Adobe Illustrator CC Masterclass: Shortcuts & Workflow Tips

1. Class Introduction: Hey, my name is Jeremy. I'm a top teacher here on Skillshare. I've got heaps of design classes to help you grow in Adobe Illustrator. I've been using Adobe Illustrator for eight years now on brand projects, client work, content creation, and even making products as well which has been super fun. I've learned so many tricks along the way, shortcuts, hacks, a little nuggets that I want to share with you. In this class, I'm going to show you all my personal tips, shortcuts, and also the things that I use on a day-to-day basis from working on client projects or creating content. Those things that will include, how to create your own custom action scripts, how to master swatches and actually create libraries for your own brand projects, how to use grids and customize your workspaces, topography shortcuts to make it super fast to edit topography. My top free and paid plug-ins as well that you can use as extensions in an illustrator. How to use art boards and create layers very fast. How to export files the fast way, and plenty more other little tricks as well along the way to help you. Also, you'll get some templates in the Project Section that you can apply and use so you can practice. For your class project, just at least try one trick or one hack that I've shared so you can actually see it in action. For each tip and trick, just apply it to your own work or previous client work. So I encourage you to get familiar with each shortcut that I've shared and apply it to your workflow on a regular basis. But, this class is going to be super fun especially if you're an intermediate designer that wants to go a bit deeper into design and build on that basic knowledge. So I hope you guys enjoyed the class. I look forward to seeing you dive into it. See you in there. 2. What is Adobe Illustrator: So what's Adobe Illustrator? It's a vector program created by Adobe and it's been around for years, it's pretty much a monopoly in the market compared to things like Affinity Designer, which is an alternative to Illustrator but it's a vector program really great for branding, identity design, logos, topography layouts, and even illustrations. It's pretty much the best program you can get. It does cost a little bit of money but if you're a working professional or freelancer then it's pretty much the best choice you can get. It's great if you're a graphic designer and an illustrator. There's plenty of other uses but sometimes if you're not really a designer then you can use things like Canva or PicMonkey , things like that which is template based. Illustrator is really for working professionals and it's really great for all these Harvard things. That's pretty much what Illustrator is. So what's the pricing of Adobe Illustrator? You can actually buy the single app which is $29 per month. Obviously the prices I'm saying is in Australian so it might be a little bit different. You can also get the Creative Cloud App, which is around $70 a month and that includes all the apps, Illustrator, Photo shop, Premiere Pro, all those good stuff but the cool thing is if you're a student or a teacher you can actually get it for only 20 bucks a month. It's actually pretty cheap. If you do work part-time or do a side gig for freelancing you can make that money back. It's less than a $100 a month, so one job will pay for it. If you think about it, it's actually not that expensive, obviously there's so many subscriptions these days so they're probably adding up but you got to be wise with your money and invest in the best software and I believe Adobe Illustrator is the best software. The reasons why is because it's the industry standards. So if you go work for a studio or design firm they actually use Adobe Illustrator, even if you're on a Mac or PC. So it's actually the industry standard. You need to get used to that, majority of the time that it needs a [inaudible] designer and things like that. So that's really a key to keep in mind. The other thing is it also syncs with all the programs. If you do have a credit card, it will sync with your libraries. If you add graphics or color palettes or topography, you can actually add all that in your one account. That's super convenient and makes it a lot easier. The third thing is that it's good quality. Not only are they always updating it, but its got so many features, it's jam-packed with things you can use and its just a lot better in terms of features because its so extensive and it's been around for a long time, so they're always working on it. Obviously, its got its flaws and crashes sometimes but at the end of the day, you got to compromise on that but it's just the thing to keep in mind. Those are the key things on, what is Illustrator, the pricing and why you should be using it. I think it's one of the best programs you can use. In this class we're going to go through some of the things and tools and show you how powerful it is. I use it to create my carousels. I use it for logo designs.I also use it for my client work as well especially women's brand identity. I create presentations indexed with it as well. There's just so many things you can do on it and obviously I use InDesign and Photo shop as well, but I just feel like illustrator is the best program and I love it. It's amazing. 3. My Personal Layout Workspace: I'm going to show you a bit about my workspace and how I use it. For me personally, because I'm a brand identity designer, I do a bit of strategy. I'd love doing logos and illustrations, all those things I do on a regular basis. I set up my workspace to help me do that. On my left-hand side, I've got the basic tools there. I just like keeping it in a straight line for most space, you can see you can bring them out like that, but it just takes up more space on the screen. If you go to a small monitor, you want to make sure that you're having enough space to work with, right? Another cool tip as well is I can press "Tab" to get rid of all the toolbars and I can press "Tab" again as well to bring them back. Another crucial cut is pressing the letter F. If I press "F" will go into full screen mode. You can see that. You go press at once, press it twice, press it three times and everything disappears. Then I can just focus on my design, on my work or even presenting if I have a client or presenting on this screen share. Press F to go back and you can see that. On my top hat section, you can see it's just all the normal things there, nothing too crazy. Then on my write is all my main toolbars and panels that I use. I'm just going to open this up. You can click the little arrows as you can see, here is to open and close panels, which I feel like are really useful. I'm going to move this. You can see this is what I typically use. I always have my swatches open because color is a key thing, even if it's just black and white, I always have black and white stay in my color panel. I also have in this panel section, my color, which is the RGB. I can click on the dropdown to actually locate the hue saturation, brightness and CMYK colors as well. From there, I also have the color guide. I love using these as well. This helps me create different palettes that I need on the go and if I click the dropdown, I can change it from vivid unmuted, to tint and shade. If I select my orange color, you can see what will happen. It starts acting very differently and I can select it and you can see there. That's my color section then top right, I love having that there all the time, so I can always just double-click, play around with the settings and choose a different color whenever I need it, right? Awesome. Below it I have my appearance panel. The appearance is when I can add effects, so I can add blows, I can distort and transform, which is pretty good. I can stylize so I can add glows as well and feathers. Then my warp effects as well on the side and then also my Photoshop effects and this panel allows me to bee non-destructive. I always have these because I typically do a lot of drop shadows when I'm working. For example, I just drop it back there, if I have a circle like this, I can quickly go to the appearance panel do a drop shadow and you can see already, I have a drop shadow here on my shape. I love having the appearance panel there and I can turn it off and on. You can see here I can just turn this off and on like that. That's the appearance panel and then also my gradient tool. The reason why I keep everything in bunches, is just because things that are similar together, I just try and keep them because these are all effects hear. My gradient tool, I can select this. Play around with that. Pretty straightforward. I've got the linear, the radial and also the custom one as well. The new one, which is the free form gradient tool, which I love playing with, as you can see there, sum really fun ways to create stuff. That's how you use the gradient tool for that. Then I've got my graphic styles. Once again, if I have a graphic style that I like, for example, these gradient, I now can create a box and apply that style to another shape. My gravity cells are really important, especially if I have a file with a lot of different content and things that repeats, then I always want to make sure that I get to reuse it. I can make a stroke like this and then I can add that two my graphic styles and then any other shape I can create, I can select the graphic style and it makes it. I love having graphic styles there, it's just super awesome. Then once you go down to the bottom here, I have my artboards. Artboards are super important because I need to be able to control what size of the artboards there are, how many there are, if I'm doing a presentation, I need to have control over that. For example, if I've got this presentation here, I'm just going to press tab and you can see I've got like so many artboards, like one to 17. I need to be able to control that and name things, so this is very important when doing a presentation and things for a client. I can press shift and open the artboards tools to select the artboards there. Then I've got my transform tool. The reason why I like doing this is because I can select a shape. I love using this won tool. I can click on the drop down menu and click flip horizontal. It will flip my shape. You can see it will flip my shape. I can flip it vertically as well. That's why I use it there, so I don't actually have to go to object transform and do it this way. I can literally do it with one button. That's why I use that there. Then I've got my link. With links because I don't have any links in this document, I'll go to this one and you can see links. I've got these PNGs and photos and things. It's like InDesign, when you load things in, I can check if there's something missing if I need to relink things or add links, that's why I have that there. That's pretty much my right-hand side of the toolbox. Now once we go to the left-hand side, you can see these are my key tools I use as well. I use a transparency panel. If I'm going to add a nice little color background, I'll bring it back and then what I can do you go to transparency and start to play with the blending modes. You can see that I'm playing with the blending modes and I'm always adding multiplies and things like that. For example, if I have a purple and I want to add a multiply, you can seen that's how I get these dark effect here. I'm always playing around with that and creating something that's interesting. Then you can see that, another example. That's the transparency panel. I can also drop the opacity really quickly. You can see I can play around with the opacity. If I select the shape and then jump it is you can see there and if you hold Shift and use your mouse wheel, it actually shows you how to scroll up and down. You can increase and drop the opacity with the mouse wheel. Next to that, I've got my library. If I'm working with a client or even my own branding, I have things in colors, in logos saved, which is really useful, speeds things up and makes time just go quicker. For example, I've got some client files here that I did a little while back. I can delete this and this. You can see I just drag and drop the logo in, if I'm doing a banner or something for the client, as you can see there. That's just an image that I've downloaded from a previous file. That's the libraries. I also love adding colors. My favorite color pallets from Adobe Color and things. I add them in and then what you do is right-click and click add theme to swatches and it's going to add into my swatch panel. You can see on the right-hand sighed now, I can literally just select these colors. That's a cool trick as well. That's libraries and transparency panel. Next we have the align tool. With this, I'm going to have three circles. Let's play around with the colors. Let's say we got these white circles here on the screen. I can select everything and I can quickly align everything I needed so I can click this button. 