Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Taking a look at the panels that you will want to know about and how to use them.
Quick reference
Overview of the Panels
Taking a look at the panels that you will want to know about and how to use them.
When to use
The panels in Illustrator are equally important to the toolbar as they will allow you to do things like manage your layers and artboards, change colors, transparency, blending modes, and also change the weight of a stroke. From the panels you can also save swatches, symbols, graphic styles and export assets for the web.
Instructions
- In your Illustrator document notice how the panels are divided into sections similar to how the tools of the toolbar are grouped.
- Click on the arrow at the top of the panels to expand and collapse them and notice how they appear.
- In several of the panels you will notice an icon that looks like three or four stacked lines in the upper right corner. This is where you can browse through the libraries and presets for tools like the Brushes, Graphic Symbols, and Swatches.
Hints & tips
- Try creating a custom folder and saving some swatches to it.
- Browse some of the presets in the Swatches panel if you need ideas or examples of color palettes to use in your work.
- Browse through some of the Graphic Symbols and try dragging a few onto one of the artboards in your file.
- Browse through the Brush Library to see some of the different art brushes that are available by default in the program.
- 00:03 Now that we've covered our toolbar on the left hand side,
- 00:06 it's time now that we take a look at our panels.
- 00:08 And the panels can be found on the opposite side of the window over
- 00:11 here on the right.
- 00:12 Now similarly to our toolbar, you have the option to either kind of minimize or
- 00:17 expand this into a different view.
- 00:19 Just by clicking on these arrows up here on the top and
- 00:22 you'll see as I hover my cursor over it, it says Expand Panel.
- 00:25 So when I click, you can kind of get an expanded view of all of the panels that
- 00:29 you have open at the moment.
- 00:31 But, similarly also to our toolbar,
- 00:33 you'll see that these are kind of divided up into sections.
- 00:36 I don't know if you guys can tell, because a line here kinda breaking these and
- 00:39 dividing each of these groups up.
- 00:42 So let's start at the top.
- 00:44 First we have our color panel here which you can kind of toggle through and
- 00:49 these other tabs here are the other options just below.
- 00:53 So you'll see we have our color guide.
- 00:55 And as I click on that,
- 00:57 it actually switches to the color guide icon over here.
- 01:00 And if I were to click on the color themes, that also changes the tab up top.
- 01:06 Now these are grouped together for a reason and these are all kind of similarly
- 01:12 useful things but let's start with the color guide here, all right?
- 01:18 If I click on this little grid on the bottom you'll see that you have all
- 01:21 different kinds of color presets, so if you wanted to choose Art History,
- 01:25 you have these ancient color palettes that you can use here.
- 01:28 You've got shades and tints available to you, but you also have some other
- 01:33 default swatches, kind of dark, and cool, and light themes as well.
- 01:39 And you can kind of just explore and
- 01:40 see what some of these different themes are like.
- 01:42 They can be really helpful if you're trying to create or go for
- 01:46 a specific look.
- 01:48 Now, one of the ones that I use the most is probably color books, because you'll
- 01:53 see that you have all of these different Pantone books and categories here, and
- 01:57 if you guys remember earlier on, I was talking about color modes.
- 02:00 I was saying one of the other useful colors,
- 02:02 especially when you're working in print is Pantones.
- 02:05 So this is, kind of the category that I use a lot, especially if I'm trying to
- 02:08 print and match colors because you'll want to use, kind of, a universal antone color.
- 02:13 All right, and
- 02:14 that's really helpful if you're trying to get something printed to ensure accuracy.
- 02:19 So moving on down, we have this panel here for our swatches.
- 02:23 Now this may look a little bit similar to our color guide, except that swatches
- 02:29 allow us to save presets or gradients, solids, any kinda colors that we want.
- 02:35 So this is a great way to be able to just kind of
- 02:38 have one place where you have a folder of colors or
- 02:41 commonly used palettes that you like to use in your projects.
- 02:46 And it also allows you to kind of create new folders.
- 02:50 So if I wanted to create a new color group,
- 02:52 I could click on this folder here and just call it something like Custom Folder.
- 02:58 And then I am just going to add colors to it, that's really helpful.
- 03:02 And you can also add individual new swatches, you can choose the color type,
- 03:07 if you want to process or spot color.
- 03:09 In this case it's basically referencing our pantone colors,
- 03:12 that's why it's showing up like this.
- 03:15 But if I wanna select one of these other ones and then choose a new swatch, you see
- 03:19 now it's a CMYK color mode and it gives you the breakdown of that color here.
- 03:24 So again, this is the cayenne 100%, magenta 100%,
- 03:29 yellow and black are both set to 25.
- 03:32 So these are the percentages or
- 03:33 intensity of each of those colors used to create this color here.
- 03:39 All right, so those are the swatches, and
- 03:40 those are the things that you should be really pay attention to.
- 03:43 I don't use too many of these other options very often, but
- 03:47 they are very useful if you wanted to show different kinds of gradients swatches,
- 03:51 patterns, and so forth.
