Quick Tip

I spoke to a friend of mine, a Swedish designer, as I figured there must be a less time consuming method to extracting the elements I needed from the PDF.

He said to use the 'direct selection' tool to remove elements I did not want, rather than ones I did. I was able to make multiple marquee selections of items I didn't want and just hit the delete key. This made things a whole lot easier, as I didn't need to identify which element was which within several hundred unnamed layers!