected, click it to turn on Isolation mode; click it again to turn it off. If you have drilled down to Isolation mode of a nested group, it may take a few clicks on the icon to completely escape.

I think the root of the problem is that the Adobe engineers never thought that people would be double-clicking a grouped item with the Selection tool by accident. They thought it'd make a great deliberate user action to invoke Isolation mode, and logically, it should.

But they didn't consider all those twitchy mouse button fingers and trembly Wacom pen users out there, hyped-up on caffeine or under the deadline gun. I don't want to get rid of the Isolation box, but let's hope that Illustrator CS3 has some sort of Preference for disabling the thing.

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