668 Downsizing the massive Properties panel

- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you at least one way to downsize what I consider to be the vastly oversized Properties panel. Which is due to Illustrator CC 2018. Now Adobe's reasoning is that the Properties panel is designed to phase out the Control panel up here at the top of the screen. And while I don't want to be a total stick in the mud, I do sometimes find the Properties panel to be useful, but I generally prefer the Control panel. And let me explain why. Now the Properties panel is new and it's context-sensitive, but on this screen, by default, and that is to say, when we're working with the new Essentials Workspace, the panel measures 252 pixels wide by 738 pixels tall.

Which means that it consumes the total of 185,976 pixels in all. And this may seem like I'm nitpicking, but you'll see why in a moment. Now we record these movies at a resolution of 1360 by 768 pixels, which adds up to a total of 1,044,480 screen pixels in all. And so the Properties panel takes up a whopping 17.8% of the on-screen real estate.

Now if you're thinking, well that's because you're working on such a low-res screen, well, when I'm working on my MacBook Pro, the panel scales up to 504 x 1686 pixels, meaning that it's taking up a total of 849,744 pixels. Now the retina display on this particular MacBook offers a total of 5,184,000 pixels. So the Property panel fills just slightly less, 16.4% of the screen.

Meanwhile, the Control panel is something like 20 years old. It's likewise context-sensitive, as I'll demonstrate in a moment. And, on this screen, it measures 1360 pixels wide by just 35 pixels tall, so it takes up a total of 47,600 pixels in all. Meaning that it's consuming 4.6% of my screen. On a MacBook Pro, the panel measures 2880 x 70, for a total of 201,600 pixels, or just 3.9% of the screen.

And so the upshot is that the Properties panel is about four times larger than the Control panel. It's actually 3.9 times larger on this screen, but more like 4.2 times larger on the MacBook Pro. Meanwhile, the Control panel is unobtrusive, up there at the top of the screen, it's not harming a darn thing. While the Property panel is massive and it gets in the way. Now Adobe argues that the Properties panel is more responsive. I am definitely not convinced of that. And that it offers more options, which is sometimes true, but rarely.

And so let me show you what I mean. I'll go ahead and switch over to this document here. And notice that my black arrow tool, so-called Selection Tool, is active in the top left corner of the tool box. And so here are the options that we're seeing in the options bar. Nothing really all that spectacular, except for the Document Setup and Preferences buttons. Whereas, over here in the Properties panel, we have all sorts of goodies. We can edit the Artboard. But notice, as soon as you select the Edit Artboards button, you get access to all the Artboard options up here in the Control panel.

But we do have an Exit button right there. So I can click on that. Or you can just work the traditional way, which is every bit as easy. And that involves selecting the Artboard Tool, which has a keyboard shortcut of Shift + O, for what that's worth, at which point you'll see all your Artboard options up here in the Control panel. And then if you want to escape out of the mode, you just press the Escape key. So we really don't have all that much use for the first few options up here in the Properties panel. Now these guys are pretty helpful. Even though they're all associated with commands under the View menu.

So we've been able to, for example, turn on the Smart Guides not only by clicking on this icon, but by going up to the View menu and choosing Smart Guides. Or you have that keyboard shortcut of Control + U, or Command + U on the Mac. Now these are all options that are found inside the Preferences dialogue box. Which you can get by clicking the Preferences button in either the Properties panel or up here in the options bar. And the only one that I adjust on a regular basis is this guy right here. Which is why this is, by far, my favorite option in the Properties panel.

Alright, now let's say, however, I decide to draw a shape. So I'll go ahead and select the Ellipse tool, from the Shape Tool fly-out menu. And I actually want my Smart Guides to be turned on. But I'm not seeing the Smart Guides option, because I've switched away from the black arrow tool. So I'll go up to the View menu and choose Smart Guides. And then I'll press the Alt key, or the Option key on the Mac, and drag outward while pressing the Shift key as well, so that I'm creating a circle. And notice that heads-up display, next to my cursor, which is telling me that the shape is going to be 290 points wide and tall.

At which point, I'll go ahead and release. And notice I have these Appearance settings, right here, which are mimicked up in the Control panel. So I could go ahead and change the line weight to something like 16 points. And I'm going to change the color of the stroke to the shade of orange right here. Just so it stands out from the stuff in the background. And then I'll switch back to my black arrow tool so that I can edit this shape. Now notice, currently, that my bounding box is turned off. So I'll go up to the view menu and choose Show Bounding Box to turn it back on, so that I have access to these widgets right here.

And so I'll go ahead and drag this guy down and around. And this one as well. So that I have a kind of upside down Pac-Man. Now notice that we are seeing the shape size up here in the Control panel. We're not seeing those shape numbers in the Properties panel. If you want to see them, then you have to click on this little More Options doohickey in order to bring up this pop-up panel. At which point, I could change the angle of my pie segment. So I could change the first one to 360-45, for example, and then I could change the second one to 270-45, just so that they're set equally apart from each other.

