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.