Lessons

Lesson Info

Creating Guides and Multiple Artboards

gonna jump back in and just talk a little bit more about the environment, and that's what I want to do is make sure everybody is comfortable in the environment. You were saying just a minute ago that, you know, you see all the tools and everything, but sometimes just trying to get familiar with what you know, where they are and why they are and all that. And that's that's something I feel overwhelmed by when I started. New application is what is all this stuff. It just looks like it's all thrown at me and I see some great things, but I feel like I can't do it. So I want everybody to feel like, you know, they kind of know what everything is, and at least we're not gonna go over everything but at least feel comfortable to venture out and try the other tools and try other other panels, things like that. So we talked a little bit about setting the color of guides, and I just want to talk a little bit about guides. And so there's smart guides, which were introduced a few versions back, and ...

so that leaves us with the other guides which I don't want to call him Dumb guides. But I call him not so smart guides, right? There's kind of guides. You know, There's actually a term that when you you've always just had the term guides and then you have this other guy. Now you have to come up with another term to say what the old ones were. You know, like black and white TV. Well, in the old days, that was just called TV, right? So I don't know to call those not so smart guides. So to get guides on the page, the regular guys, they're not so smart guides. Well, we need rulers on the page. Someone new, commander Control are to get those rulers on. And I'm just gonna go ahead and go upto one of the rulers. So I'm gonna go to the horizontal ruler to get a horizontal guide. I'm just going to drag down. So getting mother's pretty easy. Oh, it looks like we've stuck them with the dashed We went with dash guides. Let's actually clothes that I don't like the dash guides and we do Commander controlled K Tau open up my preferences, elected guides and go back toe lines and go ahead and keep him orange. Actually, those were kind of nice. I could actually see those very nicely on here. So we're gonna stick with those Commander control are to bring that open and dragged down a guide. I said, it looks blue. You're thinking we just changed. Um orange. Well, it's because its selected since I grab another one, it's selected. If I click off of it now, it's de selected, so this might be a little darker than you would probably want to work with, but I think it's easy to see on the screen here, so they're just guide. So I put these guides on the page. Why do I have guides on the page? Well, I want a line things up. I want things to snap to them. When I draw summer drought, a few more. I'm gonna come over to the vertical ruler and droughts, um, vertical guides as well. And obviously I would probably be paying attention to what the location was like. For instance, I'm looking at the ruler on the top, and I can see that it's sitting right at six inches, so I probably would want to have that. So I know that that's exactly it. Six inches, right? So I can grab them. I can select an item and I could move them. I could move that just like I would any other item on the page. I can grab guides and move them. Where I find this kind of confusing is if I have an item on the page and I want to select something, let's say I have this item and will draw shapes in just a second. But in this case, I've drawn a rectangle. And if I want to select the rectangle and I drag across, I know the rectangles there. I selected the rectangle I could tell because it's out outlined, but so is my guide. So if I hit delete, I've gotten rid of the rectangle and the guide. Well, the guides should be kind of permanent right there, kind of your foundation, how you were drawing things so we can actually choose to lock our guides. So right, click or control, click on the page with nothing selected, and I can choose toe lock the guides. Now when I draw out a guide and let go, you know it's not even selected anymore. Once I plopped it on the page, it's locked, so I can't actually move it. I can't select across it. I'm not hitting that guide at all. And for me, that just works like in design. And because I came from in design to illustrator, that to me just makes a lot more sense toe lock my guides. Because if I've taken all the time to set up these guides, I don't want them moving around going crazy right side. Go ahead and work with them just like I would any other object. I could always unlock the guides. There's also a trick to putting him on a separate layer, and we're not really gonna cover layers today. But we could put him on a separate layer and lock that layer as well done, select or de select that so I can actually select the guides and pull them off. So why do we have the guides there? Well, when I draw out an item or when I move an item like I said, it will snap to that. So it's actually I'm going to just draw on the lips and again we'll draw in just a little while. But I have this item, and when I move it and it gets close to the guide, it snaps. Don't even kind of see how it's kind of grabbing it. Gravitational pull, its grabbing it and sucking it in just says, Sit right here. This is where I wanted to be and it's just going to snap in to this box, and this is called the Bounding box. And this is what all the images, everything we place in Illustrator