From the course: Time-Saving Tips Using Illustrator

Illustrator tool shortcuts - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Time-Saving Tips Using Illustrator

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Illustrator tool shortcuts

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- [Instructor] Part of working efficiently in Illustrator, or any application, for that matter, is taking advantage of shortcuts that avoid overusing the mouse. Illustrator has plenty of them. I'm gonna focus here on the tool shortcuts inside of Illustrator. The way these tool shortcuts work is you'll notice that if I hover over one of these tools, it's gonna provide the name of the tool as a tool tip, as well as a letter behind the tool. That letter is the shortcut when you're working in Illustrator. The tool you're gonna be using most often is the selection tool, that's this black arrow right here. But you're gonna notice that if I press the A key, that will make the direct selection tool active. If I press the S key, that will make the scale tool active. And the E key will activate the free transform tool. Now again, you don't have to remember every single one of these, but it's helpful to memorize the ones that you use most often. Some other useful shortcuts here, is that if you are working in the selection tool, which is gonna be the one you're gonna be using most often, and you decide that you wanna edit text, what you could do is you can double click on the text and that will immediately switch to your type tool. Notice that now the type tool becomes active. When you double click on a type object, Illustrator understands that you wanna edit that type and now you can select this and make whatever changes you wish. Once you're finished making those edits, if you simply press the escape key on your keyboard, it will go back to your selection tool. In similar fashion, a lot of these have multiple tools underneath them. If you click and hold, you're gonna notice that in this case only one of them actually has the shortcut for the S key. You'll notice that there's several ways that you can access them, but one of which is, just click and hold on that and if you click on this little gripper on the very edge, it will float that panel so you can see everything within. One last thing I'd like to show you is in the case of the direct selection tool. You'll notice that underneath there is the group selection tool. A little tip here is that when you are using the direct selection tool, if you simply hold down the option key, it'll temporarily activate the group selection tool while you're working. Take advantage of those tool shortcuts and if you do, you're gonna become a much more efficient Illustrator user.

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