4. My Top Plugins: I'm going to show you all my Adobe Illustrator plugins that I actually use. I'll show you a little bit of an example to show you what they actually do. Number 1 is Astute Graphics. They've got all these plugins, different types, and it's just a yearly subscription, $119. It does cost a little bit, but if you are someone that needs to do inking or you need to work with pads a lot or you hate the pencil, then you can use sum of these tools they have. They've got like heaps of different ones able for texturing, a mirror effect, rostering so you can edit images even if they are not a vector which is really cool. They've got heaps different stuff even like a width scribe so you can actually adjust pubs, especially if you're an Illustrator, that's really, really good. You can check them out at astutegraphics.com. I'll just jump into Illustrator and show you some of the plug-ins here. On the left I've got all these different ones. I have one here which is the dynamic shapes, which are alike. What I can do is actually create a gee icon, and it gives you all these settings on the left. I can just drag out a shape and you can see it's going to create this cool gee icon here. I'm just going to drag this out, I click, and I can actually adjust some of the parameters here. You can see there I'm all customizing with all these different settings. It's actually really, really handy. I can create a love heart if I want, change it, if I just click, and then I can adjust that. I can adjust the depth of the point. This is one of the quay tools that I actually use which is really good. They also got ones where it's like the PathScribe. Let's just create a shape, go to PathScribe and you can see I can adjust some of these handles. I get control over the paths as you can see, highlights it, which is really useful. I can change all the paths to straight paths or rounded. I can actually cut paths with the scissor tool. There's always different ones hear but you can go through that if you get it. They also got rounded corners. I can actually select corners and apply the selection so it credits, it's like a bevel. If you select all the corners, then click and apply it. You can see that, which is really cool. I love that one. It's got auto-savior, it saves your files as well automatically, you can set like every 10 minutes or 20 minutes. They've go phantasm and there's all these different ones. It's got rulers, it's got stylisms. It's got stippling effects. It's got brush tools, it's got the mirror me effects which is cool like if you do Mandela's and things, it's got all these different ones but this is just a quick example of how to use it. Next won is the Logo Package Express. This is a great tool if you're a logo designer mainly. It pretty much exports all your logo files in one click and it makes it such an easy process. You can check them out by going Logo Package Express. I will put a link down in the coarse as well, an affiliate link, which is good. I get a little bit of a kickback from that. But if I go to Illustrator, for this tool what we can do is we go to window, click on "Extensions", and we open our extensions. I'm going to go down to Logo Package Express 2.0 If I click that, you get this box pop-up and pretty much I can just select my logo and click "Set Logo." It will automatically set that main logo as our main logo. The first thing, it will pop out very dark colors have detected. Do you want to convert them to black? I'll click "No." I can see what our mane Lego. I want to set the logo marks. I'll select the mark is all set logo. Then I can select the text and do set Logoltype, then I can click, "Make Web logos". Then I'll start to generate all those logos really easily, say black and white versions and all that. Obviously, I can go to the settings and adjust which files I want, so I can turn off the AI files and maybe I just want a PNG, which is really cool. They got all these other cool effects as well and settings you can play with. Then what I can do is click "Export Logos". Then eye can just go to the desktop. For now, I can make a folder and just call it Logo test. Press "Okay" and then click "Create Lego package", and it'll automatically generate all those logos for me. It's like one of the best plugins you can get. Especially if you logo desire shaves like three hours of your time when doing this, especially if you work with a lot of clients. I recommend this plugin. It's super awesome. I can go into the files and you can see it's got all the different visions, the PNG that I've set it to and then the one color, as you can see there. It's such a good tool and I think everyone should get it and everything goes into different folders as well as you can see. That's the Lego Package Express. The second tool is actually called Fontself. This is great if you want to make your own fonts and it's super easy. It's not complicated, it's not complex. It's actually really easy. You can have a Photoshop version and an Illustrator version. So you can check it out through it's $150 to get this. But if you're serious about typography and making your own fonts or selling fonts, then you can really get it. You can checked out the features, but I'll just show you a quick example of how to use it. This is my text here, and I'm just going to expand that. Now I've got this alphabet, I'll go to Window, Extensions, and click on the "Fontself Maker". Once I do that, I'm still waiting for it to load. I'm going to ungroup everything, then I'm going to click A to Z. You can see now that I have all these letters here, it's really awesome. I can add custom padding and kerning and the tracking and everything. I have fool control over everything. They've actually got a cool tool where I can click on "Smart" and what it will do, it will make smart kerning. It will kern all the letters automatically for me. Then all I do is press "Save", and I can call my font, and then I'm pretty much make fonts. It's easier to do and it's really awesome. This is Fontself, it's a great plug-in as well. Then last but not least, is the Nimbling Asymmetric Tool. If I go to Extensions and click on "Nimbling 30 SSR", it's on Adobe Exchange. If you go to Adobe Exchange, you can say this is what it's called. It's actually really useful. Instead of creating your own actions or script, you can just download this for asymmetric design. If ewe want to create like certain logos or shapes, illustrations, then this is really cool. I'll share an example. I've opened it up buy going to Window, Extensions, and click on nimbling. You can see it's got like these weird toolbox which is weird. But I have this and all I have to do is select my shape and then click what I want. This one I want the top. Select this, and this can be the left. Then select the dark one, and this one could be the right. You can see the square, which panel or dimensional plain I want it to bee on. Then I can connect everything, doesn't have to be completely accurate. Bag and box. You can see these rectangles would be longus, I'll cut that. You can see now we have a box. It's really easy to useful asymmetric stuff. But those are my top four plug-ins for illustrator. That's what I use on a daily basis for my designer MOOC, branding work, and anything in between. 5. 5 Common Shortcuts: I'm going to show you some more shortcuts that I actually use on a regular basis. You can see I've got a graphic of an illustration and some text, here.I'm going to zoom in here. The first thing is actually zooming in. The quickest way to zoom in and out, is holding ''Alt'' and using your mouse wheel. If you're on a Mac, you'll be optioned, but you just hold that and zoom in and out. Another cool thing is if I want to go into outline mode, so maybe I want to see all the outlines of this graphic. I can press ''Control Y''. This is going to go into outline mode, so pretty much it makes everything white and black. Then it shows me all the outlines and anchor points, as you can see here on any graphic or piece of text. You can see this text is not outlined. But if I did outline it, you can see the text there because it was currently live, but press ''Control Z'' will go back to live there. This is a cool tip to do outline mode, and then I can press ''Control Y'' to jump back out of it. A cool thing as well, is if I want to get rid of the out board, you can see, if I have an out boarded behind here, I can press ''Control Shift H''. You can see it gets rid of the out board. It could be another way and it just makes everything white on the document. I can press ''Control Shift H'' to turn it back off. I'm going to press ''Control Z''. That's really cool. Another cool tip as well with the same ''H'' button, is if I click on the illustration, you can see how it's got a lot of these outline. But what if I didn't like that? You can either do two things. I can actually go to my layers panel, and you can see how it's green. I can double-click on this panel. It will bring up a box. I can change the color from green to maybe something more subtle. Maybe I can put it to gray or blue, anything like that even lavender. Well, maybe I want to do peach, so I'll click ''Peach''. Now press ''Okay''. Now it changed the outline to a different color. All the anchor points come up at a different color now, which is really cool. But what if I wanted to get rid of it altogether? All you have to do, is press ''Control H'', and it deletes all. What it does, it pretty much hides all the anchor points. If I wanted to bring it back, I press ''Control H'' again. It works the same for text as well. You can see the text. It doesn't highlight it with a line under it, which is really cool. I think this is a super handy tool, especially if you're doing illustration or outwork and you want to see what's happening and helps you get into the details and start to move things around and shift things and do all that type of stuff, do the things that you need to do. If you need to edit some stuff. I think that makes it look really, really cool. Press ''Control Z'' just to go back there. I think that's super awesome. If want to access some other shortcuts what we can do, is go to view and a lot of these shortcuts that I just used are all in this section. You can see you've got edges, hide artboards. I can hide a bounding box. A bounding box is the box that happens around some text or even a shape. You can seen a bounding box, the square box is there. If you go to view, you can see hide bounding box. It's shift ''Control B''. If I click that, you can see now the box doesn't pop up. If it's in a way or it annoys you, you can actually turn that off and on. But I got back there. You can see you've got some other key shortcuts as well with the guides. A cool thing with guidelines, is that you can actually create your own from a shape. I'm just going to lock the background layer so I can press ''Control 2'', to lock that background. Now this shape, is not moving. I can also actually press ''Tab'' to hide my toolbox, so I can focus on the outward. Once I've done that, I can actually press ''M'' for the rectangle tool, drag out of box, and maybe change the color. What I'm going to do, is press ''Control 5''. That's going to create outlines and guides from my shape. If I press ''Control 5'', it literally turned my rectangle into a guide. Now maybe I want to extend or increase the size of that text and maybe center it being that space. You can see that. I can also add guides by pressing ''P'' for the pencil. Maybe I want to add some more guides. I can press ''Control 5'' for that one. If I want to turn off the guides, I can press ''Control semicolon''. If you're on a Mac it'll be command semicolon, it turns it off and on. If I want to unlock the guides, I can press ''Control Alt, semicolon''. It should allow me to select this guides and move it as you can see there. Sometimes the illustrator for some reason it goes invisible when I'm selecting it, but that can be corrected if I got the guides and you can change the colors here so I can change the guide color too. Maybe I want it to be green. Press ''Okay''. I can change it to dots if I want. I can show a pixel grid, all these things. Press ''Okay''. Now you can see it literally changed that guide into green and dotted. You really have control over that. You can see because my guides are on this page layout, maybe if I dragged it on another layer, you can do that buy selecting this little square box, bringing that up. Now, because this layer is a red layer color, you can see now when I select the guide, you can see that it fixes that and you can see the guide of it will clear up. I'm going to press ''Control Z'' to bring that back into action there. As you can see that. Another cool tip is all that illustrator recently brought out, is the ability to have some smooth images. As you can see, it renders it live. Before it would not render it. But if I go press ''Control K'' to open my preferences, I can literally have so much control of everything here. If I want to click on performance. Then what I want to do is go two real-time drawing and editing. If I turn this off, and press ''Okay'', you can see if I click and drag, it's not showing me live, it's just showing me where the illustration will be, as you can see there. If I go back, press ''Control K'' to go back, click ''Performance'' and click this. You can see the difference. Now it doesn't show me the outline where it will be. If I let go of the mouse, it shows me live that rendering, which is really cool. If I go back here and get a performance, you can see how I would GPU performance turned on. If I turn that off, you can see, if I'm trying to zoom in, it's a lot slower. If you have a good GPU, I recommend turning it on. If you're zooming in a lot, you don't want it to be jittery. That helps everything be smooth as well. Go back, click that. I've got a GTX 1070, so it makes it less move. You can see as I'm zooming in, maybe I need to edit like these little anchor points or something that will help there. Those are some of the top shortcuts that I use when I'm doing outwork, or doing. 