I'm going to show you my personal top seven powerful illustrator tools and why
I do feel they are the top seven for your graphic design workflow you might
have seen tutorials and videos on some of these tools but I wanted to collect
the top seven most powerful tools in one video so every designer and person who's
interested can make use of them in one video so the first function that I think
is really really powerful and something you should be using in illustrator is
actually the artboards panel illustrator is awesome because we can actually make
many different artboards on one document you actually have the i/o board tool
here which allows you to change the name the size and also the position of the
artboard also you can actually hold down the alt/option key drag and duplicate
the artboards like so that's all well and good but there is actually something
else completely dedicated to the artboards that i want to show you and
that is the artboard panel which is located in the top drop down menu
so in this panel you can see the various different artboards that we have and you
can toggle between them quite easily also you can change the order of there
are boards here with the specific artboard selected you can come into the
artboard options which is a very handy thing to be using you can precisely
change the size of an art board as well as the name the orientation and you
actually have some presets here which is very very handy also one very handy
setting is the show center mark because I'm always trying to find the center of
my artboard and this will present a green marker showing you exactly where
it is so we have the current artboard selected if we create a new artboard in
the panel here it's going to duplicate the settings and the format of the
artboards we can also click and drag to move around the orientation of the
artboards in the panel and when we click on a specific our board illustrator will
zoom to the our board automatically also if you want to remove empty useless
artboards you can use this option here which will quickly remove any unwanted
out words also in the artboard panel we can quickly change the name of an
artboard by just double clicking the box here and then typing in the new name for
the our boards it's best to keep things organized in the daily illustrator
especially if you're working with many different up words and you want to
export or print specific ones but yeah the artboard panel is I think it's able
looked by many designers but it is very powerful especially when you're working
on large documents with many different artboards going on so moving on to the
second powerful tool in Adobe Illustrator we're going to be looking at
a function that can export files for web such as PNG and JPEG
but we can actually export specific artboards as separate files which is
really powerful and I'm going to show you how to do that right now
so we're working on one document and I've got three different artboards with
three different designs if we come up to window and then assets exports we're
going to be met with this window here
now you want to make sure you can see the export settings I'm going to remove
all of these presets and just set up my own one I'm actually going to export
pngs for my designs here then it's just a case of dragging and dropping your
design elements into this panel you want to make sure that you've got all of the
assess clicked by holding down shift and clicking every single aspect of this
panel you also have an iOS and Android option
but I'm not going to mess with that today you then just export your files
and illustrator will send them to a folder on your desktop
so now I've actually got three different watch over for because I had one in here
before I've got four different files just from one document this saves a lot
of time and it's very very powerful indeed now thirdly another process or
function that is really overlooked in my opinion is the appearance panel it's
hugely powerful because you can add so many effects and do so many different
things just from this one panel and on one vector shape so for example here
I've got a circle let's go ahead and open up the appearance panel in the top
drop-down menu so as you can see I've got a feel with no stroke and we can
easily add a stroke right here now I can actually bring the stroke below the fill
layer which is something you cannot do the strokes normally you can only do
that within the appearance panel I'm going to quickly adjust the stroke
weight and then I'm going to duplicate this stroke by heading into the fly down
menu I can add multiple strokes to one shape
and I can adjust their weights and their colors really really easily with this
appearance panel so just like that I've got two different strokes on one shape
make sure you've got your shape selected when you make adjustments because as you
can see here I'm changing the stroke to 100 points and it didn't actually appear
on the shape because it wasn't selected
so what else can we do from the appearance panel well firstly we can add
effects such as Gaussian blurs and so forth make sure to keep the Preedy box
checked while you're working on the blur effect and yeah the blur is not looking
that great but we can adjust that in the document raster effect settings but
going back to the appearance panel I can then adjust where this blur stroke layer
is in relation to the shape itself by offsetting the path the offset box is
going to dictate how far away from the shape things are offset so 40 isn't not
too far away from the shape but let's try something like 300 and as you can
see I've got a huge ring around my shape that is offset and again this is just in
one vector shape all in the appearance panel you can see how powerful this will
be and just to prove it is on one vector shape let's enter into outline mode and
as you can see it's just one circle so the fourth most powerful tool in
Illustrator that you need to be using is the Pathfinder tool I do actually have a
dedicated video to this which I'm going to link down below but briefly to go
over things the Pathfinder allows you to create designs and complex shapes by
cutting and intersecting various different objects into each other
that it saves you a lot of time as a designer as opposed to say drawing
things with the pen tour for yourself
and as I've said before if you hold down the alt or the option key when using the
top row options here you can make compound paths this means that even if
you've cut out the design you can still take the group selection tool and then
change and edit the layout of the path file operation as opposed to your shapes
being cut in a fixed position a certain way but yeah I do have a dedicated video
to the path finder which I'm gonna link down below another really useful option
in the path finder is to use a divide function this is going to cut out the
entire selection along the vector paths which means when you in group the
selection you have full control over what you want to remove and what you
want to edit the Pathfinder is truly helpful and also powerful for making
quick and complex shapes similar to the Pathfinder we next have the shape
builder tool you can find this here in the tool bar but before you go and use
it you must select your objects and then take the shape bird at all now with this
one you can hold down the alt or the option key to bring up the minus icon
over your cursor and then wherever you draw you're going to erase that specific
selection
if you do let go of the alt or the option key then you start to unite
shapes together as one wherever you draw this is very very powerful and it's
similar to the Pathfinder tool but I feel with this one you have more control
and freedom boss using the tool itself you can quickly come up with complex and
intricate shapes by using both the Pathfinder and the shape builder as they
are both very powerful indeed so the penultimate function that is very
powerful in the illustrator is the layers window and again I think many
designers overlook this in Adobe Illustrator they think it's just with
Photoshop but that's not actually true the the layers panel in Illustrator is
very very important in keeping your work neat tidy and organized so as you can
see I've got my layers labeled apart from one of the circles so it's add a
name or label just double-click it and type it in and like I said I can pick
any of these shapes by name click here and I automatically select them this is
very very handy on large complicated busy designs I think you should be
labeling your work and organizing layers especially on larger projects it's just
more professional and it makes your workflow that much better
you can also hide layers and arrange them and do all sorts of things from the
layers panel also when you group things together with command or control G you
can see the group of being created in the layers window which is really really
awesome and it helps when you're working with many groups and many layers of
course you can also label and rename your groups as well
so finally today the function in Adobe Illustrator that is very very powerful
and something you should be using is the blend tool now firstly we can use the
blend tool to make interesting patterns and shapes and designs and you can
actually access it here or you can just press W on your keyboard clicking while
holding down shift between shapes will blend them together like so and that is
really neat and that's a really cool thing to be able to do but the blend
tool is also good for making copies of shapes over a set distance or even a
certain amount of shapes so to let me demonstrate let's take this circle here
and duplicate it over and then use the blend tool again we can actually hold
down the alt or the option key and then click the blend itself and this will
bring up the blend options if we choose specified steps we can actually choose
how many copies of this shape we want to make now this is very quick and it's a
very powerful technique to keep in mind and the blend tool can have many
applications within your workflow so there are my personal top seven powerful
tools and functions in a debut list rater I hope you found today's video
useful and do let me know if you agree with my selection of seven different
tools also do let me know what you want to see on this channel because I am
focusing on making only two or three videos per week but actually making the
quality and the length longer as opposed to putting out four or five shorter more
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