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About this lesson
How and why to use art boards when working in Adobe Illustrator.
Quick reference
Artboards
How and why to use art boards when working in Adobe Illustrator.
When to use
Artboards can be extremely useful for creating different versions of a design as well as organizing your work all in one document. You can use artboards to lay out different pieces of a campaign such as a letterhead, envelope, and business card.
Instructions
- Launch Adobe Illustrator
- Choose ‘New…’ from the Start Workspace
- Any of the preset options or custom sized documents will allow you to choose any number of artboards.
Hints & tips
- If you want to add or remove an artboard once you've created a document, you can easily do so by using the Artboard Tool or accessing it via the Window menu.
- If you have a document with multiple artboards, you can grab the artboard tool and then move individual artboards around freely within the workspace.
- 00:04 In this lesson, I'd like to talk to you guys about one of the more useful and
- 00:07 cool features of Adobe Illustrator.
- 00:09 So we're just going to go ahead and click on New from the Start Work space.
- 00:13 Now at this point, this should look somewhat familiar to you guys,
- 00:16 as you click through the New Document menu here.
- 00:18 And as I go through these different types of projects, you'll notice once again that
- 00:22 we have this area on the right where we can determine things like the width and
- 00:26 the height and so many other properties of our project.
- 00:29 Now we've already discussed the color mode and why that's important.
- 00:33 So now we're going to talk about Artboards.
- 00:35 Now Artboards are very cool and they're very useful because it allows you to
- 00:39 create multiple versions and organize your artwork, all in one Illustrator document.
- 00:45 So, if I click this up arrow you'll see the number going up,
- 00:48 you can add more artboards and as far as I know you can have
- 00:51 pretty much an unlimited number of artboards in any one document.
- 00:55 Now this would be really handy,
- 00:56 say for example if you are working on some stationary for a client, and you
- 01:01 wanted to have a letterhead, a business card and an envelope all in one document.
- 01:06 It could also be really handy if you are working on say a flyer design and
- 01:10 you wanted to have multiple versions of it or
- 01:12 to see what different colors look like all in one place.
- 01:16 So it's a great time saver and
- 01:17 it prevents you from having to open up multiple Illustrator files.
- 01:21 So really quick, just as an example, let's just go ahead and
- 01:25 create one of these documents with four Artboards to start.
- 01:29 I'm going to go ahead and hit create.
- 01:31 And right away,
- 01:31 you'll see that you basically have four different canvasses now.
- 01:35 And I know we haven't really jumped in to the tools or anything like that yet.
- 01:39 So I'm going to keep this very simple.
- 01:41 But over here on the left side you'll see that you have the Artboard tool, and
- 01:45 you can get that by pressing Shift + O on the keyboard.
- 01:48 Now once I click that, you'll see that it changes a little bit and
- 01:51 you can now kinda move your cursor around and
- 01:54 see how it changes as you move over different parts of the screen.
- 01:58 This means that you can just go ahead and create other size Artboards.
- 02:02 You can move the existing Artboards, or you can select one and delete them.
- 02:07 Now this is a very kind of easy and quick way to navigate your Artboards, but
- 02:12 if you end up getting rid of too many, it's very easy to add a new one.
- 02:16 And you can just do that by coming up here to this icon and choosing New Artboard.
- 02:22 Now I can just click anywhere and it'll create a new Artboard for me.
- 02:25 So if I delete one, that I shouldn't have deleted or
- 02:28 if I just wanna add an extra Artboard, that's a great way to do it.
- 02:32 Another way that you can view your Artboards,
- 02:34 is by coming up to the window menu and choosing artboards.
- 02:38 And now, you'll see over here, I can pop this panel out,
- 02:41 just by clicking and dragging.
- 02:43 And it will basically allow me to toggle between any of these Artboards.
- 02:48 So this is another way that you can kind of manipulate and
- 02:51 navigate between your Artboards.
- 02:53 You could change the order of them.
- 02:56 Or you could even delete or add a new Artboard right from here.
- 03:01 So that's just another way,
- 03:02 and as you guys will see as we progress through this course,
- 03:06 sometimes there are multiple ways of doing the same thing in Adobe Illustrator.
- 03:10 So, I just wanted to show you guys and
- 03:11 example of what this looks like and how to use these Artboards a little bit.
- 03:17 So, in the next segment we'll actually be seeing how this can
- 03:21 be used as we create and save our first document.
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