Transcripts
1. Graphic Design for Lunch Illustrator setup Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of graphic design for lunch. Today we're looking at 10 interface and setup tips that will help you speed up your workflow every day in Illustrator. Now, today we're looking at the Illustrator interface. I have 10 tips and tricks to help you work just a little bit more efficiently in Illustrator and to understand a little bit more of what's going on, on your Illustrator workspace. By the end of this course, you're going to be a lot more familiar with the workspace and a lot more able to set it up to suit your own personal needs. As you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which asks if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend this class and secondly, write even in just a few words, why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is the class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now on the screen, if you see the follow link, click it to keep up to date with my new classes as they're released and if you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Now if you're ready, let's get started, looking at 10 interface and setup tips that will help you speed your workflow in Illustrator.
2. Pt 1 Understand the Tools Panel: The first part of the Illustrator screen that we're going to look at is the tool panel over here which has all your tools in it. Mine is showing as a two column layout and that's a really good idea if you're working on a laptop, for example, where screen real estate can be quite reduced. You can set it to be a single line if you double-click on the bar at the very top of the toolbar. Double-click it, it becomes a single line of icons. Double-click it again, and it becomes a paired set of icons. So you can display it any way you choose. If your toolbar disappears, I'm going to just make mine disappear by choosing Window and then Tools and I'll disable the default toolbar and it's disappeared. If yours ever disappears, you can always get it back by going back to Window and then Tools and just select Default and that will re-display it. Now, in a lot of these toolbar positions, there's more tools that are actually showing. In the ellipse tool position here, which is typically the rectangle tool showing, you'll see that there are a lot of tools sharing that toolbar position. You know any particular tool has other tools sharing that position if there's a little triangle in the bottom right corner of the icon that just tells you there are more tools here. Now, when you click on that little triangle, just click and hold it with the left mouse button, you'll see these additional tools. If you want to see these tools in their own little bar, just click on this panel over here and when you click on it, it becomes a tear off toolbar. Now, it doesn't mean that we've lost the tools from up here because they're all still up here, but they're also on this little mini toolbar that is tear off and displayable. You can see that it's going to be traveling wherever I put it and even if I'm working with other tools, it's not disappearing. That's handy if you use tools a lot and you want to have them always visible, you can just tear off the toolbar. Let's go and tear another one off. Just click here, and as soon as I let go, it becomes a tear off toolbar. Now, it's also possible to view tools that share the same toolbar position. If you hold the Alt key on Windows, and that would be the Option key on the Mac, and just tap on this icon, and when you do it changes to the next tool. Again, Alt or Option tap, and it's the next tool and you can continue all the way around these tools and you just rotate around them. That again, is another way that you can select these tools. Now, you might have noticed that when we were looking at displaying the missing toolbar, that they look to be other options in relation to toolbar. So let's go to Window and then Tools. You'll see that you can actually create what is called a New Tools Panel. In other words, a totally separate tools panel. I'm going to call mine Helen's, but you could call it whatever you like, and you might want to create tools panels for different work that you do. Now, once you've created your tools panel, you're always going to get the fill and stroke here. You're always going to get the default settings and you're always going to get this little icon here that would flip the fill and stroke, just reverse them. This plus symbol here just allows you to add additional tools to this panel. Obviously always use the Selection tool. I'm just going to drag and drop it in here. I'd like the direct selection tool. Let's go and get the direct selection tool. Let's just drag it into position. A little blue bar tells me where it's going to go in position. Now, I also like the group selection tool. Let's go and get it and drag it onto here. Each of these three tools now has its own position. You can't grab a set of tools like a whole panel of tools and dropping them in here, you have to bring them in one at a time and each one of them has its own position in the panel. Let's go and get the rectangle tool because we use that a lot too, and the ellipse tool because I use that a lot too. Now, if you add a tool to this bar that you don't want, let me just go and get the flare tool and I'll just add it and decide that I really don't want it. Well, I can hold the Alt key, that would be the Option key on the Mac, and just drag it off. As soon as I drag it off, it disappears from this toolbar. But of course it's always on the default toolbar because that's the way that toolbar has been built. This is my little personal toolbar and I can close it down by just clicking the close button. I don't have to actually save it because it's being saved automatically by Illustrator. If I want to say it again, I'll go to Window and then tools, and here's my new toolbar. I click Helen's, it just reopens, and I can add other tools to it if I wish. Now, there's also a tool for managing these toolbars. If you go to window and then Tools, and then go to Manage tools panel, then you'll get a list of the tools panels that you have created. Here's Helen's, and I could delete it if I wanted to. I could create a new tools panel if I wanted to, from this actual dialogue. That's a way of perhaps prepping a tools panel with just the tools that you use most often, making sure that they're nice and handy and don't have to go looking for them in under other tools.
