Touring the Illustrator interface

- [Instructor] I don't know about you, but when I visit somewhere new, I like to have a little bit of a wander around and kind of get the lay of the land, and that's what we're going to do in this movie. And even if you've visited previous versions of Illustrator before, this is a good idea to actually watch this movie, because things have changed a little bit. So let us have a look by starting with a new blank document. So I'm just here in the Start workspace, and I'm going to move over to the left and tap on Create New.

And in the New Document dialog, I do have a recent document here, but I'm going to go to my Art & Illustration profile, although you can choose any of these, really. I'd just avoid Film & Video just for the moment, and choose maybe this 1920 by 1080 artboard here. Lots of options for document creation now. I'm going to hit Create, and so a new document is created, and this is the bit where it will start to look a little bit different, because there's much less interface hanging around in Illustrator now.

I'm going to make one small change here before I go any further, and that's to go into full screen mode with a menu bar, which I can do down at the bottom of the toolbox here. I have this Change Screen Mode option, I'm just going to click that and choose Full Screen Mode with Menu Bar, because it'll make it easier if you're perhaps watching this on a phone, for example. Now I've just changed my zoom level here to fit the artboard inside of the window. So looking around from the left-hand side of the screen, this is where we have our toolbox.

Now, if yours fits on your screen as a single line, you can do that by clicking these double arrows at the top here. Mine doesn't quite fit, so I'm just going to go for the double arrangement there like so. But this is where you get all of your different tools from, and we'll be looking at those, of course, as we move through the course. Above that, we've got the application bar, which just has a few things inside of it, and then the top level menu system above that. On the Windows platform, the layout's slightly different, but you'll be able to find out where everything is.

Then we've got the workspace switcher over here, this small thing here. I'm using the brand-new Essentials workspace for Illustrator's 2018 release here. Essentials Classic, if I just swap to that, this will be something that looks a little bit more like the old one, you see there's a whole other bar just there. However, I'm going to come out of that for a second and back to Essentials, because this is a much cleaner way of working, in my opinion. On the right-hand side, we have this brand-new panel called Properties, and this is contextually sensitive.

It will change depending on what you have selected, or in this case, as nothing is selected, it just wants to talk about the document. And it's designed so that you don't have to have loads and loads of panels open. And I'll be looking at panels very, very shortly, but there are just three here that we need to look at now. So there's Properties just here, and then there's the Layers panel underneath that, and the CC Libraries panel just underneath that. Okay, so that's basically where everything is.

You don't need to know much more than that at this point. Tools on the left-hand side, Properties panel on the right-hand side, now let's get stuck into some of the nitty gritty around those, starting in the next movie.