Creating a time-saving template

- [Instructor] Over the course of this chapter we'll be creating this illustration once again entirely from scratch, this time using Illustrator's shape tools. And while this project is a little more challenging than the previous one I'm confident that you can pull it off. And we're going to start things off the same way we did in the previous chapter by creating a new document complete with center guides, which may make you wonder if there's some way to save those upfront steps so you don't have to perform them over and over again.

And the answer is to create a template file as I'll demonstrate in this very movie. And so the first step is to go to the File menu and choose the New command, or you have that keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+N or Cmd+N on the Mac. And notice if you've been working along with me that you'll see your previous settings stored inside the new dialog box, but just to make sure that you and I are on the same page, I'll go ahead and click on Art & Illustration in the top left corner of the dialog box and then I'll change the name of this file to RGB with center guides.

Notice that the units are set to Points, and so I'll go ahead and change the width value to 1008 and I'll tab to the height value and change it to 672. And again these values just happen to work well for the video and they also ensure that you and I will get the same results. Notice that the color mode is set to RGB Color, which is exactly what we want. I'm just going to make one change to the bleed values by taking them up to 12 points which is the same as one pica after which I'll click on the create button, or you can press the enter key on the PC or the return key on the Mac.

Alright next you want to go to the Layers panel, and then click on the fly out menu icon in the top right corner of that panel and choose Panel Options from the bottom of the menu. Next go ahead and select the other option and change that size value to 60 pixels and click okay. Alright now go ahead and double click on the existing name of that layer and change it to Guides and press the enter key or the return key on the Mac. Now to create the center guides, go ahead and press ctrl + r or cmd + r on a Mac, to bring up the rulers and then press the ctrl key or the cmd key on the Mac and drag from the intersection of those two rulers in the top left corner of the screen in order to draw out two guidelines at the same time and then press ctrl r or cmd r in a Mac to hide those rulers.

Now we need to unlock the guide so we can center them. And you do that by going to the View menu, choosing Guides and choosing Unlock Guides. Then armed with a black arrow tool up here at the top of the toolbox go ahead and partially marquis both of those guides like so and then click on the word Align and make sure Align To is set to Align to Artboard. Now if you have a bigger screen you're going to see the align icons up here in the control panel, but because my screen is smaller I'm seeing them in a pop up panel.

Either way you want to click on this second icon, horizontal align center, followed by this fifth icon, vertical align center in order to exactly center those guides. Now return to the View menu, choose Guides and choose Lock Guides in order to lock them down so you don't accidentally mess them up. Alright now I'm going to go ahead and zoom in a little bit and now that I've established a Guides layer I want to add a new layer that I can draw on because after all the purpose of the Guides layer is to hold the guides and nothing more.

And so I'll drop down to this little page icon at the bottom of the layers panel and I'll press the alt key or the option key on the Mac and click on it in order to force the display of the Layer Options dialog box and then I'll just call this new layer Drawing and click okay. Alright now we want to save this document as a template and you do that by going to the File menu and choosing Save As Template. At which point Illustrator will automatically direct you to its recommended folder which is deep inside the system folder structure, and so what you want to do is just go ahead and save the file by clicking on the save button.

Now it's possible especially here on the PC that you're going to get a privileges error. In which case you'll either need to talk to your IT guy or one of your very computer savvy friends in order to address that problem just as I did, by the way. Or you can save this template to a different location. But in my case I'll just click save and because I've created this file in advance I'll go ahead and replace it by clicking on the Yes button. Alright now all you need to do is close this file and then return to the File menu and choose New From Template, and that will take you back to that exact same folder at which time you can select the file and click on the New button or you can just double click in the file in order to load it as an untitled document.

So notice that it's behaving as if it's never been saved. And that's how you create a time saving template in the RGB color mode which is great for both local printing as well as screen graphics, complete with a couple of center guides and these generously sized layer thumbnails here inside Illustrator.