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Cheat Sheet for Adobe Illustrator CC

Hey there. It's cheat sheet time and only the best shortcuts. Let's go through them. Now. First one is actually two shortcuts. If I hit command Y on a Mac or control Y on a pc. It gives me into kind of like invisible x ray mode. Okay. And I can see there's a star there and a dot there and a dot there. If I turn it back off fighting the same key, you can see they're just shapes that have, that's a text box that has no type. That is our anchor point from my pento and over here is a star with no stroke and no fill to tie it up. Go up to object, go to path and go, let's just clean up all that stuff please, illustrator click. Ok. Now if I go back to my command y or control Y on a pc, tidy it up. Nice. The next cheat is that let's say these stars here. I want to change the color but that color has been used a few times through my document So what I can do is I can go up to here and say select illustrator, grab everything that's using that same fill color super handy and go to my properties. ...

Go to my field color and I'm going to say you're all white now, awesome. Okay, the next one is math in any of the fields and illustrator. Okay, I want to draw a rectangle actually I want five little rectangles kind of evenly spaced down the bottom here. So I'm gonna draw one that covers the whole thing. I'm going to give it a fill so you can see it. So I needed to divide it by five up here, the width. I'm even in the wrong unit size. I mean using points. Okay, it doesn't really matter. I'm going to put it in forward slash five. You could put in times five, you could put in minus five. Okay, if I click on that now, it's 1/5 the size awesome. So I'm going to grab my black arrow, drag it across and I want to duplicate these along. I could use copy paste ends up in the middle. What I'm going to use is a trick where if I slept with my black arrow, I start dragging and then after that I hold down the option key on a Mac or the old key on a Pc. Makes a duplicate while I'm dragging. Okay, that's a handy little tip. Another little handy tip is if you now hit command D. On a Mac or control D. On a Pc, it's going to duplicate whatever you just did over and over again. Another handy trick. Next trick is, let's say I want to grab this and I want to give it, use my library colors and I want to give it the foxy orange color, but it didn't apply well it did kind of, it applied it to the stroke. So the stroke was at the front. I needed this to be at the front, click on that and then I'll bring the stroke to the front and then click none. Okay, that's the long way. The shortcut way, is this gonna undo till it was back to when it was broken. Okay. Is that watch this the X key on your keyboard? Can you see it over here? It just toggles these back to front. So up here I can say I want you to have the foxy center and then I'll have maybe a black striker on the outside. Okay so you can toggle these back and forth. Even better is I want the stroke gone. So I'm gonna toggle it to the front and then hit my forward slash key. So it's the question mark on my keyboard that mixed up together down by the shift in the bottom, right, it's okay, click on this guy and I could say actually toggle the filter the front and I want no fill with a forward slash. If you want to add a fill you hit the comma button that just adds a fill pops this little box open as well. Okay, so if something doesn't have a Phil you hit the comma the last one and the one that nobody's going to use is the period or full stop, it adds a gradient. Well you're not going to use the gradients are back, right Phil so they're all kind of gathered down there at the bottom comma for a fill period or a full stop for a gradient and the forward slash for nothing in it back to gradients. I said gradients aren't going to be used but gradients are totally back. Check out this site gradient dot com. I love it's just cool gradients that you can use, you can find a color, click on this and that's the hex to decimal number to start with and there it is to finish. They got pages and pages of very cool gradients. Let's put them in illustrator. Okay, so I've copied the color from gradient, I've added the first one already to speed things up and I'm going to click this last slider, It defaults to K often. Okay, we're gonna go to RGB and that's where this color needs to be pasted on that return is my lovely gradient. One more little thing about gradients. Sometimes they can print badly with banding. If you've got a file print, there's an option to convert it into pixels with this handy under graphics, you can turn this on and says, hey, don't do this unless you're having problems with gradients. If you are hit print, you'll find that their pixels and they look nice. File size is a lot bigger but that's okay, we want our gradient cancel. Another cheat for illustrator is let's say I want to export this Fox just him by himself sending the whole document is easy enough. So actually I'm gonna shift drag a box around him, hold, shift, click the background. I just want you fox to go around. Okay, Just with it selected doesn't even have to be grouped. I can right click it and there's an option that says export for selection. There you are. Okay. Just him is gonna get exported. He could be a PNG, he can be a pdf for SVG, whichever you like. Awesome canceled. Let's say you do want the whole thing as a pdf but your pdf's coming out huge. Let's go to file save and then here I'm going to go down the bottom pick pdf and I'm going to click save and even if I change these