Advanced Artboard & Pages Tricks in Illustrator

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Course info

104 lessons / 10 hours 33 quiz questions 31 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hey there, I'm Dan Scott, an Adobe Certified Instructor with over 16 years of design experience under my belt, I'm part of the Adobe Expert program, and my online and in-person classes have been attended by more than a million people, just like you! Join me as we dive into the exciting world of Adobe Illustrator Advanced! In this course, you're not just leveling up in Illustrator, you're transforming into an Illustrator SuperHero!

In this course you will work on a bespoke brief designed to ignite your imagination, coupled with immersive course videos, you'll be crafting jaw-dropping graphics in no time. Throughout our journey together, you'll flex your creative muscles and construct projects that will elevate your portfolio to new heights. So, let's dive in and unleash your creativity!

You’ll learn:

  • - How to use artificial intelligence to boost your creativity in ideation. 
  • - The quick way to take hand-drawn sketches and vectorize and color them. 
  • - The building blocks needed to set you loose on a huge variety of beautiful effects and techniques.
  • - To make beautiful charts and graphs for your documents. 
  • - Color mastery to make quick color adjustments, Pantones, and blend it all together beautifully.
  • - How to master images inside of your illustrator workflow. 
  • - To harness all the secret gems that'll help you level up your typography skills. 
  • - All the tricks of the trade for drawing complex shapes easily. 
  • - To double your creativity with the Transform and Distort section. 
  • - To speed up your personal workflow to get the most out of your creative day.

Explore the full course outline for a comprehensive list of topics that will expand your Illustrator prowess beyond imagination.

If you're already comfortable navigating the basics but want to  unlock the true potential of Illustrator, then this Illustrator Advanced course is your ticket to becoming a master of Illustrator! So join me and the ranks of design superheroes and let's embark on this thrilling journey together.

Requirements:

- All you need is a copy of Adobe Illustrator, you can get a free trial from Adobe here to get started.
- A basic knowledge of Illustrator is required. I recommend watching my Illustrator Essentials course prior to embarking on this epic adventure.

Who this course is for:

- Creative adventurers who already have a basic understanding of Illustrator.
- Self-taught Illustrator enthusiasts yearning for structured guidance.
- Graduates of my Illustrator Essentials Course, hungry for more knowledge and skills.
- Visionaries who have developed their own unique Illustrator approach but crave exploration of the vast universe of tools, updates, and time-saving techniques.

What you'll learn:

- How to use Text to Vector Ai
- How to use Text to Pattern Ai
- How to use Generative Recolor
- When to use the Scissor Tool, Eraser Tool & Knife Tool
- Advanced Shape Builder Uses
- The differences between the Pathfinder Vs Shape Builder
- How to use the Join tool & Joining Path Ends
- Advanced Pen Tool Tricks
- Width Tool Advanced Techniques
- The Curvature Tool
- How to master corners with corner widget effects
- How to work with Compound Paths
- The difference between Expand & Expand Appearance
- How to create Graphic Styles
- How to make Symbols
- How to use the Smooth Tool
- Advanced use of Simplify Path
- What Live Shape Effects are for
- How to make Repeating Grids & Concentric Circles
- How to make Random Objects
- Advanced Keyboard Shortcuts in Illustrator
- How to add a Gradient on a Stroke
- How to add a Gradient in Text
- How to use the Freeform Gradient tool
- How to use Advanced Color Swatches
- How to use Global Color Swatches
- What is the difference between RGB vs CMYK color modes?
- How to proof colors
- How to use Pantone Spot Colors
- Recolor Artwork & Changing all colors at once
- How to use Blending Modes
- How to work with Images & Blending Modes
- How to make Black & White Images
- Learn Advanced Workflow Tricks
- All the Super Selection Mastery
- How to use the History Panel
- Advanced Fonts Tricks & Tips
- Use Retype to know what Font is being used
- How to put Text Inside a Letter or Shape
- How to use the Touch Type Tool
- How to add a Connected Stroke Around Multiple Shapes
- How to Offset a Stroke with Text
- How to make a Bar Chart in Illustrator
- How to make a Pie Chart in Illustrator
- Layer Power Moves
- Advanced Artboard & Pages Tricks
- How to Unlink vs Embedded Images
- How to Crop Images Rather than Mask
- How to Mask Inside Text & Multiple Shapes
- How to you use the Puppet Warp Tool
- How to use the Distort Envelope Shape & Type
- How to use the Envelope Mesh
- How to blend lines together
- How to make a Linocut Effect
- How to make 3D Gradient Lettering Blends
- How to spin text into a ring
- How to turn text into a 3D donut shape
- How to make a Duotone image effect
- How to make a Roughen Stamp Vector Effect
- How to make a Neon Sign Glow Effect
- How to use a Halftone Effect using Plugins
- Advanced Exporting Assets Tricks in Illustrator
- How to use the Dimension Tool

