Lesson Info
2. Zoom and Navigation
Lessons
Class Introduction
05:01 2Zoom and Navigation
10:31 3Create a New Document
02:19 4Drawing Shapes
12:50 5Properties Panel
02:57 6Live Shapes and Transform Panel
07:16 7Drawing Lines
06:42 8Combine Shapes
08:32Lesson Info
Zoom and Navigation
There are a lot of panels here, an illustrator. And if you go under your window menu, these are all the different panels that you can have an illustrator to dio numerous things right now. I've got my properties panel in my layers panel in my libraries panel up here as a default when I launch. But I may want to work with a whole bunch of other panels as we will when we work through this entire illustrator class. So I'll go under my window menu and I'm gonna call up my art board panel when I launch any panel, it may come up as a single panel, but it may come back or may come up as a set of nested panels with multiple panels together. Now, when I get a lot of panels on my document, you can see a cover up a lot of my usable space. So what I'd like to do is I'd like to nest these together like my properties. My layers and my library panels have been nested together, and I can do that by going to my floating panel, clicking on the name of that floating panel, and then they can drag that name...
up to next to any of my other tabs. Here you will see that I'll get a blue border around my nesting area and then my new panel. I'm dragging in there. We'll go dim showing me. I'm gonna ness this in there. Now it's nest it all together, and I can use the tabs to get through all of my nested panels. If I would like to remove a panel from my set of panels, simply click on the name of the tab of that panel, and I can drag that out separately if I'd like to use that separately. And if I want to close that, simply click on the X in the upper left hand corner and that panel goes away. I do want my art boards panels because I need to navigate through my document now in Illustrator, we don't have pages, these air called art boards, and the reason why is because we don't really do page layout an illustrator. This is Mork creation and tight manipulation, so art boards are how we work now to navigate through everything that you want to work with. Here you can go through call a pure art boards panel and you can see we can click double click on each one of the numbers here to walk us through the number of art boards in our document really quick and easy to navigate and be able to go through an editor. Art boards Now. I accidentally referred to these pages all the time, but I have to keep reminding myself that these air art boards. So how do you get more art boards in your document or manager art boards? Well, it's actually pretty easy if we go back over to our properties panel here and we go over and we select our art board tool in our toolbar right there. We can go through and we can see some of our properties with our art boards. Here we can create new art board. We can remove art boards, and we can change the orientation of our art boards as well. When we are in our art board tool, Zoom out here and you can see when I have my art board tool activated. I can now go in, and I can pull the corners of my art board to resize this in my properties panel. I can go ahead and rename that art board. And if I want to add new art boards, Aiken simply click on the new art board feature and get a new art board. So it's not pages. It's called art boards, and it works slightly different from what you may be used to and in design. And that's what we have an illustrator. Now, once you get comfortable with illustrator and you begin to set up your tools the way you like them, your panels, the way you like them, what's really nice to do is be able to capture everything the way you like that. So just in case somebody else uses something or things get moved around, we're going to capture everything that we have in here as a workspace. Wherever you put your panels, whatever you have up and preface and preferences that you set, you can go into the window menu under workspace. And Illustrator has several different preset workspaces based on the type of artwork you want to create. Well, I would like to go ahead and create my own panel set up, which I've done right here, and I can go be in and I can capture everything that I've done here as a new workspace I'm gonna capture. That is a new workspace. Aiken, choose this workspace. I can name this. And then any time that I log onto Illustrator and start to work, I can go right back to my workspace and I can get all my panels and all my lay out exactly the way I want. Teoh. Very nice toe. Have you could have as many workspaces as you want? Works really good. There it is. There's a quick overview of working around the illustrator workspace. We're gonna jump to our next our next page. See, I just said it's not a page. Is an art board do that all the time going to go to my art board panel? I'm going to double click on page two and I'm going to zoom out here. And speaking of zooming out and moving all around navigating, getting around the illustrator document quick and easy. So first off, being able to zoom in and zoom out Well, some of my favorite things that I've used for a long time under the view menu zoom in and zoom out command plus zooms in command. Mine assumes out Command zero fit everything to the window Command one actual size. Really good stuff. You're on a PC. It's just simply control plus minus zero and one. You'll see me zooming in and zooming out the whole time. That's what I'm doing now. Pretty easy to do. The zoom tool, however, is something that I absolutely love and a zoom tool over here in the toolbar you'll notice as you get to