6. Custom Keyboard Shortcuts: I'm going to show you how to create your own keyboard shortcut. You can do actions which is similar to doing it this way, but when you add a keyboard shortcut, the negative is that it's going to change the whole cable shortcut inside of Illustrator itself so that means you have to make it go back to default if you want to change it. The shortcut you go to Edit and click on ''Keyboard Shortcuts''. Now you've got these keyboard shortcuts, you can set a preset, you can create your own preset and call it 2020 or September or whatever you want. You've also got your tool menu so you can see these are all the main tools I must have them for me are pretty much the same. The ellipse, rectangles and stuff as well same thing. I'm going to click on this and click on ''Menu Commands''. One of the things that I have changed for example is if I've go to object and go down. I'm going to Shifts Control E for Expand Appearance. This just makes everything a lot faster and a lot easier. You can actually create your own keyboard shortcuts. For example, if I want to maybe go to original menu, maybe we want to get a type, maybe glyphs. We want to have a shortcut key, so maybe I could Control Shift T. What happens is when you add a shortcut you can seen that it's already in use by tabs command. I have to figure something else, maybe Shift Control Alt T. That's in use as well. I'm trying to think of ways to make this shortcut work for me. You can see I've just maid a shortcut Shift Control T, as you can see that and that's going to work for us. If I press "Okay", I show you once I write this set 2020, I can click yes. Now if I go Shift Control T, it should open the Glyphs just like that. Then I press T for the Type Tool and you can see here. Then I can obviously like customize what I want. Maybe this is like a logo. Then I got left the trademark there. I double-click on the Glyphs, that's pretty cool. Am going to just play around with that. That's pretty awesome. Instead of me having to go to the menu and click on Type, I may go down to Glyphs, instead of clicking that in about two clicks, I can just press control shift T. That just makes life so much easier for me. These are a few shortcuts that I use. 7. Artboard Shortcuts: I'm going to show you my tips on how to use artboards faster. I've got some highlights here that I've recently created for Instagram and they are on three separate artboards. I've just got a basic colors and just an icon in the middle of it. To access the artboards tool, all you have to do is press "Shift O". That's the quickest shortcut. Once you do that, you can see that the text will pop up. The toolbar at the top will change as well, and you can see the artboards names will change as well. The quickest way to add or move artboards is hold Shift and left-click on all the artboards I want to change. I can hold Alt. If you're on a MAC, it will be an option. I can also hold Shift as well to keep the proportions to 90 degree angle. I can let go and it should duplicate those artboards. I can do it again, holding Shift, clicking, holding out, and holding Shift to keep the alignment and drop those artboards. It's really quick way to add some artboards. I can "Control Z" to delete those. Another cool way to change all your artboard size in one go is, once again, hold Shift select the artboards, go up the top and you can see the width and the height. If I want to make these a bit shorter, maybe I'll change it to a 1,000 pixels or points. Press "Enter". Now you can see all the artboards change. If I move my background color, you can see out of the way, you can just move it.You can see that the artboards got shorter. Maybe I want to adjust it, maybe I want to make it a different size. As you can see there, it seem to have another icon in the back, which is cool. Delete that. You can see we got these shorter artboard, which is really, really cool. If you go to your artboard Window, so you go to Window and artboards is another few tricks you can do as well. A quick way to re-arrange artboards is you click the "Hamburger" menu. If I bring in here, you can click "New Artboard" and it should add them automatically. If you press "Shift" or you can actually just press the plus button on the top left, and it should automatically plus like that in the order that it's defaulted to. Press "Control Z" to do that. Remember, you can also rename the artboard by clicking on the top-left and calling this whatever. As you can see hear or I can click, call it Icon 3 or Icon 1, whatever I want. I can always click "Delete" button on the top or just press "Delete" on my keyboard to actually delete the artboard a lot faster. What you can also do is we can also rearrange these artboards. Click on the "Hamburger" menu. Click "Re-arrange". I can actually change direction. I can add spacing. If you hold Shift and left click, you can see or add it by 10. I can click "Move Artwork with Artboard". Maybe I want to make them go down in the line. I press "Okay". You can see that what it did is it moved all the artwork. It kept the icons, but they background squares it left it, and sometimes that happens..But you can see how it stacked all the squares now, which is really, really cool. That's a quick way to shift your artwork and move your artboards around. I can go back. I can click artboard option as well. Here's another way of customizing the width and the height. I can do presets, which is really awesome. I can use Delete and Okay, just like how we have the tools at the top there. I'm going to press "Cancel" for that. Let's go back to the board there.You can also delete empty artboards. If you've got nothing, let's say I have some artboards over here. If it's too long to actually go select and delete. All you have to do is click this "Hamburger" menu. Click "Delete Empty Artboards", left-click and you see it just deleted everything in one second. That's really helpful and handy if you've got to much of a mess on your artboard, which is cool. 8. Customising Workspaces: I'm going to show you how to customize and add your own workspaces in a simple way. What you want to do is you want to go to the top left and click on Window. Once you do that, go down to workspace. I have two workspaces, one is my 2020 version, and then I have empty space. If I click on my empty space, it will get rid of my toolbars on the right. This just allows me to have a bit more space, so I can see what I'm doing. If I go back, I'll go back to Workspace, I can change it to my work and you can see the toolbar pops back up. I'll go back to Window click "Workspace" again, and you can see you've got all these different default versions. You've got Essentials, Layout, Printing, Web, even Topography, if I click "Topography," you can see, open up these custom panels that Illustrator, I believe, is the best for me. The Layers, Libraries, Properties, and all these ones there and attaches it to the right-hand side. I typically don't use those ones I typically my custom ones because it needs to work for me. I'll just bring it back and it should change it back. In order for us to create our workspace or customize it, what you can do is go down and click new workspace, and then you can call it your own. This is my My Space 2020. I can move things around so I can add sum workspaces, maybe I want to add, let's see, info hear maybe I'll put info there and I can put let's see, Properties, we can maybe checked the properties tab over here. That's my workspace. What I can do is go back window Workspace and you can see now it's saved my workspace there with a name. If I want to change things around, I can click Manage workspaces and I can click on that space and rename it, I can call it My Space Test, press "Okay," and it will change the name of my workspace as you can seen there. I can also click back, click that, and I can also delete that workspace. If I click the bin as we'll also you want to delete it and I can click the late and now I don't have that workspace. I can also plus it here as well, if I want to duplicate a workspace or create a new one, and I'm going to delete that as well and then just press "Okay." If you want to update a workspace, you want to add panels to it, I can click Window Workspace and I'm going to open my empty space here. Then maybe I want to move things around, maybe I want to move the toolbar on the write side instead of the left, I can move, this over here. I can go Window, Workspace and click "Reset Empty Space." This will pretty much reset everything to the original positions. Even if I move around from left to right or anything like that, it's going to reset it from the original and keep all the panels there so you can see it brought my panels back to the original workspace there. That's how you add and create work spaces. It's really useful because you want to make sure you're tailoring your experience to the work you do. It's really important that you understand this. 9. Targeted Layers: You can see here we've got this graphic with some text, a bit of illustration, and some color in the background. If I go two my layers panel, you can see I've got five layers. Text, gold plant, dark plant, green, and background. I'm going to select my text. You can see how it has the green bounding box? Obviously, if I put my mouse over the other ones, you can see the different colors like red and blue bounding box. You can see in my Layers Panel that the line or the color is actually green and the other layers, if I select it, you can seen it's red. I want you to notice something though. If I click on the layer, you can see on the right hand side there's a little square here. What this little square allows us to do is allows us to select everything within that layout and we can drag it in to another layer. Instead of individually going in holding Shift and selecting each elements, like all these texts for example, and moving it, all I have to do is if I make sure I'm not clicking on anything, I can click where that square was. Click here, and I can drag this to another layer. I can drag it to the background layer, which is behind everything. Now you can see all the text disappears, right? I can bring it back up by dragging it up to the green layer, and you can see it will be behind the plants. Then I could drag all the way back up, back to text and it will bring it back to the top layer as you can see there. This is such a fast way of moving things around. If I want to move this gold plant, I can move it to behind the text as you can see there. I can drag everything else and drag the other plant like this. It's a quick way for moving things around. The other cool trick as well with this targeting layers feature is that you've got this circle here, right? In my text layer, you can see next to the green squares is a circle. I can click this circle, which is going to select all my text, you can see it selects all this text and I can apply an effect to it. For this, I'm going to use a transparency. What I can actually do is apply transparency. I can go to Color Dodge, maybe I want to change this to 50 percent, just like that. Now you can see in my "Layers Panel" how that circle is filled in, right? That means every time I add text in this layer, I'm just going to type something in, you can see I've got this, 'protect the plants', right? I could make this text white. Now because I'm on this layer, even if I select the text, you can see the transparency panel is only showing me normal 100 percent, right? But if I click on the targeting layer, you can see it's at Color Dodge 50 percent. What other element I add, it's going to add that to it, right? I can change it. I can go to multiplying if I want or overlay, and you can see that it's going to change that. Once again, I can add some text in, for example, if I press T and type, you can see now that the effect is applying to the text. This color is a darker one. If I go back to white, you can see it adds it. Then obviously I can change the color and swatch or whatever, that's totally fine. But the effect will still apply to everything I add in that layer. That's the cool trick. A thing as well is that I can drag it to a different layer. You can see in my layers panel, I can drag the targeting. You can see that it's got the effect overlay 50 percent. I can drag it to the plant layer or I can drag it to the other layer, as you can see there. Even to the background. You can see what happens. It's making the green background transparent now because it has that effect on the layer. 