Transcripts
1. 1. Introduction: Hi. My name is Brad Woodard. I'm a graphic designer and illustrator, and I'm one half of Brave the Woods, a design and illustrations studio that I run with my wife down here in Austin, Texas. This course is called, The Fundamentals of Adobe illustrator one. I'm going to be teaching a few more courses on illustrator, and down the road, this is just the very very beginning. So, if you're starting this journey on learning how to use Adobe illustrator and this is your very first time, welcome. This is the perfect class for you. What I want to do is, I want to teach you how to feel more comfortable within it, by showing you the basic tools, helping you navigate and and demystifying a few things in the toolbars, and in the program for you to make it something that isn't so overwhelming. Every time you open up new software, it can be a bit intimidating. So, hopefully, we can take that away, and walk you through this step by step. So, the project I want you to do is, to set up your own works pace. Just as if you would take your physical desk and rearrange your items on it to make it. So, you're more efficient when you work, and it's more comfortable, you can do the same thing in Adobe illustrator. You can rearrange your tools, get rid of tools, bring more tools in, do whatever you need to make it so that you can work more efficiently down the road. So, Adobe illustrator, is just an amazingly flexible program as well, that you'll notice. So, how old is the classes? I'll be doing a series of videos, I will be sharing the screen with you, so that you can go ahead and see how I navigate through. So, the first lesson will be, just what the possibilities are within Adobe illustrator? Then, we'll go into setting up your very first document, and laying that foundation and groundwork for your project the right way, and then we'll walk through some basic tools, help you navigate through it, and know how to maneuver around the space, and then setting up your work space as I said. Finally, saving your documents. So, I use Adobe illustrator almost every single day on all my projects, and I find more ways to to incorporate illustrator even when I'm working in Photoshop or in design, there's so many possibilities, and things that I can do. In all those other programs, I can do them all on illustrator. Not that I need to or that I should all the time because they obviously have their reasons for, and there are perks to using them. But Adobe illustrator is just that flexible. So, it makes things easier for me, and I love the program, and I'm excited to teach it to you. So, I'm excited for you to start the courses, and really start diving into the basics, and how to set up your very first document. I'm glad to be here with you doing that. So, I'll see you in the other videos.
2. 2. Create a custom workspace: So, this video we're going to be talking about the possibilities within Illustrator. You know there's so many things that people don't know Illustrator can do and it's a really really versatile program. So, you know things like Photoshop or other software like InDesign and they all have their specific uses but the great thing about Illustrator is that it kinda dips into all of those different programs and I find you can do almost anything within Illustrator. So it kinda becomes my go-to. But let's talk about why I use Illustrator specifically. One of the biggest reasons why I use Illustrators because I like vector images and creating vector graphics over raster graphics. So, with Adobe Photoshop you'll end up using everything is created out of pixels which is a rasterized image. So it's built up of all those little tiny blocks of color that when you put them all together you see your image but with vector graphics in an Illustrator, it's just made out of closed paths. So, what that means, is that you're not using pixels, it's just out of close path objects which is you could take an item, like you could build an icon in Illustrator and if you wanted to blow it up the size of a billboard you could not lose any equality, which is awesome. So in Photoshop, whenever you set your image to the size, if you make it any larger than that you're going to start seeing some pixelation because those little squares, those pixels are going to start getting bigger and you're going to start noticing it, lose some some quality there. So, for example, here's illustrator. Actually let me show you, here's Photoshop. So, if I were to, this is dragonfly here I built it out in an Illustrator but I brought it into Photoshop so now it is a rasterized image and now it's pixelized. So it looks great here but if I were to zoom in, you'll start to notice that it's made out of these little blocks and you'll start losing some colors. So, if you were to make this larger and blow it up this is what you would see instead of this clear image right here. So, that's the downfall of making things out of using raster images in Photoshop. But if you're in Illustrator, the great thing about that is if you were to zoom in, it doesn't matter how far you zoom in it's going to stay clear as a bell. So you don't lose any quality no matter how you scale it. So what that does for me is great when I'm working with clients and on tight deadlines or if they need to make lot of edits. It's great because I can go ahead and make changes on the fly and not worry about how I set up the image at the very beginning because size-wise it won't matter because however I do it here in an Illustrator I can just blow it up or alter it. So again, so that's the difference between raster and vector but you just editing images. So these are all different shapes and stuff like that and you can do that with layers in Photoshop but what's cool is you can just kind of click on different points at different points on the shapes and you can alter them however you want, you can alter things very very quickly, and changing color in areas and stuff like that is a lot simpler in a Illustrator. There's a lot more things that you can edit and quicker and not lose quality. So, those are the two biggest things that I like it for. But just if you want to have things very precise and kinda more technical, you'd like to build with shapes, perfect for that because there's so many ways that we will learn later on how we can subtract shapes, build shapes and that's kind of how I see Illustrator and how it differs from everything else. Is you more build your graphics rather than draw them, where in other programs you kind of draw and it's a little more free hand, you can definitely do that in the Illustrator but with Illustrator, the thing it has that others don't is its capability of building with shapes and how precise it can be. So, just take that into consideration as you're thinking about how you build things and that's kind of how I approach it. So, Illustrator is great for print and web, which is awesome and so let me show you some examples of things that you can do in Illustrator, kind of get you excited about the possibilities but also just maybe show you what you haven't seen before. So, none of these images are mine obviously, but I just kind of drag and drop some things that I think were perfect to be built in elsewhere. If they weren't made in Illustrator, they definitely could. You could definitely render them in Illustrator if you wanted to. So, things like patterns repeatable, seamless patterns are great to make an Illustrator because like I said you can make them large or small, doesn't matter but you can build it in and you can kind off keep. That's another thing with building vector images, you can keep your file sizes very small for keeping that amount of quality. If you're going to keep that kind of quality in a raster image, you'd have to make it huge and it would slow down your computer, fill up your hard drive, all that type of stuff. So, vector images are very small file sizes but they can keep that quality. So, going along you can draw, you can kind of tell how technical some of these things are, in Australian geometric sum. Some of these icons or these illustrations tend to be. That's a good indicator that it was built in Illustrator and if it wasn't a definitely could be and it'll be a really quick easy process. As you can see you can start adding, you can even add textures, you can make it feel a little more hand-drawn around the edges like I did for this camp nano rhino poster. Here you can see how it's kind of the jagged edges there and I kinda made it feel a little bit more stamped or however printed and that's something I did all in Illustrator. So, obviously like these old ads they weren't made an Illustrator but they definitely could be. You can get really detailed. It really detailed make it look very realistic which actually helps you in other types of artwork to UI which I'll show you in a second. But one of the biggest things that people use Illustrator for now is lettering, because you can customize letters, you can build them, shape them and all that type of things and even build typefaces that wouldn't be the choice I guess, amongst the actual typographers if they were willing to build a full typeface but most people make all their custom lettering within Adobe Illustrator and easily editable like I said, and you can see some examples of what people have done and then you can use things within, you can do lot of things for web or for mobile apps and things like that like here iconography. You can make things look more realistic and buttons and interfaces, data visualizations. All that type of stuff is great and you can even generate all your graphs within Illustrator and a lot of really really cool things that you can do here. So, I hope this gives you a good idea of what's possible and helps you get a little bit excited about what you're going to be learning. So, looking forward to talking about them, how to set up your document in the next video. So, thank you.
