Speed Up & Streamline Your Design Workflow in Adobe Illustrator

1. Intro: Hi. I'm Maya Faber, and I'm a surface pattern designer from Stockholm, Sweden. This is a class for illustrators, surface pattern designers, and graphic designers who want to get a more efficient workflow in Adobe Illustrator. My guess is that many of us have felt frustrated working with Illustrator, not having things in order, and not having a workflow that works good for you. In this class, we will learn how to speed up and streamline your design workflow and customize it to suit your needs. I will go through everything really truly and you can be a complete beginner at Adobe Illustrator to take this class. By the end of this class, you will get a functioning, smooth, and easy workflow for Adobe Illustrator, which will make all of your future projects run much more productive and efficient. Now, I know that this might not seem as the most fun class you've ever taken, but I promise you that if you follow the steps that I teach you in this class and create a workflow that works good for you, it will be much more fun to work with Illustrator in the future. 2. Your Project: Your project in this class is to organize your workflow in Adobe Illustrator. To present your project, take a screenshot of the Adobe Illustrator workspace that you create in this class, write a few lines about how you streamline your workflow using the tips in this class. To take a screenshot on Mac, press ''Command Shift'', and ''3'', to take a screenshot of the whole screen and if you want to select areas of your screen, press ''Command Shift'' and ''4''. 3. Your Workflow: Before we get into the practical parts of this class, you should shortly think through how you use Illustrator today. My suggestion to create a good streamline workflow, is to narrow down your choices and simplify. It's much more efficient if you create a workflow where you include the tools, panels and options that you use all the time. Needless to say, it's easier to remember a few things than many. Before we continue with the practical parts of this class, try to answer these questions for yourself. What type of artwork do you create? For me that is mostly patterns and sometimes illustrations but it can also be logos or branding projects or whatever artwork you are creating in Illustrator. What tools do you often use to create this artwork? Example of tools are arrange to the front, unite or the arrow tool, or all sorts of tools that you use in your workflow. Also it's good to think about what frustrates you the most. Is it that you can find the tools? That it is time-consuming to work in Illustrator for you, or that you feel that it's too advanced. When you care about how you use Illustrator today, we can move on to the next lesson, where we will dive straight into the practical parts of this class. 4. Organize Your Workspace Part 1: I would say that the most important thing to do to streamline and speed up your workflow in Illustrator is to organize and customize your workspace. What do I mean with workspace? Well, if you have a look at all of the tools and panels that are open in your document. That is your workspace. You can create new workspaces and adjust your current ones. Have a look at the top right corner. You can see that we are now working in the "Essentials Classic" workspace. This is basically just a preset that hides and shows certain tools and panels. As you can see, when I change the workspace. If we make changes to which tools that show in this workspace. For example, if we remove everything that has to do with colors. It should be saved as the settings that you had when you closed Illustrator in this workspace. As you can see here, there are no color panels open. You can always reset a workspace. If you click the little workspace menu and "Reset Essential Classics". Let's start to build a custom workspace that suits your needs. We will start with just adjusting and customizing the workspace that we have here. I am using the "Essential Classics" as a start. If you thought about an answer to questions from the previous lesson, your new workspace will be easier to arrange. Let's start with what we use Illustrator for. I mainly use Illustrator to create patterns and sometimes illustrations. I have a very clear workflow when it comes to creating patterns. I will start adding the tools and panels that I often use. In my opinion, this right tool panel is the most important to get organized. Let's start with customizing it. If you click the little arrows, your tool panel will expand or collapse. You can also choose to have your panels showing with only symbols like this. Or if you drag it out with symbols and text. But I think that the most efficient way of organizing your workspace is to have expanded panels on the right side of my workspace. It makes the tools easy and quick to reach when I need them. Let's start with sorting out what panels we need. I would narrow it down here to the panels and tools that I use often. The ones that I only use once in a while is no meaning of having in my permanent workspace. If you find that some of these two panels are the ones that you use often, you can just save those here. Other ones like the "Color Guide" I don't use that one. I will just drag that one out. I don't use "Brushes" that much, or "Symbols" or "Strokes" or "Gradient". Or