From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

981 Very large artboards in Adobe Illustrator

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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981 Very large artboards in Adobe Illustrator

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- Hey, gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Today, we'll be talking about how you can create very large artwork on very large artboards in Illustrator. And when I say very large, I don't mean poster-size, I mean big enough to cover the side of a city bus 72 times over, which is a fairly recent development, by the way, starting with Illustrator 24.2, which came out in the summer of the year 2020. We have what Adobe calls the 100x canvas, which means that we're creating a new document, not when resizing an existing artboard. You can create one or more artboards that, when added together, consume up to 100 times as much area, that is, 10 times as wide and 10 times as tall, as the previous limitation. And so, I'll go ahead and zoom way out here so that we can see the dark gray canvas, which contains all the artboards, we just got the one, as well as their bleeds. The lighter gray area outside the canvas is the pasteboard, which may contain objects, such as type, but not artboards. We're talking big, people, big. Here, let me show you just how big it is. All right, so, let's take a closer look at what's going on here inside the most recent version of Illustrator. Now, prior to 2021, as we saw, the canvas size, which contains all artboards and bleeds, very important to keep that in mind, was limited to, and here's the new info, 16,383 points wide and/or tall, which is about 18 feet 11 1/2 inches or 5 3/4 meters. Now, you may be looking at that number, 16,383, and thinking to yourself, that must be wrong, because that's a ridiculous value. PostScript, upon which Illustrator was once based, uses 14-bit coordinates. And so, bear in mind that a bit is either a zero or a one, so one of two values. And so, if you have 14 bits, you take two to the 14th power, which gives you 16,384. You may look at that number and say, wait a sec, Deke, that's not the same as 16,383, in fact, it's one more. But whenever you're working with these kinds of values, you have to count zero. And so, by way of demonstration, consider two to the first power, which, of course, equals two. The values, however, are zero or one, you don't get all the way up to two. If you take two to the second power, then you get four, but the values are zero, one, two, and three. So, we're cut short of four because the first value is zero. And so, when you take two to the 14th power, which is, as I've said, 16,384, you have to count zero, one, two, three, four, five, and so forth all the way up to 16,383, which is where we get this value, whereas, nowadays, the canvas can be 10 times as wide and/or tall, that is, up to 163,830 points in either direction, or 100 times the total area because, after all, 10 times 10. The artboard you're looking at measures 130,000 points wide by 86,000 points tall, which is more than 150 times 99 feet, or just shy of 15,000 square feet, which is about 1/3 of an acre, I'm not kidding, that's how big this document is. That's 45.861 by 30.339 meters, in case you're curious, or roughly 1,391 square meters. Now, in case you're thinking, well, it looks exactly the same size as the other document. Well, bear in mind that we're seeing this document at 100%, the 100% view size, whereas, we're seeing this guy at the 1% view size, so we're zoomed way out. And to just give you an idea, I'll press the T key in order to switch to the Type tool, and I'll go ahead and select this artboard layer here inside the Layers panel, and I'll just click inside this text right here, and then, I'll bring up the Character panel so that you can see that the type size is 4,800 points, so this is immense type, as you might imagine. And just in case you think I'm being dramatic, check this out, this is a full-size Brachiosaurus right here, and notice, if I were to click on this object in order to select it, and then, I clicked on the word Transform, up here in the Horizontal Control panel, you can see that we're working in feet, by the way, instead of points, and the width of this object, from nose to tail, is nearly 50 feet, so we have a dinosaur that's nearly 50 long by 40 feet high. The reason it looks so small is because we're zoomed so far out. And yet, while you might expect this document because it's so huge, would also land an enormous file size, after all, if you created the huge document in Photoshop, it might weigh in in a gigabyte or more, this document weighs in at under 200 K, so it's very small indeed. Compare that to the Brachiosaurus, which weighs in at about 75,000 pounds, or if you prefer, 34,000 kilos. And that is exactly what's going on with the so-called 100x canvas, which allows you to create up to 1,000 artboards on a single enormous canvas or one big huge artboard, as we have in this case, here inside the most recent version of Illustrator. After all that, you may wonder, how do you now create an artboard big enough to fit your swelling brain. Well, if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, the answer is simple, watch the teensy-weensy follow-up movie. Your brain will remain enormous, and your options will expand. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep your brain!

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