3. 3. Document Setup: Let's go ahead and set up our first document in Adobe Illustrator. Now, it may seem daunting thinking about all the new tools and the interface and all those things that push us away from the program. But I'm going to walk you through it slowly and help you set up your first document and avoid some pitfalls later on, but help you feel a little bit more comfortable with some of the lingo that they're using within the program and in case gets set up for your first project. So, let's go ahead and go down here and click on Adobe Illustrator CC. That's what I have, the Creative Cloud version. If you're using an older version like CS5 or CS6, don't worry. There's not enough changes in this new one that will make this difficult for you at all. You'll have 99 percent of the same tools that I do. I may highlight some of the newer tools for those using CC because there's some really cool ones, and I'll highly recommend using it. It's the subscription-based version from Adobe that allows you to get any of the updates or new tools that they have immediately as soon as they're released. So, I highly recommend it. So, let's go ahead and set up our first document and go to File, New. This little box here is going to save you a lot of time down the road if you can get this filled out correctly. There's the Name. We'll just go ahead and name it New Doc, because I'm feeling crazy. Your Profile, this will help you set up some defaults here and lay your groundwork for you so you don't have to click every single one each time. So, I'll click on Web first. So, we can take a look at that. You have Artboards. So, your Artboards, that's really just saying, "It's your paper." You'll be putting in any artwork that you want to create goes on these Artboards, so just think that as you're putting all this art on this paper. So, anything that shows up on there will show up when you save it and get it ready for print. Everything outside of it will be in the file, but won't be printed. Hope that helps. There's also your sizes, they give you some default size that you can choose from. For Web, this is great. So, you know some of the standard websites' sizes and widths, and screen sizes. That's really handy. You also get Units that you can choose in pixels, obviously for Web is perfect. You can set those manually yourself. You have the orientation of your paper or your Artboard. Then you have your Bleed settings which you won't need because you're working in Web. If you click, this might not be clicked, so if you click on your "Advanced" you'll see different things like your "Color Mode." RGB is for Web. It's the color setting for Web and CMYK of course is for print. Raster Effects is 72 ppi, perfect for Web. Then you also have this right down here which says, "Align New Objects to Pixel Grid." Now, that's great for when you're working in Web because it'll set everything to a pixel grid. So, you can't split pixels on web of course so it helps to align those. So, it's frustrating though if you have a print document but you have this checked. Because then you're trying to align some objects together but they just won't because it's not going to split pixels for you. So, printing you don't have to care about any of that. So, just have that on checked if you're doing print. You'll notice as I click "Print" it'll take that off. So, let's go ahead and look at these here for sizes. Now, it gives you the American version, standard sizes and European as well. We'll just click with Letter for now. It automatically sets it to Points. I like Inches, and Bleed settings now are something I need to think about because if I'm going to print this it's going to need some room. If I'm having images or a color bleed over the side of my paper or up to the edge of the paper, I'm going to need a Bleed. So, every printer will ask for something different every project. So, I just keep it at point 25 to be safe. It'll set that all the way around. If you want to do multiple Artboards, I forget to go back to that, you can. I'm really lazy sometimes and didn't want to learn how to- I know how to use them but I haven't spent enough time in them to be worth my time, like a Keynote and PowerPoint. So, I make a lot of my presentations in Adobe Illustrator. That's one of my confessions to you all I guess. But it's actually really easy for me to do because I can choose how many slides or Artboards that I want, and you can arrange them or grid them by column or by row and you can change any columns you have. You can change how far apart or close the Artboards are to each other. So, lots of things that you can do there. But I'm just going to choose two just you can see what it looks like. I have set inches, eight and a half by 11. I want to go landscape. I have my Bleed. Now, it is CMYK which is for print. The Raster Effects, I lied a little bit when I said everything is vector in Illustrator because some of your facts aren't, like your dropped shadows. So, having them set to a 300 ppi is great for print, and if you're for Screen, it can be 72. But I always just had a 300 because even if it was a web project I may want to make it print later, so I want to set that the right way. Obviously, don't have that click if you're not in web because that'll be really annoying. All right. So, let's click "OK". Here is Adobe Illustrator. Here is your workspace. Now, all this gray out here, just think of that as your desk because the white things are your paper, which are your Artboards in Illustrator, and everything you create needs to be in here. Now, you can create it out here but it won't if you're going to be printing. This is your printable area. So, you'll have this little red line here, that's your Bleed. So, for those who you don't know exactly what Bleeds are, you've never dealt with those before. If you have an image. If you want to fill a full pink. That's really pink. So, if you want to fill full page of color and you're going to have this printed. Have your color fill all