Lessons

Lesson Info

Workspaces & Preferences

I've created a new document here, and we're gonna go through the whole new documents set up once we get through the interface right here. And yours may look totally different from mine. And one of the reasons why is because we have several different setups based on presets or workspaces, that adobe gives you depending on what you would like to go ahead and do or create or where your artistic abilities lie. So when we launch Illustrator, we could go into the window menu and we have different work spaces Workspaces for automation essentials. If you're used to older versions of illustrator, this is the essentials classic you're gonna do. Lay out. You wanna do painting? You want to do typography or web Every time you click on this, What it's gonna do is it's gonna rearrange your panels, your preferences, toolbar your art board and give you different things to go ahead and work with or work on. Now I like to set up illustrator from myself and my use and my purposes. So what I do is I go. We...

had and I set my panels and I set my preferences and set my locations and Then I go in and I capture this work space so that it works best for me. So I've done that by going. I went in and I actually created a new workspace so I could go in and create a new workspace based on how I've moved all my panels around and then I capture that. So we're gonna show you how to capture that there. So if you start moving these things around and you find if you like this workspace you could go in and captured by choosing new workspace. But let's talk about just kind of navigating around here and getting the set up so that we feel comfortable on how this is one of the things that's the newest addition to Illustrator is gonna be the properties panel on the properties panel here. I'm going to pull off the way. You snap off these panels, you click on the name of the panel right on the tab. If you'd like to have from free floating, dragged them into a free space in your document window and you have your free floating panel. There's lots of panels in certain modes or certain workspaces that we have There's lots of panels that you can click on, and they fly out there nested together. By the way, this set of nested panels when all the tabs air nested together here and you can move these around, you can edit thes. You can close these, you can pull them off, and then you can close them here. And as you do this, you're going to see that little hints will come up showing you some of the newer features or how toe work with this kind of stuff, and you end up getting your panels where you'd like them to be. I'm going to pull all these panels off here because we can snap these panels all the way over to the right hand side. And to do that, you grab the name of your tab. You can pull that off, and then you can drag either the name of the panel or the gray bar at the top and snap those to the side and you'll see you get a blue bar and you'll snap them to it. You can then take other tabs, and you can ness them with each other by going ahead and grabbing the name of the tab, bringing it up next to the other name of the tab and floating it right in there. Or if you've got certain panels that you wanna have, you can click on the name of the tab. You can snap them to the side of the other existing panels, which will then give you more panels. Space are more panels here takes up a lot of space to go ahead and minimize them or collapse them. You can click on the little double ended arrows and then that's going to turn that into this small little icons or the icons with names. Well, how do you get icons and icons with names? Well, you get a little icons by taking and dragging the edge of your panels out. You get the name and the icon, or if you have minimal space like you're using a laptop, you may want to go in and drag those in. Now, as you go through, you're gonna see a lot of icons here. And you're like, Oh, my gosh, you got 60 more icons. Trust me, I haven't even memorized him, Okay, I don't And the reason why I don't is because I actually have very few panels up, and I call it the panels when I need it. So the properties panel is one of those ones that is new in the newer versions of illustrators. So that's something I have open all the time. And then I opened panels as we go. Now, if you're new to illustrator, this is the control bar up here. And not all work spaces have the control bar. What illustrators trying to do is they're trying to get rid of the control bar because with laptops, we have a very limited with of screen space. So the control bar lists all these things. But the problem is, is that it starts getting too wide and you miss a lot of things on your laptop. So the properties panel is a more robust version of your control bar. If you're used to using the control bar, I've used it my entire life all the way since the very beginning of Illustrator 0.88 I don't know what we're up to. Illustrator 20 something who knows. But the control bar has always been there, and you can turn on and turn off the control bar under the window menu. If it's something that when you launch Illustrator, it's not there. You don't use it. Properties panel is gonna work. Great. If you're fond of the control bar window, you can turn on your control bar right there. Next is the toolbar toolbar Zehr Very important. And of course, you need the tools in order to go ahead and work and in different setups here in different work spaces, the toolbar is gonna look