3. Pt 2 Optimize the Control panel: We're now going to look at the control panel and the panels that appear down the right of the screen. The control panel is this panel across the top of the document. You can show and hide it by choosing window and then control. So it's now hidden to make it reappear window and then control and it reappears. Now, what appears on the control panel depends on what you have selected and right now I have nothing selected. This is what it looks like. When I click on a shape that looks very different. It's showing what is relevant to what I'm working on at the moment. Now you can also control things that appear on the control panel. You can actually add things to it, but we can remove things. When I have nothing selected, I see here, the document setup and preferences as options. There's a list here on this icon on the very far right of the screen that sets up what is going to appear on the control panel when it makes sense for it to appear. Right now, document set up and preferences are visible because I have nothing selected. If I deselect document here, they disappear and they will disappear from any control panel that they appear on. Now they don't appear on all of them. It just depends on what you have selected. But if they were originally up to appear on one of those control panels, they now will no longer appear there. We can turn it on or off at our discretion. You probably want to make any selections here. You'd probably just want to leave things as they are. The only scenario in which I think it might make sense to turn things off would be if you were working on a laptop screen where screen real estate is fairly precious and if you have something that's appearing over here on a busy control panel and you want to get access to the things that are over here, then you may choose to turn off what is over here that you don't often use and just leave accessible the things that you do want to use to stop them, for example, being pushed off the edge of the screen. That's really probably the only scenario in which I think that you may want to control a little bit more granularly what appears on the control panel. But also you probably just want to know what this list is because it can be difficult to find a detailed explanation as to what it actually refers to online. If you want to get rid of your panels, whatever state they're in, I'm just going to make a big mess of my screen here for a minute so that we can say what's going to happen. If we want to hide the panels, press the tab key, the T-A-B key on your keyboard, everything disappears, the toolbar, the control panel, all the panels down the right of the screen as well as any that were floating. Press tab again and they will reappear. If you use shift and tab, then only the panels disappear, the ones down the right of the screen and those floating and then you can press shift tab to get them back again. Now these panels can be docked. You can see here that swatches in libraries are paired up. Well, we could add layers in there by dragging the last panel. I'm grabbing it by its name. I'm going to drag it in here until it has a sort of blue around it so the panel I'm about to drop it into has a blue surround and if I let go now, it's going to appear opposite libraries and swatches. It's now in a panel group and that entire panel group can be grabbed by this area here. You don't want to grab any one of these panels because that just takes one panel out of the group. We want to grab the group over here. If I collapse that group down, it becomes a series of icons and it would fit over here, so I could just grab that group and just slot them in here. Anytime I open one of these three panels, all three of them is going to open. If I open align here, then pathfinder and transform both open because they're all part of this little group of three. If I don't want to align to be part of that group of three, I can just remove it and now we have a group of two with transform and pathfinder, but align is no longer part of that group. It's down here. Well, it can become a gerbil on its own, so I can just slot it in here. It is possible to rearrange things to look the way you want it to look and of course, you can close anything that you don't often use or don't want to say visible at any particular time. In an upcoming part of this class, we're going to look at making some permanent changes to the arrangement of your screen and how you can save them so you can get them back at anytime in the future.
4. Pt 3 Explore the Properties Panel: The next tool that we're going to look at in the Illustrator interface was introduced in Illustrator CC 2017 in the October release. It is of course, also in Illustrator CC 2018. What it is, is a new properties panel. I'll choose window and then properties to display this panel. What you see in the properties panel is going to depend on what you have selected at a particular time. Now I have no selection at all. You can see up here it says no selection. Also over here in the control panel. When I have no selection at all, I get some preferences that I could set. I could also view rollers and grids here I can view guides. I have some snap options available to me and I can also see information about my document. When I select a shape, then it changes to show me the properties that are relevant to that shape. For example, the transform panel details appear here and there are some more options button that I can click to show even more of those options. I have the appearance details for this particular shape so you can see the fill and the stroke. There's also the ability to adjust the opacity settings here. If there were an effect, we would be able to see it here. We could also choose an effect from the list here should we wish to apply it to that shape? Here is another one of these more options, icons. In this case, it's going to open the appearance panel for us. There are also some quick actions here, things that we might want to do with this shape, for example, we may want to recolor it and so it opens the re-color dialogue for us. Here is a shape that has an effect applied to it. It is actually a path. Well, it was a rectangle. It's had some extra anchor points added to it, and it's got a pucker and bloat effect applied to it. If I click this once, I'll get my pucker and bloat settings so I could adjust the way that it's being applied to the shape and then click okay. Again this will take us to the appearance panel. Again, this will just show the more options in the transform error. You're going to see that with all of these shapes, the same things are going to appear. Here I have a blend and their options here for a blend, I can click re-color, and that would allow me to adjust the starting end or end point of my blends. Let's just go to edit and let's change the blend starting color. You can see that it's as easy as that. We've actually changed the color of one shape of the two shapes that comprise this blend. Up here, I've got a grid now, I drew it using the polar grid tool and there are different settings. Again with the grid, there is some align and pathfinder options here. You may find it handy to include the properties panel, for example, in your collection of icons down the side here to make the panels more accessible to you. Or you may want to keep the properties panel open so that the tools that you most likely to use with individual shapes and as you're working in Illustrator, are handy and visible for you.