the way to the edge of these Bleed lines. So, that's counter-intuitive a little bit because everything outside of here won't be printed but it will because later when you save it you can say, "Save with the Bleed settings intact." It's little incorporate this area as well just so the printer can cut it off. That goes for shapes too. If you're going to have images like something inside your thing, it's going to be bleeding off the edge here. A lot of people will just want to shave this down and make that easier to make. That's exactly what it will look like. Don't shave it own. I'll show you better ways to do it later, but to hide it. But for now, you want to leave that off the edge so that they can cut that off themselves. So, hopefully that makes sense. Now, maybe I don't want this other Artboard. I can go on Document Setup right up here and then go to Edit Artboards. There's a little X right here. If I highlight this one, hit the X, or I can hit the little trashcan here and delete the Artboard. But if you had noticed, it has their numbered. So, that comes into account when you need them to be sequential. So, take that into account. Whenever you create a new one, it's not going to be number one, so when you save it it won't show up as first or whatever. So, you'll have to rearrange those yourself. But they are numbered for you. Some things that I do often with my Artboard would be maybe I want to duplicate this exact thing. Maybe this is a template that I want for all my other ones. Wrong buttons is what I hit. If you hit Alt or option and Shift, you click and drag. You'll notice that my whole piece of artwork and my Artboard came with it. Now, maybe I didn't want the artwork I just want the Artboard. You can click, there's a button right here "Move/Copy Artwork with Artboard." So, you can go ahead and click, and now it's just bringing your camera because I have it unchecked. If you want to start a new one just like this Artboard click here, new art board, and you got one. You can keep making as many you want here. If I keep zooming out, you have a huge desk. So, you have a lot of room to play with. So, I'm going to take out that one. Maybe I just want to create a custom sized one. If I'm over here, I click and drag. I can customize my own new Artboard or this existing art board. I can go and click on these anchors here and drag it and change the size here. So, hopefully that gives you an idea of what you can do with your page, and all these little things may seem a little nitpicky right now, but believe me, they will help you. Another thing you can do too is you have your sizes here. It's eight and a half by 11, but you can change that. You can change the size of your Artboard here as well. So, maybe I wanted this to be like a five by five. It'll automatically change that for you. So, pretty awesome. There's more presets that you can go in here. You can reorient right here. You can name them. But that is the first introduction, just setting up your new document within Adobe Illustrator. Later on, I want to talk a little bit more about your Preferences panel because there's a whole lot more you can change in here, key one being your Keyboard Increment. Now, real quick. What a Keyboard Increment is, is when you have a shape and you want to move it left, right, bottom or wherever, you click the arrow buttons. You see mine's barely changing. But if I went back to Preferences, I could change that. Want if I did this, put a one here. Click "OK." Now watch when I hit the right arrow. You'll see it'll jump, picking up bigger steps, and that will help you set things a little bit quicker. Yeah. So, I hope that helps you. Let's meet up again in the next video and we'll learn more about saving our documents and we'll learn about our workspaces. All of this right here, how we can customize this for ourselves and for each project that we take on and then what some of these basic tools are. We can start showing you how to put some things together and really feel comfortable with an Illustrator. So, looking forward to seeing the next video.
4. 4. Navigation: So, now that you've learned how to set up your own document and you found how to navigate through the settings there and the preferences and now you understand that this is an art board, you have bleed settings, you have your workspace all around it, now let's talk about some other details here about our workspace that we haven't talked about. Now one thing is you'll notice this whole, you won't notice, I notice right now because there's a blank spot here, but really there must be a ruler there. So, hit command R and you'll see rulers. Those will help you obviously for measuring things of course, but also inside of these are our guides, and these guides, if you click anywhere on the ruler and drag down, you'll see that you can place these guides anywhere. You can do the same thing for the vertical ones and what these do are these help you- they're just like your own rulers or guidelines that you'd make on your artwork if you were drawing it, but the other cool thing about this is that you can hide them if you'd like to. You don't always have to see those. I use them just to align art work to it, or if I know this is like an area that I'm not supposed to be designing in, you can build custom grids. All that stuff are with these guides, you just click and drag. Great to know. But I would hit command semicolon, and they'll disappear. They're still there, they're just hidden. So, if you hit that again, command semicolon, they'll come back. Just great if you want to see what your art looks like and then kind of have it come out of the way, but if you need to look back at your guide, go back and see it, go back and see it. Another thing with these two is if I'm tired of these guides, I don't want these here anymore, if you notice you can't really manipulate them, so there's two ways you can do it. You can either get rid of them completely by going to View, Guides, and then just Clear Guides