has to live in a rectangular world. Even though it's an Ellipse, you notice it still fits in this rectangular box, making our round pegs fit in our square holes, right? So those air regular guides I'm going to select all of those and again, you know. So I selected and I can either click on an item or I can shift click on an item to select multiple ones, or I can drag across from holding down the shift key to drag across all those as well. And grab that guy right so I could do that and delete them. But a smart guide, smart guides are a little different. Let's actually open up, Let's go to my butterflies again, and I can have smart guys. I want to make sure my smart guides are on. So I'm going to go back into my preferences Commander Control K or under the Illustrator menu on A Mac or Under Edit under PC. And I'm gonna go back down to smart guides, and I want to make sure that they're turned on and there isn't an on off preference, but I have all the individual items for smart guys. I need to make sure some of them are turned on, and we'll turn these on and off in just a second as well. And my smart guides are this bright green, and actually, I'm not sure we'll be able to see that on screen. Let's make that just maybe not quite so bright. Let's go with that. So say okay and what a smart guy does is it knows when you're moving close to something else and it lines it up so I don't have to draw out all those guides necessarily ahead of time. I don't know that I want this butterfly to sit at three inches. I just plopped him on the page, but I know I want this next guy to kind of be lined up in the same fashion, so I'm gonna zoom middle of us. We can see it. So again, here's that square bounding box. Even though as I roll over each object, you can see all the different pieces that make up this one item. I can move this over. But I see this bounding box because again, I've got all those items and they're all grouped together there. One item. But I'm gonna grab this guy now and I have his green line, you know, is going out from here. They're shooting out the bottom, the sides, and I can tell it when I get up close, it will tell me when something is lined up. So the middle of my item is being shown right now and I can show in that middle is lined up with the bottom of the item next to it. The other thing I can do, let's move this guy off the page of it. By moving this item over, it will tell me what I'm centered, you see, sort of the purplish line sitting on the bottom that's telling me that I'm centered on the page. If I were determined rulers on, I could look at about four and 1/4 inches. That's where the the middle of the pages I can see. It tells me when it's centered. If I were to get rid of these other guys here is well and drag this down, just levels. We could see the center of our page coming or not only is it centered, left and right, but will tell me when it's centered completely on the page. It tells me where the intersection is. The top of the box now is sitting there intersected on the page. Now it depends what shows up, just depending on what else is on the page. So everything that zoom when you're zoomed in it will show you relative to the other items I find it's a little weird sometimes where it doesn't show me when two tops of an item are lined up. So, for instance, if I actually draw an item, let's actually draw out two rectangles and again. Now I can see all these guides that are being drawn as I'm working and let's actually just gonna give it a stroke, and we're gonna actually talk about this in just a little while. But if I were drawing that item again, I can see when things were lined up to the top. And now, even though I'm not doing the same thickness, I can also see when things were lined up to the bottom. Or if I've got another item sitting here and I want to line it up, I can come up here and say, Okay, these air lined up to the centers. It's not lining up to the top. That's what I really wanted to tell me is when it's lined up to the top, but it's not actually doing that. But if you notice it's telling me where things are lined up, it's got that little gray box that's telling me where it sits on the page. Now it's telling me that it's sitting centered until it's centered on the page. So again, those items, that's what it's telling me. But as you can see, there's a lot of lines flying off here. In here, you can turn some of those on and off, back in the preferences, Commander Control. Okay, back to preferences, and it come down to smart guides I can tell it. Show me alignment guides. That's where it showed me when it's lined up to the tops of the sides and again, for whatever reason, it it's not doing the tops. I would really it used to do it if I've done something wrong, but I can have that set up there. I can also tell it the anchor and path labels. That's where I was rolling over each thing here, and it was highlighting each thing and saying, Path Path anchor shows me where every point and every segment is on an object. That's great if you're trying to figure out like where things are, especially if you get something from somebody else you're trying to figure out they built it. But having those things flash on and off all the time can be a pain. You can turn that off and the measurement labels. This is the bit that's in the gray box. I generally have that off. I don't really want to know that as I'm moving it around, because I can never get precise enough anyway to get it in the right spot, so it really doesn't do me a lot of good