this whole panel with "Appearance" and "Graphic Styles" I don't use the "Artboard" panel or the "Properties" panel. The ones that I don't use that often, I will just shut those down. By clicking at the little "X" Here I have some basic tool panels that I use. You can rearrange your panels by clicking and dragging them to different position. If you drag them to where there shows a line. You will place the tool panel above the other one. If you drag it so it shows a whole rectangle. You will share the space of the other tool panel. I'm just going to drag the "Transparency" up here, the "Layers" and "Asset Export" You can also drag in the arrow to make some panels smaller. That makes the other panels that are below larger. There are still some panels that I use often that are not included here. What I do then is that I go to "Window" and here I will find all of the panels that I can choose from. One thing that I often use is the "Pathfinder" and also the" Align" panel. You can drag out if you want to separate them, or you can have them in the same. I think I want the "Pathfinder" panel on its own and "Align" panel on its own. We'll just drag those in here, and "Transform" panel. I think I will share that one with the "Transparency" Maybe I want the "Transform" panel to be the one that opens first. I will place the panels that I use all the time like stand-alone panels like the "Pathfinder", "Align", and "Swatches". The ones that I don't use as often, they can be a shared panel. I think that I will make the "Libraries" be shared with the "Layers" panel and the "Asset Export" panel. I also use some text tools. The "Character" and the "Paragraph". Those can be shared like that. Then I'll just drag that in. Maybe I want the "Pattern Options" panel as well to be at my permanent workspace. As I create patterns pretty often. My workspace are coming together. These are the tools that I use often. You don't need to arrange your workspace exactly like mine here. Just think about which tools and panels you use often and create your unique workspace of those. As I said, you can find all of the tool panels on the "Window" in the "Menu" 5. Organize Your Workspace Part 2: So now let's move on to customize your left toolbar, is this one. You could just go on with this as it is. But if you know that there are certain tools in this that you never use, you could just remove them and make a customize toolbar with the tools that you use to be more efficient in the workflow. If you click that three little dots at the bottom, and then the menu, you can first of all, choose if you want to have the advanced view or the basic view. The basic view has just a few tools in it, maybe this suits your needs and then you don't need to change it at all. Or the advanced view has a lot more tools in it. If you click the little arrow at the top, you can choose if you want two rows with your tools are just one row. I usually have two rows when I have these many tools. What you also can do here is to drag out the tools that has the little white arrow at the bottom. If you click the little arrow at the right, you will have a separate tools panel for those tools. You could actually do this with all of the tools that has the little white arrow on them. But this is not my favorite way of arranging my tool panel, I just wanted to show you. If this suits you and you like how this works, you can have it like that, but I would just shut this down. Let's create a new tool panel that suits our needs so that you can have as streamline workflow as you possibly can. If you click the three little dots at the bottom of your toolbar and then the menu and new toolbar, and I will just name this toolbar, my name for now, but you can name it pattern or illustration or whatever you feel is right for you. So hit "Okay". Here we have a new toolbar, if you click that three little dots, edit toolbar, you can now drag in the tools that you use. You could also just create a new toolbar of this, customize your own toolbar and drag out the tools. But for learning purposes and to be able to more clearly see what it is that we're doing, I'm going to teach you how to create a new toolbar. Now I can start to drag in the tools that we want to use. You can drag them in as separate tools below each other or if you drag them in so that there shows a little square, there will be a white little arrow with both tools in that selection. Let's see as we continue to drag in the tools that we use. I like to have most of my tools separate and not combined because I know that I won't be using all of these tools, I will just have a shorter toolbar. For some I might combine them like this shapes, tool with rectangles and squares and all of those. I will just continue to drag in all of the tools that I use in this toolbar. At the bottom here, you can select which of these options you want to be showing. I'll basically only use the fill and stroke and also the coloring controls. So here we have a customized toolbar. This will be saved With your selected workspace which we will save to a different name in a little while, but before that I will just drag out my previous to a panel, delete that one, and drag in my new tool panel. Now we have a customized left-hand panel with all of the tools that I use often, and we have a right hand panel with all of the other tools that I use often. One more thing