From the course: Illustrator CC 2017 One-on-One Fundamentals
Creating and duplicating artboards - Illustrator Tutorial
From the course: Illustrator CC 2017 One-on-One Fundamentals
Creating and duplicating artboards
- [Instructor] In this movie I'll show you how to create and duplicate art boards inside Illustrator, because here's the thing, Illustrator is not a typical multi page document creation program. So unlike in InDesign, in which you could say, gosh I've got nine pages, I'd like to add 12 more, Illustrators art board tool allows you to create and modify one art board at a time. Which is why it's often times extremely useful to duplicate an existing one. So I'm going to scroll over to the number eight here, and then I'll switch to my art board tool, which again you can get by pressing Shift O, and then notice if you were to drag anywhere inside this dark gray pace board, you'll create a new art board, and as long as smart guides are turned on, you will see in that heads up display below and to the right of my cursor, the dimensions of the art board that you're about to create. All right, that's one way to work. I'll go ahead and press Control Z or command Z on the MAC to undo that art board, and this time I'll start dragging from the center of the eight, and as I drag ill press and hold the Alt key, or the Option key on the MAC and notice that I'm now creating the art board from the center outward. Thing is, you need to keep that Alt or Option key down, because if you release the key, you'll return to drawing the art board from one corner to the other. You can also press and hold the Shift key, and that's going to constrain the aspect ratio of your art board so that it matches the previously selected one. In this case, art board seven. But let's say what you want to do is create a new art board that exactly matches the size of an existing one. In that case, I would once again press Control Z or Command Z on the Mac to undo that new art board, and then I'll select art board four. Which is the one with the desired dimensions, and then notice this little page icon up here in the control panel. Anytime you see a page icon inside of Illustrator, that means that clicking on the icon will create something new, and in our case, as indicate by the tool tip, we're going to create a new art board. But notice as soon as I click on that icon, nothing seems to happen. I haven't created a new art board at all until I move my cursor into the pace board, at which point I'll see a new art board that matches the existing one. All right, I'm going to move my cursor upward so that I'm seeing that magenta smart guide that tells me that I am snapping into alignment with the top of art board four. Which is what I want, and now I'll just go ahead and click in order to create that art board, and now I'm going to drag the bottom handle until it snaps into alignment with the bottom of art board seven, even though this is my eighth art board, as indicated by 08 in the top left corner. Illustrator has decided to name it art board 11. So I'll just go ahead and change the name up here in this name field in the control panel to art board eight and press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that change. All right, now I want to move this art board so that its distance from art board four is the same as the distance between four and three, and the best way to measure distances inside Illustrator is to use the rectangle tool. Now, Illustrator does provide a measure tool. You can get to it by clicking and holding on the eye dropper tool and selecting the measure tool from the fly out menu, but the rectangle tool is just easier to use and it provides you with snapping as well. So I'll select the rectangle tool, and then I'll draw a rectangle from the right side of our board three, and you can see I'm snapping into alignment to the left side of art board four, and notice now that the width value, that's all I care about, is 60 points. So in other words the distance between one art board and another is 60 points inside this document. All right now I no longer need that rectangle. So I'll just press the backspace key, or the delete key on the Mac to get rid of it. Now if that 60 point distance sounds unfamiliar, it's because Illustrator's taking a few things into account when spacing art boards, and so notice if I go to the File menu and choose the New command, or I could press Control N or Command N on the Mac, and now I'll click on the More Settings button in order to bring up the legacy dialogue box. Notice here that my spacing value reads 24 points. So what gives? Well Illustrator goes ahead and inserts this spacing between the bleed values. So if you were to whip out a calculator and add 24 to your left and right bleed values of 18 each. So in other words, 24 plus 18 plus 18, you would get 60. All right so I'll just go ahead and cancel out, and then I'll switch back to the art board tool, and then I'll click on art board eight, and I'll drag it to the left until it exactly snaps into alignment with the top right corner of art board four. Now notice this X value up here in the control panel. It tells you the coordinate location of the left side of this art board. I can tell it's the left side because notice this top left point is selected inside this tiny reference point matrix. So now all I need to do is click after that value and enter plus 60, and that's because you can do basic arithmetic with any numerical value inside Illustrator, and so after entering plus 60, I'll just press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to invoke that change. All right, now I'll escape out of the art board mode just by pressing the Escape key, and that takes me back to my last tool used. Which is the rectangle tool. What I need to do now is drag this number eight into the desired position here, and you can do that using the black arrow tool. Now notice that Illustrator calls this tool the selection tool. I call it the black arrow because that's what it is. Most tools inside Illustrator are named after what they are. For example, the pen tool is not called the drawing tool, it's called the pen 'cause it looks like a pen. Which is why I call what looks like a black arrow, the black arrow. Now whether you agree with my reasoning or not, and it's pretty prevalent by the way, in the industry, I just want you to know what it is I'm talking about. All right so I'll go ahead and select that tool, and I'll click on the eight in order to select it, and I'll drag it to more or less the desired up and down position here, and now I need to center it horizontally, and so I'll click on the word Align up here on the control panel, and I'll make sure align two is set to align two art board, which it is, and then I'll click on this second align objects icon. Which reads horizontal align center in order to center the number like so, and now I'll press the Escape key in order to hide that panel. All right, now let's say I want to create a new art board just like this one, but on the left side of the pace board. In that case, I'm going to go up to the view menu and choose the zoom out command in order to zoom out a little bit, and then I'll scroll over to the left like so, and now I'll once again select the art board tool, and because I want to not only duplicate art board eight, I want to take the number eight along with it, I'll go up here to the control panel and turn on this icon, move copy artwork with art board, and now rather than just dragging this art board to a different location, which of course will end up moving it, I'll press Control Z or Command Z on the Mac to undo that change. You want to press and hold the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac, and notice that changes your cursor from a little move cursor to a double arrowhead cursor. Which shows you that you're going to duplicate this art board. So once again, press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac, and go ahead and drag this guy over to this location right here. So the right side of the new art board snaps into alignment with the left side of our board one, and then drop it into place, and now you want to go up to this X value, and instead of adding 60, go ahead and enter minus 60 like so. So again, you've got basic arithmetic that is add, subtract, multiply, and divide, and then press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to invoke that change. Now I want to change the name of this art board from art board eight copy to art board zero, and then I'll select my type tool. Which you can get just by clicking on this letter T inside the tool box, and now I'll drag over the eight and I'll type in zero in order to replace that number, and then I'll press the Escape key in order to invoke that change, and now I'll click off the number to deselect it, and then I'll go up to the View menu and choose Fit All in Window, in order to zoom the document like so. And that is how you create and duplicate art boards using the art board tool here inside Illustrator.
Practice while you learn with exercise files
Download the files the instructor uses to teach the course. Follow along and learn by watching, listening and practicing.
Contents
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Pages of any size, at any angle1m 3s
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Using the Artboard tool8m 6s
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Undo, Redo, and Revert3m 16s
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Deleting and scaling artboards7m 6s
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Creating and duplicating artboards9m 5s
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Artboard tips and tricks4m 46s
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Introducing the Artboard panel8m 50s
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Autoarranging artboards6m 41s
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Artboards and rulers7m 26s
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