different. The toolbar can actually be two columns. It could be one column, and you could just do that by clicking on a little double ended arrows to collapse. And open up your toolbar if you're used to having Illustrator, the new illustrator toolbar looks substantially smaller, and what they have done is they've gotten rid of a lot of tools that air in the toolbar as a default, and they've put them down into little dot, dot, dot down here for all of your other tools that you may not use on a regular basis. And with this it's like, Okay, it's nice, but if you want all your tools in the tool bar, you can always go under the window menu and there's your toolbar and you can have your basic toolbar, which is what the new versions give you. But don't worry about it. You know, you don't have to be like, Well, I like the old way, sure, going to the tool bars and do the advanced and the advance is going to give you all the tools that you were used to having right there. This is what I run because I'm used to it, and I know where all these things are. So a couple things that I do all the time. I'm constantly creating and you'll notice we have a lot of tools in here, and the tools have a little arrow in the lower right hand corner. Almost every tool in the toolbar and illustrator has fly outs, which means there's multiple tools that air nested together. And I'm constantly drawing with lines and shapes here and going back over to the toolbar every single time and clicking on these tools to get access to them. E just I need something that's a whole lot more efficient. So if you click on any nested tool, you get a fly out menu, which you can Then go over and move your cursor to the right hand side and click on that vertical bar that's now going to create what's called a tear off. You simply fly it out. You click on that vertical bar, click and hold. Go to the vertical bar, let go, and you get a tear off, which is floating menu here, which allows you to very easily position these wherever you want. Thio. But then you have the full complement of tools right there for you without having to click and hold and wait. And you know when you have to click and hold that split second between clicking and having it fly out in seem like an eternity. So I like to have my fly out menus right here. Now, once I go ahead and I've set this all up the way I want it to be, I've got my properties panel or any other panels that I want. I got my tool bars. This is where I could go on and I can capture my workspace so that every time I get into Illustrator, if I need to get back to my workspace, I can just go to my workspace. So I've set this up the way I want. Thio could go under workspace, and I can create a new workspace here and I name it and then I've got one already existing. So if I would have this, I could go in and simply click. Okay, Since I already have one existing, this is how I would save the workspace, and I could go into my workspace and just say, Okay, here's my workspace right there. And it gives me everything that I want, just the way I want it every single time. So, of course I didn't save this with my little fly outs open, because if I did, it would capture all of that content as well, so I could begin working whatever way I feel comfortable now under the window menu, these air all the panels and there's too many panels to have open all the time. I opened them as I see fit. I'm not one of those panel hoarders where I have to have every panel and you start moving them all around. I like to keep things nice and simple. I do have my appearance panel on my transformed panel up a lot depending on what I'm doing. But I may call those up a swell, and that's very simple to call up the transformed panel on my appearance panel. And if I want, I can nest those all together so I can have those readily available right there, and I could capture. This is a work space to workspace new workspace. There it is. Click. OK, there is my workspace. And now, if anything gets changed, I can always go back into the window menu, call up my workspace and go right to it with whatever I'm doing. Okay? One interesting thing that may happen is something like this may happen. You're like, Oh, my gosh, What did I just dio? Well, when you hit the tab key tab key is going to go ahead and get rid of all your floating panels. Sometimes people freak out there like Oh, my gosh, what did I just press? Well, remember, it's the tab key, and you could just use the tab key to get it back. But every once in a while, you know, your cat may run across your keyboard or something falls on there, and you're like everything disappeared now I don't know how to get it back. Yeah, it's just the tab key, folks. Not a big deal. Okay, so that's just basically setting up how things are going to look inside here. Now, the next big thing is setting up our preferences. Whether you're on the Mac or the PC, there really isn't that much difference between the application on both of them. The one difference that is going to be noticeable between the Mac and the PC is that the Mac will have a software specific menu here. The PC doesn't have this. Okay, so under preferences here on the Mac, we could go through and edit all of our preferences. Since this doesn't exist on the PC, you go into your edit menu down to the bottom, and that's where your preferences are going to be. So we're just gonna run through our preferences really quick to get kind of an idea of how this is all going toe work. Okay? We're not gonna go through all of