10. Global Swatches: I want to show you how to create global colors in the illustrator. The reason why global colors are powerful is because you can literally just change a swatch and it will change all the same elements, or graphics, or illustrations that have that color into that new color, instead of doing it manually. Instead of me going through holding Shift, selecting all these orange colors, and then maybe changing it to lets say something else, maybe a blue or something. In doing it manually, I can just change the swatch itself and it will change that color. What I'm going to do, I'm going to Control C that, you can see I already have a swatch with this orange and the yellows. Every element here, with that color has this swatch selected. What I can actually do is I can "Double-click" for example, this yellow swatch, and I can rename it and call it sunny yellow. But what I want you to do is you need to click this button under the color type that says "Global" you wanna make sure that it's clicked on and then what I'm going to do is click on "Preview". Now what I can do is I can actually adjust this color and you can see it's adjusting that yellow into a new color. As you can see there. What if I change it to maybe a navy blue or something? and press "Okay". That's amazing. What I need to do now though, because the other colors weren't selected, I need to make sure that they have this new global swatch. I'm going to use my magic wand tool and just make sure that everything's ungrouped, and then I'm going to select the yellow and click that blue swatch. Now you can see all those yellows are now changed to the blue. Now what i do if I "Double-click" on this swatch and you can see that this swatch is different to the orange one, it's got this white tab on the bottom right in the corner there, you can seen that, that means it's a global swatch. Now if I "Double-click" this swatch, I can change it to hue, saturation, brightness, I can do CMYK, whatever it is, doesn't matter and I can actually adjust this color and make sure "Preview" is ticked on. Now it's adjusting all the colors in the outlook as you can see. I can do whatever color I want, navy blue, pink, yellow, whatever. I can go to hue, saturation, brightness, I can change it like this as well that's another way to do it. Maybe I want it two be green, press "Okay" and now you can see it changed everything in one go, and that's the power of global colors. Always use it whenever you create a new swatch, make sure that you tick on the global colors like this, and then you can create the swatch, press "Okay" and it should add it there. Make sure that whatever element or whatever you're going to create, make sure that it has that swatch selected, then it allows you to "double-click" on the swatch and change it whenever you need to and that's the power of that. It's just so useful because it's going to speed up your workflow and it's going to make your life a lot faster and a lot easier and that's why I use global colors. 11. Colour Library Hacks: I want to show you some tips and hacks using libraries in Illustrator. One tip is that if you use Adobe color and you have a CCA account, you can see I'm logged in here. I go to the Explore tab of the top-left, I can actually select a color palette for one of these images. For example, let's say I like this one, I can click the button that says "Add to library", so just put your mouse everywhere and it should pop up. Once I click add to library it should connect to my Illustrator account. You can see a little tickle pop up and a green bar on the bottom right, we'll say that it's added. Now what I can actually do is go to my libraries window. I'm going two click that, then what I want to do is I'm going to go to cool colors. Now I should waited and it should connect and you can see I've got so many different colors here which is crazy. You can see this is the one that we just added just then so you can see the blue one and you can see there. This one is not in a group so I can drag this and put it within a group so I can drag it to the top group. I can drag it into this one so you can see my colors which is really awesome. The cool trick with this is I can right-click and then what you do is click "Add theme to swatches". If I click that, it will literally add all those colors in a folder in my swatches just like that, within 10 seconds, is very fast when adding colors. I'm just going to bring that back over here which is super cool. Another thing with libraries is that it can create a new library very easily so I can just click the "Drop down", click "Create new library", and we'll call it 2020 colors. Now what I can do is I can drop some of these colors inside these assets. For example, I've got this client logo that I had, I can select this logo and it can drag it and drop it into the libraries. Now you can see I got these artwork, it is artwork 1. I can double-click and call it logo and then what I can do is actually create a group so I can call this client logos or client assets. Now I've got this logo hear so I can drag it and drop it. The cool thing is I could literally open a new document or be in Photoshop. My libraries will still have it saved, you can see my library still has this and I can drag it and drop it into a new document so I had this logo just like that, which makes it super easy. The cool thing is I can actually add some colors, for example, maybe, I want to change the color of the original logo here that's maybe a logo here, maybe I want to change it to the blue color or just the yellow. Then I can click on the color so I click on the yellow, I click on the blue. I go to my libraries and click "The plus" and click "fill color", it should add that in. I'll do the same this fill color super-simple and others Kuwait as well, say for example, if I have this as blue and maybe this is like orange, I can select all this, click the plus and click graphic. Now I have a version of the logo like this. I don't even have to drag it and drop it in. The quickest way is to drag and drop it, but you can actually click the "Add button" as well, you can see that. If we want to make a group, all you have to do is click the photos on the bottom so I can make new group, I'll call this brand colors. I can drop the blue and the yellow in there just like that dragging, jumping. I've got all these client logos and the client colors all ready to go. Now that I have these saved in my library, I can go to my Photoshop libraries. I'm just going to drag this out here and I'm going to click on 2020 colors, which is the won we made, you can seen all the colors are there. I've got my logo, I can drop the logo in there as you can see. I can add solid color, I can click "Solid color", press "Okay", then I can make sure on my latest pan, I select the black holiday and just click the blew or the yellow. I'm going to drag it behind the logo. Obviously, they should be like a white vision, but now you can see we have that, which is really awesome. That's how you use libraries and be efficient with that. Once again, if you want to exploit this, I can click the hamburger menu on the top write and actually click "Export", I can import libraries. You can actually invite people to the libraries as well, or you can get a link to share that specific one, or you can rename the libraries and call it Coated colors or change the client name Kingdom Advances. Then click "Rename". Now I've got this library all day and I can always just shift to my library now. It will connect with my Adobe programs, which is super amazing, but that's how we use the libraries. 12. Typography Shortcuts: Right now I'm going to show you my quick tips and shortcuts on how to use typography in Illustrator. I think illustrator is a lot faster than doing it in Photoshop or InDesign. Typically use Illustrator for everything when it comes to type, but if it's a long document use InDesign. I've got this quick layout, you can see it's like a poster lay-up, just some text. I got some text from Hipster Ipsum, it's a cool site guys, definitely checked it out and it can produce all these different paragraphs of random hipster words and I just copied it from that. Now, I added Graphic Design Club at the top. My first shortcut is the sizing. What you can do is if you're on a PC, whenever I say Control, that's for the PC guys. If you're on a Mac, then it's going to be the Command button. Then Alt for PC is going to be Alt and Mac is going to be Option. Just keep that in mind. You want to press Ctrl Shift and the comma on the keyboard also it will be the less than sign. You can see that if I press that it will decrease the size of my text and if I go the other way, you just want to press full stop instead. I'm still holding Ctrl and Shift and it's going to bring it up. Ctrl Shift comma to go down and the full stop to go up. All you have to do is just select the block of text that you have. V is the button to select that, you can see that. You can see I'm going to use the same shortcut key and you can see in the top section toolbar, it's going up by two. If you want to double that, all you have to do is press Ctrl Shift Alt and then press those same keys and you can see it doubles the size by 10. You can see that. It goes from like 30, 20, 10, as you can that. If you go up it goes by 10, so this is a quick way to quickly size up everything. What if we want to adjust the leading. Leading is the space between lines. All you have to do is press Alt or Option if you're on a Mac and I can press down or up arrow keys on the keyboard. I'm pressing down, it's going to increase the space or the size. If I want to turn it on it, I just hold Alt and press the up arrow key as you can see there. If you want to double that again, you just hold Alt and Ctrl and it should speed it up a little bit as you can see there, but obviously, you don't want to go too crazy. What if we wanted to adjust the kerning? It's pretty much the same concept, instead of pressing the up and down arrow key, is going to press left and right. Once again I have my text selected, I'll press Alt and then I'm going to tap the right arrow key, that will increase the overall kerning there in tracking and if I press Left, it's going to do the opposite. That's tracking, and if I want to do the kerning specifically, I can select some letter C, and then I can do the same thing holding Alt and the right arrow key or holding Alt and the left arrow key. If I want to do specific kerning, but if you want to do a hole bunch of text, then it's tracking and you can see that. Then once again, I can hold Alt and Ctrl to speed it up and double it. That's one of my favorite keyboard shortcuts as well, just to speed up everything and make it quick. What if we wanted to move our overall text? What you can actually do is you can tap the arrow key, if I select the text and just tap the arrow keys on my keyboard, you can probably hear the clicking in the background. You can see it goes by increments. If I hold Shift and do it, it'll bump the increments faster, sort of doubles it again. Just make it quicker. If I want to shift things around, it makes it a little easier. That's how you can move it. If you don't want to touch a mouse and click and move, you can just like that. I like to hold Shift to keep the angles correct as well. Another cool thing as well, if you look at the top sections, you can easily change setting C. If I want to adjust to the right, justify it, you can justify right. I can send to the text as well. Okay, click left. Using these buttons at the top really helps me out. You've also got like other options he make with wrap and we can also align things as well. I can also change the style. Quick way to change my style is go to the top and just change the stuff. I'm going to make things bold, make it lighter, whatever I want, which I think is super cool. If we're going to get nitty and gritty, the way to select text really fast is press T for the type tool. Your mouse should change to a little typewriter thing and what you can do is just left-click and drag so I can highlight text. If I bring my mouse down, it'll start to highlight the other texts in the actual books. If I start from the bottom and start to highlight and holding my click, my mouse, bring it up. It will highlight everything there. If I just want to highlight the title, I can just highlight that, change the style to black and then I can use my shortcuts to increase the size, bump up the lighting, and the tracking there as you can see. We literally did that within a second, I'll change the color as well. Over see there's some issues here, you can see that. But that's just a quick way to change your overall heading and maybe the eyes and that means I'll buffer up the size of it as you can seen that. That's all within the same text box, this is all one text box, it's not separate. If I want to quickly separate it, what I can do is press T for the top tool, select all these texts, press control C and then I can move this and I can drag out a box and then press control V to paste that in. Now I've got this box and this box. Obviously, I didn't delete the text T, so I can drag this out. As you can see, if I want to continue the text box, I click the little bottom here, which is similar to InDesign and it will continue the box. If you're doing like a magazine or e-book spread, I can drag this out and I can move it and you can see it's going to continue the text where it left off and connect it to this box and I can do it again. Click the little square box hear with a little plus sign. Click that and I should be able to make sure you click it and then I can drag out, and now it's connecting even further. May be I want to extend my outboard further out and I can play around with the settings here like that. That's a quick way to extend and cut up your text and move the text boxes around really, really fast. To me that's how I would do it. I'm want