We're gonna come up under file. And your gonna see that there are two commands here. There's new and new new from template. Now, I don't really use new from template much. They have some templated files that you can start with, like a brochure, and a this, and a that, explore it okay? I don't really go there, but we're gonna go and create a document from scratch here so go ahead and choose file new and let's take a look. Now in Illustrator, like every Adobe application that I run across, when you choose something you're like hey do this thing, export that, save that, open this, you expect it just to do it but you're always gonna get a dialog box that says well you can do it but what do you want to do with it, you know what I mean? Like what are your settings? A lot of these are super important, we're going to hit a few of them. When you set up new documents, you can go in and you can change a lot of this later, but one of the first things I tend to do is give it a name. This is so weir...

d, but this is actually going to be the file name, okay? The one we save the file on. So why don't you call this, we're gonna call this robot. We're gonna be drawing some flowers in a little while here so we're gonna call it robot. I'm totally kidding. We actually gonna draw a robot. So, call it robot, that's gonna be the file name. You can change it later. Come under profile here, come into this menu. If you are designing or creating for different things. Let's suppose you're trying to do web design or you wanna maybe do some icon mock-ups, or you're creating a brochure. You're gonna start with a profile here. It always starts with print. Now what it's gonna do is it's gonna set a few things for us. It's gonna set us how the colors are made, resolution, different things like that. We don't have to worry too much, but if you are gonna do something like maybe you wanna. Does anybody do web-design at all? Any kind of web, okay, why don't you go ahead and choose web. And what I want you to do is come under size here, there's a menu right here that you can click on. You're gonna notice that it does things like set the sizes for us based on the profile we set. So it's gonna do things like set units for us, it's gonna pick pixels instead of inches. It's gonna do all these different things. It's really important to pick what you're doing. We gotta pick a profile first, okay? Why don't you go back up to profile and choose print. Just make sure that's selected. Now you're gonna see here it says number of Artboards, we can tell it how many pages or Artboards we want to start. I rarely do this, cause one you get in there you can say let's jam out 20 Artboards if we want We can do it really easily once we open Illustrator. We're gonna start with on single Artboard. If you come down here you're gonna see the size. Why don't you click on size. You can pick jut about, you know, all the different sizes that they have in here. If you don't like the option available, you can type in your own. So, if I don't wanna do one of these, you're gonna see we have the width and the height that we can set separately, you can type those in. We don't need to do that. Does anybody work with Points, Picas, anything like that in design or any program? Yeah, I stopped doing those about 10 years ago. Why don't you come to units here and I'm always working in either inches or pixels. So we can do that. So go ahead and choose inches in this case. So we're working on a print document and as soon as you choose inches you're gonna see the things change, okay? So we get our 8.5 by 11 etcetera. Now you're gonna see right here that we have a bleed. What, in print world, what's a bleed? Does anyone know? Okay. He says goes off the edge, that's exactly it. So if we have, let's say we're printing something like a postcard, and you want to have color or artwork go basically to the edge, print to the edge, we're gonna actually set a bleed. A bleed is a series of just lines drawn around the outside edge of the page or the Artboard. And you take your art work and you pull it just beyond the edge so that when you print it, at certain printers, they'll actually cut it out. Okay, so that's what's called a bleed. We're not gonna have to set that today though, that's fine. Why don't you click on advanced right here. I know we're just kind of beginning here, but if you click on the arrow to the left of advanced later on when you become more familiar with how Illustrator works, you can set things in here. Right now, don't touch, okay? Just click on the arrow to the left of advanced and we don't need to touch that for now. And why don't you go ahead and click okay. We're gonna get this open. Alright, so we've got our first document. Now, first thing we need to do here is we need to save this thing. Super important, so we're gonna go save it. Come under file and your gonna see that there are about six million different ways to saving here. Kinda makes your head spin a little. We're just gonna choose save or save as. It's kinda weird, they're the same thing. We're just starting so go ahead and choose save as. Save as. Go ahead and put this on your desktop if you don't mind. And we're gonna save it under, now notice what the name is here. It's the name we picked when we first setup this document, robot.ai You can go in and you can put just about anything you want there. You'll notice that the extension is .ai for Adobe Illustrator. This is your native file format. The awesome thing about this file format, you can take this and bring it to InDesign and place it directly in what you're working on. You can bring it over to Photoshop, you can bring it to Muse, you can do all kinds of things with this file, okay? Down here you're gonna see that we have what's called format. Let me see if I could pull this up a little bit. Why don't you click on format down here. We have a series of formats that we can save in. We want to save as ai, that is our working file, our native file, okay? The rest of these we're ignore for right now. So make sure ai is selected there, Adobe Illustrator and go ahead and save it. Now of course, like I said before, when you make a selection it's gonna say you're not done yet, okay? You gotta answer some questions here. I, you guys, I look at this and I'm like huh? I know what this stuff does cause I've used Illustrator for a while. I'm gonna tell you one thing. If you're taking a document and you're sending it to somebody who has an earlier version of Illustrator, it can help if you save it backwards to their version. This is one of the only things I'm gonna suggest you even look at in here to start with, okay? You don't have to do this, to be honest, because it will open, alright? It will open a previous version so it goes all the way back to Illustrator three, it's pretty crazy. Alright, just go ahead and click okay. Most people jus blow by, don't even look. We'll look at this maybe later on. And we've got our document, cool. Robot.ai Alright, now what we're gonna do is we're gonna go in and we're gonna start looking at trying to, let's say, zoom and navigate and kind of get a feel for how to get around in a document. And we're also gonna start working with artboards a bit, okay? Now this document is pretty underwhelming. There's not much here yet. So what I want you to do is we're gonna switch back to that other Illustrator file we had open, the intro file. Hopefully you all still have that open. You'll see that when you open multiple files in Illustrator they're opened as tabs along the top, which is kinda cool. Why don't you click on the tab for intro.ai and you'll just toggle back to that one. Now we're gonna take a look, like I said, of kind of just getting around a little bit.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Adobe Illustrator CC Project files - Part 1