5. Pt 4 Create Custom Workspaces: It's time now to have a look and say how we could rearrange this grain toast suit ourselves. I'm going to make the toolbar here a double set of tools because I like it to be like that. I don't like to have multiple panels here, but I could if I wanted to. I'm just going to drag everything out of here that I don't want to be where it is. Let me just put these two together and let's close them up and let's move them across here. I can take brushes and let's make brushes joined knows three, I'm just putting it into this group. If for example, this was the way I wanted my screen to look every time I opened illustrator, I could save this. I could go here to this drop down list at the moment, that was the painting interface that I had open, but I'm going to drop opened this drop-down list and I'm going to choose new workspace. I'm going to call this, well, let's call it temp because I'm not actually going to keep it for a really long time, but you could call yours by yo name or you could call it whatever it is that it relates to. If you like to do a lot of sort of free-hand drawing inlet [inaudible] , you might call this your drawing workspace, so I'll click "Okay" Now it's selectable from the list, you'll see that I've got a temp workspace. I can get back to that at any time by just selecting on it. But occasionally as you're working in these work-spaces, you might make things a little bit messy, so I'm just going to really mess this up. Let's just gone grab all of those unless clause that whole group, so things are now not the way they were when I created temp. If I go to temp and just select temp, nothing's happening because right now illustrator thinks that's the way temp is supposed to look. But we can ask it to show us temp, the way it was when we first created it. We do that by selecting reset temp and reset temp is effectively show it to me the way it was when I created it. Now it's jumped back to be exactly as it was when I created it. Now I'm looking at this and thinking, one of my students suggested to me that they like to drag their panel out here so that they can actually say the words, and that's a really nice idea if you like that, you may want to build that look into your workspace. Well, I've got a temp workspace, but it doesn't look like this. It wasn't set up like this. Let's see how we would update it. Will go to the drop-down list and look for something that says update. We can look into wear blue in the face because it's not there. This is something that is a little bit annoying about illustrated. What I'm going to do is choose new workspace. I'm just going to call this temp now I know I already have one called temp and illustrate is going or the name or exists clicking Okay will override it. Well, that's exactly what I want to do. I want to look like what it looks like at the moment, not like what it used to look like, so I just click "Okay". Now temp is going to look like this. We can test it. I'm going to my illustrator for launch one which is different again. Now let's go back and let's say temp. It opened up this in top panel of panels has become larger so that we can say the text. This is a really valuable way of being able to set up illustrated way you want it to look and also to be able to get back to it at any stage. If you mess things up by just going temp and then reset temp and everything jumps back to the way it used to look. Now there's also a manage workspaces option here and from that you can say they work-spaces that you've got. You can click on any and you can delete it. For example, if you no longer needed. Just click "Okay" to say yes, I want to delete sample. When I go to the list now sample is no longer one of the options for work-spaces. You will find being able to create your own workspace is extremely valuable for getting illustrated to look the way you want it to look in, to be able to get it back to the way you wanted to look really quickly.