to move to the side here to show you some other examples that you can actually do. You can see I've got an old caps total here. What if I wanted to change it to lower case? All I have to do is a left click once on this text box. Go to the top-left menu, click on Type. All I have to do is go down to Change Case and all I have to do is click Lowercase. You can see it literally change everything to lowercase, so I have don't have to retype anything. It's just super fast and it can do the same thing InDesign as well. If I go back, Type, Change Case, I can also do Title Case, also Sentence case. Title case makes the first, letter of each word a capital. If I go back and click on the Sentence case, then what that does, let's just make this smaller, let's say this is a sentence which should make it. Let's go back. Select it, Type, Change Case, Sentence case, and you'll see it will only make the first letter of the actual paragraph, the title, and we'll make everything else different. I can always go back, Change Case, Uppercase, and shift it around. That's a quick way to do those things and I think it's really fast and really cool. What if I want to make these texts expanded and make it into outlines? A shortcut is Ctrl Shift O. You can see it turns my topography that was live and now it's all into shapes. If you don't want it as a shortcut, you can go to Type and the bottom you see. You can see mine is set to Shift Ctrl O makes it really, really easy. Now, I can customize the shapes the way I want it. You can see maybe I want to move these ER here, move the I just maybe want to move these off there, I can just play around and make we think. So that's a cool way. As you can see, to start to play around with my text and do whatever I want. That's how you quickly make text outlines, you can do it for a paragraph as well, so even for here, I can do it here and you can see it turns everything into shapes and I can customize it. That's another cool tip that you can use to quickly create outlines Ctrl Shift 0. If you're on a Mac, it'll be Command Option 0. I'm going to shift back to my original page here. Another new feature that actually illustrate a plotting in 2020 is the older spell check. You can see I've got my lump of text here. As you can see, I can drag this out. If I right-click, you can see there's a new option that says spelling. All I have to do is actually click Auto spellcheck and that should automatically spellcheck everything. You can see here a red line will pop up and it's already designed spellcheck things. Brooklyn should probably be a capital. There's other words that should be a difference so I can actually right-click. Dreamcatcher, I can right-click and you can see it's giving me some other options. Maybe it can be Dogcatcher, Dreamweaver or whatever else. If I click Dreamweaver, I should change it. This one, I'll just right-click humble-brag. I can put humble-brag. It works for pretty much whatever language you've set your default to. Mine should be on American English or UK English and it should do that for you. That's another cool tip when you're working with topography and I think it's super helpful and it's going to help you out. Another cool tip as well, I'm going to delete these and I'm going to drag this up, is that you can actually, instead of clicking the button on the top section, you can actually press Ctrl Shift and you can press either C for the center, R for right or L for left justified. Left justifies the Ctrl Shift, R right justifies and Ctrl Shift C centers the paragraph text. 13. Blend Tool : To create these circles, usually what would happen is you'd create one, and then I'll duplicate it like this and press control D Command D to duplicate like that. But I really need to do that. I can literally just have two circles like this. Press W for the blend tool. Then all I have to do is left-click once on one circle and left-click on the other. It should automatically make the circles like this. To edit the circles, I can just press W and hold Option or hold Alt if you're on Windows, and left-click ones. Then what I can do is actually use smooth color. I can specify how many circles I want. I can change the orientation and also the distance as well if I wanted to have like that. There's heaps of quick ways to make it happen. Then you can see here, this is what happens when it's got two circles, and you can see the smoothness. This one, if I go to the Blend Options again, you can see it has five steps. This one, if I select that, has 20 steps, and then this one has a higher, which is smooth color. You can change the spacing to smooth color. It should make it very smooth, as you can see, it's very well blended. Then obviously this one, you can see the circles there, which is really cool. Another cool trick as well is that once you've made a blend, so I've got to circle here, I'm going to make a blend real quick. Then what I can actually do is if I hold Alt, first I want to press A for the selection tool. Then if I hold Alt and drag, it's going to continue the blend to the next shape. I'm adding to it like that. Then what I can do, you can see it's blended all day. I can press W and hold Alt and left-click. Then once again, I can adjust the Blend Options. You can see the effects there, which is super awesome. I can then go ahead and change the color here as well to get a nice effect there, as you can see, there looks really cool. You can play around with all these effects. Then once again, I can move it. I could scale these down like that using the selection tool, and scaling up and down, makes a really big difference and have so much control. She's super awesome. Another cool thing as well with the blending tool is you can create really cool 3D effects specially with typography and lettering. As you can see here, I had a path, and I added this 3D to the actual letters here. You can see it's bells Sonic. Then obviously I can move these down, fix it and stuff like that, which looks really, really cool, looks 3D, I can change colors is half of that. All you have to do is have a path, which you can make with the pen tool. Once you have that, all you have to do is get a blend. I've created a gradient on this one. You can see if I drag the Gradient tool, it's got 120 angle with a blue and purple and a pink color, as you can see that. Then I just blend those two circles, one on this side, one on this side. I'm going to duplicate this here. All you have to do is select the path you want the gradient and the blend to work on. Then select this blend that we've already made. It's like those together, go yo Object, Blend and click Replace Spine. Once you do that, it will add that 3D blend. Or will add that gradient blend that you've made into that shape. Now you've got this cool gradient 3D looking thing, like a worm or whatever could be shapes, it could be objects. You can actually even add it to a shape as well. For example, if I want to use a polygon or something, I can do the same with this as well. I've got a polygon here, and I'm just going to select these two, go Objects, Blend, Replace Spine, and you can seen that the polygon has made. I don't known why it's not connecting. There's an issue with the 2020 version. I am not sure how to fix the solution as of yet. But you can see, it still looks pretty cool. You can create some awesome effects. Then I can always change the color as you can see there, really easily. I can play around and you can just create some really awesome things. That's the blend tool and there's a few hacks on how to create these cool effects. 14. Creating Actions: I'm going show you how to use actions. They are so awesome because I can literally press one button and it's going to create an action, it will do an action that I tell it. For example, I've got two circles here and I have an action. I'm going to drag out my Actions panel here and you can see here my F2 button is set to unite. All I have to do is select these two circles, press "F2" on my keyboard, and it united them together. This UNITE option comes from the Pathfinder Tool and you can see it's the first Shape Mode option. I'm going to drag this back in. Another example, here is make a clipping mask. You can see that on the right-hand side it's set to the orange. I'm also going to scale this up. You can see it's set to orange there and it's set up through F3. I can select the shape and in this background image together, press "F3" and it applied that mask. You can see it was highlighted because it applied that action. I've got a clipping mask which is really cool, and I can obviously scale the image down and inside that shape, which is awesome. Then my other popular one is the Compound Mask, which is F4. I can set this, select all this circles. You can see they're all different colors. I can press "F4" and it's going to make this a compound path, which is amazing. For example, I could go ahead and I could make a gradient and it's going to apply the gradient over all those shapes which is super awesome, and that's how we apply those. Great. That's how we apply those actions. Now, I'm going to show you how to create one. I'm going to go back to the example of the two circles here, and we want to create the UNITE action as it's very, very simple. In order for us to create an action, you can see we need to go to a different menu. This is the Button Mode. If I click on the drop-down menu, you can see Button Mode is activated. This means for example, I can have these two shapes and I click the button. Even if you don't have them set to your keyboard, you can click any of the buttons and it's going to work as you can see there. What I'm going to do, I'm going to go to the drop-down menu and click "Button Mode off". Then you can see I've got some actions here, which is really, really cool and my actions as well. What I wanted to do is create a new action. You can go ahead and create a new folder, and we can call it MasterClass Actions. You can call it whatever you like. Then what I'm going to do is click the plus button and we're going to add a new action. We're going call this action Unite and we might just say Pathfinder. Then you can see we select the folder. The folder is just the color to set, and then I can make the function key any of my F keys. For this example, I'm going to use F2. Depending on your keyboard, you might have buttons on the F keys that are used. For example, my F5 to F12 is occupied by other things. So I'm just going to click "F2". Then what I can do now is if I want to add Shift or Control, I can select those if I want both of them or just one of them as you can see that. If you already have a shortcut key to that thing, it will automatically select one for you. I could do Shift, Control, F2 and that's going to bee the shortcut key. I can already make the color yellow or whatever color you want, and then I'm going to click "Record". Right now you can see that this Record button is grayed out and there's the Stop button there. Now, Illustrator is actually recording every move that I make, so I'm going to move these two circles together. I'm going to select them, and then I'm going to go to the my Pathfinder Tool over here and I'm going to click "Unite". Then all I have to do is go back and click the Stop button. You can see I've got this action here in that Pathfinder. All I have to do now is pretty much, I can test it. I'm going to make two circles, so there are the orange one there and maybe a blue one. I can go to Button Mode and you can see our new action is down the bottom here, so I can select these two shapes and then click in that Pathfinder. You can seen what happened, it actually applied the UNITE but it also applied the Move. I don't want to actually have the move part there. What I can do is actually delete parts of the recording. I'm just going to go back. I'm going to get back into the Drop-down section here, and you can see the move part. Because I moved my shape before I applied that action, it's applying that move. But all I have to do is go to the Bin and click the Bin and it will say, "Delete the selection?" I'll click "Yes". It deleted that Move function and now it should just make the Pathfinder. Let's try it again. At two circles, delete these ones and then I'm going to go to the Button Mode. I didn't have to go to Button Mode. I can just click here and click "Play", and it will automatically apply. You can see it didn't move now. Whatever I'm working on, I can do the bottom and I can apply it and that's how you create an action. You can always delete the action. You can re-record the action by clicking the Record button and maybe I want to rotate the shapes. I'll press "R" and maybe I want to rotate it 120 degrees or something like that. Then I can click "Stop". You can always actually adjust and play around even if you record something that you didn't want to be there, or maybe you wanted to add something in. We'll see what happens. I've got these two circles and let's see, I'm going to select them both and then I'm going to play the action, and see what happens. You can see it united them and then it rotated the shapes. That is super cool, super fun, and it's amazing. That's how you use the actions. Then you can go to the drop-down menu. You can always go to Playback settings. You can change these settings here if you want a Step By Step or Accelerated. Then you can also go Clear all Actions, Reset all Actions, or you can actually Load Actions in. Probably, I'm going to put some actions where you guys can load them in. Then you need an ACTION file and that will be really, really cool, but all the other settings are pretty straightforward. If you clear it will delete everything, but I don't want to delete all my actions. 