to say the highest quality print, which a lot of people use. It's still going to make it really big pdf. The trick is this button here preserve illustrator capabilities. Okay. You just need to turn it off. It's gonna save. Illustrator is not going to like it, but it just means that it's not going to have all the functionality of illustrator which we don't need it to have. That's what the Ai files for. Okay, the pdf just needs to be small and printable. One of the things you might do is down here, there's an option that says smallest file size that turns it off by default, lowers the resolution a bit and we'll make it even smaller but probably not right for a print but definitely right for email. Herbal or downloadable from our website. Let's say cancel. Next up are some more shortcuts. Ok. Command shift P is to bring it in a file to import. It's not a particularly sexy shortcut but I use it quite a lot. I'm going to bring in this file here. I'm going to click hold and drag it so it's nice and big in the background. I need to send it to the back. So next shortcut time, if you're on a Mac it's command shift and you're looking for these square brackets the next to your peaky. You want the first one? If you're on a pc it's control shift and at that same square bracket sends it to the back. Now I'm going to select both of them and use another shortcut. Command seven on a Mac or control seven on a pc. It's the clipping mask. Next and reasonably related. Is that one's the clipping mask that's for cropping things. The other one is cutting holes and things. I've zoomed in here. I'm going to click him hold shift, click that tail Next to command seven is command eight. Okay. And it is compound bath. There's an hour hole in it. If you're on a pc it's control eight. Soon back out. Next shortcuts I use loads are for fonts so I'm going to have my text selected up here. Command shift on a Mac or control shift on a Pc and tap the period key increase the font size. The common key goes back smaller. So get the font size kind of where I want it about. Their next thing I wanna do is I want to decrease the leading or the space between the lines. Okay, I've got it selected, hold down the option key on a Mac or a Pc and just hit the up arrow on your keyboard. Okay, That decreases it and the down arrow increases it. Another thing you might do is with that same key held down or option, use the left and right arrows to do the tracking. That's what I want a couple more shortcuts to go with my black arrow. So I want to move this around. I can use my arrow keys right just on my keyboard. But if I hold down shift while I'm using my arrow keys, it times it by 10. Okay, so instead of moving just one pixel it's going to go 10. Nice and handy for that. Now you can use that for a lot of things. Let's say this thing. I want to increase the font size properties but I want to go really big. Okay, so if I do it once it's going to go 18 19. Okay. But if I hold shift and do it goes up 2030 40. Okay, so it's just hold on shift and it will times anything by 10, it might be the strict wait, okay, you can add a stroke to this font is going to look bad. Okay. And you can go up in 10 points by holding shift. Wow. Now two more to go. This is kind of a new feature you if you're not using CC 2018 or above, it might not work for you. You're working over here. Right. But I've got my tail selected, I did it down there, so if I hit command plus, which a lot of people used to zoom in, it jumps down here and you're like no, no, no over here and then command plus again, it really wants to bring that into the middle. What you can do is you can go up to illustrator cc preferences. If you're on a pc it's under edit right down the bottom should be preferences. Okay. And in here we're gonna go to general, go to selection and anchor display and down here it says zoom to selection. You can turn that off and it will just zoom into the middle of the screen, like the good old days. Another thing people love in here or we don't like about the new version is under general. You can say this one here says show the start works place and it opens up all your previous files and if you're old school illustrator people don't like that, you can turn that off and it just loads up with an empty software. I turn my back on, click. Ok. And the last one, the last one is a timesaver, it's when you're working with a file like this, it's one of the files that we made in our exercises for compound shapes and what we did is we added a gradient to it which is no big deal, especially in something like Photoshop. But watch what happens when I try and scale this up. I'm going to go you scale and my machine rolls over and dies. Now I've got like a brand new Macbook Pro it should be Flying illustrated doesn't do things like affects very well. So if you're going mad with waiting for your computer to do things like this, wow, it's long. Okay. Is when that's finished, I can go up to effects, go to document Raster settings and this thing here is going to save the day you're going to turn down and say I want the resolution down to 72. It's not going to destroy your resolution and things disappearing. It's still victor. But it means when I work now I can make it bigger and it's just a whole lot quicker. You see The one thing you need to remember though is when you're exporting your pdf, you need to make sure you turn it back up because it will remember 72. So while you're working, crank it right low. When you go out. When you're pre press process, make sure you ramp it right back up to 300. Alright, that is going to be it. See you in the next video