6. Pt 5 Configure New Document Profiles: We're going to look next at New Document profiles. I'm working on a PC, and I'm going to tell you if you're working on a Mac, where things that are going to start to be different. I'm going to click 'Create New' here. I'm going to create a brand new document. I'm going to do it on a web profile because I don't happen to like the web profiles. I'm going to open these presets here because I want to go and find one called colors copy. Because I just want to show you what happened to this file. This is one I've created myself, so I'll select it and click 'Create'. Now, built into this document profile is the size of the document. It's 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels, but also built into it is the color swatches. Here in the last pallet, the size of the layer thumbnail. We can save elements like this inside a preset that we can use anytime that we want to create a file that looks like this. Well, let's go and make a change to this one as if we were setting it up to suit ourselves. I'm going to make this 1920 by 1080 and size. The art board is a different size. I'm also going to change the size of the layer thumbnail. Go to the flyout menu and arches panel options. I have mindset to other which is quite large, but let's take it up a notch further and make it 60 pixels. That's a nice big layer thumbnail. Let's go and change the swatches too. I'm just going to have a look at the swatches here and I'm going to grab most of these and just delete them. Let's go and get some new swatches. I'll go to the Swatch Library and I'm going to choose the art history once. Let's have a look at the impressionism. These look pretty good. I'm going to add this to this document. You could add your own swatches. You can do anything you like here. I'm just trying to give you an example of what is possible to do. Let me just close this fly out and we're going to make sure that we reset Illustrator for Lunch layout just so that everything is looking as it should be. But this is now my new swatches panel. Having done that, let's see how we would save it. This is where things are going to get a little bit different depending on whether you're working on a Mac or PC. Let's go for the PC first. You'll choose 'File' and then 'Save'. The location you are looking for is on your computer and you're going to your user area. That will be in users Helen or users whatever your name is. Or whatever the name is of the person whose computer you're using. Then you'll go to AppData and then Roaming, and then Adobe. Adobe Illustrator 22 settings. While in this case, this is the settings for Illustrators, say 2018. If you're working with 2019, when that comes out, it's going to be a bit different, 2017, it's going to be a little bit different, and obviously, say a six is going to be much different. You'll just look for the settings that correspond with the version of Illustrator that you're using. Now, I'm using an English version that is English US, but you may have a different language. You might be in UK or Australia or some other language. Just look for your language setting. If we go to Illustrator 22 settings, you'll see that the language that I'm using is the only one I can select. I'm just going to double-click on that. X64, I'm using the 64-bit version. Again, there's only one thing to select here. Now, we're looking for new document profiles, and here is where I can save mine. I'm going to call this Web because it is a web layout. I'm going to call it 1920 by 1080. I'll call it impressionist colors. You can be quite descriptive of what your document profile is going to be called. I'll click 'Save' and 'Okay'. I don't want to be working in this document profile. I don't want to preset it with anything. I just want to have those settings in it, so I need to at this point close it. Now if I want to use it to create a brand new document, I'm going to click 'Create New'. I'll go to 'Web' and I'll open up all the presets and let's look for the new one. Well, here is the Web, 1920 by 1080 impressionist one. I'll click on it and click 'Create', and in it, apart from an art board that is 1920 by 1080 pixels in size, we have an impressionist colors here. We also have this much larger layer thumbnail. You're able to create your own document profiles that are preset with the things that you want for a particular job. For example, if you're working for a client who has a very limited color palette and a very specific color palette that they want to use. Well, you can create a document profile for their projects and you can set it up for business cards or you can set it up for just an average size Apple which you change each time. However, it works for you. But be aware that these document profiles allow you to configure Illustrator in a way that makes sense to you and that's going to help you with your workflow. So much for the PC, let's switch to the Mac now and just say where we'd save things on the Mac. Here I am with Illustrator open on the Mac and I'm going to choose 'File' and then 'New'. I'm going to the web options and I'm just going to start with a standard web document. I'll click 'Create'. From this, I want to make a new document profile that I can use. Let's go to the swatches palette and just say what it looks like. Well, not happy with that at all. I'm going to grab everything and delete it. Again, I'll go to the flyout menu, 'Open Swatch Library', 'Art History'. Let's go to the Impressionist palette again. It looks like this didn't delete. Let me just get rid of them. Let's add these new swatches. I'm just clicking on H swatch in turn and that adds it to my document. Let's go to the last panel here, and I'm going to Panel Options exactly the same as I did on the Windows machine. I'm just going to increase the size and click 'Okay'. Now, I've got this document set up. I'm going to save it. I'll choose 'File' and then 'Save'. On the Mac, I'm going to the Mac hard drive and I'm going to applications. I'm going to look for Illustrator CC 2018, which is here. Then I'll go to 'Support Files' and then 'New Document Profiles'. Over here, I'll select my language. There is only one, and I'm going to name my file. I'll click 'Save'. Now, I'm coming up with an error here on my Mac. The problem is that I don't have the access privileges to the folder that I'm trying to save this file into. If that happens to you, this is what you're going to do. You'll go to 'Finder' and your going to that exact same location that we just went to. Let me navigate to it again. Applications Illustrator CC 2018, Support Files, New Document Profiles. This is the folder that I need to put them into but I can't get into it. Well, with that folder selected, I'm going to choose 'File' and then 'Get Info' because this allows me to unlock that folder. I'm going down here to this lock icon and I'm going to click it wants to open it. I have to put in my computer's passwords, I'm just typing that. That will allow me now to make changes to the permissions for this folder. What I'm doing is I'm letting everybody have read and write access to that folder. Having done that, I can now go and save the file in that folder. Let me go back to Illustrator and back with this file, I'll choose 'File' and then 'Save'. I'm in the location that I previously selected, but I couldn't save it into that location, now I can. Let's make it 1920 by 1080 impressionist colors. I click 'Save'. Click 'Okay'. I don't have any problems with saving it to that folder this time. Of course, I'm going to close it because I don't want to make changes to my Document Profile. I want to create a brand new file based on that profile. I'll choose 'File' and then 'New'. Now, we'll go to the web collection and we would expect to see this new document profile in this location, but it's not there. This is a difference between how the Mac and PC work. I'm first of all going to quit Illustrator. I've got a whole lot of windows open here. Just ignore those because I'm going to re-start Illustrator. All I need to do is to quit and re-start Illustrator and Illustrator goes and reads those Document Profiles all over again, and discovers that there's a new one. Now, when I choose 'File' and then 'New' and got across to my web profiles, and open up my presets. You will find that there is the new one here. Here it is the 1920 by 1080 Impressionist profile. I'll select it and click 'Create'. Not surprisingly, it is 1920 by 1080 in size, it's got all my impressions colors in it. Here is the layer thumbnail and it's much larger. It is a little bit more of a workaround on the Mac because you might have to unlock that folder so that you can put files in it. You probably will also need to restart your Illustrator program for it to be able to find the new profiles. But once you've done that, that's going to be set in concrete. That profile is always going to be accessible to you.