and that'll just erase them completely, or you can go to the Guides and then just do Unlock. So, it says lock. If you click on that, it'll unlock them. What that means is you can click on these individually and move them around or you can just hit Delete when you highlight at one and they're gone. Now, that's really nice but if you're going to be working again, like for example, I want to bring this hand around or something if I want to select a big area, you'll notice that it grabs my guides. I don't like that, so what I want to do is I'll click on these. If this is where I want the guides, then I'll just hit the- I'll go back to my View, Guides, Lock Guides, and now I can't alter those at all. I can still go command semicolon and have them hidden, but this way, I don't like to maneuver them around, I don't need to edit them anymore, but I can still add more. They'll just be locked as well. So, those are super handy. I use them all the time and it's great that you can hide them, that's probably the best part about them, but you also have something which is just a grid already setup with Illustrator. There you hit command comma, and you'll see that you can have- it'll have a grid already made for you, and if you need to build anything to that, that's awesome but there's there's some things that get kind of annoying if you accidentally hit the wrong keys, and so I'm going to just show you right now so you can- you'll know how to troubleshoot it later. You hit View and it says, right now, it's a Snap to Grid. Now, that can be kind of annoying if you don't want to snap anything to the grid. So, let's say if I'm going to take this shape, I'll make a square. You notice how it's fitting immediately, and let's do- let's add a color to it. You'll notice immediately that it is snapping to those white lines, those grid. I can't put it in between. I can't have a halfway in between this grid. I have to have it, snaps to one. That's helpful if that's what you need. If not, that can be really annoying, you can take that off, and you can see I can lay this wherever I want. It doesn't have to adhere to the grid at all. But I can go ahead and hide that, and even if I hit it, it would still snap to grid, so sometimes that gets kind of annoying if you don't want it, and you can go ahead and change that or snap the point and then it will snap to those separate points. But, yeah, so those are your guides, those are your grids, and now you'll notice that I'm kind of bouncing in and out, zooming, enlarging, dragging. Let me explain how you can kind of navigate that because this will save you a lot of time maneuvering around your workspace. There's these buttons right down here. There's these tools. You have the hand tool and you have the zoom tool, but there's lots of- there's different ways to do each of these. So, , the way I would do it is if- let's just talk about the hand tool first. Now, the hand tool just helps you drag your art board around. It doesn't move any of the objects within your our board, it just moved the art board, so it changes your view, which is super helpful. For example, if I wanted to just move this object, it would move it, but maybe I want- I obviously want to drag the whole screen. I don't want to drag this as well. But so I'll go down to the hand tool, click and drag, and I can move that around. To get out of the hand tool and once you're in- what you'll kind of like your resting tool that you'll be using all the time, your default would be this selection tool. I'll explain selection tools and all these other ones a little bit in more depth in other videos, but just know that if you're trying to go back and you don't want to be using a hand tool anymore, just go to the arrow, this black arrow, and that'll help you deal directly with these specific shapes. So, again, hand will move it around and you can do that also, I hit command Z, which brings that, that image back. Anytime I want to, say it now, anytime I have stuff to move around, if I want to bring, if I didn't like what I did., hit Command Z and you can undo that. But if I want to do this, if I want to drag around and pan around the screen, I can hit the spacebar and that does the exact same thing, it brings up the hand. That's a quick, quick way to shave some time off for your design. There's the zoom tool which is your magnifying glass here you can click. It'll zoom in and little increments, or you can click, hold it, and drag it and you can highlight specific areas that you want to look at. If you want to zoom out of this, you can do it incrementally also without having to use that tool. I just hit command subtract with the minus sign, command minus or command plus, and that will zoom in. That's a real quick and easy way to use it. You can even- you can do it set the actual increments to percentage so you know whatever your size that if it's at 100 percent and you can kinda see how that will look at that size or you can set it huge, but when you're here, if you want to go back or maybe you're lost, you don't know where you're at in the screen, it may take a little while to go back a million times, so if you just- if you go down to this bar again, you can go to Fit On Screen and it will bring everything back to fitting in that screen, which is really handy, and you can do the same thing as zoom back in command plus. If I hit command zero, it'll bring it all back into my display again, and so it's all within viewable area, which will help. So, yeah, so those are just some basic ways to navigate around and hopefully, those shortcuts help. They sure do when I'm working around- working on a project, I can click Drag, Zoom, whatever I need to real fast. So, , hold on and we're going to go ahead and talk a little bit more about all this that you're seeing around you and how you can customize it to fit you and your work, your working methods a lot better and make your work a lot more seamless, the whole process more seamless. So, thank you, we'll see in the next video.