But there's a lot of different different options we can turn on in here and again. Wouldn't is it snap in? So if you've given it a four point tolerance with when it gets within four points of, say, the center or that other object, it's gonna pull it in and snap it. You can set that tolerance separately, so it's not quite so annoying, and you could turn it so that you know it. Zero. It has to be right exactly in the right place. All right, so the smart guides are great because it means you don't have to necessarily grid out everything. Lay out everything with guides Before he starts putting stuff on the page, you can put stuff on the page and then start lining it visually to that. So it's kind of a nice kind of meet me middle point between being having everything laid out, completely integrate ahead of time and being that person that just eyeballs everything because I used to just hate when people I built everything. But the nice thing is I can eyeball it, and then it kind of uses the guides to really guide me in right at the last moment. So smart guys, I think a really good thing. It just sometimes they give me too much information, so feel free to turn off the stuff that doesn't work for you at all. And again, it's why it's called a preference. Do it. It is best for you. You want to be able to work as smart as you can with the tools that you have and not not have too little information and not have too much information. All right, those air guides. Let's talk about our art boards. All right, so I went ahead and open. This document has won our board, but I want to add some other art boards along the way. Maybe we want to do the, you know, the different business card, letterhead, envelopes, something like that. And so I actually have set up for that as well, and we'll open that in a minute. Let's say we started with this one. This is one our board. We told it, it's one our board. It's letter size, and I want to create Ah, whole new airport. I've got a couple different ways to do that. I can either open up the art board tool and click on that and start drawing one out. Or I can use the our board panel. And that's this little our board for this little panel that's here. So I click on that. I have the airport panel and I can create a new one just by clicking the new our border here, someone do that. It's gonna open one up. But you notice that opened up right next to it exactly the same. That's fine. But I like that because if I drop my hand, I have to actually again use my smart guides to make sure it's lined up. But by doing this, I know it went ahead and put it in that nice extra column. But now I want to make some changes to It's not the right size to begin with. So over here in the art board panel, I've got this little art board tool, which is the same as the airport tool over here so I could do it. Either way, I can click on the our portal, and when I do that, you notice it suddenly kind of isolates it. The background gets darker. We kind of focus just on the art board. And it says that I have this one called our board too, and our board one and this one selected. But come over here and click Now. This one's highlighted, right? So I can just use the airport tool to get around. And now what I've been doing is changing the size of this art board so I can come over here and just say, I'm just gonna throw that like that, all right? So I can visually do it if I want. I can use the rulers if I want. When undo that. What I really want to do, though, is do it numerically. I just I know exactly what size it needs to be. Sometimes I'm just making our borders just so I have separate once, and I'll just drag him to size and not really worry about it, or I've got artwork that have copied off of one and put off on the pace board. I'll create in our board underneath it, and I just need the airport to be a little bit bigger than the artwork, and that's it. In this case, we know we want business cards. Those there a specific size So I'm gonna go back to the art board panel and click on the little button and I'm probably gonna give it a name. I don't like it just being called our board to Let's call it business cards. Go ahead and put the information in here just like we did when we started our document. I'm sorry. 3.5. Let's do it this way. 3.5 by two inches there. And I wanted to go ahead and be centered reference from the center point. So whatever you're doing measurements, it'll ask you where you referencing that from the upper left or the center. So everything grows outwards? Well, I want to keep it that way, and I'm gonna go ahead and make it. It's already set for me as Lansky portrait. I can also do things like put center marks, crosshairs or from working on video. I can look at video safe areas. You know, that's something I'm doing. I'm not doing any of that. I'm gonna say OK, and now I've got my my board here. Now you notice because the reference point it good in this way. Let's undo that. Let me go backwards here. If I tell it, do it from the upper left and we do it 3.5 by two. If I do that now, it grew from the upper left, which is great. Now I haven't lined up with the top of that on board. Now, it's not a big deal, but I just don't like things kind of thrown all over the page. I could I could just totally dragged this somewhere else. I can set it wherever I want. All right. So, again, I want to make sure that it has a good name. I could just go ahead and name it here if I want double click on it. We'll call this BC and then I'm going to double click on