7. Pt 6 Manage Your Preferences: Illustrator comes with a whole series of settings that are already in place. Basic useful things that you need an actual setting for and these are called Illustrator preferences. Being able to change the preferences to configure Illustrator to do what it is that you want it to do can be important. You're going to find the preferences under edit and then preferences on a Pc, on a Mac, you're going to go to illustrator and then preferences, the dialog is the same, it's just in a different place. I'm going to start with general,, then we're not going to look at all of these preferences, but I am going to point out some important ones as we go through. The keyboard increment is how far does something move when you adjust it using the keyboard, the up arrow key, or the down arrow key, or left or right. You can also display tooltips or not. When you hover over something, if you see that little tooltip appear, well, you can turn them off if you don't want to see them. Anti-aliased artwork is something that we disable quite frequently when we have problems with our Illustrator patterns. Anti-aliasing is adding a little smoothing around the edge of your artwork so that visibly on the screen, circles look like circles because after all, they're being displayed in pixels which are square. Anti-aliasing smooth things out visibly on the screen. If you turn that off, things will have a little bit more jagged edges. They show that the start workspace where no documents are open is that start workspace that you see when you first start up Illustrator. If there are no documents opened, you can elect to see that workspace. If you don't want to see that you can also enable the legacy new file interface which is a gray dialog like this where you set up the new file specification. You don't have to do it using the new version. You could use the older version should you wish to do so. Use preview bounds, actually, needs a little bit of explanation. Let me cancel out of here for a minute. I have two shapes here, I'm going to select over them. Go to the align panel. I'm going to choose align to key object, [inaudible] on these up, so that there is zero space between them. In this case, the two objects align perfectly to each other. There's nothing in between the edges here. But if I disable preview bounds which I can do from the align panel or from the preferences. Let's go do exactly the same thing, align to key object, zero space. Now, you can see that the objects are aligned to this little marquee, the little selection marquee, and not to the very edges of the object, but it's the difference in how Illustrator treats those preview bounds. We said, it's available from the align options dialog here over here, or the align options panel. We can also select it or deselect it here, and you can see it's been deselected because I deselected over here. The other thing that's important is scale strokes and effects, so that's disabled for now. Let me say this, "If I make this shape a whole lot bigger, notice that the border around it doesn't change in dimensions, it's still the same width". Well, if I enable that preference and set it back two scale strokes and effects, let's see what happens when we enlarge this one. Well, the border gets so much larger, it's being scaled when the rectangle itself is being scaled. Depending on what you want to be, the behavior, you can enable or disable that as you wish. Let's have a look at selection and anchor display. I have slightly larger anchors than usual being displayed here. I've got this option selected, for me it just helps you to see the anchor points more clearly on the screen. If you're having trouble seeing your anchor points clearly, you might want to choose this larger option, and enable rubber band for the pen tool and curvature tool, means that when you're using the pen tool, you'll see something attached to it as you move. Let me show you this with the pen tool. This is the rubber band, if you don't want that rubber band to appear, you can disable it as a preference in Illustrator. Let's go forward to the type option. There are a couple of options here that you might want to look at. First is a font preview. You can set that to small, large, or medium. That's showing you in the font dropdown list when it appears up here, the actual look of the font. If you've got a Sans-serif font, you've got to go and see what that font is going to look like. If you have any trouble seeing it, set it to a large size. This option I have disabled which is fill new type objects with placeholder text. What happens if you have that selected is anytime you click to create a type object, the Lorem ipsum text is going to be inserted in a placeholder, if you don't want that, if you get sick of having to remove it, then turn it off here in the preferences. Now, unit is pretty self-explanatory. These are the general units used in Illustrator at the moment. I've got mine set to pixels for general and stroke endpoints for type. It makes better sense, it may set yours to whatever it is that you want. There are options here for grid and guides. There are options for smart guides, how