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

982 Creating a new very large artboard

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

982 Creating a new very large artboard

- [Instructor] All right now, we'll show you what it looks like to create a very large art board from Illustrator's New Document dialogue box. And so just to review prior to June of 2020, the canvas size, which contains all art boards and bleeds by the way, was limited to 16,383 points wide and or tall. Nowadays the canvas size can be 10 times as wide and or tall. That is up to 163,830 points in either direction, or a hundred times the total area. And so let me show you what that looks like. I'm going to start by double-clicking on this text object right here and I'll go ahead and select this value and copy it by pressing Control-C or Command-C on the Mac. That way I don't have to remember that value. And then I'll go to the file menu and choose the new command, in order to bring up this big, old, New Document dialogue box. Now I'll switch to Art and Illustration just a great place to start, whether you're creating a document that you intend to print or artwork for the web or a device. And now I'll go ahead and triple-click in that width value. Notice that the unit is set to points, by the way, and so I'll just go ahead and paste in that value right there, and I'll press the Tab key, and Illustrator has thoughtfully converted the comma to a decimal point, which is not what I want. So I'll go ahead and get rid of that guy so that we have 16,383 points, and I'll go ahead and triple-click in that value, copy it, and then paste it into the height value as well. Now notice down here at the bottom of the dialog box we are not seeing a warning icon. This is very important. However, if I were to increase the bleed value at all, by the way, if I were to press the Up arrow key in order to increase that value to one point, we are seeing a warning icon. The same would happen if I increase the number of art boards. And notice what this warning is telling me, not that I can't do it, but that Illustrator is going to house the art board on a special large size canvas. And if you want to learn more about whether this is compatible with creating PDF documents and the like, which it is by the way, but you can find out exactly what's going on by clicking on that, Learn More link. Anyway, I'm going to take the bleed value back down to zero. Notice the warning disappears. However, if I were to click in the width value and press the up arrow key to take it up by .1 point, that is, 10/72nds of an inch, then I will see that warning once again. And that's just telling me that I'm going to create this new large size template, which is not really backward-compatible by the way. So if you were to try to open this document inside Illustrator 2019, for example, or earlier, then at best, Illustrator is going to scale your artwork. All right, in any event, I want you to see what happens here, If I just go ahead and delete that and enter a zero so that we have 163,830 points. And I'll do that for the height value as well. Of course, we get that warning, by the way, but these are the maximum values. And so notice if I click in that width value, and I press the Up arrow key, Illustrator doesn't even bother to respond because it can't go bigger than this value. Whereas if I press the Down arrow key you can see that I can go smaller, but as soon as I top out at 163,830 points, that is the end. Now you could change the number of art boards to four art boards, for example, or you could enter some bleed values, but if you do that, by the way, and you click the Create button, then Illustrator is going to fail. So just bear that in mind. In any event, I'm going to return to the New Document dialogue box, by choosing the New command from the File menu, switch to Art and Illustration, triple-click at that width value and enter 163,830 for the width, and then Tab over to the height and enter 163,830 for that value as well, in points, by the way. And if you're not comfortable in working in hundreds of thousands of points then you can switch to any other unit you like. So notice if I switch to feet, then Illustrator is going to automatically run a conversion, so I now have a document that's nearly 190 feet in either direction, or I could switch to meters, if I like, not millimeters, but entire meters, at which point I'll see that I'm nearing 58 meters in either direction. And if I do that by the way, and click on the Create button, which is located to the left side of the Close button here on the PC, it's located to the right side of the Close button on the Mac, just to totally mess you up, if you're a cross-platform person. But in any event, I'll click Create and then I create this immense document and you wouldn't know it, because it's fitting on screen, but notice that I'm viewing the document at the 0.4% view size, which means we're zoomed way the heck out. But it also means you can create artwork for the side of a bus, for a museum exhibition, or what have you. And that is how you create a new art board. I want to stress, you don't start with a small art board and then try to increase its size. You create the new art board in the first place, here inside the most recent version of Adobe Illustrator.

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