you can do is to customize this top Control Panel. This top Control Panel works like this, that if you create something on your art board, the tools in this control panel will change depending on what you are creating on your art board. If I create text, I will get text tools at this top panel and some other tools that might be good to use when you work with text. What you can do with this top tool panel if you wish, I don't personally adjust my workspace like this, but what you can do is that the click the top right menu. Here you can first choose if you want to dock this parallel to the top or to the bottom. I like to have it to the top. Then you can select which of these tools you want to be showing. You can basically deselect some tools and I can show you what I mean, if I love the character and the paragraph, and again, I tried to type two, then I won't get the character or the paragraph two up here. You can basically customize this to a panel by the deselecting and selecting the tools that you want here. If you want some permanent tools here, you can just choose to select those ones, and deselect all of the other ones. But personally, I think that is good that that tool panel changes accordingly to what I'm creating. I will just click in all of these, which will make them visible when I work with certain tools. Now we have our whole workspace setup. I will go in and save this as a new workspace. Because if we would hit reset essential classics here, it will go back to the presets that are in the Essential Classics Workspace. We go into the Workspace Menu and click "New Workspace". I'II just type my name here, but you can write whatever you want and then hit "Okay". Basically what I did is that if I change my workspace now and go to Reset Maja, it will go back to the workspace that we just saved. If you want to manage your workspace, for example, delete a workspace. You can go to the Manage Workspace option in the Workspace menu, and you can go in and type in a new name to it, or even delete it here. That's all for this lesson. Now we've created our own customized workspace and saved it for later use and this will save you so much time and frustration when you work on future projects, especially as you use this workspace more and more, you will get more used to where your tools are, and it will be really quick and easy to find them and use them throughout your whole workflow. 6. Create a Template: If you're like me, create the same type of file over and over. For me, that is patterns. You can save a template that you can use again and again, which will save you so much time in the long run. A template means that you make some settings to your file, so you can use those settings every time you open a new file from that template. Without wasting time on creating those settings, every time you create a new file. You can save settings such as color mode, size of art board, and he can even save more detail setting such as colors in the swatches panel. Let's dig into it and I'll show you what I mean. Here we have a new document where you start here, how your document looks really doesn't matter as we can adjust everything that we want to have in this file. We have our Maja workspace already open, that's great. For this example, I will create the CMYK pattern template, with a common size of art board that I normally use and some other settings that I will customize. Let's start to adjust some settings in this document. I will show you what I adjust, you could of course, go ahead and do whatever type of settings that suits you and your needs. First of all, let's change the color mode to CMYK. I go to File, Document Color Mode and CMYK, then make sure that you have the right color profile. Go to Edit, assign profile, and make sure that you have the color profile that you would like to use. If you have no idea what a color profile is, go check out my other class here on Skillshare, Prepare Your Files for Print, where I go into more details, into color profiles and how to change them. Next, let's change the size of your art board. I usually create 1000 pixels square patterns. I will change the size on my art board by using the art board tool and adjust the size in the transform panel up in the top control panel. To 1,000 pixels wide and high. Next thing that I might want to change is the Swatches panel. I never use all of these default swatches. Normally, I just delete all of them except black and white. I'll go ahead and select all of them and hit the little bin to delete these swatches. You can even add certain swatches here to template. If you, for example, have a color palette that you use, you could add colors manually, by dragging them into swatches panel, or you can open a swatch library that you would like to use in this template. I will just delete that one and here I have a color palette that will always open when I open this template. I will show you all about how to save swatch libraries in the next lesson, and for now I will just delete these swatches as I want my template to only have white and black colors. One last thing that I might want to add into this document, is a background box and a pattern tile box, because I want to make a pattern template. I go ahead and create a rectangle with the Rectangle tool, click once on the art board and type in the same size as my art board and I will