So what're you waiting for? Let's start the course now!
Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Certificates

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

How to earn your certificate

Work your way towards your certificate for this course by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Complete and pass the Knowledge Quiz (Merit level courses only)
  • Complete the Distinction Certificate Project (Distinction level courses only) - look out for the video marked with
  • Upload your Distinction project to the My Projects area in your account
  • Request your certificate when you've completed the requirements for the certificate level you're working towards

Good luck!

Pass certificates

We’re awarding ‘Pass’ level certificates for this course.

You can work your way towards your ‘Pass’ certificate by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Don’t forget to request your certificate when all your projects are complete

Good luck!

Merit certificates

We’re awarding ‘Merit’ level certificates for this course.

You can work your way towards your ‘Merit’ certificate by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Complete and pass the Knowledge Quiz
  • Don’t forget to request your certificate when you have passed the quiz and completed all your projects

Good luck!

Distinction certificates

We're awarding 'Distinction' level certificates for this course.

You can work your way towards your 'Distinction' certificate by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Complete and pass the Knowledge Quiz
  • Complete the Distinction Certificate Project - look out for the video marked with
  • Upload your Distinction project to the My Projects area in your account
  • Don't forget to request your certificate when you have passed the quiz and completed all your projects

Good luck!

Downloads & Exercise files

Transcript

Hello everyone. We are gonna do advanced art board and page tricks and tips. This is one of those leveling up videos  where you're gonna be impressing everybody in the office  with your mad secret skills, especially working  with multiple art boards. That's where it's really useful. So, alright, let's jump in and get nerdy. Alright, uh, have anything drawn on any page?

And I'm gonna show you my favorite one is the,  I've got this selected and I want the art board  to match the edges of it. Have you ever tried to like resize the actual object  to match the art board or shift O to grab the art board tool  and try and resize it to fit that? It's a pain in the butt so all you  need to do is have it selected. Okay. And you can go to your outboard tool, so shift O  or the outboard tool over here  and in your properties panel you can go to your artboards,  you can go, the preset size I want is fit  to the selected art please. Oh, and it just resizes it to the thing you had selected.

It's great when you're exporting things like icons  or stickers or the page size needs to match the size  of the thing rather than a predefined size. One thing you might have to do though is sometimes you can  be down here if you've got a um, like a preset down here,  you have to scroll to the top. If you can't find it and it can use this one,  that does work as well. Uh, without having it selected, it depends on, yeah,  I find it easier just to select,  be very personal about the thing I have selected  and then fit it to selection. Alright, tip number one, tip two. Uh, open up the art boards panel.

So in your exercise files there's a file called art boards. So there's multiple art boards here. Did you know you probably didn't. There's a window, there's an actual art boards panel look at  that shows me all my art boards. All really nicely named. If yours aren't nicely named,  you can double click on the first one.

Give it a name. Hit tab, name this one,  hit tab, name this one. Kind of like what we did earlier with the layers panel. I don't know why I find that useful. You can rearrange the order in  here using these little arrows. You might decide that this mobile leaderboard really it's at  the top of my stack, so it should be at  the top of my outboards here.

It doesn't really change anything other than makes it  clearer for me sometimes as well. This is like nicely laid out, right? But let's say that you've got mad messy um, artboards. Okay? What you can do is with the artboards tool,  there's this option here to reorganize them. And if they're all rectangles you might decide  that you know, they're all the same size.

You might say, all right, I want two columns. And you can see this one's gonna go, uh, left, left to right  and then down a row left and right. You can change the different  order and you can re-stack them. Okay, that doesn't work For this one. I'm gonna go more of a just straight down please with a gap  and they're just nicely ordered. There you go.

Instead of grabbing the outboard tool  and trying to like go, all right, I want you to line up  and this one to be you move 'em around. You can just do all in one go. Another useful thing is if you use your outboard tool, okay,  this one here or shift O, okay,  and go select all, which is command A on a Mac,  control A on a pc. You can select them all like rectangles  and just go, all right, you're right aligned. Okay. Or top of line, whatever you need it to be.

