Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Creating and saving your first document.
Quick reference
Creating Your First Document
Creating and saving your first document.
When to use
Anytime you want to make a new Illustrator file you will need to create a document. You can choose from a preset, template, or create a custom document with the parameters of your choice.
Instructions
- Launch Adobe Illustrator
- Choose ‘New…’ from the Start Workspace
- Choose from one of the presets or templates, or create a custom document where you can set your own dimensions, color mode, orientation, and number of artboards.
- Once you have created your document, remember to go to the File menu and choose either Save or Save As before selecting a name and destination for your file.
Hints & tips
- If you want to quickly and easily navigate around a document, hold down the spacebar and then click and drag to move around freely.
- To zoom out of a document you can press Command/Ctrl and the minus key on the keyboard.
- To zoom into a document you can press Command/Ctrl and the plus key on the keyboard.
- If you have a file with multiple artboards and you only want to save one, or multiple artboards, you can do this easily by saving your file as an EPS and checking the 'Use Artboards' box in the Save As window and choosing either a range or a specific artboard that you wish to save.
- If you save your file as an Ai file you will still have the chance to save one or multiple artboards from the dialog box that appears immediately after saving.
- 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.