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About this lesson
Quick reference
Overview of the Menus
Browsing the different menus that you will want to know about and briefly covering the different things that can be found in each menu.
When to use
The menus are an integral part of Illustrator that allow you to do some basic things like create a document, save a document, or print. In addition to that, the menus also offer a wide range of helpful options from transforming and distortion effects to filters, keyboard shortcuts, and quick ways to access a panel if it isn't already displayed on the right.
Instructions
- Go to the File menu and choose 'New' to create a new document.
- Choose from any of the presets or create a custom document of your own.
- Once your document is open, return to the File menu and choose a destination and a name for your file.
- Go to the Window menu and toggle through some of the different Workspaces found under Window > Workspace.
- Choose the 'Essentials' workspace and then return to the File menu and choose 'Close' to close your file from the menu.
Hints & tips
- If you are ever stuck or unsure of where to find a certain tool or menu item, refer to the Help menu and type in a few keywords.
- You can easily change a font directly from the Type menu, and browse through all of the Illustrator and Photoshop Filters via the Effects menu.
- If you ever set the wrong Color Mode (CMYK vs RGB) for your document, you can easily change it from the File menu by going to File > Document Color Mode and changing it here.
- 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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