Okay? You can just organize them like objects. You can create new artboards from here, but there you go. That's probably enough for the outboards. Great. When you're working with large kind of social media,  multiple touch or spread across the internet,  you can select them all using the outboard tool like we just  did and go and change the presets.

Let's say you are doing, you know, this is more  of a paper document and you've, you've started at US letter,  but you need them to all be a four. You can go and change them all. One big go. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. They all social media ads, but you get the idea. Another handy trick is  I'm gonna go back to my selection tool.

I'm gonna go to, oh aboard tool is  handy for navigating as well. Let's open that back up. You can kind of like double click on the ones you actually  just, yeah, that's it. Just double click on the numbers. You can kind of move around the document this way rather  than scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. All right, number one.

Um, another handy tip  for boards is grab. Let's say you add a logo or a bit of text or something. I'm gonna put this in, gonna make sure it's at the top  and make sure it's got a color. You can see which is the, in my case, it's the what? It is the D for defaults. For some reason mine's not at the top.

Let's look at the layers panel. Yes, we're on the right one. Okay. Somehow it'd ended up in the background. Anyway, I want it at the top. So with it selected, I'm gonna copy it  and I'm gonna go to this edit.

There's this fancy one called Paste on Artboards,  which in my one's doing something really weird,  I don't know why it's a bug. Um, normally 'cause I've messed around with these things. I think in my current version,  normally when I teach this one it just  paste on all the artboards. For some reason it's pasting them all on the  same art board here. It's really weird. Watch this.

Okay, so I've just closed and opened it again. So what I'm gonna do is do the exact same thing  without messing with my outboards. This normally works fine, I don't no reason. I don't know why mine's not. Um, but let's, let's pretend  that I haven't done all the weird, it's something to do  with probably the shuffling of the outboards. But let's pretend that didn't happen.

Yeah, with it selected. We gotta copy. Then we can go to edit paste on all outboards  and you'll notice that it's just a great way, you know,  have you ever done it and you're like trying to copy  and paste a new outboard copy and paste a new outboard. It puts them all um, with reference to the top left. So you can't like put them all on the bottom corner. Let me know if you can.

I don't think you can,  but at least they're all on all the outboards  and now you can go through and resize them  and put them where you need to be. Okay? For the various different aspect ratios. And this of course yours brakes like mine  and dumped a whole pile of them on one art board. I'm not sure why. Another useful art board trick is if I go  like do I know probably everyone does this right?

You start working in the past area  or this, oh, mine's really having a bad day. So gives you little pixels. I'm gonna close down, illustrate it and open it back up. I bet you that'll go away. You wait there. Alright, I'm back.

I just closed  the illustrator reopened it. If you ever run into problems,  it's normally just a close it reopen it. So let's pretend yeah we go we're back. So you're working in the canvas instead of the art board,  like this stuff around the outside  and you like end up doing stuff  and you're like okay, this is the perfect one, right? This is the finished version of the drawing  or the text that I've done  and you move it onto your art board  and you're like, what does all this junk you end up  with like this mad mess around the artboards. You do it looking at you, okay?

Um, but you just wanna tidy it up  for a presentation or something. You can now go to view  and there's one in here called trim view. There is there, okay? And it just cuts everything out from view, okay? If you're presenting to a colleague,  we just wanna look at something a bit more tidy. Okay?

Trim view. It also gets rid  of bleed if you've added bleed, oh no, it is a new feature  and there is there trim view. Turn it on and off. You can kind of still work in trim view,  which is, so we turn it on,  there's still things here you can kind of work on them. It's like InDesign if you hit the W key,  it's the same sort of thing, okay? From view back on another handy one when you are  presenting is the F key.

Okay? So the shortcut is F presentation mode. Okay, if I go to this, it just kind of like launches it in. Uh, yeah presentation mode. Let's hit escape to come out of it. I'm gonna open up that uh, upwards one.

It's handy for this because what you can do is go  to view presentation mode  and you can see I might be presenting to somebody  through a data projector, like a PowerPoint presentation  or just you know, to my creative director  or my client, whatever it is. You can use the arrow key to kind  of toggle through them, okay? To show them the different concepts. Um, so yeah, the F key just toggles  that into presentation mode. Escape to get out of it. That's where this layer order is a bit more important in the  art boards because the arrow keys will cycle through one,  you know, through to six in this case.

