Creating a new document

In this exercise, we're going to create a new document inside of Illustrator. Here I am looking at the Welcome Screen and over here on the right side of the screen we have a bunch of Create New options, and you can click on any one of these items in order to create a new document. And all these are is presets by the way, a Print Style Document, which is designed for commercial reproduction by the way, where you actually take the file into a commercial printer and get multiple copies made of it. You can create a new Flash Catalyst Document, we'll see how that works in a much later chapter, a new Web Document, and so on. These are just presets though, as I say, meaning that you can override the settings inside the Print dialog box if you like and you can even change your mind much later than that, after you create the document, save it to disk, and so on. Another way to make a new document is to go up to the File menu and choose the New command or press Ctrl+N, Command+N on the Mac. And if this is the first time you've ever done this, then you will create a new Print Style Document, notice that right there, which is the exact same result as if you had clicked on Print Document in this list. Notice that the Welcome Screen persists in the background. No reason for that, because there's nothing you can do with it when you have the New Document dialog box open. I just want you to see that's the case. As soon as you click OK to accept your settings, both the New Document dialog box and the Welcome Screen in the background will disappear. Now, notice that our first option is to give this document a Name. Now, you don't truly name the document until you save it to disk, but when you give it a name here, you will see that name up in the Title bar. So I'll go ahead and call this, My corporate illustration or something along those lines. And that's a fairly generic name, but it's something to get me started any way, and that's what I recommend you do. Just make a stab at the dark for now, just so that you have a sense of where you're going with your New Document. Next, you can select from a different Profile, we'll see how that works in a later exercise. But for now, I'm just going to leave it set to Print. Again, that's going to generate a CMYK document; Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black, which is suitable for commercial reproduction. Here we can change the Number of Artboards. Now, you might think of Artboards as pages. So you can create multi-page documents inside of Illustrator CS5. By the way, that was a new feature inside of illustrator CS4. Believe it or not, in Illustrator CS3 and earlier, you were limited to single page documents inside of Illustrator. Now, the reason that Illustrator doesn't call them pages, it calls them Artboards, is because each and every Artboard can be a different size, a different orientation, that is upright or on its side, and it doesn't have to match any output paper size. However, for most of us, this will mean, if you change the number of Artboards to 6, for example, this will mean that you're creating a six page document. That's the way most of us will probably be working with Illustrator. However, I just want you to have a sense for Illustrator's unusual nomenclature. Next, you can specify how these Artboards are arranged when you zoom way out from your Pasteboard. So in other words, if you were to see all of your Artboards at the same time, would they be Gridded by Row? That is, page 1, followed by page 2 on the right, then later pages would be arranged into lower Rows. Or do you want to Grid by Column? So you're going to go from 1 to 2 down the Column and then over to 3 and 4 in the next Column and so on. Or do you want a big Row of Artboards or do you want a big Column of Artboards, up to you. And again, you can rearrange these Artboards later if you like, this is just a starting point. I'm going to go with 3 Columns here. So what that means is we're going to have 3 Columns, 2 Rows, because I'm asking for 6 Artboards. So the Artboards will be arranged 1, 2, 3 across the first Row and 4, 5, 6 across the second Row. You can switch over to a Right- to-Left Layout if you want to. This is specifically designed for international versions of Illustrator, because not all countries work with a Left-to- Right orientation as we do in Western countries. However, anybody can take advantage of this option if they want to. Next, you can specify the amount of Space between each one of your Artboards. This is purely a Preference setting, for your sake only. It doesn't affect how the Artboards print anything like that. Notice by default, I'm working with the Spacing value of 20 Points, and that's because my units are set to Points. Now, if you're wondering what's going on with Points? Points are 1/72 of an inch. So in other words, 72 Points fit inside of an inch. You might also think of it this way, that there are 12 Points inside of a pica and six picas inside of an inch. And this goes way back to the early traditional days of design here in the States and elsewhere. Otherwise, for those of you who work in metric countries, which is just about everything, except the States, you've got millimeters and centimeters at your disposal. I am, just for the sake of simplicity, going to switch over to Inches right now, and I'll change the Spacing Value to 0.5 Inches, half an inch between each page. Next, you can specify Size and you can select from predefined Paper Sizes if you like, but you don't have to work with the Paper Size. You could enter your own Size values. For example, I'm going to request Artboards that are 6 Inches wide and 8 Inches tall, and again, that's just a starting point. You can change the Size of your Artboards later on down the line if you want to, so that each and every Artboard is a different Size. Here are your Orientation options. You can work with Portrait style, that is upright pages, vertical ones. Or you can work with Landscape style, horizontal pages, or you can mix and match. Now, you can't mix and match here inside the New Document dialog box. You can mix and match later. Anyway, I'm going to stick with what I got, a Vertical orientation. And then I'm going to specify some Bleed Values. Now, a Bleed is specific to the world of commercial reproduction, and the idea is that you want your artwork to go all the way off the edge of the page. And the edge of the page is known as the trim size. And if you want to be able to trim right next to a graphic, so that it goes off the trim size, then you need to have some extra wiggle room, in case there's a little bit of misregistration during the printing process, otherwise you'll end up with a tiny white line right there next to that trim, and you don't want that. So the Bleed determines how far you go off the page with your artwork. I'm going to set my Bleed to 0.25 Inches or a quarter Inch, and notice that all of the Bleed value is changing kind, because I have this Link icon turned on. If you were to change them independently, you would turn Link off. Now, a quarter Inch of Bleed is more than enough Bleed. That's going to work out really nicely. And then I'll go ahead and click OK in order to create that New Document. Now, notice what we have here, each one of these black outlined rectangles is an actual Artboard, and then the red rectangles indicate the Bleed size that goes beyond that Artboard, and so we have an extra quarter inch of room right there and then we have a half inch between the edge of one Bleed and the next. Inside of Illustrator CS4, that Spacing value of a half an inch would have been the space between each one of the Artboards, now it takes into account the Bleed, which is actually a really great thing. And that my friends is how you create a new multi-Artboard document here inside Illustrator.