15. A little Math Hack: I'm going to show you a cool trick in Illustrator that allows you to use mathematics to be able to apply it to text or even shapes. I've got this text here and I've got my character window box open. If I click on this text you can see, if I go to the sizing, it's 140 points. You could also go to the top bar as well, next to the character where it shows my style and my font, and up the top bar here it says 140. What we can actually do is we could use the asterisk on our keyboard and that represents multiplication. I can put the asterisk after the numbers and press asterisk and then type two. Now, watch the text as I press "Enter". What it did is it times that point and made it double, so times it by 2 and doubled it. I can also use minus. If I go off to the number and do minus, let's say 100, you can see the text went smaller again. That actually works as well, really well. I can also do divide by. If you use the forward slash and let's say two, so it's going to divide by 2. It's going to divide that sizing by 2. You can also do plus as well on the keyboard. Just put plus then you can put, let's just say 300. It made it really big. That's how you use mathematics really well and it works and it's super easy to do. You can also use it with shapes as well. If I go to a shape and then on my properties panel, you can also do on the top bar as well, as you can seen. But say I want to increase the width, I can times by 2, or the height, I can divide by 3 or 5, whatever it is. You can see that it made it smaller. Using mathematics, when you're creating objects, is going to really save you time and actually get to a specific point. Especially, if you're doing something like layouts, this is really helpful. 16. Custom Swatch Library: I'm going to show you where to save your own custom swatches, so that you can load it every time you open a new document in illustrator. Every time you start a new document, you'll see in your swatch panel, you just get the default swatches in Illustrator. I don't like this and I just like it, keeping it clean so I'm going to delete all of this. Typically what I do is, I click the drop-down menu, the hamburger menu, and click select all unused, and then click the bin, then you want to click yes. Now delete the older colors that are not in this document, and you can see I've got some other colors from my carousel. Here, you can see it's drawing the colors from this. But I can always just delete these colors, so I can hold Control, and then shift, to click and it will select all these swatches. As you can see, it gets highlighted in white. I'll make this bigger so you can see. You just control left-click ones, hold Shift, and then left-click on the pebble and it'll select all of these. And then I'll click the bin icon to delete it. Press yes. What I want to do now is actually load in some swatches that I've already put in a photo. You click the hamburger menu, click Open Swatch Library. And then you can see I have my MDC COLOURS 2020, my mirror design code. Click that. And it instantly loads my brand colors every time. It takes like less than five seconds. And then all I have to do is left click on the photo once, one, two, three, four. And now it's added all those swatches into my live swatch panel. Then I can use it for my design or whatever I'm going to work on for today. I can close this and I can take up my swatches panel here, which is really awesome. I want to show you where to save your swatches. To save your brand colors, your brand colors would look different obviously. I can click the swatch menu and click, save swatch. You can save that as an ASE or an AI file. I can save as ASE. Once you click that, you'll get this box pop up. And it's going to give you a preordained destination. But I'm going to show you where to save it. What you want to do is locate the photo where your Adobe Illustrator is. You can see I am in my Adobe folder with all the programs. And I'm going to click on Adobe Illustrator 2020. I'm going to go Presets, en_US. And then you can see you got all these different options. You can actually add Brushes, Actions, Graphic styles, Scripts, and Swatches. Swatches is the one that we want to click on. So now you can see, all you want to do is save that folder into this folder. And you can see my MDC COLOURS is right here. Then you've got all these other ones like the Metal, Neutral, Corporate. These ones are all the default once the [inaudible] illustrator. That's what you want to save the ASE file and then you can load it in. For example, let's create one quickly and we'll just do a test. I'm going to go to some color palette that I've saved before. And we're going to add theme, I'll just delete these colors here. I've got my swatches here. And then what I'm going to do, I'm going to click, Save library as ASE. Locate my Adobe Illustrator 2020, Presets, en_US, Swatches, and then I'm going to save this, TEST SWATCH. Click Save. And then it'll ask you tints, that's OK. And then now I'm going go load Open Swatch Library. And you can see the TEST SWATCH, my illustrators already reading it. I can click that. And you can seen now it loads that in and I can add it right in there. And obviously, the color's already in there, so they have it. So, that's the quickest or best way to save your swatch pallets, your brand colors, or even for a client project so you can have it on hand all the time when you're making new documents. 17. Global Edits: I'm going to show you the power of global edits. You can see here, I've got a logo and there's different sizes and it's for different uses. For example, this one's on like a letter head, this is a business card, and this is maybe a bigger thank you card or something like that. What do you have to do is go to your properties window. I can click on Window and go to Properties, activate the global edit, you need to select your main object. I'm going to select the logo and go down the bottom here, so I'm just going to move these up. You can see how it says Start Global Edit. I'm going to click that. What happens now is that the logo goes green, so this is the master object. Then if I scroll to the left hand side, you can see that this is blue. Then now this has a blue square over it. You can see that all these other instances of this object it's pretty much illustrate is reading this object, ensuring that this object is similar and it recognizes it. If I make any change to this master object, it's going to affect the other objects. For example, I can make the space of these anchor points bigger. You can see it made changes, regardless of how big the size is of the other logos or illustrations or objects. I can also make a different color for this one. For example, this one could be like blue. Then once again I can get Start Global Edit. I can even make the edits. It's not going to change the colors, so to keep that one at blue. It's really cool if you have multiple instances of one object and it's going to spit out your workflow because you don't have to go manually edit every single logo. You could also go down to the drop-down menu pot. You can see, you can filter out by upwards. You can match appearance and size, as you can see that you can take those on and you can also filter by different Art Boards. I typically just leave low settings there. You can also get out of the stop, the global edit by clicking Stop Global Edit and then we'll go back to normal, so I can go back hear start to edit this logo, maybe I want like the orange color. I can edit this. You can see that it doesn't affect the other ones there. It's really useful tool in global edits, when you have multiple documents or multiple layers or multiple designs or illustrations wherever it is. 18. Exporting For Social Media: I'm going to show you the best and fastest way to export files in Illustrator. You can see I've got heaps of carousels in his file, and I've created these recently. You can see I've got 10 boards of artboards. Each individual slide is an actual artboard. This is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and you can see you'll go up to 10 and it's all different slides. I want to save this a quick way. Typically what people will do is they'll go to File and click Save As, or they'll go to Export, Save for Web. If I click Save for Web, it's going to open this box up. I'll see if I can, scale this down. You can see what's going to happen is, it's going to only allow me to save one artboard at a time. I've selected this one. You can see I get the settings here, but this is just too slow. What I'm want do is go to File, go Export and click Export for Screens. You can see the keyboard shortcut is Alt, Shift Control E. Now what I can do is, after you get the box pop up, I can actually scroll down and you can see I've already made the selection. Usually I'll click, Clear Selection and then I'll click on the artboard I want, hold Shift and left click on the last one. Now that's my whole carousel selected there. If you go to the right-hand side, you can see you can choose bleed, you can change the range. You can also export to a specific folder. I'm going to click a folder and I went on the desktop and actually made a folder called Carousel Export, which is good. That means it's going to save the files to that folder. You can also create sub-folders as well by clicking this button here. I can also change the scale of the format. So if I want to change it and make it double, my carousel is 1350 by 1080 at the moment, if I want to double it, it will pretty much make it over 2,000 pixels. You can see I can add scales. Maybe I want a JPEG instead of a PDF and a PNG. I can just close these as well. But I'm going to leave the PNG there, because typically that's how I save my carousels. I can also click this little cog icon there and you get some control. I can change the anti-aliasing, which is cool, anti-aliasing. You can see here as well, the JPEG compression methods, you can change that, and PDF you can select a preset that you've created before. Then from there what I'm going to do is click Export. I'm going to click Replace because I already had the files there. Then now I'm going to go to my desktop. Double-click that folder. Then now you can see if I double-click, it saved out all those 10 artboards. Now if I just press my arrow keys, you can see that boom, just like that. Really easy to do and it makes it a way faster than just manually pressing Control, Alt S and saving that out in doing Save for Web, as you can see here. 19. Creative Texture Tips: I'm going to show you a quick way on how you can use textures I do have a texture course on Skillshare which you can watch that goes more in depth about creating your own textures, but this is just going to be a quick one on how to use some different file types of textures. The first one you can see if I click on this, this is actually a vector texture. If I hide the edges by pressing control H, you can see I can zoom in and all these little elements are actually shapes. So they are actually vector shapes, I can actually click on it, I can change the color of it as you can see here, and actually get this really cool effect, make sure I don't select the background, as you can see there and this is a manipulative texture, so I can actually scale it up, it won't lose any of the quality because it's actually shapes. As you can see there, it's all anchor points. Then obviously, I can scale it down to customize it, I can rotate it, do whatever I want to it to make it interesting, you can select it all, change the color of it, make it maybe just a lighter gray color, something like that. So that's how you use a vector texture, these are really great because you can scale them, but the downfall is is that it can lag your computer if you don't have a fast computer because there's so many anchor points and little details, especially if it's a crazy detail texture. The next one is a bitmap TIFF. So this is one of my textures I've created before, you can actually buy them on my website, but if I click on it, I can actually change the color of these textures. So I can actually change the color, obviously they're not vector shapes, it's a raster bitmap so it's like pixels, black and white pixels, and you can see there that it's pretty detailed, but it's pixelated when I zoom in, but you can actually scale it very big as you can see there, and it still retains that detail because it's a bitmap. Then I can also add transparency to it. The same for the vector one as well. For example, I can go multiply, I can change it to all these blending modes as you can see, it blends it nicely with the background, that's why I love bitmap TIFFs, it's really easy, it's lightweight for the Illustrator file, so it doesn't really clog it up too much, and you get the same type of effects as well, which is really awesome. The next one is just a normal JPEG, so you can see I can zoom in, I can scale it and the thing is I can add transparency to it. A normal PNG or JPEG, so I can make it multiply, I can color burn, any of these transparency blending modes are actually going to be useful. You can see what's happening to that. This is great for doing backgrounds or subtle effects or mixing things up, making it look interesting. So that's a JPEG as well. The next one is a watercolor effect, and it's a JPEG as well, so very similar to the last one, and once again, you can get these nice effects so you can see this work really cool as a background, so maybe I want like that watercolor effect, and then what I can do is make a clipping mask around the artboard, select the watercolor, press F3, which is my shortcut key for a clipping mask and you can see now I've got this background, and then I can add text, The Power of Voice. Call it something like that, make it white, and then you can have a nice cool slide there, just using some texture, then obviously I can play around, double-click inside the clipping mask and maybe I want to play around with some of the effects there. Looks pretty nice. That looks good overlay. Because it has this purple effect, the JPEG on top is overlaying that effect of the watercolor. As you can see, this is the original. It's just interesting what you can do. So that's four ways you can use different types of textures in Illustrator and using transparency to make it look really interesting, and cool, and effective. 