arrange it to the center of my art board. Click Command C and Command B to paste another rectangle at the back of this rectangle, that has no fill and no stroke. If you want to learn more about how I create patterns, I have a bunch of classes here, on Skillshare, where I show you my exact technique. You can check out, for example, From Sketcher to Repeat Pattern or Level Up Your Pattern Design to learn more about how I create patterns. For me, this is the basics that I want to have in my template. I've changed the color mode, I made sure that it has the right color profile, I have my pattern tile here, and I also have no swatches in the swatches panel. You can make any adjustments that you want and customize it even more than this, but for now, I'm just showing you how to create a template and the details on what you would like to have in your template, is yours to decide. Now I will go ahead and save this file as a template. I go to File and Save as Template. I'll just name my file; Pattern Template CMYK. As you can see illustrator has opened up a folder for you, where it stores templates. But if your computer is like mine here, you might find that there's some sort of bug or problem anyhow, to save directly to this folder. If you hit Save, you can see, if you get this little problem box that says, Can't save the illustration. You do not have enough access privileges. I read online that this is a common problem in Illustrator CC 2020. If you like me get this box that says that you can't save the illustration, then you go ahead to the next step instead, where I will show you the way around this problem. Don't ask me why this box appears. I can't find the reason no matter how long I've searched for the solution, but I know how to get around it. Just hit Okay and the thing with templates is that you can actually save them wherever you want on your computer. You don't need to save them in the Templates folder. But it might be good to know how to save it in the Templates folder as well, as it will be much easier and quicker to reach your templates if you have it in this folder. I'll go ahead again and Save as Template and type Pattern Template CMYK and save it to the desktop. You want the file format to be this AIT, Illustrator template, and hit Save. I will just minimize Illustrator, and we will move this Pattern Template to the Illustrator folder for templates. If you have a Mac, I will show you how to find that folder, but if you have Windows, I don't know where to find this. If you don't want to spend time googling and how Windows, you can just create a folder in some other place in your file system, where you save all your templates. But if you do have Mac, you go to Applications and then click Adobe Illustrator 2020, Cool Extras, and for me it says en_US, it might say something else if you have another language setting, but just click that one folder and Templates and here you have some blank templates, and here you can drag in your newly created templates. I'll just drag that in and you might need to authenticate this change, and then I will move it. Now I moved that template into the folder in Adobe Illustrator. The perks of saving your template to this template file is that if you go to Illustrator, and I would just shut that down and hit File, and New from Template, this is the folder that you will see as a default. It will be a much quicker workflow if you can save your Templates file to the Templates folder. Then I will just hit Pattern Templates CMYK, the template that we just saved, hit Okay, and here I have my newly created template ready to be used. Just as I wanted when I start a new pattern. 7. Save Swatch Libraries: A really useful thing to do when it comes to colors and working streamlined is the same swatch libraries. You can save both patterns watches and colors swatches. Single colors and color groups. I like to work with color groups in my files and if I want to create the color group, I select some objects that has the colors that I want to save in a group and click "New Color Group" in the swatches panel. Then I will just have all of these settings and click "okay". As I have two now, I will just delete the first one. Here I have a pattern, its this pattern and I have a color group with some swatches and I also have some single color swatches in this swatches panel. What I want to do now is to save this Swatch Library so that you can easily open it up for later use. This can be really good to save patterns so that you can easily reach your patterns in Illustrator. It's also nice to save color palettes this way because it will give you a really smooth and easy workflow, working with colors, especially if you use the same colors in different illustrations. All you need to do now is to click the top menu in the swatches panel. If you have a swatches library that you want to save and then you click "Save source library" as AI. You can save swatch libraries as, ASE as well but if you will only use them in Illustrator, I will save them as AI, because if you have patterns in your Swatch Library, they won't show, if you save them as ASE. To show both patterns and colors in your swatches panel, choose save Swatch Library as AI. I will just name my new color palette. For this, I will just name it example. As you can see Illustrator has opened up the file for the swatches automatically. I will