From the course: Illustrator for Fashion Design: Drawing Flats

Placing the template - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator for Fashion Design: Drawing Flats

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Placing the template

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- [Instructor] Alright in this chapter, we're going to talk about how to set up a start file. And the first thing we need to do is open a new file. So we're going to create a new file, and just like all our other files, we are going to make sure we're in Print. Select Letter and click Create, so we get an 8 1/2 by 11 page. Now it's important to set up a start file because we can get all our little details in line, we can set up our workspace the way we want it, so that every time we get started we don't have to go through this process. We can just open this file and we're ready to go. The first thing we want to do is open the Layers panel, you can see it was already open here, but we're going to click on Layers. And in the Layers panel there's a tab here called Artboards. Let's click on that, and we're just going to click on Artboard 1. And what that did was it just sort of centered it in the page, and that's important to do because we want to make sure that the template is placed centered on the page. So we've got that now clicked on and centered, we can go back to Layers and we're going to place a template. It's always important to place a template rather than open a template. If you open a template file in this case, what happens is you don't get all your color swatches showing up, you're just going to get these first few. So we want to make sure that we have all the elements we need in Illustrator in order to work comfortably. So to place your template, you go up to File, click on Place, and it's going to open up this window. You'll find a file called Flat Template AFF, you're going to click on that. Now don't get click happy and click Place yet. We're going to open the options, and on a Windows computer you don't have to open it, they're already open, and we're going to turn off Link. We don't want the file or the template linked to the file. We want to embed it in the file, so that whenever we open the file, the template will always be there. Now we want to make this a template, so we're going to click the box that says Template, and now we're going to click Place. And you'll notice it placed the template centered on the page beautifully, and if we open up our Layers, you'll notice there's a layer that says Template and a Layer 1 right above it that's already for us to start working. So this is a really nice way to get your template in the file. And in the next movie we're going to talk about setting up guides.

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