it. We're just gonna get kind of a quick overview right here. So certain things when I start off with general Preferences, I got this thing called a keyboard increment. It's like, What's that? Well, keyboard increments are when you're trying to prove something. Do you wanna go and use your up down left, right arrows to nudge things on the keyboard when you use your keyboard, Your arrows? How much you wanted to move every time you do your arrows when you're drawing a box, what do you want? The default corner radius to be? Certainly not 18. to, I don't know. 10. Okay, on a whole bunch of other little check boxes. Here is we go through. We kind of work on some of these things. These were just a whole bunch of boilerplate stuff. Selection and anchor display. When we get into things like selecting corners, corner widgets, curvature, tool, pencil tool, things like that, this is really handy. To be able to go in and see our corners CR anchor points because before things used to be really small and then the latest versions here, they can actually die all that up so you can see the anchor points. The pull handles the coroner's things like that just makes life a little bit easier. Basic type, going in and setting our keyboard shortcuts. Usually these air set to to 20 and two. Which means if I use my keyboard shortcuts and we're gonna learn all about type, use my keyboard shortcuts. This is the increments of the keyboard. Shortcuts are gonna go in. I usually set them toe less than the normal standards. Because this, Like I said, this is normally to 20 and two. And I don't want my keyboard shortcuts to go in that course of increments. So I usually set those for my shortcuts, adjusting the size and letting we're gonna go up and down in one point increments tracking a little bit less than the 20 I do it a 10. So I have a little bit finer adjustments. Basic stuff. Units. How do you want to set up your file? Um, well, right now we have general stroke and type of What does general mean? Well, general means when I'm going in and I'm measuring distance of lines, shapes, circles, corners what you wanted to be You wanted to be in inches, things like that. What do you want to be? Your stroke weight in stroke is normally done in points right there. Actually, I work in millimeters because I love increments of 10 That just makes life so much easier. We're gonna talk about the, uh, units of measure to and some of the cool things that you can do. So setting up your units of measure here are nice. We could do another locations as well. But there's also a couple other things that if you're using millimeters, but you're supposed to be using inches, we'll talk about that. So it's a quick little shortcuts, grids and guides. If you build grid structures, which I do, I build a lot of icons. So using grid structures are really handy. This is where we can set it up. Smart guides, something that we definitely talk about for alignment, distribution, spacing, making sure things draw from or align thio or constraint angles. Yeah, slices right there something that we use for the Web and slices of kind of a bygone era Hyphenation. Plug in scratch disks here. Scratch disks are if you're doing very, um, intensive illustrations or facts right here. You may require a lot of hard drive space so you can go in and you can set up a scratch disk, which is gonna be your hard drive. And if you run out of space or memory, you can plug in like a USB or another hard drive. And then you could go ahead and specify, um, secondary scratch disk that it can kind of use. That is some memory user interface. This is really important here, and we can have super crispy, crispy, original recipe or light and fluffy. This controls the brightness of the whole thing, and you can always go in and set certain things right here. The overall scaling of the user interface right here. So sometimes people like the tools are really small illustrators. Great. You can make them larger if you want Thio. Or maybe it's too too big, you can scale it down. And so it's kind of cool. So if you make this all larger, I actually scale it a little bit bigger here. If you want Thio, it just scales the whole interface little bit larger. So if you know you just need everything just slightly larger to see is people do. From what I understand. Once you hit 30 you know your eyes aren't what they used to be. So this is nice that you could just scale a little bit larger and be able to see performance How this is going to work for you. Um, GPU performance basically speeds up to redraw of things. Um, animated zoom is one of those things that when you click and drag your zoom tool, it, uh, does it in real time. I'm just in old school or turn off animated zoom. I like to zoom in. I'm gonna show you how to zoom in my way, But animated zoom is kind of interesting. Um, one interesting thing with the GPU performance, though, is we have seen in the past that it doesn't render the thickness of the lines correctly. It kind of tapers the lines, they look thick, and then and so sometimes you may have to go in and turn this off. If there's like, a preview issues right there, file handing clipboard here it automatically, um, keeps copies of your files save. So if something crashes, you at least have some recourse right there and then basic stuff on how black appears so interesting. Preferences here. We're gonna hit thes as we go through, because we're gonna need to change these as we go. But those are the basic preferences overall with dealing with our illustrator file. Now, one of the things that I want to talk about here is what kind of work space or what kind of layout we're gonna choose to begin with here. So I'm gonna go into the file menu. We're gonna create a new document under file new. And here comes our new document window right here. Now, depending on what it is that you want to go ahead and create, we've got presets for Mobile. You wanna do mobile creation's Web, print, film, video, art and illustration And under each one of these categories here, they're going to give you a whole list of templates. So maybe you're designing for an IPad or an IPhone or an android or whatever. We've got all these presets here. You're doing something for the web. Different sizes, you know, 10. 