[ Music ]
>> Hello and welcome to this video tutorial brought
to you by tastytuts.com.
In this video we are going to take a look
at the Adobe Illustrator interface.
I'm going to show you around and introduce you to some
of the things you need to be aware of.
Now I am currently using Illustrator CC for a Mac.
If you're using an earlier version, or Windows,
some things may be a little different in parts,
but in principle it should be the same.
If you have Illustrator open and wish
to follow along you will need to first come up to "window,"
scroll down to "workspace," then scroll down
and select "essentials."
Then to make sure you end up with the same set
up you see here we must again go to "window," "workspace,"
and then scroll down and select "reset essentials."
This will then set the interface to the essentials default layout
and you should have something that looks like this.
What you will come to learn later on is
that you can customize this layout,
but what would help right now is for you to have the same layout
so you can follow along with me.
Now, if for some reason you don't see the same
as mine, don't panic.
It's not a problem.
Just follow along and you should be fine.
Now, on a Mac, by default,
the application frame is switched off.
Some of you may prefer to have this on and some
of you may like this off.
So let me show you what this is.
If I come to "window" and scroll down to
"application frame" we can see that there is no tic next
to this, as it's currently set off.
If I click this we can now see a solid gray background.
This is the application frame.
If I turn it off again --
"windows," "application frame" -- we can see the desktop.
My personal preference is to have the application frame
on so I'm not distracted by the desktop background.
So this is Adobe CC and with CS6
and CC we have this dark interface.
If you're using an earlier version you will be looking
at the light interface.
Now, if for whatever reason you wish
to toggle the interface color, if you come to "illustrator,"
on the top bar, and scroll down to "preferences" and select
"user interface," you can toggle the lightness and darkness here.
I'm going to go with "medium-dark."
So to begin, I'm going to open up a document.
To follow along you can also open up this document.
This can be found in the "introduction" folder
in the "project" folder.
Now, you can download this folder for free.
The download link is in the description.
So I have my project folder here in the desktop.
When you have the project folder, simply open it,
then click on "introduction," "interface introduction,"
"versions," and select the version
of Illustrator you're using -- in my case it's CC --
and open the "interface introduction" file.
This file is going to help
to demonstrate various functionality of the program,
which we are going
to be covering a little later on in this video.
So as you can see, this is a document
and it contains four art boards with an object on each page.
Also, we have some artwork elements in the pasteboard area.
Okay, so let's take a closer look at the interface.
On the far left we have this tall, slim panel.
This is the tools panel and contains all the tools
that can be used in Illustrator.
And as you can see, we have lots of icons.
To activate a tool we simply click it or press one
of the many shortcut buttons on the keyboard.
We know which tool is active
because it has a highlight square behind it
on the tools panel and also you will notice
that the mouse cursor will change,
indicating which tool we have active.
In Illustrator we will be using many tools
and most tools have their own unique mouse cursor.
Now, if we look carefully we can also see that some
of the icons have little white arrows
in the bottom, right corner.
If we click and hold on the icon this will reveal more tools
in that set.
For example, if I click and hold
on the pen tool we can see an extra three tools
within that set.
If I click on the shape tool we can see a variety of shapes
that can be created very easily.
And if we move our mouse cursor over the tab
on the right we can expand the tools panel out,
which can be very useful.
And to remove this we can simply click the X
in the top left corner.
So keep in mind that some tools work in sets.
Now, if we take a closer look at the bottom
of this panel we can see two overlapping squares.
One appears to be a block and one appears
to be an outline of a square.
Now, if you're new
to Illustrator you may not be familiar with this.
What this represents is the fill color and the stroke color
of an object on the canvas area.
The top square is the fill
and the background square is the stroke.
So right now we can see that the fill color on the top is white
and the stroke color is black.
Now, if I come over to the canvas area
and select an object -- to do this I will first need
to choose the selection tool.
This tool is located at the top of the tools menu
and is recognized as the black arrow.
With this active let's select this yellow circle here.
Then you can see that the fill color and stroke in the bottom
of the tools menu has changed in accordance
to the selected object.
You can see the fill color is yellow and the stroke is orange.
This is important because it helps tell us
that this object is just one object
and not two separate objects.
For example, with the object selected I can click
and move this around like so.
I'm just going to undo that and put it back in place.
And if I come over and select another object we can see the
fill color and stroke color will change again.
Now, if you look closely, just above the fill and stroke color
on the tools panel, we have this little button here called
"swap fill and stroke."
And if I press this it's going to swap the stroke
and color fill like so.
So very easily we can swap the fill color and stroke color.
Now, to the left of the "swap fill
and stroke" we have another little button and this is the
"default fill and stroke."
If I press this it's going to set my fill and stroke squares
to black and white, though keep in mind,
if you have an object selected on your canvas area,
like I have this circle selected here,
and press it you will see the object has changed to black
and white with a default stroke applied.