things are marked as they're lined up against each other. Let me just select this shape and when these two shapes are lined up, so that their middles are in alignment. You can see that magenta line. That's a smart guy that's telling me that the centers of these two shapes are aligned. They can really help you, if you have some preferences that you want to set for smart guides, color and stuff like that, you can set them here. In user interface, I'm going to go straight down to here to use our interface. You can choose the style of interface that you have, a dark one, really dark, medium, slightly lighter, and a very white, or bright interface. You can make a choice that make sense to you. The other thing that you can select or deselect here is opening documents as tabs. At one stage, Illustrator and Photoshop changed from having floating documents to having them tabbed across the top of the screen, and people really hated that, a lot of people really hated it, and I was one of them. I used to really hate saying everything meet across the screen, but now I'm learning to live with it, so I have that enabled. If you still find that a little bit difficult, disable it and then your documents are going to float. In performance, you get to set the undo counts. So you can set 50, 100 or 200 as your undo count. Obviously, if you have more undo's available to you, you're going to be using a lot more computer memory and that may impact performance. It's the same problems with your computer speed, the spinning beach ball, for example, on the Mac, you may want to consider decreasing your undo counts, but of course, that's going to give you less ability to undo changes, if you need to. Last thing we'll have a look at is file handling and clipboard. Here, if you want to, you can save Illustrator to automatically save recovery data and you can set it to a time. I don't have that enabled. You can or not as you place, you can also disable it for complex documents. But you know what? If you've got it set on probably complex documents are the ones that you're most likely to want to have that data recovery available for, you might want to consider what settings you choose here. Here, also, I have set to zero, the number of recent files to display. Now, that's on the start menu when you first launch Illustrator and I have zero. When I open Illustrator and when you see that create new or open, dialog appear, there are none of my existing files being visible there, for me as a teacher, that makes better sense because the screen is nice and clean and tidy and you don't see everything that I've been working on, even it may not make sense to you to have zero, so you can adjust this. It's going to be set to some value by default anyway because I had to change it to zero. I don't remember what the defaults were, but if you want to see the recent files that you've been working on, you can add up to 30 of them by typing any number between zero and 30 in this box. Now, that one go backwards. If you were to type now 30, when you open the dialog next, I'm not going to see 30. I'm only going to see 30 as I continue to open and work on 30. It's going forward figure if you like not, I wanted to say what I worked on a few days ago, so I'll type in 30 and see what happens, it's not going to work like that. Once you make changes in this dialog, click "OK". Those changes are saved as part of your Illustrator setups, or they're going to be sticky, and they'll be there when you next open Illustrator at the time that you're going to lose them is, if you have to reset your preferences file. If you have to open Illustrator and lose your preferences file because you've got some problem in working with Illustrator, in that case, these are the preferences or some of the preferences that you're going to lose.
8. Pt 7 Display the Start Workspace: In the previous video, we noted that this is the new start screen in Illustrator cc, and that way could turn this off by choosing edit and then preferences, of course, Illustrator Preferences on a Mac and go to general and disable this show starts screen when no documents are open and just click okay. This is the interface without the start screen if you opt not to say it. But the secret to this start screen is that it's a workspace itself. If you don't have any documents open at all in Illustrator from the workspace drop-down list, you'll say start, and anytime you could click here to view the start screen. Even if you have the start screen disabled because you don't like to see it, it's still going to be accessible to you, but of course that's only going to be the case when there are no other documents open. I'm just going to my own workspace and that lets me flip between the two because I have no documents open I can't go back to start, but as soon as I open a document, so let me just create a brand new document here very quickly, and let's say that the start screen or the start interface is no longer an option. We would need to close this document down and then we could go back to the start screen. Just a little bit of information about what the start screen actually is and if you turn it off, how you can get it back.
