if your used to working with Adobe Photoshop
then Illustrator should be pretty easy for you to adapt to
however if you're new to illustrator it's a good idea to familiarize yourself
with the workspace so you can work more efficiently
so let's go over the various parts of the workspace and how to customize it
so that you can get started working in Illustrator before we start though
if you're on a Mac and you've opened illustrator for the first time
it probably doesn't look like what you're seeing here illustrator on a Mac
for some reason has a floating application which means you can see the
desktop in the icons on the desktop and everything just kind of floating around
I find that pretty distracting so I went up to the Window menu
and clicked application frame and that allows me to see
a normal application where I don't see anything underneath this gray area here
on a on a PC you don't have to worry about this
so let's go ahead and get started talking about the various parts of the
workspace
this white area here is called an art board
and in this document I actually have three different art boards
this is really great if I was designing a logo for a client and I had three
different
options because then I get to keep those three different options separate
but also in one document so it's easier to send to people
outside of the art boards
we have this gray area and this is considered the canvas
this is where you can store different items or
text or pictures or what not that you might want to use later
but you don't actually want to appear on your art boards because you're not sure
about them
on the left hand side you'll see the toolbar and this has all of the tools that your going to
use in Adobe Illustrator
in again if you've worked with Photoshop before this should be
fairly simple but if you haven't know that most of your
tools if you hover over them It'll tell you what the name of the tool is
it also has a letter right next to the name that tool
and when you hit that letter on your keyboard in automatically switch that
tool
some tools like the selection tool
are stand-alone tools you just click it and you start using it
but there are other tools like let's take this shape tool
and you can see a little arrow on the bottom right hand corner
this tells you that they're similar tools hidden underneath this one
so if I click and hold its gonna bring up
a little flyout menu that has all the various shapes that you can create an
illustrator
sometimes this can get kinda tedious let's say I wanna do
a big project that has a lot of different geometric shapes
I don't wanna have to keep coming to this and holding it down
every time I want to create a new shape so illustrator has this option for you
called a tear-off tab that you can click and its gonna tear that little
fly out menu off so that you can
quickly and easily access those tools it doesn't mean they're gone
they're still there it just kinda made a copy for you to easily use
so I'll go ahead and close that now with Illustrator every time you click on a
tool
just know that you might need to set some of the options up here for that tool
unlike Photoshop which the options change
drastically for each tool for the majority of the tools in Illustrator
all of these options stay the same there are ones like the art board
that all of the sudden you'll see a bunch of different options but most of um are gonna
use a
basic set that we just saw now this application bar up here
is unique to a Mac you can launch bridge and you can change the way documents
are arranged
it's not actually unique it's just that on a PC you'll see your menu bar
and then you'll see the application bar these specific buttons
on a Mac it's just one hole bar by itself then we have the regular menu bar
so anytime your
doing let's say a tutorial video online or your in a class where they're using
Adobe Illustrator
anytime they say menu they want to go up to the very top and choose one of these menus
and just realize that you have keyboard shortcuts next to some of these
menu commands and you're gonna get real tired of sometimes of coming up and doing
the same action
for instance undo all the time and this is where you want to use keyboard
shortcuts to be more efficient
last but not least are the panel's in these panels
I can drag out so that their separate panels but as you can see it's just like
Photoshop or
really any other adobe program a panel is indicated by a little tab
and you can see that some panels are active while some panels are hidden
in behind other panels
and you just have to click their name to make them active
now as with other Adobe programs you can collapse or expand these panels but with
illustrator
they actually have three different levels so I can double-click the word
color
and its gonna collapse that whole panel I can double click again
or just actually one click and its gonna do
the full expanded version of that and double click again
and its gonna give me a halfway point and then collapse
that's also what this little button is on the left you can do full
medium small, so
when it comes to your workspace you're gonna start finding that there are some
panels you use a lot and there's some panels that you never use
and sometimes you get a workflow going and you'd like to have your panels in a
certain spot
if that's true then you can definitely customize your workspace
so if I grab this panel tab I can move it over
and I'll go ahead and group these together and if I go up to
Window menu you can see that there are a ton of other panels
that are currently not up in our document now
the ones with the check mark show that they're active but just so you know the
brushes panel
it's not active but it is actually showing up over here
so let's go ahead and choose let's say document info cuz it doesn't look like
we have that panel at all
so now we have these two panels that go together document info and attributes:
and this is what we can do we can have a floating panel over here
we can grab this particular tab and use our drop zone
you can see a little blue bar and this is going to create a second column
so I can move this one so let's say it's down at the bottom
so it creates two of these and expand them
and you can kinda re-size the different columns
and you can expand or collapse any of these and just
move things around the way you need them to be when you get all of your panels and
everything situated the way you like it
you can go up to the window menu go to work space
and do new workspace so I'll call this my name
because this is the settings or the workspace that I like to work with
and click okay and now when I go to work space you'll see that I have this
Jessica
option so if I ever mess up this option let's say I wanna move document info so
it's a floating panel here
and let's say I accidentally get rid of the brushes panel
it's not going to permanently change that workspace all I have to do is go to
window
workspace and click reset Jessica
now this goes back to my original layout the way I had it
another thing you should know is that with the workspace adobe has created a bunch
of work spaces for you that are related to specific tasks
so if you know that you're gonna create a tracing document you drew something
scanned it and you want to trace it and turn it into a vector digital
art object then you might want to choose the tracing workspace
and it'll bring up a bunch a different panels that relate to
image trace the panel that you should start out with any time you open
adobe illustrator for the very first time would be essentials
so I can click essentials and as you can see it kinda brings up all this other
stuff
so I can go to work space and reset that essentials and this is how Adobe
Illustrator starts out the first time you ever open up that program
one more thing if you have a couple different documents open let's
say I create a new one and let's do just two art boards for this one
if you have two different documents open just know that you can go to this
arrange button
to see them side by side simultaneously to see them
one on top of the other and this is a good way to move artwork between
projects
or you can go back to consolidating them all and this is where you can see your two
various documents
you can also get to that arrange here