5. 5. Workspaces: All right. So, now that you know your way around Illustrator a little bit, we're going to talk about how you can customize your own workspace. Just like you would, set up your own desk and prepare it for whatever project or just move things around the way you like, you like some things, your pencils and erasers on this side so it's easier to grab with your right hand whatever. Or you don't like it to be super crowded because it just kind of gets in your way and you can't focus, the same thing applies for Illustrator, they allow you to be able to customize things your whole entire workspace and your workspace is everything you are seeing right now. You have your desk right here, your paper, all your work but then you have all your tools out here on the side and how they're set as a default, is just that, it's a default, so you can go ahead and alter that however you would like. Right now, if you look in the top right it says Brad's go to. Again, I'm not very clever with names, but that's how I've set up my- that's a saved workspace, that's Brad's workspace. Maybe doesn't look super interesting because I haven't changed a whole lot. But, I wanted to show you how you can go ahead and customize your own and save some workspaces and toggling between because that'll save you a lot of time and maybe it just, it'll keep you a little bit more sane as you're working because it won't be so cluster. So crowded or whatever on the page and you can get to the tools that you need. So, if you go up here, you can go, you can see that it says Brad's Go To that's what I have now. But it also comes with some default, so before we customize around, let's look at what's already there. Now, they have essentials kind of you'll see it's kind of the same as mine. There's a painting, and you'll see that this automatically brings up, you'll see all these things starting to change for you and they kind of set it up for if you're going to start a painting, these are the things that you'd need. You need color, your swatches, your Kuler account, your colored guides, your brushes, stroke your symbols. So, all these different things in your layers, all the stuff is now, it's something that it's anticipating your need for painting. If you don't like it, we'll talk about customizing it and using this as a groundwork and that's what I like to look at these as kind of like the framework for certain things and if you want to off them you can to fit you better and fit your style of working better. Typography brings up some swatches, some character panels so that you can mess with your type. There's a web one that brings up your CSS properties, your appearance, all those types of things that'll be crucial for you when you're working in those formats. But let's go back to the essentials, let's just say we want to go to the essentials. Let's say these are. Okay, so we're resetting the essentials, I had it set to something else. But, this is what you'll see, you'll notice that there's some things missing from what you saw in mind. So, maybe there wasn't some character panels. So, the first thing we want to do is, let's look in window and see if we have everything that we want. There's some things down here, maybe type, if I go in on a type and I want character X. I don't see it over there, I can click Character, notice that a little box pops up, and I could drag this over here click on the black bar at top. I can drag it and you'll notice that it'll turn blue right under here. Let it go. Now, I have my characters. In the character panel or each of these little panels, they each have their own little tabs that have now the paragraph, styles, and your open type options. So, each of them will have those things like if you open up layers, you'll notice that art boards are here as well. So, you'll want to be able to navigate your way through these things and customize it how you want. So, maybe there's a few other things in here in the window that I'd like maybe or maybe I don't know it's missing. Maybe color is already there but I didn't, I can't find it because I'm new to this whole thing. So, I click Color, it will actually pop it out here if it's already there, and then you can see all the different options within here, and then you click on this little double arrow button and it'll bring it back into here. Now, maybe I want to see exactly what these are because it doesn't give any, they don't have any words connected to them so it's kind of hard to understand what they are and maybe for at first, they don't know what these symbols are, so if you drag that out, you can drag and resize it and then you can go ahead and see what each of those icons do, and you can notice here that these little boxes here, you can move. If you click here on this little black bar, you can go ahead and move those out on their own, and then you can hover over and you can either make them a part of this whole group or you'll notice that if it has the blue highlight around it will be a part of that group but if you keep going up a little bit, they'll put it right in the middle and then you can organize in that way. Now, if I want to take out maybe let's say, maybe I think some of these things go better together than how it's laid out here I don't like this. Maybe I want color, out on its own, if I click on it. Maybe if I just bring, if I click on the color it'll just, it'll have it out there by itself, and maybe I want a larger. I'd like to see the different gametes of color that I have as an option, and then maybe the color guide should go with that too. So, I want to drag that down but I want to see it at all times. I don't want it to be hidden there in the side. So, I can drag out those separate boxes I can put it. If I connect it here, it'll do that. So maybe I don't want it to be connected. I want to be able to see it all the time. So, if I click over here, don't have it connect. Just have it right underneath it, and then you can see it always open and you can connect to other ones that are open to each other. So, I hope that's clear. I mean you could play around with it and see as you click around, you'll notice how you can maneuver things but really you can do so much I can drag that and throw it, notice that now character and color are in the same line. I can take the color out. Click on it, bring him under here. So, you have a lot of different options there to customize your space. So, play around with that and then also on within each of these, you can go ahead and let's say if I'm looking into- I'll just do it. Yeah, it's just swatches, I'll click on swatches. You'll notice that there's these little buttons right here. What that does, if you click on that, that adds more options within that tool. Not to make anything more confusing. I know there's a lot to take in, and so this is just kind of overwhelming. Maybe a little bit knowing that there's even more tools there but they're actually very, very helpful things to know and there's also you can go through and each of them have their own little settings here, that you can mess with. Over here, if you click on here, you can see things like open swatch library. Maybe you had no idea that you can already have swatches, color swatches, that they've already made for you. So maybe it's I want Earth tone swatches and I get these colors right here, and I want to have those out and available for myself but you never knew they're there because they're just hidden, over here you can make a new swatch, new color group. You can sort them. So each of these, even brushes if you notice it has a whole new set of options in there. So know that those are there and we'll go into those in more detail as we go throughout further courses and we'll be using them quite often. But, so now you kind of figured out how to maneuver your way around setup, customize your workspace and then let's go ahead and save this workspace, by just going to this section up here. Click go all the way to the bottom here, it says new workspace. When I click on it, lets say test space. Click okay, so now we have this saved as this and now let's say I want to go back to Brad's Go To. There we go. We will reset it. But, maybe now I have those new settings that I'm starting a new project and they're better for that so I'll go back to test space. Or I want to start a painting I'll go back there. So you can toggle in between these all day long and you can make your new ones. If you don't like what you made, just go ahead and save over it by altering it. Go to Brad's Go To, and make a few changes. I drag somethings out and that's how I like them and then I can go and save it as a new workspace. I'll save it as the same thing, it will just save over it. Then if you want, if you're tired of a workspace that you've created, go to manage workspaces you can click on them, you can duplicate them or you can just go ahead and delete them and so if I say test space I want to delete. Then you click okay. Now, all I have is my Go To and maybe I made some changes in here. Let's say I made some changes over here to my workspace and I feel kind of like, darn it! I really wish I, I wouldn't have moved all that stuff. So, go back to Brad's Go To and then you can reset it, to what you originally had saved it as. So, okay, hopefully, I did not confuse you or lose any of you at this point. Just letting you know you can customize this thing all day long, and then you can make as many workspaces as you'd like. To help you out be more efficient and just know your way around the workspace and feel a little bit more comfortable around it. But, to also one other thing before I let you go, I would check preferences. Whole lot of things in here as well we'll be going through them eventually through different courses will be kind of hitting on each of these separately. But, if you go through and see in general, like we already went over keyword increments and there's a bunch of other options here that we'll talk about. But if you can see type, there's units you can change all these things. So, you can play around with this in your own time, until we actually get to these for specific areas. But, if you go down to user interface, this one's kind of just a little thing, but some people really like to work with the lighter workspace. So it changes the whole, some of the older versions of Illustrator. Or look like this but maybe you like it. A little bit darker. I like it medium dark, it's just perfect for me, but just whatever you decide that works best for you. So, alrighty, I think I've talked your ear off. Hopefully, you're able to play around with this a little bit and experiment and set up your own workspace, so go ahead and do that now, and then after this, we'll talk about some basic tools and start moving around some shapes. So, alrighty, thanks so much.