So I'm going to undo this, click off the object to deselect,
and click on the "default fill and stroke button"
and now we are back to the default black
and white stroke and fill.
So as you can see the tools menu is currently in two columns.
If we look closely up to the top left
of the tools panel we can see these little arrows
pointing left.
If I come and click this once we can change the panel
to a single column and if we press this again we can go back
to the double column.
For the duration of this course I'm going to click this
and set my tools panel to a single row.
Now, if we move to the top
of our window we can see the standard tool bar
across the top.
From here we can access various properties and controls,
but we are not going to touch on that too much right now.
Just under the top tool bar we have the control panel.
Now, this control panel is really useful
as this will display various properties of a particular tool
or object you have selected at any given time.
So right now we can see some properties here.
If I close the document we can see that it all disappears
and that is because now we have nothing going on.
If I open up the document again --
and I can do this easily by coming to "file," open "recent,"
and selecting the file we can see the control panel kick
into action.
You will soon realize that this is one of the most key panels
in this program and as you use Illustrator you will be
referring to this control panel a lot.
So let's take a look at how it works.
So right now I don't have anything selected.
I'm going to choose the selection tool from the top
of the tools menu and select an object on the canvas area.
Let's select this blue circle here.
Now, you will see the control panel change
in accordance to the object.
Just like earlier we can see at the bottom
of the tools panel the fill and color stroke has changed,
but also we can see this on the control panel.
If we click "down" we can access the "swatches" panel
and change the color of the fill and the stroke very easily.
Also, here we have the stroke property.
Here we can easily toggle the stroke size
and also I can adjust the variable width
from a choice of options.
If I come across I can also change the brush definition
and even toggle the opacity of this object.
So I'm going to undo all this
and deselect the object by clicking off it.
This time I'm going to select the "text" tool from the menu.
This time in the control panel we can see some new properties.
We have properties for font choice, font style, font size,
and some formatting options.
All of which I can use when I add text to the canvas area.
So keep in mind, as you use your tools, to keep an eye
on the control panel, as this is really useful.
Moving over to the right hand side we have another slim panel.
Now, like the tools panel
over on the left this contains an array of subpanels
that are represented by these icons.
What you will soon discover is that these panels,
like the control panel, are essential in order
to produce work in Adobe Illustrator.
In order to have a swift workflow
in this program it will help
to have a comfortable setup of these panels.
Now, in Illustrator you can arrange these panels
in various ways.
I'll be demonstrating how to do this in the next episode
and recommending an effective set up.
Though what you see here is a default setup.
Now, as we click down the panels
on each icon we will begin to reveal the panels.
For example, we have "color," "swatches,"
"brushes," and "stroke."
Now, these panels contain various tools
and properties regarding objects on the canvas.
Also, if you look carefully,
these panels also include subpanels as tabs.
For example, on this stroke panel, we also have the
"gradient" panel and the "transparency" panel.
If we come down and click on the "layers" panel we can see
that all our objects in the document are existing
on one layer and I can toggle the visibility of this
and if I click on the "artboard" tab we can see
that this document contains four artboards.
And if I click once again on the icon
in the panel this will disappear,
giving us full visibility of the canvas area.
Now, if I come to the very bottom
of the window we have this thin strip.
This also contains some useful tools.
If we look over on the far left we have the magnification
of our document.
We can use this to zoom in and out of our document like so.
To the right of this we have the "artboard navigation."
We can use this to quickly maneuver through the document
to a particular artboard or this will give you a clear indication
of which artboard you are on at any given time.
So next I want to touch on document tabs.
Now, what are document tabs?
Okay, so currently we have this document open
and if we look carefully in the top left corner,
just under the control panel, we have a tab
that shows a document name.
Now, sometimes you may find yourself using multiple
documents at any given time.
For example, let's quickly create a new document.
I'm going to come to "file," "new,"
and just click "ok" and there it is.
And let's make one more.
And we have another.
Now, look again closely at the top left,
just under the control panel and this time we have three tabs.
Now, we can click these to navigate to other documents.
If I click the far left tab we are back to our first document
and if I quickly select an object and press command C
to copy I can click on the third tab to go back
to the new document and simply paste in the object
into the canvas like so.
So when we start to use multiple documents later
on in the course we will be using document tabs in this way.
So I'm going to close these two docs down by clicking the X
on the far left of the tabs until I am back
to my original document.
The last thing I want to talk about here is the canvas area.
When you create a document you will have a white area
which represents your artboard size
and a gray area around the canvas.
As you can see we have four artboards sitting
on the gray area.
The gray area here is called the pasteboard.
We can put any artwork we want on this, which we don't want
to include in our main composition.
This is pretty handy if we want to keep bits of artwork
on the side to use later.
In my example we can see I have some vector artwork sitting
in the pasteboard area here.
So that's a brief overview of the Adobe Illustrator interface.
In the next video I will be taking a closer look
at the work panels where I will be showing you how you can
customize your panel layout
to get a more comfortable workspace.
So I'll see you in the next video.