Introduction
I'm Brian Wood, Creative and Content Strategist for the Adobe MAX team.
Whether you're brand-new to Illustrator or looking for a refresher, let's jump into Illustrator and get started.
First things first,
Understanding vector art and scalability
Illustrator makes vector art, which is artwork made of points and paths like this.
That means what you can create can be scaled small, like a postcard, or as big as a billboard, and still look amazing.
When you open an Illustrator project by clicking Open or choosing File, Open,
Exploring the Illustrator workspace
you're going to see the main parts of the workspace.
Out here in the middle is your project, and this area is called the Document window.
The tools on the left are for creating and editing your designs, and they're organized according to the type of tool they're.
Selecting, moving, and editing objects
Select the Selection Tool here, and click on this shape to select it.
You can use the Selection Tool a lot.
This is for selecting, moving, resizing, rotating and a lot more.
Try moving this shape.
You can put it under the text here if you want to.
The Properties panel on the right changes depending on what you have selected.
This is where you can change properties for something like this shape.
Maybe you want to change the color, this is called the Fill of the shape.
Click the color box, and you can try all different kinds of colors.
Do you see what looks like a page here?
This is called an artboard, and it can be treated like a page, or maybe even as a place to put a bunch of logo ideas.
And you can make as many artboards as you need.
Navigating the canvas with zoom and hand tools
As you create, you'll want to zoom closer and move around.
Using the Zoom Tool over here in the Toolbar, you can either click and release to zoom in a little bit, or press and drag to control the zoom.
Press and drag right, it zooms in, press and drag left, it zooms out.
It takes a little getting used to it.
Here's a tip: If you need to see everything again, you can choose View, Fit All in Window, and then try zooming again.
Come to the top of this little pear stem - really, really close.
See this little ladybug?
That shouldn't be there.
Let's get rid of it.
To select something, we use the Selection Tool and just press Backspace or Delete to remove it.
To zoom out, with the Zoom Tool selected, press Option or Alt, and click a few times.
You can also move your project around inside the Document window.
Select the Hand Tool, or if you want to use the shortcut, it's pressing the Spacebar, and you can drag to move it around.
See this colored circle and date?
We need to move all of it with the Selection Tool onto the actual artboard.
To select multiple objects, make sure the Selection Tool is selected, and drag across them.
Then, drag one, and they all come with.
Let's practice a little and change the fill color of this shape.
I need to deselect, so click in an empty area.
Now select just the circle.
See this little bar near the shape?
This contains a handful of useful properties you can edit, and it's a little faster if you want to do like the fill color.
So, click the color box and pick another one.
Here's a tip: You can actually move this bar anywhere you want, and then reset its position by coming to this menu.
Creating new documents and adjusting document settings
I started all this by opening a file, but you can just as easily make a new one.
To do that, you can choose File, New...
In here, you can pick what you're doing with the project and a size if you know it right now.
As you get further into Illustrator, there are more options you can set for this file, like how many artboards you want to start with.
You can also set things like the document color.
Make it RGB is a best practice, so that all of the colors are made with red, green and blue.
Then create it.
Here's a bonus tip to get you started: If you have nothing selected, like in this blank document, you can see the Rulers, or change the Document Units, change document settings in the Properties panel over here.
Now that you've been through an overview of Illustrator, let's make something with shapes in the next part of this series.