this one will call that l age for letterhead and again. Keyboard shortcut command option zero or control all zero to fit in page. And I want to make 1/3 1 so we'll just go and click. That will set. Airport number three will call this Call this envelope. All right. And I can drag it by hand if I want again. I have to be in the art board tool to do this and I can line this up. You know, it's I get my smart guides saying, OK, it's lined up here. Great. Now I've got it set where I want. Maybe I can pull it up So it's close and it's not telling me when the distance is the same. Sometimes on certain objects, it will tell me when things were the same distance. It's not doing it here, but that's right. I'm going to click on the our board tool and tell it what size it is. If I could remember what size a number 10 envelope is, you notice it rounded its 100.1 to 5 around it for me. But again. Now I have that all set up and everything in the same window. And again, whichever one I've selected becomes highlighted. Or if you can see that Melissa, do you have to be in our board? Tool teas are board panel. Do I not to be able to use it? No. But as soon as I click on it, if I can come in here and make changes to the name or jump around, you know, so I can double click on each, not in the our board tool. That's what this is here. So soon as I click on the little I convent, I'm in the tool and it's it's isolated it and hit the tool. If I'm just using the tool and moving around when I'm done, I need to hit escape to get out of that mode that's there. Otherwise, it just thinks I'm working with the art board measurements and not the measurements of whatever is on the page sense. Okay, so the airport tools pretty cool, because I can create them and tell them where I want them to be in line them up really nicely. Now I can take this our boards and I could like to say I can move them around if I use the tool and I decide I want these here, Maybe I want him to look more like pages. I want them to be in columns. I can totally do that, which is one of the choices that we had in the beginning was to doing all in one column or all in one row instead of doing this grid. Maybe you really don't want to see them together if you're thinking of them like pages. You may wanna have single our ports all the way down, even for me. If I'm doing it, I'd rather have, like, 200 page just so I can see him. But a lot of people I know like toe have, um just lined up all in a all in a row. Makes sense our ports. Now, you said you might have bushes that kind of clear up. Some of the confusion on the airports are Yeah, so just tryingto understand the inherent differences between working and pages versus working in our ports if you want. If you're doing your layout like the whole layout likes, let's say you're doing a 12 page brochure or something again. It's not something I would recommend to use illustrator for, but I know people that do it. I just find that the maintaining 12 separate items doesn't work as well. Assay using master pages in in design where you could make a change once and have it rippled down. That's the one thing that that illustrators kind of missing. As far as that goes, is that you have the same elements everywhere. But if you update one, you've got to update them in all the places. So this faras, what I usually think of is I don't think of multiple pages in illustrator I think of as the different elements that I'm gonna creating and probably putting in in design separately. So I might have these three things are kind of connected. I want them in the same documents so I can see them together. But I'm a place them separately because I'm gonna use a letterhead in one place and I might use a business card. It might be going Teoh PdF and we're gonna print it online and the envelopes gonna go to a printer and my letterhead is actually gonna be printed out on my into my accounting software or something like that. So I just like them together to maintain them. But you could do Emma's pages, but you just don't have sort of the same page architecture you do in page layout program like in design. So question over there. Well, that's great airtime. And that's that's exactly what Becks was saying in the chat rooms. I always thought you should create business materials and in design and create the elements you would need an illustrator and so just was looking. Yeah, thinking, Yeah, I mean, I think they're bridging the gap, and I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Yet I think having them separate is good because I think each one has its its purpose. And page layout is not the purpose of Illustrator, Right? So right, well and it. But it's nice to be able to see the pieces that you're putting together exactly. And Angie agrees. She said, The art board is going to save me so much time and excellent. Excellent. Yes, it really it does come in handy, like I say, to have everything there at the same time. Sometimes, though, I find that I get too many things in one document, and it's too much to maintain, um, for whatever reason. But when we play some images later, I think you'll see that having them all in the same place, being ableto update them all at once is really helpful when we start working with exterior images safe from photo shop or something. If I placed my logo, even if it's another in design, five placed it in three places. I see that all together, but then when I make a change and make it change in one file and it updates everywhere and that's super super handy as well.