6. 6. Basic Tools: All right. So, hopefully now you've set up your own workspace and you figured out how to navigate the interface a little bit and to learn some of those basic tools of how to maneuver around your workspace, which is your Command Plus, Command Minus for zooming in and zooming out or the Hand Tool by hitting space bar and clicking and dragging, being able to look around. Command 0 being able to put everything right back into your viewable area and you can start in those things. Again, we're over here, your Hand Tool and your Zoom Tool. So, you'll learn all these things about how to navigate and set it up, but let's talk about how to interact with specific shapes in your artwork as a whole. Since we haven't really taught you how to create the shapes yet, you can go ahead and make your own shapes by just going here in the left-hand side and playing around with, maybe like the Rectangle Tool, creating a shape. If you want to change its color, very simple. We'll go over this in way more detail in the next course, but you can click and change the colors if you want and just to get you started. But yeah, so once you have some shapes here, you can click and hold on any of these, on the tool bars over here. The great thing about them, you'll see that they'll have a little white arrow in the bottom right-hand corner. You'll see it on a few of them. If you them, it means you can click and hold and you'll see more options within them, so you can make it different, you can make a star or whatever. These things that you can, we'll teach you how to move them around and interact with them right now. So have those, make some shapes so you can play around with them. Okay, let's go to the first tool that you're going to use every single project, about 98 percent of the time is this Selection arrow, which is the black arrow on the top left. That one is just so you can click on shapes and drag them around. That one is extremely important because it's just like your hand being able to drag stuff around and maneuver stuff around the page. So, really, really simple thing, but it's important to know the difference between it and these other arrows over here, so you can get back to this Selection Tool. This is your default. You always want to go back to this, your default, if you want to move things around and that's if you hit the V, you can go ahead and get that tool arrow. It will always go back to the black arrow if you hit V on your keyboard. Now, the one below it, does a little bit different. It's the Direct Selection Tool. If you click on it, you'll notice, I'm going to zoom in here on this hand. So, what it does is it's starting to show anchor points. Every shape is made of anchor points and you can build those with Pen Tools and brushes and things like that. It'll give you anchor points that you can manipulate and that's the cool thing about Illustrator. In our next course, we'll go over how to manipulate shapes and so forth. But just so you know what this arrow does and how to use it, now if you click on one of those, it'll highlight that specific anchor points. I can click and hold and then drag it somewhere and you'll notice that I can start building, reshaping things, but it only grabs that anchor point. It doesn't grab the whole thing. If I went back to hit my V again, now if I click on here, it'll just drag the full shape. But if I click A, which is this white Direct Selection Tool, you can go ahead and click on those once, click on it again, hold and drag, or I can click and drag, and grab the whole selection of those and then I can maneuver though. That's great if I actually want to like extend something simple like right over here, I can click and drag that. Another thing you can do too, if I want to click multiple points at a time just by selecting them individually, just the same way you can click and select different objects is, if you click, hold shift and then all the ones that you click on from there, now you're highlighting all of them and keeping the ones before, and then you can obviously move just that section. Now, if I was going to go back, you can do the same thing with the, if you hit V again, you're back with your Selection Tool. You can click on this one, but I want to click and highlight multiples. So, I'm going to go and click on that circle, this circle, this circle, this circle and so now I can have those all together. Now, if I want to have those stay together, you can do that as well. You can right-click on this, once you have selected and you can set it up as a group. So, you could group and now, you'll see if I click off of that, you can click back to it, and then you can always, it'll keep those together for you. There's other ways to do that. If you want, you can group things by using the Lasso Tool. So, I can go around any items I want so I have to do it by square, and just by clicking, I can just draw around what I want to highlight. Then now, they won't be saved like that until you group them. So, if I draw it around there while they're highlighted, I need to right-click on them and then group them or instead of doing that, what I can do is just hit Command G. That's the shortcut for it and then you'll notice, if I go back to my. Now, I want to move them, right? This is a classic, really simple thing that people struggle with. You'll notice that I still have the Lasso Tool open, just always get out of whatever tool you're using. Otherwise, if I click, it's going to start doing it again. Just hit V and it'll go back to your selection. So then you can click and drag on your shapes and do whatever you want with them now that they are grouped. Now, let's say they are already grouped, but now I want to go and just manipulate just one. I want to change the color of just this one right here. So, let's double-click on it and now you're in what's called isolation mode or preview. So what it does is it only isolates the things that, since they were grouped, all of these popped up. So now, if I went to click and highlight, play around, I can't interact with any of this other stuff around which is great because I don't want to grab all that stuff. I just want to deal with this stuff. If I want to click on this guy, I can go ahead and just change just his color and that saves me a lot of frustration and time by being able to do that because now, they're still grouped but you can mess with them individually. But so if I double-click outside, now that one's green, but they're still grouped. So, that's kind of a cool tool to use is double-clicking on items so that you can isolate them because if I just wanted to highlight these guys and if I went like that, anything that I touched with that marquee box is going to get highlighted and it's really frustrating sometimes to deal with other layers and things like that. So I'd just like to double-click on them. Now, you can do the same thing if you have one highlighted, you can also do the same thing by going up here, and it's the Isolate Selected Object and you can do the same thing. Now, maybe you want to select by color or shape or opacity. There's a certain attribute about whatever object you have and you want to select all the ones with the like attributes. So, let's save its color. I want all of these, I want everything blue basically because I want to put it on its own layer for something else. Let's say, I want to click on