9. Pt 8 Create Keyboard shortcuts: Most applications have some means by which you can create custom keyboard shortcuts and Illustrator is no exception to this. I have a custom keyboard shortcut that I created to reset the current workspace, and I've used Control Alt R, so as soon as I tap that keyboard shortcut, my workspace resets itself. Now this is not built into Illustrator. I was able to create it myself, so let's go and see how we would do that. We'll choose Edit, and then Keyboard Shortcuts, so that we can get to the keyboard shortcuts dialogue. Now, this is my set, it's called mine, but I could go back to the Illustrator Defaults, and that's the default set that is shipped with Illustrator. Here you have options for tool, so you can create keyboard shortcuts, for example, for tools that don't currently have them. You can also do it for menu commands, so we're just going to select what you want to make a change too. Here you'll say that current shortcuts, the shortcuts that are currently associated with a particular character. Let's go and make a change, so let's go to Menu Commands now because I'm working in the Illustrator Defaults, the keyboard shortcut that I showed you a minute ago isn't here, so let's go and put it there. We're going firstly to window because I can get to my workspaces here, and here's the workspace sub menu, and here is the option for reset current workspace, and you'll see that there is currently no shortcut associated with it. Well, I'm going to click in here and I'm going to press Control and Alt and type the letter R. Now Illustrator is telling me that the shortcut Alt control R is already in use, and it's in use by the change to art board rollers command. Well, that's a command I never use, so I'm quite happy to for go the use of this keyboard shortcut to use it for something that I actually do want to use. I like the fact that Illustrator will tell you that there's a conflict and you can also go to the conflict, so you can go and see where that option is that already using Alt Control R because sometimes when you're in this dialogue, you actually go to use the keyboard shortcut and Illustrators says, "Well, that's already in use," you're thinking, "Woo, that's a really good shortcut." I didn't know that I could use it for whatever it was that it's currently set up for. If you want to go and see where it's currently in use, you can do so, but I'm quite happy with this. I'm going to put this in place, so that's going to be my new reset current workspace keyboard shortcut is going to be Alt Control R. You can see here that we now have a custom set. It's not going to overwrite the default set, this is a custom set. So I'm going to click here on Save, and I'm going to call this Helen's Skillshare, and I'll click Okay, and so there is know a custom set of keyboard shortcuts that enclose this Alt Control R keyboard shortcut. Let me just temporarily go back to Illustrator Defaults, and let's look here at the Illustrator for Lunch option. You can see that reset no longer has a keyboard shortcut because I'm back to the Illustrator Defaults, but as soon as I go and get my set, the Helen'S Skillshare one, and just apply those. Then let's go back over here and you can see that not only is Alt Control R going to reset whatever the current workspace is, it's not just Illustrator for Lunch, it's whatever one I happen to be using, but also Illustrator is telling me what that keyboard shortcut is in these menus as if it's always been there. There are very few Illustrator shortcut keys that have not been assigned elsewhere. So typically when you're making your keyboard assignments, we'll be using things that are already assigned elsewhere, so you're going to be disabling them from one option and using them where you actually want to use them. Now if you're a teacher of course, you can always go back to keyboard shortcuts and go and reinstate the Illustrator Defaults when you're teaching because you obviously want to show people the information that's going to be appropriate to their screen, not the customize shortcuts that you've created for yourself, for example. Things like this Illustrator for Lunch reset one more I know that I put it in there. It's really obvious to me I remember that one very well, so I would never suggest that you use that in a tutorial because you don't have it unless of course you decide that as a really handy shortcut, and as a result of watching this video, you determined that that's a really good one for you to use. Now just a word of warning about what you can use. Typically for tools, you can use a letter of the alphabet or a symbol plus or minus the Shift K. If you're looking at menu commands, then you will be combining things like the Alt and the Control and the Shift K, of course on the Mac, that would be option, Command and Shift. There is a slightly different convention for shortcuts that are used for menu items as against shortcuts that are used for tools, but Illustrator is going to tell you if you going to do the wrong thing. I've pressed Alt and F. It says, two shortcuts can't contain either function K's or the Control or all modifiers. So if you try to type something that can't be used, Illustrator is going to tell you. One final thing to note about the keyboard shortcut dialogue is that there is an export text option, and this will export a list of your keyboard shortcuts that have been assigned under whatever set it is that you currently have selected. Click that and you can type a filename to save the file to, and Illustrator will export a list so that you could for example, print it if you want to learn those shortcuts.