show you in a minute how to find this folder as well, so that you can delete and rename your color libraries. Now, we can open up our swatches panel by clicking the little menu at the top of the swatches panel and go to Open Swatch Library user-defined. Here, you can see my example Swatch Library. Now, we can use this swatches over and over again in Illustrator. You can go in to the menu of your Swatch Library and click ''Persistent'' if you wish. That will make this Swatch Library stay in your workspace until you close it. This can be really good if you constantly work with certain colors that you use over and over again, you can just save this as a persistent color palette in your tool panel. Let's just have a quick look at where to find your swatches folder if you want to rename the library or delete it. I will just minimize Illustrator and go to my finders window. You should have a home folder, your users folder. If you don't have your users folder, I would suggest that you search it and then you would just click and drag it to your favorites in Finder. It's really good to have you use this folder in Finder because there are sometimes things that you need to reach in that folder. Then you should click the folder library. It's also common on some MacBooks that you don't see this folder, which is a little bit tricky. If you have it like that, you go through a little settings menu up to the top of your finders window and click "Show View Options". Here you have a little checkbox that says show library folder. Make sure that you have that checked in.Go into the library folder, application support, Adobe and the latest version of your Adobe Illustrator. Sometimes Adobe saves the version before the one that you updated. Here I have a Adobe Illustrator 23 and 24. I will just click 24 en_US and at the bottom I find my swatches folder and here I have all of my saved Swatch Library. Here I can find my example library and if I want to, I could rename this now to summer colors maybe. If I go into Illustrator, it won't change here, but if I shut that down and open up my source library again, it will have changed to summer colors. I will just close the last one and make that one persistent instead. You can also of course, go in and delete your swatch libraries here and that we're deleted from future use in Illustrator. If I go in again and try to open up the Swatch Library, it won't show, great. Now, you know how to save swatch libraries.This is a huge time-saver. As you can see, I have a bunch of swatch libraries that I use often and I find that it really speeds up my workflow. let's head over to the next lesson where you will learn more about how to use the CC libraries. 8. CC Library: The creative cloud library is another great function to incorporate in your workflow. A really great benefit to this library is that, it goes through most of the Adobe software, meaning that you can reach the same library, both in Illustrator and Photoshop as an example. In the CC library, you can save colors and graphics. You can even save images if you wish. For this purpose, I will show you how to use the libraries to save graphics and colors that you might want to reuse, all to streamline and speed up your workflow. So as you can see in my libraries, I have a bunch of saved libraries. I have colors, and I also have my logo, like social media symbols. If you want to, you can even have all of your patterns saved and anything that you wish you can save in the libraries. So let's start to create a color library. This is great if you want to use Adobe fresco to draw on your iPad because you will be able to reach this color library, right in Adobe fresco is also a great way to get the same colors quickly in, for example, both Illustrator and Photoshop or other Adobe softwares. So to start a new library, you click the little menu at the top and create new library. I will just name mine EXAMPLE, hit Create. To add colors you need to select an object with a color, and then click the little plus sign at the bottom and fill color and then you added the colors. So you can do this with separate colors, but if you choose, for example, two colors, if we click the plus sign, it will be added as graphics and not colors. So be sure to just select something with that color and hit Fill color. Now we have a whole color palette in this library. You can also group your libraries. We can create a group and can just name it pink and orange and drag in the colors or graphics that you want to have included in this group. You can also create a group at the bottom by the folders symbol. Now let's add some graphics to this library. You could, for example, drag in a logo and it will be saved the same size as your artwork in your document, if I just drag in my object and click Okay, then it will be added as a graphic. You can also select your graphic and hit the little plus sign and click graphic. You can add other graphics, such as patterns or illustrations that you create in and if I drag those out again, they will be saved as non adjustable files. This is really good. If you, for example, dragging your logo, then you can use your logo really quickly in all sorts of Adobe softwares. If you want to delete or rename your library, just click the little menu symbol at the top right. Here you can export your library, you can import libraries, you can even