the blue. I want to find all the other ones that are blue. I don't want to have to go through and click them all individually holding shift, that's just kind of slow and tedious. Let's go up here and it says Select Similar options, I can go and do the same fill color. So I click on it. Is that a different color? Let's see. Select the Appearance. It'll go ahead and do that. Let's show you one more time, sorry. Maybe we already have it selected. So, let's do Fill Color. There we go, sorry. So now, you can check and then you'll see everything blue is when it's isolated now, and you can do the same thing. There's other options you can use stroke, weight, fill color, all that stuff, but you can do the same thing if you hit the Magic Wand Tool. It does the color. The great thing about the other, this tool up here, is that you can do it by other things, opacity or appearance and stuff like that. So that's the power of that one. But yeah, so now that you've learned how to navigate through, I just wanted to show you a little bit of how to interact with these different shapes that you're going to be having in your board and learning how to use these arrow tools and how to just deal with your shapes because just being able to know the difference between your White Selection Tool and your Black Selection Tool are so key because you're going to be using those and switching in between those all the time. So, again you hit A, it goes to your white selection that deals with your individual anchors. Double click and then if you hit just the V you'll go back to your black and then you can go ahead and just drag the shape around. So practice with that, make some shapes, you can go over here, again click and hold to see more if it has a little white arrow at the bottom and you can go ahead and click and drag and make your different shapes that you want. You can even, if you want to sneak ahead and try to play around with different colors or even like the stroke that goes around them, you can make a black stroke. You can play around with that kind of stuff. You won't get in trouble for cheating here or sneaking ahead. So, thanks, I hope that helped and we're going to talk about how to save and prepare our documents for saving them as print or web or a PDF or however you want to do it. So, stay tuned for that. Thanks.
7. 7. Saving: Let's talk about how to save our files, and prep our images and prep our work so that it will be easy to find it later, or it'll be easy to just send to a printer later. There's lots of different scenarios that you may want to take into account, but let's talk about just saving it first as an AI file, just as a project that we want to keep open. Now, you'll see that my workspace, my desktop, I can keep anything I want out there because I'm not going to worry about this time. I have printable area only on my canvas, my artboard here will. So, I have a couple of them because I want to show you some differences between saving the images, and also saving them with multiple artboards. So, yeah. So, you can look in here, and I have all my different some other image assets that I've created that weren't able to use and color palette, but I also have linked images, I also have fonts in here. Now, if I was sending this to someone else, there's somethings that we'll talk about and making sure things are linked together. But, right now, I have all my images and my fonts in here and it's on my computer. I just want to open this up later to continue working on it. So, let's just save it as a standard AI file. So, go down to File, Save As. We'll call it, Test Save 1. We'll save it here, and you can choose where you want to save it. I want to put it on the desktop as an Illustrator file, I hit Save. Now, it gives me options. I'm in version Illustrator CC. So, for me obviously, I'm already using it. So, it won't matter. I want to keep it at that. But if I was going to be sending it to someone else who is using a different version of Illustrator, you can go ahead and save it to these legacy formats, these older versions down here. You just click on there, and it will down save it for you. So that's pretty helpful to know. Because a lot of times, you won't be able to open up your file if it's an older version and you're using a newer. It'll create the PDF file for you to link, and it'll include linked files. But, you also have an option here to save each artboard to a separate file. So, that's if I want these to be separate AI files on the next time I open it, or do I want to see both at the same time for now. So, if I just was to save it right now, let's go ahead and just save. I didn't do multiply whereas, they're all just going to be on the same thing. So, if I'm going to click out of here, look over here, and there's my file. Then, I can see that there's two artboards in there. It doesn't show you any of the other stuff because that stuff's not printable. If you were just to print straight from here, this is all that would print. So that's pretty handy. So, all that stuff, all that extra junk that was laying around in my AI file is only for me to see. If I open up that file, this is what it will look like. So, yeah. So, but if I was going to send this to somebody else, you need to make sure that things are linked. Because right now, my image, if I go on the desktop, there's that canoe image, right there, and I have it on the desktop, that's why I haven't linked, and I drag it from the desktop into here. But if I was to send it to someone else, it'll be just like me having this in the garbage can because they don't have this file. It's not going to save that file, and it's going to tell you there's missing or modified links. So, people aren't going to know. If they open up the file, they won't see this image. Maybe you want them to have everything on here, maybe there's an image in the artwork that you want them to keep. So, make sure there's a way to do that. I'm going to show you how to package things, but if you're not going to package it, and you don't want to have to deal with having all these extra links and things, you want to embed your image. So, over here on the right, you'll see this little links panel. You click on it, and I can go in here on the top right. I can click Embed My Image and then no longer, even if I threw this out on the desktop, I look over here, it's still here. This is now part of my AI file. So, I don't need to worry about that. So, I would keep that embedded, and then if I want to send that to them, that way they'll have it. It will increase your file size a little bit, but at least, they'll have the image. Then for fonts, if they don't have the font when you sent it to a middle, it won't show up, and they won't be able to see it. So, this will just do a default like myriad typeface. So, if you need these fonts to be in there, what you can do, is also go to Type, and you want to outline the font. So, goes to Type, go down to Create Outlines and now, you can see these are just shapes. They're no longer using the font, it's just a shape. I can actually go in and alter if I wanted to. I can alter these different shapes however I'd want, because it's no longer a typeface, and then you don't want to worry about linking, giving them the same typeface, if they don't need to manipulate it. So, you can save that. So that's just a way to make sure that your images are embedded, and make