20. Pen Tool Shortcuts: I'm going to show you some pencil tips that are really going to help you out in some [inaudible] or second make it fast out, when using the pen tool. I'm going to go to the right-hand side here. You can see I've got a circle and I've got a S letter. I want to press, P for the pen tool and you can see your mouse should change. If you press caps lock, you can see your mouse does change to an X. So make sure that you turn caps lock off to have the pen tool icon. I want to select a bright color so you guys can see. I'm going to use these outlines as a starting point. Especially when you're using lettering or shapes, it's good to always find the furthest North point, the furthest West, South and East points. Then you want to do as least anchor points as you can. I'm going to find the center point here and left-click once. You can see as I drag out, there's a blue line. It's like a guideline saying, this is where the next point is going to go. Where the line is going to be. I want to find the middle section of the furthest West point and I'm going to left click and hold. As I hold, I'm going to hold Shift and drag upwards. What Shift allows us to do is to keep the proportions at a 45 degree angle or 90 degrees. I can actually move it like this. If I move my mouse up, you can see angle 45 or 90 degrees. That's how we hold Shift to keep this proportions. I'm going to let go and you can see how we get this curved line. I can fix this line by maybe moving this anchor point and playing around with this handle. I can also move this line by itself. Make sure it's on the P for pen tool. Press Alt or Option on your keyboard and left-click on this line. As you can see, I can actually control this line now. I can move it whilst holding Alt, and clicking and dragging, I can re-move the line to make it a bit more accurate. I can move it there and you can see how it's moved it. If I don't want to put it on the actual line itself, I can actually go to the handle, You can see the little handle, the white circle. I can click that and move it around, just like that. On the top anchor point, you can see how there's any one handle here but I want to have the two handles. I'm going to hold Alt on it and left-click on the anchor point and drag that out. It should drag out the second handle as you can see here because, it was missing one. As you can see there, you hold Alt, left-click and you can say it will drag out the handles like that. Then you can start to manipulate that by holding Alt. I'm going to continue from where I left off. On the right section here, I'm going to drag this up. I'm going to go back. I've moved this line on top of the layer. I'm going to get back to this point here, find the center point, and once again left-click and drag hold Shift at the same time. Find the furthest point and scale that and same thing. Just like that. Once you get faster, it becomes really easy. You can see we have a circle here and obviously it needs tweaking so I can press P, find the points, and then hold Alt and Shift. You can see I'm just going to drag it from left to right. Then I can fix these ones as well. As you can see just like that. I'm going to just tweak it. It doesn't have to be perfect. You can spend the heaves of time on this work. I'm just going to keep it casual. What you can actually do as well, if I press P and just hold Alt or Option, and left-click once, you can see it will actually straighten up theses lines. It gets rid of the curve and it straightens it out. I just press Control Z and show you again so you can see how hold Alt, left-click once and it straightens it out. That's how we create a basic shape. Now, I want to go to lettering. Using the same principle, we want to make sure that there's minimal anchor points as possible. I'm just going to pick any point here. It doesn't really matter where you stop. But once again, I'm trying to find the furthest points. I'm going to drag out here, as you can see. You can see how we get a lot better smoother lines. If I just turn off the guide here, you can see how we get a smoother line. I'm control Z that. Instead of going like this, I'm going to go one, then to another one here, and then here. It ends up becoming too junky. If I turn off the guides, you can see how the lines start to lose its smoothness as you can see it because, you have so many anchor points. We could have just done that in two or even three anchor points, not five. I'm just going to Control Z and we'll go from the top beam. It will go over here, finding the furthest point there of this letter, on the top there. Doesn't have to match up with the lines. It's just for practice. You can see you can get really quick. You don't have to hold Shift, you can actually just drag, as well. You can see how now I had these anchor point that's too long. Because now if I drag and find a thing, you can see the end is kicking out too far from the outline. In order for us to move these, all you have to do is hold Alt and just drag this anchor point back in. You can see that it will shrink it. Now you can see I have more definite control of where the angle is hitting on this end bit. [inaudible] Then continue from where I left off. So clicking and dragging, holding Shift when I need to keep the light proportions. As you can see here, this is to be too short so am going to increase this to make it wider and there we have it. Now, I can do the fill and body. You can see that letter S, just like that. Obviously we can refine it. We can go in, press that P for the pen tool and hold Alt. I can change the handles around. I can make things sharp like that. I can press A for the direct section to work and move things, make it thick if I want. There's so many things you can do with the pen tool. It's crazy. That's how we get it straight with the pen tool tips. Let's see if we can create these bear face. I've got this image. I've dropped the opacity down so that I quickly trace him out. Let's see how it turns out. You can see I want to trace the main outlines of his face and his nose. I'll probably do one side and then I'll mirror it. For this one, I'm going to get the eye here, like that. Holding Alt, shifting that. This handle's too big, so am going to drop that in. Shift to connect that last shape. You can see we have this shape here. Then I'm going to do a shape. This is over the pen tool as well. I'm not using any shapes even though you can do it that way. I can round off this bit as well, which is super cool. Then I'll just do one main path for the bear's head so you can see nice, fluffy, fizzy bear. Line is up. I'm only doing one side of the face because we can just duplicate it to get the other half, just like that. I'm going to just duplicate this, like this and then just press [inaudible] Shift X to fill it. What I'm doing, I've got the outlines by pressing Control Y, then selecting that blue color, bring it to the front. Then I'll select these other shapes like this, make them yellow. Then make this shape yellow and bring it to the front as well. Make sure that there's no strokes. I didn't intend for this to have this effect. That's very cool. Just leave that like that. Press Control Y to going to get the outline, select the middle section. I'll make this blue and then bring it back to the front. So Control Shift, Right, brings it up and Left, brings it down the square bracket. Get rid of that stroke and then I'm going to select everything. Just group it, then press R for the reflect tool. Find the top point in the middle point here, holding Option or Alt, left-click. Then we're going to click vertical so you can see it's going to flip it and we're going to press copy. Now I've made a copy of the bear on that side and all I'm going to do is select the main path. Then I'm going to go to my pathfinder tool. So go to ''Window'', click on ''Pathfinder'' as we can see here. I'm going to press unite, and that should unite the base. You can see we've got these base. Then I'm going to bring it back. Just want to bring these ones up to make sure it's up on the top layer. There we have it. You can see I've got to plus this one as well so I'll just use my shortcuts. I'm going to press F2 just to plus it really quickly and I'll make sure that this is okay. Sometimes if you're not careful it pluses all the shapes, which is not good. Let me just ungroup these things. Get these backup and there we got this bear. Obviously it doesn't look like a bear because we need to add the first so we could go in and use the pen tool. What I'll do is probably make some spikes like this on the outside. Just make it really spiky. Find the center point, then just go around like this, make it yellow. Then what we can actually do is I can press P for the pen tool and then once again holding Alt and just pumping up this to make it more rounded, more organic because, right now it's very geometric. You can see here holding Alt and then I'm left clicking and just dragging these out like that. This is a faster way to manipulate that. Once again, I can also manipulate the ends. If I put my mouse then hold Alt or Option, you can pretty much change the handles. Am going to reflect this pressing Alt, holding Alt or Option, left-click once. Make sure that it's doing it on the whole shape. Click vertical, click copy, and you can see now it looks a bit like a bear. We can add shading and things like that but for now, I think that looks cool. That's how you use the pen tool. That's just some tips that I use to make it really, really awesome and fast. 21. Creating Custom Grids: I'm going to show you a cool tip when working with guides. I'm just going to have a [inaudible] on the right here. You can literally turn any shape into a guide. I'm going go to the left here, and I'm going to select my Polygon tool. I'm going to drag out just any size polygon. Let us change the color there. The shortcut key to make a shape, or any objects on guide, is Control 5 or Command 5 if you're on a Mac. Once I press that, you can see that the guideline which is now blue, it's a pretty much a guide. If I make a shape, I can drag it and you can see my smart guides, it's snapping to the point. You can see the purple line. It's actually snapping, which is really cool. I think that's amazing. Another cool thing as well is we can actually drag from the roller section to make a guide. Press "Control R" and look up the top here, on the top corner, you can see that you get the [inaudible]. Control R or Command R to bring that up. Then I can just grab the top and drag this down like this, and drag down from the left. Another cool tip as well is if I'm dragging, for example, from the top and I want to switch it to a vertical instead of horizontal, all you have to do is hold "Alt" and it will change it, as you can see like that. You can see I'm dragging down, you can see the line, and I hold "Alt" and it pretty much swaps it. Hold "Alt" down and it will swap it just like that. That's really very cool. You can also apply it to grids as well. I can turn off my guides first by going to "Control", and pressing the "Semicolon" or "Command Semicolon" on your keyboard, which turns off and on the guides. As a shortcut, I can unlock guides by pressing "Control", "Alt", "Semicolon." This allows you to select the guide so I can delete it. You can see the color changes to a dark blue, and I can press "Delete." I could also delete these ones as well, as you can see there, which is super cool. I'm going to get the Polar Grid tool on the left-hand side. I'm going to right-click and see that I've got a Rectangular Grid tool. I can drag this out, and if you press up and down, you can get my different lines. Maybe I want to make a four-by-four grid, as you can see here. I'm just going to hold "Shift" to keep the proportions. Then I'm going to drag this out, maybe into the center or something like that. You can see it's just an ordinary shape as it normally would be. I can increase the [inaudible] , but I can actually turn this into guide as well. If I press "Control 5" you can see now this grid is a guide. I didn't have to waste time dragging on each individual line and doing it manually. I could just do a grid like this and then I can move the grid around. The reason why sometimes it goes invisible, is because you need to get your options, go to "Control K", and then one of the things we need to go to, is you go to "Performance" and turn of Real-time drawing an editing. Once you do that, you should be allowed to see the grid. As you can see there, it shouldn't go invisible. That's a glitch or a bug at the moment with Illustrator, so just keep that in mind. Now I can move it, and you can see the guide just like that. Now, I can move it out. I can customize these ones. You can literally use the guide as you would as a normal shape. But Illustrator reads it as a guide so then I can snap items to it. Say for example, maybe I want to put some type down like here. It's got some Lorem Ipsum there. Then maybe I want to go uniform. For example, you could be doing maybe a magazine or something like that. Something just quick. I think I wanted to do 2020, September, the date thing. I want to snap that like there. I can turn my guides off, so you can see just by using simple guides and the [inaudible] you can make a lot faster to create your own guides, and make it super handy when working with layout and typography or designs. 