Creating Your First Document

Quick reference

• 00:04 So what I would like to do here is actually create a brand new document, and
• 00:08 to do that, I'm just going to come up to the file menu and choose new.
• 00:14 And now it will take me back to this screen which you guys have seen before,
• 00:18 and we can go ahead and create a web document or a print document.
• 00:22 So let's go ahead and view all presets, and
• 00:25 I'd like to take a look at some of these other paper sizes here.
• 00:29 Now for right now, I'm going to go ahead and
• 00:31 choose tabloid which is a pretty standard size.
• 00:35 By default over here on the right,
• 00:36 you'll notice that units of measurement are set to points.
• 00:40 So if I go ahead and click this drop down, I'm gonna change it to inches.
• 00:44 And now you'll see that it basically converts to and 11 by 17 size document.
• 00:50 Now by default, we'll have this kind of portrait orientation.
• 00:54 We can go ahead and change that to landscape.
• 00:57 And then as I do that, you'll notice that the height and the width are changing.
• 01:03 So anytime you have a landscape orientation,
• 01:05 it's going to be wider than it is tall, and conversely,
• 01:08 any time you have a portrait orientation, it'll be taller than it is wide.
• 01:14 And as we saw before, we can go ahead and give ourselves maybe two or
• 01:18 three art boards when we initially set up our file.
• 01:22 Now we're not gonna worry about the bleed right now,
• 01:24 that's kind of more a layout thing that we to address in a separate kind of video,
• 01:29 but that's more if you were working on a page layout or anything that you
• 01:32 had a full color that you wanted to print all the way to the edge.
• 01:36 It's basically just the way to add some extra room to ensure that you don't
• 01:40 have any white lines or anything like that around the outer boundaries of your file.
• 01:46 And lastly, let's go ahead and just leave this to CMYK Color,
• 01:49 and then we will go ahead and hit create.
• 01:52 So here is our new document, and you'll see over here that we still have
• 01:57 Untitled-3, our previous document from before.
• 02:01 So let me click over here and just click on this x to close the document.
• 02:06 Now coming back to our file here.
• 02:09 Let's say really quickly if I went and grabbed my artboard tool, and
• 02:12 I clicked on the third artboard, and I'm just going to go ahead and delete it.
• 02:17 Now as I showed you guys in the previous lesson,
• 02:19 I could always add it back if I wanted to.
• 02:22 And yes, I could use the artboard tool, but I could also come up here once again,
• 02:25 to the Window menu and choose artboards.
• 02:28 Now this time let's try adding a new artboard from here.
• 02:31 Click on this icon on the bottom that just says new artboard, and
• 02:35 you'll now see that you have an artboard added this way.
• 02:39 If I double click on this name, it will not only make
• 02:42 my whole screen this artboard, but also give me the chance to rename this.
• 02:48 So let's just go ahead and call it Artboard 3.
• 02:50 Okay, and now if I move around, I can come back to any of my three artboards.
• 02:58 So I'm just gonna close out of that window, and
• 03:00 you guys can now kind of see what our workspace looks like.
• 03:05 Now a really handy tip is if you wanted to just navigate around this window,
• 03:09 you can just hold down the spacebar, and kind of click and drag your way around.
• 03:14 Or if you wanted to zoom out, you can just press command or control and
• 03:18 the minus symbol.
• 03:19 And if you wanted to zoom back in, press command and the plus key together.
• 03:24 So now that we've created this document, let's go ahead and
• 03:27 save it before we lose any of our work.
• 03:30 The easiest way to do that is to come to the file menu, and
• 03:33 you can either choose to save or save as.
• 03:36 So let's do a quick save as.
• 03:40 Now that this is done, you'll see this window here pop up, and
• 03:43 it's just gonna ask you where you wanna save this file.
• 03:46 Now, for right now, I'm just going to save it on my desktop as
• 03:50 GoSkills_Illustrator_Doc_01.
• 03:57 And before I go ahead and hit save, I just wanted to point out one other thing here
• 04:00 for you guys, and that is that at the bottom of your screen here, under format,
• 04:05 you'll notice that you have some different file types to choose from.
• 04:08 Now by default, it will almost always be going to AI, but
• 04:11 in addition to the an AI file, you have something called an EPS.
• 04:16 Now an EPS and an AI file are very similar,
• 04:19 they're both factor files and they're used kind of interchangeably.
• 04:23 So either one of these is acceptable when you're saving an illustrator file.
• 04:29 Now you also have some other options here called an illustrator template which you
• 04:32 can create.
• 04:33 Or you can save it as an Adobe PDF file.
• 04:37 Now you also have these other two options here on the bottom called SVG's.
• 04:41 And those are just completely scalable file types which can be used for
• 04:45 things like logos or resizing texts.
• 04:49 But for the sake of simplicity, let's go ahead and
• 04:51 just save this out as an illustrator file, or an EPS file.
• 04:57 Now one other thing to notice here is that if you do save this as an EPS file,
• 05:01 it will allow you to check off this box that says, use artboards.
• 05:04 And if you check that off, you can either save all the artboards, or you can
• 05:09 just save one of the three art boards, if you don't want to save them all.
• 05:14 So that's a nice option to have to, if you might have one of your three art boards
• 05:18 that you're just using to kind of hold some elements in your design,
• 05:22 but you really only wanna save, say, artboard 2.
• 05:25 Well then you would save it as an EPS and choose that as the option.
• 05:29 But for now, I'm gonna save all three artboards as an Adobe Illustrator file.
• 05:34 Once I hit save, this box is going to pop here, and you'll just see a few of
• 05:38 these options that you won't probably want to leave alone.
• 05:41 Create PDF compatible, fine, embed profiles, use compression.
• 05:46 And this another place where you have the option to save
• 05:49 each artboard as a separate file if you want.
• 05:53 So from here let's go ahead and hit okay.
• 05:58 And now that we've saved that, you'll notice that the name on the top of our tab
• 06:02 is changed from untitled to the file name that we've given it.
• 06:06 So that is how you create and save your first document in an Adobe Illustrator.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.