Zoom and Navigate

Lesson 5 from: Adobe Illustrator Creative Cloud: Essentials for Creating Projects

Brian Wood

art & design

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5. Zoom and Navigate

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Next Lesson: Working with Artboards

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SVG Export in Adobe Illustrator

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Zoom and Navigate

One of the things that's going to happen in here is you're going to want to work on something and, invariably, because it's vector, you're going to want to zoom into it. You're going to want to bring it into your face, okay? There are a lot of ways to do this. If you look over in the let over here, you're going to see that towards the bottom of the tools panel we actually have the zoom tool right down here. How many of you have used a zoom tool in another program? Okay, I know? It's the same. It's very similar, okay, except Illustrator has an awesome new feature I want to show you guys. Okay, it's part of it. Go ahead and select the zoom tool, and come out here, and you're going to see that we have the little plus in the zoom. If we want to zoom in, you can go where you want to zoom in. Let's say I come to the text over here on the right for instance. I want to zoom in there. You could just click. Why don't you do that? Just click. All right, I know this is probably nothing new to any ...

of you, but go ahead and click. This is what's new, okay? And this has been in here for a couple versions now, but if you have Illustrator CC, I believe it's 2014 and later, we have different way to be able to zoom because there is some things going on behind the scenes that we don't need to know about, okay? How many of you see a little rocket ship all the way up here in the application bar? Okay, if you see one you got some awesome things you can do. If you don't, I'm sorry, but maybe a previous version. I don't know, but, okay, so this is actually part of what's called GPU performance or GPU acceleration. We can if we want to do this. Watch. Why don't you come out here to the text and just click maybe one more time. And you'll see just you zoom in by a factor. It's like 50% or something. If your machine supports it, and if you have a later version of Illustrator, you can do this too. If I click and drag right or left, watch what happens here. I can dynamically zoom in and out, okay? This is GPU performance it's called. Your machine has to support it, and you gotta have the right version of Illustrator, okay. If you guys do not see that rocket icon up there, or if the rocket icon has like a sorry circle on it. You know, like a slash thingy going on, you can't do it, Okay, because your machine doesn't support it, but that's pretty sweet. That's pretty awesome, okay? To be able to do that. I'm kind of addicted to it, but if you don't have it, what's going to happen is when you click and drag, you're actually going to create a box. That's called the zoom box. It's going to zoom into that area when you let go, okay? So it's a little different. All right, so we got this dynamic zooming we can do, which is pretty amazing. Now, what I want to do a lot of times is as I'm zooming into something, I can still just click and zoom. You'll notice that where you click, this freaks people out, but where you click, it actually zooms into the center. So if I click down here, that's going to jump it to the center of my document window. Okay, so you kinda gotta get used to that. As you zoom in, you want to zoom out, which you can do. Hold down the option key on Mac or alt key on Windows, and you're going to see it turns to minus. You can then just click. Or if you want to click and drag you can zoom left: click, drag left. It's kind of weird, but ... So you can just click a couple times with that key held down. When you want to zoom back in, you let go of the key. You're back on to zoom in with the plus. Okay, so you can do it that way. Now a lot of times ... You're going to get used to this. You need to get used to this, okay? This type of zooming. We have other ways to zoom. I want show you a few of these because they're really, really helpful. If you come under the view menu, come under view, you're going to see that we have a series of zoom commands right here We have from zoom in down to actual size. Actual size is pretty awesome. What it does is it says ... If you're working on something like a logo, and somebody gave you a file, and you opened it up, and the logo is like in your face this big. If you went to actual size it might actually be that big, so it might show it that big. You know what I mean? Or the size of a billboard or something, so actual size can be very helpful. The two that I use all the time are zoom in and zoom out. It's kind of weird, but it's the same thing as the zoom tool. But you'll notice the shortcut commands to the right here: command plus, command minus. Control plus, control minus on Windows, okay. So a little further along as you get used to Illustrator, you might start using these kind of keyboard commands. This is another one we're going to be using all the time. Go ahead and choose fit artboard in window under the view menu. Go ahead and choose that. Now what that does is it fits what's called the active artboard into your document window. Did it fit the one you expected in your window? It didn't for me. I was zoomed in down there on that one, so why wouldn't it fit that one? It's whichever one is selected. Now we're going to get used to this. We're going to talk about this in a few minutes here, but, okay, so each one of these is your artboard or your page. We're going to use that a lot to kind of fit it in, to get it done. There are other zoom commands that we can use. Why don't you look down here, lower left. You can see the zoom menu down here. Check this thing out. Now for some of you it's only going to go to 640%. In later versions of Illustrator, if your machine supports it, you actually have up to 6,400%, which is kind of insane, okay. It seriously is. You're going to use it though. What you're going to do is ... We just a couple of versions ago, we jumped from 640 to 6,400. Now I go to 6,400 and I'm like, "Why won't it go further? I need more, need more." You're going to use this, so you can, if you want, just jump down here too. And you can pick like let's say 100%. You can pick 150. You can do whatever you want, but this is telling you, down here, how zoomed in you are, how zoomed out you are. Super important because sometimes you're going to get lost. You're going to be like starring at a logo, and it's actually only that big. So it's important to know. You'll also look up here. I always glance up here too at the tab. It tells you how zoomed in you are, what your zoom level is it's called, okay. Really important, okay? All right, so zooming, getting around a little bit. Something that really, really ... Something that we're going to do a lot. Does anyone want to know the keyboard command to get to the zoom tool? I'm going to share this with you. I know we're beginners. If you don't ... If you don't want to do this, you don't have to do this, okay, but as you get more comfortable in Illustrator, you'll realize that a lot of the tools over here have commands you can use, right? Keyboard commands. You can use command spacebar to get to the zoom tool. Almost any tool you're on. If you select any other tool out there, you can hold those two keys down, and you're on the zoom tool temporarily, okay? You guys, don't worry about it. We're just learning here. We're just starting out. I just wanted to throw that out there for those of you that are a little more in, okay. But, like I said, there are key commands we can use. All right, here's what I want you to do. We're going to fit everything we have in the window so we can see everything, okay? Come under view and you're going to see fit all in window. Go ahead and choose that. All right, we've got it out there. Now what we're going to do is we're going to start to take a look at working a little bit with artboards and start to look a little bit at zooming and a little bit more that we can work with I guess you could say. So I want to start to kind of go a little bit further in there. We're also going to do a little bit more zooming and things like that.