Adobe Illustrator CC Project files - Part 2

buy this class

$00

Buy Class

Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

79.7K Students

99% Recommend this Class

00 Student Work

0 Video lessons in HD
00h 00m of class content
Exclusive bonus content
Lifetime access, anywhere, anytime
Streaming access on desktop and mobile browsers
Download and offline access with class purchase
Offline sync with our iPhone & iPad apps
100% satisfaction guarantee

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>.

SEE INSTRUCTOR'S CLASSES

topics covered in this class

Adobe Illustrator Software Graphic Design

Ratings and Reviews

Colleen

I've been trying to learn Illustrator on and off for years. This is the best instruction I've had! Brian is a great instructor. Finally feeling comfortable with it. It does use an older version but I just adapt.

Bill Neill

Great content and a good instructor. Not his fault the world marches on and doesn't stay in 2015. Any reasonably intelligent person will be able to figure out the changes since 2015 and how they relate to this course. It is early 2019, and I'm not having any trouble, but then I am reasonably intelligent and not to lazy to do some thinking.

MikeD

This is a great beginner course. Of course, it is older and still uses Illustrator CC (2015.3), but it's real easy to figure out the differences. However, anyone who has Creative Cloud can still install the older version (located in the "Other Versions" tab and take the class using that version and then delete it when done. The knowledge transfers easily. Brian is an incredibly knowledgeable instructor, teaches in detail and doesn't patronize his audience.

2,000+ classes ranging from fundamentals to advanced techniques.

Create and Save New Documents

Create and Save New Documents

Lesson Info

3. Create and Save New Documents

Lessons

What is Adobe Illustrator?

Explore the Adobe Illustrator Interface