Overview of the Menus

Quick reference

• 00:04 So now that we've covered our tools and our panels,
• 00:06 let's take a look at some of the menus that we have.
• 00:09 And these are all of the options up top,
• 00:11 along the very top tool bar of Illustrator.
• 00:14 So if I just click on this first one here, you'll see that I have a few options for
• 00:17 About Illustrator.
• 00:19 Preferences, which allow me to choose some of these
• 00:22 options here like general settings, Grids and Guides and so forth.
• 00:26 And you also have the ability to hide Illustrator, or
• 00:29 hide your other programs as well as the option to quit.
• 00:33 And you'll see that some of these actually have keyboard shortcuts
• 00:36 attached to them as well.
• 00:37 So if I were to just hit CMD+Q or CTRL+Q on a PC,
• 00:41 it would automatically quit Adobe Illustrator.
• 00:44 Or if I wanted to hide I could press CMD+SHIFT+H or CTRL+SHIFT+H on a PC.
• 00:49 And from there we have our File menu.
• 00:51 Now, if you remember, this is where we go anytime that we want to either create
• 00:54 a new document, open a document, or save or save as a document.
• 00:59 But you've got a few other options in here as well, such as the ability to export.
• 01:04 You can run scripts, you can change the document color mode in here,
• 01:09 or you can print, or choose your document setup.
• 01:13 Now, this is just kind of a quick overview,
• 01:15 but I wanted to show you guys what some of these panels look like here.
• 01:18 So, this is a place where you can come in and make some changes,
• 01:22 you can edit your art boards and things like that.
• 01:24 Or you can come into your document setup, change things like the gradient colors and
• 01:30 also add bleed, which is something that we haven't touched on yet.
• 01:34 And you can also change the units.
• 01:36 So if you had forgotten to set that up initially, when you created a new
• 01:40 document, you can always come in here to document setup and change it here.
• 01:43 From there,
• 01:45 we've got our edit menu, which very similar to other programs like Word and
• 01:49 Photoshop, it's just basically where you'd find things like cut, copy and paste.
• 01:54 But you also have the edit colors option which allows you to,
• 01:59 change the color of your artwork.
• 02:00 If you were to select some text, or a shape, or
• 02:03 any kind of artwork in Illustrator, you could change the color mode here.
• 02:08 Okay, you also have some other cool options here,
• 02:11 such as your Keyboard Shortcuts.
• 02:12 Which, when I click on this, is a really useful way to kind of get an overview of
• 02:17 some of the different shortcuts in Illustrator.
• 02:21 So if you're ever wondering about a shortcut, or if you ever wanna create
• 02:25 a custom shortcut of your own, this is where you would do it.
• 02:28 And you'll see there's a ton of options in here.
• 02:30 A lot of them don't actually have shortcuts associated with them.
• 02:33 But you can set shortcuts for either the tools themselves, or
• 02:37 menu commands like, you said like file open, or file new,
• 02:41 things from the edit menu, and all of these other menus up top as well.
• 02:47 From there we have the object menu, now the object menu is one that
• 02:50 I tend to go to a lot, because you can do some cool stuff in here.
• 02:53 You can group things, you can lock things, you can rotate them via the transform.
• 02:59 And you can also bring things to the front or move them to the back.
• 03:03 But a few of the other cool things that you can do here are image tracing,
• 03:07 distorting, blending, creating patterns, and converting shapes or expanding shapes.
• 03:15 And all the way on the bottom you also have this option to
• 03:17 change some of the art boards.
• 03:18 And you'll see that a lot of these things are kind of grayed out right now,
• 03:21 but that's because we don't really have any artwork to apply them to.
• 03:25 This is just kind of a general overview so that I can show you guys what these
• 03:29 menus look like and, typically, what kind of things you will expect to find here.
• 03:34 Now, just as the name implies, with Type,
• 03:35 you'll see that you have some options here for all of your different fonts.
• 03:40 Recent fonts, sizes, glyphs which are kind of like extra
• 03:45 things that come with certain fonts, extra characters.
• 03:48 You can also change the case from uppercase to lowercase.
• 03:51 Smart punctuation and create outlines is one that we're gonna be dealing with later
• 03:56 that it's currently grayed out.
• 03:58 But those are the main ones that you'll be using throughout this lesson or
• 04:01 throughout this video tutorial, as well as probably in future projects.
• 04:06 Now under Select, this is kind of the menu where you can select everything or
• 04:11 de-select.
• 04:12 You can select things which have the same appearance,
• 04:17 fill color, stroke color, opacity.
• 04:19 And this is actually a very useful menu for you guys.
• 04:22 Because if you ever want to select multiple things in a file
• 04:27 that have the same opacity or the same color, this is a great way to do it.
• 04:32 And it's something, again,
• 04:33 that we're going to be dealing with a little bit later on.
• 04:36 And you also have the option to select certain objects.
• 04:41 From there we have our Effects,
• 04:42 which are some of the different things you can apply, such as shadows and glows.
• 04:47 And you also have this category of Photoshop Effects,
• 04:49 which are basically like the filter gallery in Photoshop.
• 04:53 However, you should note that a lot of these things are not vector effects,
• 04:57 right?
• 04:58 So all that means is that they might not have some of the same properties,
• 05:02 as this top group here under the illustrator effects.
• 05:05 But that being said, you still have a lot of access to great things here,
• 05:09 like the ability to arch, bold and wave and distort things.
• 05:14 As well as some of these stylized options,
• 05:16 the path finder, paths, distorting and transforming.
• 05:21 As well as a cool 3D type of filter.
• 05:25 All right, so from there we have the view menu.
• 05:27 And this is basically where you'll have things like, changing the view,
• 05:30 if you wanted to change it to an outline view, or the normal view.
• 05:36 You also have ways that you can zoom in and out, fit an artboard to a window.
• 05:41 Hide your art board, hide edges, show unlock sizes,
• 05:45 you can get your rulers and show those.
• 05:48 Show or hide a bounding box and you also have this option down here for
• 05:53 guides, and your smart guides.
• 05:55 Now smart guides, I always leave automatically turned on.
• 05:58 But I'll show you guys a little bit more about the guides in the next lesson.
• 06:03 And if I scroll down just a touch more, you'll see that I've got these other
• 06:07 options here for show grid, snap to grid, snap to pixel, and snap to point.
• 06:11 And these are a few of the other options that we're going to be dealing with when
• 06:14 we start working with guides.
• 06:15 Because that's gonna allow us to make it a little bit easier for
• 06:18 ourselves when we want to start lining things up.
• 06:21 And aligning some of our elements, and then from there we have our window menu.
• 06:26 Now, the window menu is another very useful one because it allows you to pull
• 06:29 up some of these options that you may not be seeing by default,
• 06:33 in either your toolbar or your panels.
• 06:36 So, if you're ever not seeing any of these options over here on the left or
• 06:39 the right, you can come to your window menu and find them from here.
• 06:44 And lastly, we have the help menu,
• 06:46 which is where you can come if you ever have a question about Illustrator.
• 06:50 You can type in a few keywords here and let Illustrator do most of the work.
• 06:54 It's a great way to easily find things and let the little helper menu pop up and
• 06:59 show you where you can find them.
• 07:02 So that's just kinda the general overview of the menus in Illustrator.
• 07:06 But as I mentioned, as we progress through this tutorial,
• 07:09 we'll be covering a lot more of these things in more depth.

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