sure your text is outlined. But, what if you're sending it to someone, and they need to be able to play around at the time? Maybe they will need to be able to adjust the words, or edit it in some way later on. You're going to want to save it altogether by packaging it. So that would be, you go to File, and you go down to Package. Now, we'll go ahead, and make sure your documents, it's asking you to make sure your document is saved. So now, it says save Test Save 1, and we're going to save it to the desktop. This is what it says here on the location, and you can look at that over here. You give your name a folder and what it does here, it shows you it's copying the links, it's copying the links into a separate folder. It's relinking them to the file document, and it's copying the fonts used. So, whatever font that you're using, it's going to send them a package. We'll see, and it's going to give you a bunch of whatever mumbo jumbo about licensing and stuff. But it says there, it's missing fonts in the link. If you have issues like that, go back and make sure you have all your- Right now, I'm having a little bit issues with this typeface, but basically what it'll do is it'll create this folder. Then, you can open up and it has your fonts. It shows what fonts you are using. You can actually download those onto their computer, and then you have your actual AI file, but it has the images linked in there as well. So, links images, all your images, your fonts, everything will be packaged into one thing so you can send it over to someone and you won't have to make it, because if you outline these, they can't switch it back to type or the font. So, they can't edit it. But, yeah. Again, I guess I should say this too. When you're packaging things, you don't obviously make sure that when you send it over to them, they have full intentions of purchasing the font, if they're going to be using that typeface and that's what the little box that popped up and said licensing. That was all making sure that you are not just stealing typefaces or just sending them and then not updating them yourself. So, but yeah. So, there you go. So that's basic AI saving. Now, there are other options that we saw. If you go Save As, you don't always have to save it as an Illustrator file, you can save it as an EPS file. EPS stands for Encapsulated PostScript. So, basically, this preserves any of the graphic elements from AI, and you can open this. I mean, almost any page layout or graphic application type stuff or word processing. So, most anything you can open this thing. You can open the file up even if they're not using Illustrator to look at it. So, that's the benefit of EPS files. A lot of times you'll get logos, you'll save a logo as an EPS file. If it's just a really simple vector work because then, people can open it up in word processing. They can open it up in any other program not just Illustrator because a lot of times my clients won't have that. So, when I send them the logo, they'll need it as an EPS file. There's also your Adobe PDF. This is great being able to open it up another Adobe software as well. But, let's say, I want to save it as a PDF, it's going to ask me now, if I want to do a range, if I only want to do a PDF of the first or the second artboard, or if I want to do both of them. So, this is same both artboards, which is great. We'll do it on the desktop, and we'll click Save. It's going to give you options here. So, this is where your bleed settings and everything like that taken account. So, usually, I'll save a PDF for print or if I'm saving a presentation. Sorry, I won't keep moving this around. But, if you looking in the background, you'll see that I have the bleed settings, and I have my image drawn all the way out there. So, this is giving you a breakdown of what you can do. There's a whole lot more that you can go into. But, you can save it as a high-quality print. Typically for print, all you need is the high-quality, or you could even do press quality. Smallest file sizes if you're if you're saving it for web. If it's a PDF just to show that you're trying to save a lot of space, and you don't want to send them a giant file, if it's just like a mood board or something like that. It'll be a little bit pixelated or whatever, but it won't be bad. So, if you're going to do some for print, you're going to want to put it in the high-quality print. Then, you'll want to go over here and marks and bleeds since you do have a bleed on yours. Go to Marks and Bleeds, and then you can choose, it says down here it says, ''Use document bleed settings.'' If you didn't have it already, it can let you set it. But, since you are prepared, and had it ready, all you need to do is click on that Use Document Bleed Settings, and it will save that. If you want to help them by giving them trim marks, some printers don't want trim marks. What that does is it'll add like these little lines right here. I'll just click on it so you can see it. There are other things that you may or may not want. But, let's just say, ''I want the trim marks, and now I'm going to save my PDF.'' Now, open it up. You can choose to have it open straight away. So, now, you can see the trim marks are here, and the printer will just cut those right off, everything off on this side. Then, you'll see how this part where your bleed was. So, it's going to be cutting all this off. But yes, so there now you have it. If you double-click, you can see that you have this as two different artboards saved. So, you have both those images saved for you. Now, saving your PDFs, I love to use PDFs for presentations too. You can use those and just view those. If I want to save multiple artboards, I can use that to do like a slideshow as well. So, that's the benefit of having Illustrator and all the artboards. You can save those. You can even save them individually if you wanted. But you also have option of saving as a SVG, or these two options with SVG. That's basically just a vector format that makes high quality interactive web graphics. So, they help reduce the file sizes for web and the one thing you can't do with those is you can't save multiple artboard, you can only save the one. But, yeah. So, hopefully, that gives you a good overview of how to save your work. I think one last thing I want to say is, if you ever, you'll see this on like EPS files. It'll say, ''Use Artboards.'' Just click Yes because if you don't, it's going to take that out, and it's just going to be this huge like nothingness. Your artboard usually is about the size of your images. It won't be there when you save it. So, I like to click Yes and then it says, ''Which ones do you want? '' Basically, since I have these two posters, if I didn't have to use artboards, these would just be two floating images, and they will be saved together. I'd like to see them saved on their own canvases. So, I'd say, Use Artboards, and then I can choose, if I want one or two of them. So, I hope that helps. Thank you so much and if there's any other more technical, if you're going to be saving it for more specific applications especially like web type things, there is another course that does just that. So, I wanted to give you the overall rounded off view of Adobe Illustrator saving capabilities. So, I hope that helps and thank you.
8. More Creative Classes on Skillshare:
Brad Woodard, Illustrator + Graphic Designer
