From the course: Illustrator CC 2017 One-on-One Fundamentals

Using the Artboard tool - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator CC 2017 One-on-One Fundamentals

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Using the Artboard tool

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- [Instructor] In this movie I'll show you how to move an art board with and without its contents using the art board tool, and we'll also see the role of multiple undos inside Illustrator. So let's say I want to take art board one and I want to move it to a different location here inside this document. Well art boards inside Illustrator work very differently than pages inside other programs. So remember when we went to the File menu and chose the New command, that we have the ability not only to change the size of our art boards, but to change the number of art boards as well, and if I were to click on the More Settings button, then I can decide how the art boards are arranged, how many columns we have, and the spacing between the art boards. All right so with that I'll go ahead and cancel out. Now notice when the black arrow tool is selected, up here at the top of the tool box, that we have a Document Setup button in the horizontal control panel at the top of the screen. Now in another application, this document set up button would allow you to change the quantity and even the location of your pages, but in Illustrator it brings up this dialogue box right here which allows you to change the bleed values if you like, and you can modify your units of measure, but otherwise we're not seeing the width or height values, and we're not allowed to change how many art boards we have. What we do have is this Edit Art Boards button, but that's pretty deceiving because notice if you click on that button it closes the dialogue box and it actually switches you to a different tool. Which is known as the art board tool, down here toward the bottom of the toolbox. So the better way to work, assuming that some other tool is selected, is to avoid the Document Setup button all together and just switch directly to the art board tool in the first place, and now notice that we're seeing handles around each one of our art boards, and so you can switch between art boards if you like, just by clicking on them, and each time you do, you'll see handles for that specific art board. We also have labels so that we know that this guy's art board three, and the neighbor is art board four, and so on. Now one of the deceiving things about this tool when you first start to use it is that clicking with the tool selects a different art board but if you then click again, you're going to create an art board inside of that art board, and Illustrator's going to automatically size that art board in order to accommodate its contents. Which in this case is the number three. Now you may look at this and say, how in the world does this new art board size to the three when the three is so much shorter? Well bear in mind that every character of type is bigger than it appears to you, because it's actually designed to accommodate other letters in this font. Which may be taller than the three, or they may have descenders, such as the bottom of a lowercase G. And you can confirm this is the case by switching back to the black arrow tool. Which Illustrator calls the selection tool, and then notice if I click on the number three, that it's bounding box is the same size as that new art board. Obviously I don't want that new art board. So I'll go up to the Edit menu and choose the Undo command. Which has a standard keyboard shortcut of Control Z here on the PC or Command Z on the Mac, and that goes ahead and restores our eight original art boards. All right now as I was saying, I want to move my first art board to a different location, and so I'll go ahead and select the art board tool. Notice that its tool tip tells us it has a keyboard shortcut of Shift O. That is the letter O, not a zero, and now I'll go ahead and click on the first art board, and I'll drag it fairly arbitrarily to a different location like so, and then just so I can see all the art boards at the same time, I'll go up to the View menu and choose Fit All in Window in order to zoom out like so. All right now I can move this art board along with its contents to any location I like. I can also move it so that it snaps into alignment with the other art boards, and so notice under the View menu we have a command called Smart Guides, which is turned on by default. This is an exceedingly useful command inside of Illustrator, as we'll see in this and future movies. When we're working with art boards I could go ahead and drag this guy down, and notice that I'm seeing those magenta snap lines. The problem is I'm snapping into alignment with the wrong portion of my document. Notice that I've snapped the bottom right corner of my art board into alignment with the neighboring bleeds, which is not what I want. So I'll press Control Z or Command Z on the Mac to undo that move, and then I'll try again, and this time I'm looking to snap to the center of both art board two on the right and art board five down below. Now the only problem with smart guide is that sometimes you end up snapping to the previous location of an art board. Which is not what we want, and so if you end up getting that behavior, just try moving the art board to yet a different location, and then drag it down so that it snaps properly, and again, we're looking for the center snaps that you're seeing in the video. At which point I'll go ahead and release in order to put that art board back in place. Now there is a kind of art board gotcha that can snag you when you're first using this tool. Notice if I drag art board one down so that it overlaps art board five, and then I drag it again, I end up dragging the five along with the one and that's because the five has become part of art board one and we're moving all the contents along with. Which is why it's so useful, by the way, that we have multiple undos inside of Illustrator, and so all I have to do to back step is to press Control Z or Command Z on the Mac a couple of times in a row in order to undo that change. Notice the same will happen if I click on art board five here and then I start dragging it, I move the one along with, even though the one doesn't appear to be on art board five at all, but recall that the number is actually taller than it appears because it has to accommodate the centers that are associated with lowercase letters inside that font. All right so I'll just undo that change. Now the reason this is happening is because this icon up here in the control panel, notice that it reads Move/Copy Artwork With Art Board, and it's turned on by default, and what that tells you is when you click on an art board and you drag it, you're going to move the art work along with. Now you might wonder why in the world you'd ever want to turn that icon off, and let me show you. And by way of example, I'll switch to this document here. Notice that art board five over here is positioned out of alignment with its contents, and this kind of thing happens frankly all the time, because it is possible to make mistakes, and so notice if I try to drag that art board back to its proper location, at which point I can see that I have those center smart guides, even though I've moved the art board exactly where I want it, I've moved the contents out of alignment. If I then had to switch to a different tool and move all those items back into place, that would be a very big pain in the neck. So the better thing to do is to undo that move by once again pressing Control Z or Command Z on the Mac and then turning off that move copy artwork with art board icon, and now notice if I drag the art board, it moves independently of the artwork, which is exactly what I want. And then once you're done working with the art board tool, all you have to do is switch to a different tool in order to use it, or just press the Escape key to switch away from the art board editing mode, and that's how you use the dedicated art board tool in order to move art boards along with or independently of their contents here inside illustrator.

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