use illustrator. A lot of these keys have shortcuts. What are those shortcuts? While I've listed a lot of them in my hand out here as well as being able to go over to the toolbar, all you have to do is hover over that tool. It tells you what it is, and if there is a shortcut associated with it, it will simply show up next to the tool. Zoom Tool is easy. We're good to go. If I press the letter Z, I get my zoom tool. People use the zoom tool in kind of a weird way. They click and they click and they click and it bounces all around the screen and quite frankly, drives me nuts. OK and Here's the reason why I tell people used the zoom tool like you mean it. And what I use the zoom tool for is if I'd like to zoom into something, I click and I dragged over the whole thing and I select that and I zoom in, and that makes it full screen. Now, when you try this, it may do something slightly different, which is a perfect Segway into messing with our preferences. Now preferences here, if you're on the Mac, are going to be under the illustrator menu under preferences. If you're on the PC, you're going to be under the edit menu at the bottom of preferences. Really, that's about the only difference between the Mac and the PC versions of Illustrator Preferences. When I go into preferences here, one of the things that the zoom tool is set as a default in a new version here is I've got to find that I got to go through my find out where my zoom tool is because I can never remember where the Zoom tool is. Performance right here. When you launch illustrator, your zoom tool will probably set as an animated zoom. Now, the reason why we're talking about the animated zoom here is because some people have noticed some issue with the performance of illustrator where it doesn't render the type correctly, or they may get kind of a slow working illustrator. One of the things you can do is you can turn off your GPU performance, which will go ahead and speed things up a little bit. You're animated Zoom, which I'm going to show you right now is when you take your zoom tool. Before I would click and drag over this and create a selected area to zoom in big with the animated zoom I click and I pulled down into the right to zoom in and then go up into the left to zoom out So that animated zoom Super, super, super cool. Okay, Now for you shortcut people who love shortcuts. Check this out. I use the zoom tool all the time to navigate, and I don't want to stop what I'm doing or even just simply type Z on the keyboard to get to that, I'd rather just zoom in right now. Command space bar is going to give me my zoom tool. There it is. Command space bar will activate the zoom tool any time. That's great. Command space bar. I can zoom in, zoom out. Fantastic. The next thing moving around the page. Scroll bars. Now that went out with the eighties. Okay, big hair, pastels. All that stuff gone. So scroll bars were not something I ever use. The hand tool is what I use on their it iss waving at you right there. Say hi to the hand tool. H is the hand tool and take the hand tool. Grab your screen. Move it all around. Now, when I'm using the hand tool, do I go over and select the hand tool? No. Don't have time. Shortcut for the hand tool. Fantastic. Go ahead and hold the hand tool. We hold the space bar to get the hand tool, and you can move that around. There it is. Space bar will activate the hand tool. Awesome. Now what? I'm using this, uh, zoom in, zoom out in the space bar to get the hand tool here. Things can get kind of a little bit crazy as I'm moving along. Now, if you can't remember the command plus in command by NUS and command zero and command one here. Super simple shortcuts zoom in or fit to window. If I double click on the hand tool, it's going to fit everything into my window. If I double click on that zoom tool, it's gonna fit everything at actual size. How awesome is that? So, yeah, I could use my command plus in command minus and command zero in one. But double click in the hand tool fits to the window. Double click on the zoom tool. Actual size. Okay, that works in other adobe applications. It's well, it's not just illustrator, so super cool stuff scrolling through multiple art boards. Here. You can have any tool active here, and if you want to scroll through, sure, you could just use your scroll wheel and scroll through all of these. You can also go over your art boards and navigate through it that way. Lots of cool stuff that you can dio and I know some people are not big fans of shortcuts, but you know what these kind of shortcuts work on so many of the adobe applications. It's like, Why not learn him? It's a lot of fun
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Ratings and Reviews
Pattianne Pascual
This is magnificent! What a beautiful gift. I am 56 and always learning. This free class inspired me even more. I will be telling everyone about creative live,sharing and urging others to buy some of these great classes and bundles. Thank you so very much,again and again.i look forward to taking classes on a regular basis.
Sherrie Alexander
Jason was super knowledgeable, made working in illustrator fun and simplified . Love his easy to follow instructions. As we all know starting up in illustrator can be overwhelming. Thank you so much I needed this!
a Creativelive Student
Great job, several ah ha moments and throw in a few wow's. I thought I had better than a basic knowledge only to find out how little I really knew. The short cuts, shapes and highlight noodles just to name a few. Well worth it. This would have made learning AI so much easier than when I did. Thank you Jason,
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Adobe Illustrator