Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

•

Locate and double-click the Lesson Files-AIcs5 1on1 folder.

• Lastly, double-click the Lesson 01 folder.

3. Select a fi le. Click the fi le called Radio station.ai to select it.

This is the fi rst of the documents pictured in Figure 1-3, pro-

moting a fi ctional radio station and based on a poster illustra-

tion by iStockphoto illustrator Ryan Burke.

If you’re using a Windows-based PC and you don’t see the document

you want, you probably need to change the setting in the Files of Type

pop-up menu at the bottom of the dialog box. Although this menu is

useful for narrowing the choices in a folder full of fi les

—

you can view

just one of many fi le types (PDFs, or Encapsulated PostScript documents,

for example)

—

these options may prevent you from seeing the piece of

artwork that you want. For day-to-day work, the default setting of All

Readable Files is your best bet.

4. Open the artwork. Click the Open button or press the Enter

or Return key to open the document in Illustrator. If the docu-

ment appears on screen, all is well. However, if you established

your own color settings—something other than what I asked

you to do in the Preface (see Step 8, page xvii)—Illustrator may

greet you with a Profi le or Policy Mismatch message; just click

OK or Continue to make it go away.

I’ll be asking you to open and modify many fi les during the course

of this book. Explore these fi les if you want, seeing how the differ-

ent shapes are put together to create the overall effect. When you

arrive at the successful conclusion of an exercise, as you have now,

you may do with the document as you will—inspect it, modify it,

or ignore it altogether. (Sometimes I will ask you to save the fi le.)

To tidy up and move on, click

in the title bar ( on the Mac). Or

you can choose File→Close.

Organizing Your Artwork

In the previous exercise, we saw the simple way to open a fi le, but

there is a better way—using the standalone Adobe Bridge. The

Bridge is no mere image opener, however; it’s a complete digital

asset manager. In the Bridge, you can review images and illustra-

tions, rotate them, delete them, move them to different folders, or-

ganize them into collections, and fl ag them for later use. You can

even preview artwork at full size, fi lter which documents you see

and which you don’t, and group related assets into stacks. If you

have just a few dozen fi les lying around your hard drive, this may

10

Lesson 1: Starting a Document

seem like overkill. But if you have a few hundred, a thousand, or a

hundred thousand, the Bridge is an absolute necessity.

P E A R L O F W I S D O M

In many ways, the Bridge is a better and more fl exible navigation tool than

either the Windows or Macintosh operating system. Where else can you tear

through a folder of images or illustrations and view instantly scalable, high-

quality thumbnails? Or rename a group of fi les in a single operation? It’s a

media manager’s dream.

To get a sense of what the Bridge can do, try the following. (These

steps assume that the Bridge is set to the Essentials workspace, as

it is by default.)

1. Open the Bridge. Click in the application bar. Or press the

shortcut, Ctrl+Alt+O (or -Option-O).

2.

Navigate to the Small thumbs folder. The Bridge

window is, by default, divided into fi ve main panels:

two panels on the left, the large content browser panel

in the middle, and two more panels on the right, each labeled

black in Figure 1-5. (Violet labels show ancillary options.)

Content panel

Filter, Collections,

and Export panels

Favorites and

Folders panels

Navigation

controls

Toggle

compact view

Shortcut buttons

Metadata and

Keywords panels

Preview panel

Thumbnail size

slider bar

Panel dividers Thumbnail

previews

Photo- and camera-

View options

Search

Preset Sort/fi lter

Figure 1-5 .

11

Organizing Your Artwork