collaborate and share your library with others. You can rename it and you can even delete it. That's all for this lesson. There's so much that you can do with the CC library. It's very useful to incorporate in your workflow. So why not start to create a few libraries that you know, you use often such as your logo and maybe some color libraries too. Then you just continue to fill up with more libraries as you find use for them. 9. Keyboard Shortcuts: In this last, practical lesson of this class, we will talk about keyboard shortcuts. Do you use any keyboard shortcuts today? I use some, but not at all, as many as I could. Keyboard shortcuts, will make your workflow run so much smoother and easier. Let's dive into it and see which shortcuts you would like to use and how to customize, your own keyboard shortcuts. I feel the same here, as with the workspace in the previous lesson. You don't need to learn all of the shortcuts. Learn those that you use often. Otherwise, it might feel overwhelming. A good thing to know is which tools use often. We'll then, create shortcuts for those. Maybe some of the tools, that you use often already have shortcuts. You can easily see which shortcuts, different tools have, by hovering over them in the menu and in you're left top panel. Let's have a look at, for example, clipping mask. If I go to object clipping mask, which is something that I use often, it already has a short cut that says commands seven, and to release is option command seven. If I just use this shortcut a few times, I will learn it and it will make my workflow run so much smoother and easier. You might think, but what about those tools that doesn't seem to have shortcuts? You might be using some of those tools often, where you can easily customize your shortcuts and create your own. Let's go to edit and keyboard shortcuts. In this menu, you should see illustrated defaults, and you might have some other customized shortcuts if you created some but otherwise illustrated defaults is the one that you should have. If you want to create or change shortcuts, I would just let this illustrated defaults be as it is, and I will hit the save button at the right, to create a new keyboard shortcut file or key set file as it's named. Let's name it Maja, and now, I have my new keyboard shortcut file that I can change all of the shortcuts in. Let's customize this. For example, I know that I use the menu command scale often, so you can choose tools or menu commands up here, and you can either search, for it, scale, which we'll get the ones that you look for or you can look it up here, object, transform and scale, and when you find the two, that you want to create a shortcut, you would just type in a new shortcut, in this little box. Many shortcuts are taken. If I hit, for example, Option Command S, I can see that this is already taken by this save a copy command, and that the menu item will no longer have a keyboard shortcut. I can go to the conflict, which will make me jump to receive a copy command, but I would just choose to undo that, and try to find a shortcut that isn't used. For example, this one. For example, the next time that I want to scale something I hit Okay, I might need to say that again, and then if I want to scale something, I can just hit command, and that, and I will get the scale tool. You also might want to add shortcuts, for the tools in your left tool panel. For example, the group selection tool is something that I use often, but it doesn't have any shortcut. Let's just try that one, and that worked. If I want to select the group selection tool now, I can try it out and hit that key, and that worked perfectly fine, and maybe I will just do one more example. I use the smooth too often. I might want to shortcut for that. Let's try out, command nine. Tool shortcut cannot contain either function keys or the command or option modifies, it needs to be just a single keys so let's just try eight then for the smooth tool. Let's try that out. If I want to use the smooth tool, I hit eight, and there I have my smooth tool. Then you can just continue on like this, and think through which tools you use often, and just make sure that you have shortcuts for them, that makes sense to you, and start to use them as often as you can, because that's the way that you will learn. 10. Final Thoughts: That's all for this class. You might feel that this isn't the most fun class you have ever watched, but I assure you that is so useful to do these settings. I'm guessing that many of us have felt frustrated working with Illustrator at some point, not having things in order and having a workflow that just doesn't work. This is a great start to organize your workspace, your swatches, and all the things that we went through in this class. This will make you save so much time and frustration. Make sure that you set up your workspace and everything from start and then you can always customize it and change it as you go. Thank you so much for watching, if you liked this class hit the Follow button by my name here below, if you have any questions at all please ask them on the community page, and feel free to leave a review to let me know if you enjoyed this class. I would love to hear your thoughts. Makes sure that you share your project here in class, if you post it on Instagram, feel free to tag me @maja_faber. Thanks again for watching.