Advanced artboard & pages tricks in Adobe Illustrator CC

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at some advanced usage of Artboards. Not sort of advanced, more kind of like work flow techniques. So jump into the video, let's show you all that the Artboards can be. 

First trick for Artboards in Adobe Illustrator is, I'm going to grab my 'Black Arrow', and select this fox here. And say I've designed this, and I want-- I don't want all these white spaces around the outside, I want my Artboard to be right around the outside. I can grab my 'Artboard Tool', and I can get it pretty close. That snaps to the corner of this one. Oops, not too easy, the end has broken out, and snaps to this one. So, there's a bit of drama that way. A real easy thing to do, is grab your 'Black Arrow', have it selected, then go down to your 'Artboard Tool'. And where it says-- one of the presets is here. Click on this one, second one down, or the third one down. So it's 'Fit to Selected Artwork'. It just toggles it all up. Nice! Super easy, now I can export it, and it's not going to be too big. All right, let's undo that. 

Next trick, let's have a look at the Artboards Panel, because I've actually got a few color options for this one. Often I'm using Artboards a lot of, when I'm doing kind of UI, User Interface design in Illustrator for Web, or for applications, but I'm just doing color versions here. Let's go to 'Window', 'Artboards', and you got a full panel. Okay, easy enough. I've named these already to be nice and clear but we can do some nice stuff in here. We can click on any of these options at the end and that brings us at the Artboard options. We can resize it, and do some extra things in here. 

What's also really handy is, let's say this option here, Rearrange Artboard, because the spacing is not perfect here, I want to clean that up. Like, sometimes on a website design if you've done my UI for Illustrator course, we make loads of pages in one Illustrator document. Click on this, and it just gives you a way of tidying things up. You can have two columns with this spacing. And watch this, I can click on 'OK'. Just kind of rearranges it to make it look nice. You can rearrange it, you can say, actually I want it to be 50 pixels across. And I want it to go just left or right. Just makes everything super tidy. 

The other nice thing about the new version of Illustrator, at least 2018 and above, you can have up to a thousand Artboards. I'm never going to have a thousand Artboards, but I said that once in a video, and loads of people messaged me saying how useful it is for them. They didn't explain what they do with a thousand Artboards, but here you go. 

Another thing we can do is select multiple Artboards either by grabbing them all here, or you can grab the Artboard Tool, and you can click on this one, hold 'Shift' and just grab the specific Artboard you want to change. Then at the top here, you can go and change things like, I wanted A4 now, or-- so just know you can do multiple Artboard stuff by selecting the ones you want. You can also do strange things, like, treat them like boxes. Let's say, I like this guy, these two over here, but these two, I'd like to go kind of over here together, because they're separate ideas, maybe. What I can do is click on them, Artboard Tool again, I'm 'Shift' clicking both of them. It's easier to click the name than anywhere else. And you can just use the Align Tool. So 'Properties', I can go and align you left. Kind of weird, kind of good. I want to align you to the right. You can do Align & Distribution. You can create them like normal boxes.

Last thing we're going to do is exporting these guys. To export these Artboards, we're going to go to 'Window', and they don't call it Artboards, they call it 'File', I said 'Window', 'File', 'Export'. They call it Screens, because I guess that's what they really want this to be. They want it for UI design, designing different kind of screen sizes. I'm ticking them all, you can just decide which ones you want to do. Where are they going to go? I'll stick them on my Desktop. I can't even find the Desktop, can't find it. So we'll stick it in my Documents folder, randomly. Let's click 'Choose'. And down the bottom here, this is the format. This is an interesting stuff. You can click things like—

Do the UI course that I've got for Illustrator if you want to get into, like explaining what Android does, and all the stuff. It's not really what this one is about. What we can do though is, you want typical formats, so down here you've got JPEG, PNGs, I probably want PNG because I want the transparency around the box. I'm going to click on him. It scales things at different versions. I don't want a different scale at that, I want, maybe an SVG and maybe another version that is PNG. So I can send it to my client, and they have no excuse not to open it up. Click 'Export Artboard', kick back, relax. And hopefully, on my documents, I've got to find what is it called, it's called Artboards. Organize by date. They're all just dumped in there, not in a folder. There's all my guys. So I've got-- you can see, the cool thing about it is there's a green PNG, there's a green PDF, and there's a green SVG, Scalable Vector Graphic. The new versions of EPS', you should use those. Anyway, that's how to do that. Goodbye, you guys, you shouldn't be in there. 

One last thing before I go. I am going to show you that, with the 'Artboard Tool' selected - the shortcut is 'Shift O' on your keyboard. - and if I start dragging, and hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac, or 'Alt' key on a PC, it's going to make a duplicate. It's a good way of making duplicates of Artboards along with the art work. If you hold down 'Shift' while you're doing it as well, so you got to start dragging first, then hold down 'Alt Shift', or 'Option Shift' on a Mac, and it kind of drags out in a straight line. So everything kind of stays nice, and kind of aligned. 

All right, my friends, that is it for kind of work flow using Artboards. Hope you got some tricks in there. Let's jump into the next video.