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Brian Wood

<span style="color: rgb(80, 0, 80);">Brian Wood is a web developer, the author of 14 books, including Adobe Muse CC Classroom in a Book and Adobe Illustrator CC 2018 Classroom in a Book. The author of numerous training titles including Muse, Dreamweaver, InDesign, Illustrator and more</span>.

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Adobe Illustrator

Ratings and Reviews

KATIE Y

I am a pretty computer literate person but an Ai beginner i.e. I am completely new to the Creative Cloud/Adobe Illustrator. (This is also the first time I've used CreativeLive.) I think this course it is fantastic. The pace is good as is the content which progressed logically and covers all the basics you'd hope it would. The course is 2 full days' worth of material but it is broken down into segments so you can revisit or skip through as you need to. The presenter is really personable and easy to watch (even for me, a Londoner!). I would also say I think it is pretty good value for money -- I am currently enrolled on a part time course, basically doing the same sort of stuff, and I have to say this is better and a bit cheaper! I definitely recommend it to you!

jackflash

A brilliantly designed course. it's almost magic. It's everything you hope for in a follow-along software class. Brian Wood has engineered it so that you start on a project that just needs basics, and then you move on to more & more complicated projects, and almost without realizing it you've learned Illustrator. This doesn't just happen -- Wood has clearly put a LOT of effort into creating this course. Here's one trivial example: he doesn't overload you with a lot of keyboard shortcuts right at the beginning -- you start with the actions themselves, using the (admittedly tedious but easy) pulldown menus, and then after you're comfortable with what you're doing, he'll throw in the shortcut. It may seem obvious, but so many instructors feel they have to give you an extensive foundation of definitions, shortcuts, interfaces, etc., before you ever do anything. Good stuff to know, but you'll never remember it. Wood has you up and working almost immediately. And he's a joy to listen to, at a perfect pace. Highly recommended.

Philippe LIENARD

Top course. Very well explained, clear, good examples, pleasant teacher. I like it and recommend it. One suggestion, it would be nice to have a detailed table of content of the course in the material. For instance, it took me quite a while to find back the part of the course where how to make a gear was explained.

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Zoom and Navigate

Zoom and Navigate

Lesson Info

5. Zoom and Navigate

Lessons

Class Introduction

What is Adobe Illustrator?

Explore the Interface

Create and Save New Documents