22. Presentation Tips: Create a presentation template in Illustrator and this should be helpful for you. If I zoom out you can see, this is an identity template that I've used before and I have multiple slides here and then I've also got guides. I just want to show you first my layers and how I set that up. You can see in my layers panel I've got one for guides, one as a place holder, one for the image caption, then the arrow design, and then BG for background. If I turn these off and on so you can see I've got my guide C, it helps me align things together. It just keeps everything consistent in illustrator. Because if it's not like in design, you need to make sure everything is like neat and tidy because there's no master pages. For example, if I turn off the guides now you can see the little eyeball. You can see the guys actually changed there, so you can see that. Then the place holders, I just like these texts so I know what to put on the actual presentation slide. Then my captions are like the bottom here. I just call them captions but you can call them something else if you want. They'd also the design. The overall text slides, the cover slides there, turn those off and then the backgrounds, which is the dark black backgrounds there and then also this is a gray on the color swatches. You can see that. You want to make sure that you keep your layers as neat and tidy and then also create guides for each layer. You can see I've got six slides going down so six,12,18,20,24 and then so forth. You can see that and make sure that the guides are all neat and tidy. I can always load this template and then stop creating and designing and then when I want to get rid of the place holder, I just turn that off and then I can just make a new layer, call it design. Then I can change the color of it, can make a gold or whatever I want press the k. Then I can just start adding my logos in so where you want to add the logo in. I can start to play around and this starts [inaudible] adult. That's how I set up my template and I always try to make it super useful. You can see all the artboard here is well added. You can see I've names that fill [inaudible] the cover and the thank you slide. But obviously you would go through and nine days in cola like logo on whites, logo on black or whatever. Name all these artboard and that will help you out. Specifically how it gets started out press shift o for the artboard too and start to drag out an artboard and then you can see, I'll going to go 1920 by 1080 and then I'll duplicate these artboard like this and then to pretty much change the layout and the size, I would go to artboard and then I'll click the button and click rearrange all artboard and then I'll put a specific spacing. It puts 20 and then how to make them go like this and then I can put different columns. For this one it's seven. Maybe I just won't four columns and I'm going to tick move artwork with artboard. Some of the artboard will get stuck because it's locked but I'll press okay and you can see, that's how I would shift the artboards so make them all neat. Then it makes it easier for me to drag out the guides, can drag out guides and put them there and obviously the artboard was locked so you can see the layers. It was locked so that it doesn't move. But that's how to do the artboard to the presentation. 23. PDF Settings for Print & Web: I'm going to show you how I save my PDF presets out, because a lot of people sometimes get confused with how to save your presets. I've got a pieces called he and I'm going to show you how to save this out. You can press control alt S to put up the save as file, and I'm going to change it to a PDF, and it should bee phenomenon just typing test, and I'm just going to put on the desktop. I'm going to press save. When you do this, what's going to happen is your PDF options will come up. I have multiple presets. You can see down if I go down, I go digital max with no compression, a digital max quality with compression. Then I've got like a medium high to make the PDF files smaller. If I want to send them over e-mail, then I've got a medium quality one as well. Just if I want to send something quick and then a print version. If I click print, I'm going to show you my settings that I actually use. You can see at the top, this is set to none. Compatibility is typically set to five. We can see sometimes people have older versions of a PDF, so it's good to just keep it lower there, then you can see I turned off preserve illustrated editing capabilities. It saves space on the PDF, but if you're sending it to a printer or someone else, you want to probably have that ticked on. You can also tick, you can see optimized for web and embed page. You can turn those off as well, cause this is going to be a print version. I'll go to compression, and you can see that everything is set to do not downsample. So it's not going to compress anything. You can also see compressed texts and line art, that's also good to have as well. It doesn't really affect the quality as much. So you can have that ticked on. Then you can see monochrome bitmap images, the compression is set to, you can probably have that on none as well. That's the best further compression. Marks and bleeds typically, I have, you can see if you tick these on, you can have everything on. But typically I just have trim marks. Sometimes the printer might want you to have these answer like registration and color bars, page information. But typically that is have the trim box on. Then what you want to do is use a document bleed settings. If you don't have bleed settings, what you can do is you can make custom bleeds and it will save that out. Then the output is fine, advanced security in summary is all fine. Obviously, if you need a specific color profile, you might need to have this selected and have that. Then you get a summary and you can see this document Raster Effects resolution. You want to make sure that it's a CMYK file. So for example, if I get back, you can see up top it seems it's saying CMYK. I can go to document column. You can see that CMYK and I can click documents setup as well, and you can see preset. You want to make sure that it's high resolution there, and everything else should be fine. I'm going to press, okay. I'm just going to press put the bleeds on as well so you guys can see the bleed. I'm going to get a document setup. So you go to file documents set up, alt control P is a shortcut and I'm going to go put the bleed to three, and now you can seen there's a red line there. For example, maybe if I want to add a color behind this business card. Let's just make it maybe like, for example, maybe like a little cream colors on the end just for an example guys. You can see if I have this color, you want it to go to the bleed. When the printer cuts on that edge, you want to make sure that the color is going all the way through. So I'm just going to delete that. Once again, we'll go back, desktop save and that's for printing. You can also save the presets. You go to the top write corner, you'll see this little button here and you can click that, and that will save your preset. You can call it print or whatever. But typically that's how I do that. Now, let me show you another version. For example, this is for web, this is like an Instagram post. What I typically do is go back to the settings PDF and say digital scale, like 1-3 save. For this, what I typically do is you can see my digital max. I optimize for phosphate view and you can take these off, that's non-compulsory. Compression. I do not downs sample, but I put the compression to JPEG and put it on image quality of maximum. If you want to decrease the size, you can bring these down to high, medium alert for all of these options here, and that's going to help you reduce the file size if the PDF is to big, especially if you're going to send it over like Dropbox or Google Drive or Gmail. So I can do that. The maximum bleeds are off and that's pretty much it, and the difference between this and digital max is the monochrome bitmap images. You can see that the compression is on Zip instead of none. Then if I want to do it like a medium-high version, you can see our change the do not downsample to bicubic downsampling. So just compresses the pixels a little bit, and it downsamples it from big to small, and anything above this PPI, it'll drop it down, and then if I go down to digital medium, it jumps this quality to high instead of keeping it at maximum. You've got the grayscale, the monochrome and the color bitmap. Just keep that in mind like what type of colors and stuff you're using any document. For example, if I want to go digital max saved PDF, it will save it out, and then you can see how the quality is fine. It's not pixelated, text is not pixelated and its really good, as you can see there. So that's an example of how I save my PDFs and how I'd use it for the maximum efficiency. 24. File Size Reduction: I want to show you how to save some space with your illustrator files. Typically, when you work on a client project or your own projects, your file will be completed. You'll have heaps of files, like this one you can see I've got textures, I've got some little touches here that I've got text around, I've got an image here, like it's just a mess, so I need to clean this up. First of all, I'll start by deleting all the unnecessary things I don't need. Lets go on the left, select everything, click and drag and then press "Delete" on the keyboard. Then you can see I've got different variations of the logo and then obviously like they are the same logo, so I'm going to start to delete some of these. I'll delete these ones, I don't need these ones. Now delete the artboard as well, so select the Artboard tool and then just delete those. These ones here are just different sizes, but I don't need that because I have the logo package express which can save different sizes for me so I'm going to delete that. Then you can see now it has got this and you can see obviously there's textures behind this logo here and that can make it broad as well, but it should be a little bit less. What you also do, is you want to go to your toolbox here. You want to go to your swatches panel, so I'll just bring this out, and then what you want to do is click on the "Dropdown" menu like this, click "Select All Unused", and then click the "Bin." You want to delete unnecessary swatches, any swatches you are not using, just delete them. Same thing goes for brushes as well. You've got your brushes, any symbols, any graphic styles as well. I want to delete everything in these. Even if it's just the defaults in illustrator, you can still delete them, so click the "Dropdown" menu, click "Select All Unused", and then you can click the "Bin" to delete. I can also delete these two brushes. You can see I've got two brushes that I used for the logo. I can actually delete that if I want. But I'm going to leave that just in case. Go to the symbols here, "Select All Unused", and just click the "Bin" and then the graphic styles here, click that "Delete", "Yes". Once you do this, it should decrease the size of the file. If I go to the file, we can see it's actually 789 megabytes. I'm going to re-save the file and see if it drops down a bit. Then you just want to make sure that there's no other extra points, so I'll go to outline mode, see if there's any extra points, because sometimes you might have little anchor points or paths that you can't see, so sometimes you just want to check and delete those points. Now, what I want to do, I'm going to get files, "Save As" and save another version of it. I'm going to say say "Logo Wolf v_2" and I'm going to save that. I'll just press "Okay", then we'll see what happens. You can see this file is now 1.7 megabytes from 7.89. Hopefully, you guys can see that, I'll probably zoom in. You can see in the corner there or if I go to properties, you can see 1.7 and this one is 7.8. We're literally saved like almost 6-7 megabytes just by cleaning up my files, deleting things, and just making sure that it's just super neat.