24 by 7, 68 12 80 by 10 24. Maybe you're doing something for print, all different sizes, and these are just presets. You can make your own. It's not a problem at all. Film and video right there. And art and illustration. Well, you'll also notice that if you're new to illustrator and you want to go ahead and you want to start building some things each and every one of these settings or presets that we have also has free templates through adobe stock. So if you want to get started and you don't know where to start, I could go into Mobile and do some mobile templates, um, Web templates and print templates as well. There's a whole bunch of these two when you can scroll through all of these things, it z absolutely fantastic, and you could do searches to for Adobe stock. You can buy templates, or you can use the ones that are free here. It's always great to get started finds. We'll use something free start to learn. The biggest difference between the settings here that we have is basically the color mode and the units of measure. So if I'm doing something for the Web or mobile here, everything is always gonna be in pixels, and our color mode is always gonna be an RGB. In our resolution is gonna be 72 pixels branch because that's the standard for anything that's gonna be on a light emanating device. If I'm doing something for print, you'll notice that my everything turns two points because that's how Illustrator decides that the best measurement system isn't points. And it's also going to be in C N y que mode, which is what we use for print cyan, magenta, yellow and black. And then it also makes everything resolution of 300 if you're going to be doing images or any RASTER effects in here. Film and video, of course, is going to be pixels RGB 72 Art and illustration. They also do rgb as well because with art and illustration, they figure is gonna be online. But you can set these later. But if you want to go through and make sure that it's gonna be something for prints, you can do this. But you can also set the more advanced options here. And so you want to do something for our illustration. But you wanted to be in C n y que mode you can not a problem. Okay, it gives you this little warning saying, You know, this may not be the best mode for this here, but you know what? It should be fine. You set the resolution. Whatever you want to be right there. This is also where you could go in. You can set up your units of measure here if you don't want points and you want millimeters instead, you can certainly do that right there. The orientation of everything, making sure that you've got the content where it needs to be. And how many art boards you have there. We're gonna talk about art boards in the next video on how to set up the art boards, how to navigate around. They're not pages, okay, And illustrator, their art boards. So you can set up anything that you want here anyway, that you want to any units of measure any size and simply click create, and it creates your art board for you. There it is. And you're ready to go and do all of your illustration content work, All that great stuff. Now, once you get your documents set up here up at the top here, it tells us what we have in the name of the document and what color mode were in, which is really important because I'm doing something for print. I probably wanna be in C N y que Now I may be doing something, and I realized, Oh my gosh, I started in the wrong color mode. What doe ideo? Well, it's not that big of a deal, because you can always convert the's at any point along the way. If I'm doing something in C M. Y que Obviously C M Y K does not display on the Web because all the Web stuff telephones, uh, ipads video. Everything's RGB. I can always go back under my file menu under my document color mode, and I can simply switch from one color mode to another. And then all my artwork is also going to switch in color mode as well. So it's not a big deal. You don't have to start over. Okay, now, when it comes to tools, we got a lot of tools in here. And the great thing is, you can hover over any one of your tools, and it gives you a tool hint about what's going on. So I have the selection tool. I have the direct selection tool, magic wand, pen tool lasso, drawing tools, polygon eraser scale with shaped tools, shape builder. It's like, Oh my gosh, all this stuff. Oh, yeah, No, I mean, it's it's crazy, amazing the amount of tools that we have in here, and there's a lot of shortcuts with the tools as well. So when you learn these shortcuts, if you're familiar with the other Adobe software, you're gonna understand that there's a lot of short cuts that are similar, if not the same. So learn the shortcuts for the tools that you're going to use all the time. The selection tool. You're gonna