667 Oh Illustrator, where is your Control panel?

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to the eighth consecutive year of Deke's Techniques, making it not only the first but also the longest-running of the weekly series here at Lynda.com/linkedinlearning. And I have you to thank. Thank you very much for watching. You're not the only one, but you are the coolest. Now this week is less of a technique and more of a rant, frankly. I don't know how many of you started using Illustrator CC 2018, which offers puppet warp and support for variable fonts, as well as full-color SVG fonts, such as Trajan Color Concept, which I will be covering in a future episode because it's so very cool.

But when you first launch Illustrator, it's a little confusing because, you know that horizontal control panel, the control strip at the top of the screen? It's missing by default, which is kind of like turning off the toolbox by default. This is a mission-critical panel. But it's being replaced by the new properties panel, which like the control panel, is context sensitive. It also happens to be four times as large. I measured it. And it covers the layers panel by default. Now, in its defense, it offers a few additional options, which is why in my household we've taken to calling it the panel's panel, because it really does feel like Adobe's trying to take all the panels inside Illustrator and stuff them inside this one.

Now, we're being told that we're going to come to love this panel in time, and it may be true. You may come to love the properties panel. But call me an old curmudgeon, you just have to tell me what is wrong with the control panel? It's nice and slim. It's tucked away here at the top of the screen. It's unobtrusive. I can use the layers panel at the same time, and it's every bit as context-sensitive as I need it to be. For example, if I have multiple objects selected, such as these rectangles right here, then I can see the alignment options inside the properties panel, but if I were to just have one object selected, I don't see the alignment options, which I do in the control panel, thus making it easier to align a single object to the art board.

So all I'm going to do this week is show you how to bring back the control panel and minimize the heck out of that panel's panel inside Illustrator CC 2018. Alright, so here's how things currently look when you first launch Illustrator CC 2018. Over here on the right hand side of the screen, we've got the libraries panel, the layers panel, and then this new context-sensitive properties panel, which offers access to a handful of commonly used options. So, for example, notice how my art board, which is indicated by this black rectangle, is a little too small to suit the document window.

In that case, I could go ahead and click on the edit art boards button right there, and that's going to automatically switch me to the art board tool over here in the toolbox on the left hand side of the screen. At which point I could change the width and height values, so I'll just go ahead and click in the width value, and press shift + up arrow a few times in order to increase it to 1040 points. And then I'll increase the height value to 720, which is going to make the art board that much larger, so that we're no longer seeing that black rectangle. At which point, I'll go ahead and click the exit button, in order to return control, in my case, to the black arrow tool up here in the top left corner of the two-column toolbox.

You can also turn on the rulers if you like. And you can turn on the grid. Now in the case of this document, we're not going to see the grid, and that's because by default it's in back of all the other objects. To change that, click on the preferences button to bring up the preferences dialogue box, and then click guides and grid, right there. And turn off the grids in back checkbox. And then, click okay, at which point you will see the grid. Alright, I don't want to see either of these items, though, so I'm going to go ahead and click these icons to hide both the ruler and the grid.

And then I'll show the guides, these custom guides that I've created right here. And now let's say I want to get rid of this polygonal guide, then I would go ahead and click on this icon to unlock the guides and then I'd select this guide like so and press the backspace key, or the delete key on a Mac, to get rid of it. Now my favorite item in this particular view of the panel is this keyboard increment value, which was formerly available only inside the preferences dialogue box, and it changes how far you can nudge an object when you press an arrow key.

And so for example.