Alright, now I'll go ahead and press the Enter key, or the Return key on a Mac to accept that change. Now notice this little FX icon. That's something that you don't find up in the Control panel. And so let's say I wanted to add an effect by clicking on the icon, choosing Distort & Transform, and then, just for the sake of demonstration, I'll choose Pucker & Bloat. And then I'll set this value to negative 10, let's say, and I'll click OK, and we end up with this effect here. Now it's nice that I am now seeing the effect here in this Appearance area, inside the Properties panel.

Which means I can just go ahead and click on Pucker & Bloat, turn on the Preview checkbox, and then click in this value and press Shift + down arrow in order to modify it, and then click OK. But let's say I apply a second effect by once again clicking on the FX icon, choosing 3D this time, and then Extrude & Bevel. And I'll go to move this guy over a little bit, so I can better see what I'm doing, and I'll turn on the Preview checkbox. And I might drag this guy up a little bit like so. The bottom edge of the cube, that is to say.

Just so I have a different angle. And I'll go ahead and increase this Extrude Depth value to 100 points, let's say, and then I'll click OK. At which point, I no longer have direct access to my dynamic effects. Instead, I have this little info item here. Which tells me that the selection contains multiple effects. But it doesn't really let me modify them. If I want to get to the Appearance panel to change those effects, then I need to click on this widget right here in order to open the Appearance panel. And then I might make it a little taller.

At which point, I could edit the 3D effect by clicking on 3D Extrude & Bevel. Then I'll turn on a Preview checkbox so I can see what I'm doing. Might just go ahead and move this guy around a little bit. And then, once again, click OK to accept that change. So my point is, that we do have some different stuff going on here. But it's not necessarily earth shattering. And notice we've got this Offset Path option. That will bring up the Offset Path dialogue box if you like. You could expand the Live Shape if you want to. Meaning that you're expanding the circle, by the way, so that it's a static path.

Notice up here, at the top of the Properties panel, we can see that this item is an Ellipse. But if I click on Expand Shape, then it's going to come up as Path. We also have Align to Pixel Grid. That is duplicated up here in the Control panel. We have a Recolor button. That's duplicated at this location in the Control panel. And then we have this Arrange button. Which really brings up a popup menu, by the way, which you can access just as easily by right clicking in the document window and choosing the Arrange command. You can play around some more, decide what you think of the panel.

But, in my opinion, at the very least, you want to move some panels around. And so what I'm going to do is grab this icon right here, which represents the Layers panel, and move it to this location. And then I'll grab this guy, which represents the Artboards panel, and I'll drag it up here as well. And I'll move the Libraries panel into that same group. And then I'll grab this guy, which represents the Appearance panel, which is a super useful panel inside Illustrator, and I'll drag it into that group as well. And so what that's going to allow me to do is move the Properties panel, by dragging its tab, and then I'll just drop it to this location here.

And, that way, I can bring it up when I need it. Which, frankly, is not very often. But notice, now, if I click on this icon, I can increase the size of the panel if I want to. Or I can make it a little bit shorter as well. And then I have the option of moving over a few very useful panels. For example, we've got the Color panel right here, along with Color Guide, both of which I use all the time. So I'll drag this little scrapey thing right there, and drop the panels up here at the top. And then I'll expand the Color panel by clicking on its tab.

And then I'll grab this guy, which represents the Swatches panel, and I'll drag it into this group as well. And I might go ahead and make these panels a little wider, so that I can see all the Swatches at the same time. And then I'll grab this group of panels, which include Stroke, Gradient, which I use all the time as well, and Transparency. And I'll drag that little scrapey thing. And I'll drop them into this location. And then I'll scale this stroke panel so it contains just the line weight value and nothing else. And then I'll switch back to the layers panel.

Alright, now you can bring up any other panels you like by going up to the Window menu and, for example, I might choose the Pathfinder command, to bring up the Transform, Align, and Pathfinder panels. And I'll just go ahead and drag them and drop them into some location here in the icon column. Alright, once you've organized the panels as you'd like, then click on Essentials Classic, up here in the top left corner of the screen, and choose New Workspace. And just go ahead and call this guy anything you like. I'm going to call it something clever like My Workspace.

And then click OK. And, that way, you can switch back and forth. So if, later, you decide, you know what, I really like the Properties panel, then you can click on My Workspace and switch back to Essentials Classic. Now that's going to bring you back to the way that workspace appeared when you last edited it. If you want to switch back to the original version of that workspace, then go ahead and choose Reset Essentials Classic. And you will, once again, see the massive and, some would argue, extensive Properties panel.

But that's not what I want, so I'll just go ahead and switch back to My Workspace once again. And that, friends, is how you go about downsizing the Properties panel so you can bring it up when you need it, without covering the more essential panels, such as Layer, Swatches, and so forth, here inside Illustrator CC 2018.