Alright, command or control. All right, I'm gonna zoom out. So we've got lots of art boards. A handy trick is to get them all out. You can go to file, there's an export to screens,  they call it screens, I dunno why  but export all the outboards. Okay?

And you can see all the outboards can be uh, P and g  or they could be a p and G  and maybe uh, jpeg as well, okay? Not at the double size, just that the single size. You might just see the difference between jpeg and p and g. It's just a good way of getting them all out,  especially these like social media options, okay? All in one big go rather than  exporting them all corners separately. Another handy up would trick if we get a file new,  let's make a new document, whatever size it is.

Sometimes this restriction here,  the page, you just don't need it. You're at like logo design, idea time. So you don't need this stupid board, okay? And this outside stuff, what you can do is you can go  to view and you can go all the way down here. There's one called hide art board. And you're like, oh what happened?

It's kinda like old school  illustrator if you've ever used it. Um, nothing's different. I can grab my rectangle tool, I'm gonna pick a color  so you can see it and you start drawing,  you start doing your things and  you've just got no boundaries. Come on shift h, that's it, okay,  you can toggle that on and off. Okay? So you're working, you don't have  that like line running through things.

So if you act concepts  that you don't need boundaries you can just turn it off. It doesn't really wreck anything. The outboards still there  but it just might be a nicer way of working. Command shift H if you need to toggle it  or a view hide outboard. Other weird trick that I just thought  of is you can drag these things I do all the time when I'm  getting ready for these tutorials when I'm like  okay, that's the main one. And then we're gonna jump to this one next  and then I'm gonna jump to this one.

You can just drag the tabs around. Not quite art boards, but close enough. Now the last thing is actual size. Now somehow really this works. So let's say I make a new document  and it is going to be print and  I need uh, a four and I'm gonna click create. You need to see what it looks like at actual size.

You're looking at a screen recording on your screen  so it's not gonna be quite right,  but on my screen here in front of me in my office,  I wanna see what the text and stuff looks like. You know, what does this text look like  at when it's actually printed rather than just kinda like  guessing it on my screen. Okay? You can get a view  and there's one in here that says actual size there is there  command one or control one. And what it'll do is that is exactly what it is. Like it's weird somehow through my laptop onto my  computer screen, if I go and grab an A four sheet of paper  and I stick it up next to it, it'll be bang on.

I don't know how it does it. I'll show you this. So I did this a while ago when it first came out. Um, watch this. This is the live view. Don't believe this.

Mute me. This is uh, earlier me, not  so bold, still pretty bald. Um, watch this. I grab a bit a four sheet and look it lines up nicely. It's amazing watching videos together. So yeah, it's really handy for business cards.

You're like, oh is it, is it gonna be too  big or is that too small? Okay, go to actual size. I'll show you another good thing  that I used it for the other day. You don't have these files, but like  I actually, where is it? Uh, lemme grab this. Okay, it's one  of my cloud docs courier box lid.

You're like what the heck is this? So I didn't make this design, I bought it, okay from Invado. It's a really cool design and I was printing this  to be made into a giant um, sticker  that goes onto something I was making  and I was like, how big do I make this tile? Because on your screen you're not sure. So I went to view and I went to actual size  and then you realize, oh, maybe it's a bit small,  maybe it's a bit big, it's really handy for these patterns. I'll show you what I ended up doing.

So here it is there. So I made a courier box, um, lid. Can you see the lid there? That's that kind of design. Yeah, it didn't come out as good as I liked,  but I made this courier box. I wanted a lid for it and I thought I'd print this off  and it was just handy 'cause I was like,  what size will look good in real life?

I wish I printed it bigger now even  though I checked it at real life. Um, you know, the actual size. But yeah, so that's my career box. I got a massive career box  and so the career can obviously dump stuff over the fence  and, and not get wet and things. Anyway, bit overkill. But that's the view.

Uh, what is it called? Actual size. Somehow it works it's magic. Alright, my friends that is the artboards  and page advanced awesomeness features. I hope that, yeah,  I hope you found something useful in there and like  before let me know in the comments which one was it? And you're like, oh, that's the one,  that's my number one I'm interested to know.

'cause sometimes I think, oh that's not that useful. I'll add it in anyway. And sometimes I'm like, this is the best ever  and nobody else seems to like it, but let me know. Alright, uh, I hope you enjoyed the video. I will see you in the next one. Bye.
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