- 03:53 So moving on from there, we have our Brushes panel.
- 03:56 And by default, you'll just have a few of these brushes in here but
- 03:59 very similar to our swatches and our color guide, we have presets.
- 04:03 So if I click on this menu on the top right that just look like four lines, and
- 04:08 I come down all the way to bottom,
- 04:10 you'll see that you have this option to open the Brush Library.
- 04:14 Now that's really useful because you could choose from all of these different kinds
- 04:17 of preset brushes in Adobe Illustrator.
- 04:20 Some that I like to use are the Bristle Brush library, or
- 04:23 the general Artistic Library, where if you select any of these,
- 04:27 you can see that it will give you some more cool brushes to play around with.
- 04:32 And these are all available to you right off the bat in Adobe Illustrator.
- 04:35 So they're really great and a fun way to kind of add some personality and
- 04:39 life to your illustrations, right?
- 04:42 Even anything, even vector artwork, logos or
- 04:45 anything else that you wanna create, right?
- 04:48 So aside from just our brushes, we have these other things too called Symbols.
- 04:52 Now Symbols allow us to just easily kind of drag and
- 04:54 drop things directly onto our workspace, and it can be a good time saver if you're
- 04:59 gonna be using something over and over again.
- 05:03 All right, and you also have a Symbol Library here, similar to our Brushes,
- 05:07 where you can choose from some fun presets such as Retro.
- 05:11 And what else do we have here?
- 05:13 We have things like Tiki, Regal Vector Pack, Primitive, Logo, Elements, and more.
- 05:20 So some of these things are a little clip arty but
- 05:23 you kinda always add to these or save some presets as you go.
- 05:28 All right, so that's our second group.
- 05:30 From there, we have Stroke and
- 05:32 this is basically referring to a stroke meeting in line.
- 05:35 So these points are basically going to determine the thickness or
- 05:39 the weight of our lines.
- 05:41 And we also have our gradience where we can choose custom gradience or
- 05:45 we can click in here and double click on these colors to make our own.
- 05:51 And by default, it will probably be set to a linear gradient but
- 05:54 you'll also have the option to create a radial gradient which you can see changing
- 05:57 here in the preview.
- 05:59 And one other thing to point out is that you can always reverse the gradient to
- 06:03 have it go the opposite way by clicking here or you can apply the gradient
- 06:08 to an outline and it doesn't only have to be exclusively for a fill color.
- 06:11 You can also apply gradients to a stroke, and then you have a few more options here
- 06:16 to apply gradient to within the stroke, along the stroke or across the stroke, and
- 06:20 each one of those will produce a different looking result.
- 06:24 And from there, we have transparency.
- 06:26 Now, this is great because we have a lot of these blending mode options here
- 06:30 under transparency, kind of similar to Photoshop, where you get different looks
- 06:34 depending on the order of elements in a given design or project.
- 06:41 So if you we're over lapping some colors on top of an illustration or
- 06:44 something like that, you're playing around this button most can produce some cool and
- 06:48 interesting results.
- 06:50 And just as the name implies transparency you can also play around the opacity
- 06:54 of any object, type, shape and so forth.
- 06:58 For there we have the Appearance panel.
- 07:00 Now the Appearance panel is something we're gonna get into a little bit later,
- 07:03 but it's a great way to kind of set styles.
- 07:05 Like if you wanted to put a glow or a drop shadow on something you can set that up
- 07:10 here so that you can easily reuse it on other elements in your design.
- 07:14 And we also have Graphic Styles which can be handy for things like buttons.
- 07:19 So if you wanted to have different kind of a glossy button or
- 07:23 a style set up here, you can save that and you can choose from these presets.
- 07:29 So be sure to try and play around with some of these different presets in here,
- 07:33 check them out, browse through the folders and just try to
- 07:36 take a look at some of the things that are available to you right after that.
- 07:40 You've got some for type effects and
- 07:43 all kinds of different graphic styles in here that you can experiment with.
- 07:47 So many of these panels on the right side come with a bunch of presets already.
- 07:52 But remember, you can always edit, modify and save your own as well, okay?
- 07:58 And then, from graphic styles, we also have the export option, which
- 08:04 I don't use too often, but if you ever wanted to save an element for web, you can
- 08:08 choose here if you want it to be standard size, double, three times its size, or
- 08:12 even a custom size, along with the type of file that you would like to export.
- 08:17 So this is a little bit different from just saving it for web, but
- 08:20 it's kind of a quick and easy way to do it right here from your panels.
- 08:24 From there, we just have our Layers panel, which I can just click on here and
- 08:28 you'll see we don't really have any layers set up right now.
- 08:31 But when you do have that, you can toggle the visibility on and off, and
- 08:34 you can also choose to lock or unlock a layer.
- 08:37 And lastly, you also have the art for its panel.
- 08:42 So that's kind of a general overview of the panels.
- 08:45 But again, I encourage you guys to go in here.
- 08:47 Check some of these out.
- 08:48 Take a look at the presets.
- 08:50 And have some fun with them.
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