Creating a time-saving template

- [Voiceover] Alright, here's the project that we'll be creating, once again, absolutely from scratch over the course of this chapter. It's a little more more challenging than the previous project, but I'm confident you can do it. We're gonna start things off with the same opening moves from the previous chapter. In other words, we're gonna create a new basic RGB file. We're gonna add some center guides and all that stuff, which may make you wonder gosh, isn't there a way to avoid those first few folds in origami, for example. And while you can't avoid those first few folds in origami, you can avoid the first few steps in Illustrator by creating a template file, and I'm gonna show you how that works in this movie.

For starters, go up to the File menu and choose the New command or you can press control N or command N on the Mac. Let's go ahead and name this guy RGB with center guides. Change the profile to Basic RGB, just so that you and I are getting the same results. We want the Unit set to Points, and I'm gonna change the Width value once again to 1,008 points, and I'm gonna change the height to 672, which as I said before, is a size that works great for these videos. Then I'm gonna increase the Bleed value to 12 points, which is the same as one pica.

Otherwise, everything's fine. Having Rastor Effects set to 72 BPI is gonna work out nicely, and we want this Align New Objects to Pixel Grade checkbox to be turned off. At which point you can go ahead and click OK in order to create this new image, complete with the bleed. Now I'm gonna go over to the Layers panel, and I'm gonna click on the on the flyout menu and choose Panel options. Here inside this dialog box, I'll select Other and change the Thumbnail size value to 60 pixels and then click OK. And now I'll go ahead and rename this layer Guides by double clicking on its previous name and entering that new name.

Now let's add the center guides by pressing control R or command R on the Mac to bring up the rulers. Then press the control key or the command key on the Mac and drag from the intersection of those two rulers up here in the top left corner, and drag down like so. Assuming that you've got the control key down or the command key on the Mac, you're gonna create two new guides. We no longer need the ruler, so you can press control R or command R on a Mac to get rid of it. Then go up to the View menu, choose Guides and then choose Lock Guides to turn that command off.

Now you wanna go ahead and marquee those two guides like so using your black arrow tool. Then go up to the control panel, make sure that Align to Artboard is turned on, and then click on Horizontal Align Center, and then click no Vertical Align Center like so, and you'll end up with two center guides. We want those guides to be locked down, so return to the View menu, choose Guides, and choose Lock Guides in order to avoid messing them up in the future. Now what I suggest you do is drop down to the little page icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and alt or option click on it in order to bring up the Layer Options dialog box.

Let's just go ahead and call this layer Drawing so that it serves as a generic layer for drawing, of course, and click OK. That way it's unambiguous whether you should be drawing on a Guides layer. You shouldn't be. The Guides layers, they are to contain guides and nothing but guides. Now I'm gonna press control 0 or command 0 on a Mac to center my zoom. I might zoom in just a little bit more, as well, so that I'm taking in this entire artboard. Finally, we wanna go ahead and save our work by going up to the File menu and choosing Save as Template.

At this point, Illustrator may direct you to an internal folder, one of its special application folders, and that's gonna work out just fine, assuming that you can save to that location. On a PC you may end up getting an administrator error, and then you're gonna have to talk to your IT guy to figure out what in the world's going wrong, or you can just save to a different folder, so it's totally up to you. But I did have a conversation with my IT guy, so I was able to save to this folder right here, and, in fact, I'll just go ahead and save over this file by clicking the Save button followed by Yes.

At which point, I can go ahead and close it, knowing full well that I can bring back those settings just by going up to the File menu and choosing this command, New from Template. Then all you have to do is locate that template file and then click on the New button in order to create an untitled document. Notice in my case it's called Untitled 9 because I've done this a few times in advance. And we are once again working inside the RGB mode. Our document measure exactly 1,008 by 672 pixels. We have a couple of center guides, as you can see here, and we've got two layers ready and waiting for us with big, generously sized thumbnails.

And that's how you forevermore avoid redoing those upfront steps, by creating a template file here inside Illustrator.