What are Illustrator artboards?

- [Instructor] Simple creature that I am, I like to think of artboards as being little pieces of digital paper on my digital pasteboard in my Illustrator files. They're yet another way to be organized inside of your files, especially if you're doing something like working on UI components or icon sets, as in this document, then they are invaluable. Back in the day, as it were, you'd be looking at slicing up a document, and that took ages in comparison to now, where we have artboards, and combined with asset export, something we'll look at later on, they make the old work loads look so primitive by comparison, and these are so much nicer.

You can now have up to 1000 artboards in your Illustrator document, which is excellent if you're one of the people who use Illustrator to design fonts, where, to be honest, 100 artboards just didn't cut it at all. And now you can do a lot more in just one document. They don't all have to be the same size. As you can see here, you can have as many sizes as you want as long as they fit on the pasteboard. And they've been so improved in the 2018 release of Illustrator.

So let's have a look at the essentials you need for working with artboards.