10. Pt 9 Create and Use Views: When you're working on a very large illustration, sometimes it can be handy to see more or less of the screen or perhaps see other versions of the image that you had planned. I'm going to switch to a different version of this image. I'm going to view and I'm going to select my light sky option, watch as I do so that the sky and these lights here are going to change. If I go back to the dark sky, I'll choose "View" and then "Dark sky" and you can see the sky's changed and so too have these lights. What's going on here? Well, what I've done in Illustrate is to preset these two views as to how I want the image to look. I went to the last palette and I determined that for the dark one, I wanted to see just one string of lights and I wanted to see this dark sky background, so I had it visible. When I set up the document to look the way I want it to look for one iteration, I'll choose "View" and then "New view" and I can type anything for this new view description. I'll call it Dark Two, just to distinguish it from the original. Then to create the second one, I turned on more strings of lights over here and I turned off the dark sky, so I've got a document now with a lighter sky and three strings of lights. Again, I created that as a view with view, new view, and let's call this Light Two. To switch between them, all I do now is to go to the View Menu and choose the one I want to see, let's go too Dark Two. The lights have been turned off, two of the strings, one still visible and the sky has changed. Views can contain things like visible or invisible layers. If you turn layers off, Illustrator's going remember which of those lights were turned off when you created the view. They can also be set up for certain parts of the documents. I have another view here. Let's go to "View" and let's go to top left. When we go to the top left of the document, not only are these layers hidden, and this one, this dark sky layer visible, but also we're saying that part of the document that I wanted to focus on. I created a view that actually had a location in it. Let me just zoom back out again with Control or Command Zero. What I could do, if I was working in this bottom corner of the image, is I could go down to this bottom corner and just focus on it. I'll move it into the position I want it to appear in when I'm working on it, and choose "View" and then "New view." I can call this Bottom Right and click "Okay." So we can easily switch between, for example, the top left of the document and the bottom right of the document, just by selecting those options from the View Menu, now these views are stored with this image so we can get back to them at anytime, and then just a handy way of helping you move round a really complex document, so that you can see the element that you want to see when you want to see it and not have to go find it every time. Now there's also a view manager. You can get to that by choosing "View" and then "Edit views" so you can read off all of your views here, and if there's a view that you no longer want, you can select it and then select "Delete" and then "Okay" and it will be deleted from the views list you can see here, is the views list at the bottom of the view panel.
11. Pt 10 New default fill and stroke: I'm going to create a brand-new document here in Illustrator. I want you to have a look at the foreground and background colors that are set here by default for this new document. If I click here on the Default Fill and Stroke, nothing happens. Something is happening behind the scenes that is controlling a different fill and stroke in this document, a different default, but we already know that we can save preset. So I've saved this style as a preset style but what is actually controlling these two colors as being the default colors? The secret is in the graphic styles' menu here and this is the default graphic style. This is what's going to appear here anytime I click this icon or press the letter D. How do you set your own custom graphic style, your own custom defaults? If for example, you would prefer to see colors other than white and black as the stroke and fill color, how are you going to do that? Well, let's go and set up a rectangle here. I'm going to increase the stroke this time to four pixels and let's color it. Let's go and get a new fill color. I am going to fill my shapes with this orange color and let's go and get a new stroke color. If for example, I wanted these to be my new default so anytime I press this icon here, I get these colors. This is what I'm going to do. First I will set up a shape with those settings, including the stroke that you want to use. Open up the graphic styles panel and then drag and drop this style over the top of the current default. When you do, hold down the Alt key on the PC or the Option key on a Mac, you can drop this new style over the old one. Now that is the default graphic style for this particular document. So any time I create a shape and I want to go back to the default with the shape selected, all I'll do is click here, and we're inheriting this style that I've now set up as a document defaults. Now, if we combine this with the information that we learned in an earlier video about creating a document preset with all the settings that you want inside a document, then you could include this in one of these presets. When you choose File and then New and go and select a document preset like this web one that we created in an earlier video, then included in it could be this default graphic style you set it up before you actually go and save the document as a new preset.
12. Bonus Tip Project and Wrapup: Our final and bonus tip is one that- I'm just little bit embarrassed by it because I didn't know about it. When I was researching this class, I discovered it and I was like, "Oh my goodness." Let's see what it is. I'm going to the Align panel here because it's one of the panels that shows us. In the past when I suggested that you go to find the extra options for this panel, I was clicking on this icon here and choose "Show Options" because that displays these extra options. What I didn't know and what I do now know is that this little indicator here is an indicator that there are more options available for this dialogue. If you click on it, the options are going to appear or disappear. You can toggle through the states that this dialogue can appear in by clicking on this button. Let's go and see another dialogue that also has this setting in it. What the transform dialogue does, you can see this little indicator here. If we click on it, we're going to show or hide the additional options available in that particular dialogue. Anytime you see a dialogue that it has this little indicator in it, that's going to tell you that there's a possibility that there are more options available from this dialogue and instead of going to the fly-out menu to find them, you can just click this icon and they will be displayed. I hope you really like that bonus tip. I'm certainly finding it very useful. Your project for this class will be to tell me which of the topics that are being covered by these videos is going to be of most use to you. Are you going to use preset for your documents? Are you going to create keyboard shortcuts? Are you going to create views? What do you think is going to be of most use to you? Just write a sentence or two about that in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class. I hope that you've learned things about Illustrator of which you were previously unaware. Now, as you are watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which asked if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learned from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you do recommend the class. Secondly, write even in just a few words, why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations really help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now if you see the follow link on the screen, click it to keep up to date with my new classes as they're released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design For Lunch , and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