use that. Okay, it's like a fork. You know, you're always going to use the fork. Selection is V right there. The type tool is t the hand tools H zoom tool is Z and so moving around and navigating this right here. You know, the basic understanding of these shortcuts is really good toe have now. A lot of tools will have shortcuts, but some of the tools don't have shortcuts. And so, if you go to, like are drawing tools the rectangle tool, we use that all the time. It's m just hit them on your keyboard and you get that lips is l. You know when you want to draw a normal line, that's just your back slash right? They're going in and using your type tool? Yeah, type tool is simply t There it is. It's like, Okay, direct selection tool is a you know, magic one tool. There's your other tools right there. Magic wand tool is why So you can learn these shortcuts just by hovering over them right there. Now, if there is a tool that you use all the time and there is no shortcut associated with it, that could be kind of annoying. But you can create your own shortcuts. And when you go in and you want to find shortcuts or you want to edit your shortcuts a couple things here when you go in and you're working with any of the menus here, if I go into the edit menu, you can see that under the edit menu. Here's all my shortcuts, by the way. Okay, I'm on a Mac, So we've got our option shift command and little four leaf Clovers Command. This little ramp is our option. And, of course, our shift key. So we could learn my shortcuts pretty easily just by using the drop down menus to find out what those shortcuts are. if I use something all the time, I'm in a menu here, and I realize that there's certain things that just don't have a shortcut because there is no shortcut associated with it. I could make my own, and I can keep those in my applications that those shortcuts are there for me to use all the time. Yeah, I can do that by going under the edit menu, going under the keyboard shortcuts here. This is where I can also see where the shortcuts are from my tools. But if there is a shortcut that I wanna add, I can add them to my tools as well. Now we've got shortcuts for our tools. We've got shortcuts for all of our menu commands. We have each menu, so the illustrator file edit Object type Select menu here. And this is every single item in every single menu right here, whether there's a shortcut associated with it or not. Now there's certain things. I was doing one project where I was in here and I was constantly using the Ark tool always, and I was using the Ark tool, and it's like, Why do I have to keep going back and selecting this thing, I'm gonna do a shortcut for it. So in my keyboard shortcuts here I could go in and I can click on the shortcut that I want for it right here. And if I want my spiral tool to B s, I type it in here and it's like, Hey, wait, a second s has already used for the scale tool. And it's like, you know, if you don't use the scale tool in this shortcut, do you wanna use asked to go ahead and create the arc right here? It's like, Oh, you know, you're right. I should believe that. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna do are on. It's like ours with rotate tool. It's like how I use that. Let me try shift our do that. And it's like, Oh, that's for the warp tool. It's like, You know what? I don't use the warp tool, so shift our is gonna work really good for me because I don't use the warp tool. If I do, I just access it through the menu. But I use the Ark tool all the time. So if I do this and I do the shift are right here. And I could do shift our shift option are I can do option are right here and so actually can't dio option right here. I can do shift. So if I do shift our it's great. Awesome. There it is. And now I could go ahead and set that as a shortcut. Click. OK, now, if I remember that, I'm gonna set this. So this is my new shortcut set. So it keeps track of my shortcuts here and illustrator if I spell this correctly, there it is. Now if I forget those shortcuts right there, look at that. When I make it, it's actually there in my toolbar. It's like, Oh, cool. That's right. Oh, I did set that. You're right. So now if I do shift our there is my art tool and it's like, That's sweet. Sure, not everything has a shortcut, but you can set your own shortcuts for any tool or any menu right there. Now, this is also where you can go in and just do a quick little preview of these things. And I don't know if you've ever seen those posters online that you spend 25 or $30 that have all the shortcuts on them. Here's old trick. Folks. Don't spend the money, create your own call up your shortcuts, export the text and it just comes out is one big file with all the stuff in here. And you conform at it anyway, that you want to put it on your wall and save yourself the 25 or $30. Or better yet, set it all up and then sell yours for 25 or $30. So cool stuff that you can dio Shortcuts are absolutely great. And editing those shortcuts can be quite beneficial as well. So when you get into something that you're very comfortable with and you find you keep using these tools, this is where you want to go in and you really want to be able thio work with these tools, set up your shortcuts, get to feel comfortable all about them and understand how these things you're gonna work for you, um, with the tool bars and also with your workspaces to so that you get everything that you want. Thio have the way you want to and feel really comfortable with your content.