Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

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STARTING A DOCUMENT

I’VE BEEN COVERING

Adobe applications for years, and

I’m intimately familiar with most of them. So I really shouldn’t play

favorites. But if I were to pick the one closest to my heart— purely

my personal pet, clearheaded reasoning be damned—it would be

Illustrator. Compared with such powerhouse applications as Flash,

After Effects, or InDesign, Illustrator may seem like an odd choice.

I mean, hello, have I forgotten Photoshop? Don’t get me wrong, I

think all those programs are wonderful. And I must admit, I spend

more time in Photoshop than any other application. But I’d still go

with Illustrator.

I’m not saying Illustrator is the best thing Adobe’s ever released.

Honestly, it’s impossible to compare one Adobe product to another;

they all serve different purposes. Nor is Illustrator the most enter-

taining application in the Creative Suite. While there are times I

quite enjoy using Illustrator, I can’t deny that drawing an intricate

path with the pen tool can be grunt work of the most menial order.

And between you and me, Illustrator is not the most elegantly de-

signed piece of software. After twenty years of haphazard updates—

some really great, some not—the program is about as organized as

a mad tea party.

I fi nd Illustrator so particularly captivating for three reasons. I don’t

expect you to identify with the fi rst one: Illustrator was the subject

of one of my earliest books (an illustration from which appears in

Figure 1-1), and you never forget the mind-numbing pain of your

initial efforts, even if you hatched them, as I did, two decades ago.

Second, and this one benefi ts you, Illustrator is a much deeper pro-

gram than most people imagine, deeper even than

Photoshop in terms of the number of things

it can accomplish, the variety of ways

you can approach a project, and

its sheer quantity of features.

Figure 1-1 .

ABOUT THIS LESSON

In this fi rst video lesson, I’ll give you a sense of how to get

around inside of Illustrator. I’ll show you how to zoom in

to a particular area of your artwork, zoom out to see more

at a time, pan around to see details, and move between

and organize your artboards.

To learn your way around your artwork, visit www.oreilly.

com/go/deke-IllustratorCS5. Click the Watch button to

view the lesson online or click the Download button to

save it to your computer. During the video, you’ll learn

these shortcuts:

Operation Windows shortcut Macintosh shortcut

Zoom in or out Ctrl+ (plus), Ctrl+ (minus) - (plus), - (minus)

Zoom in with the magnifying glass Ctrl+spacebar-click or drag -spacebar-click or drag

Zoom out with the magnifying glass Ctrl+Alt+spacebar-click -Option-spacebar-click

Zoom to 100 percent or fi t page Ctrl+ (one) - (one)

Fit artboard in window Ctrl+ (zero) - (zero)

Fit entire artwork in window Ctrl+Alt+ (zero) -Option- (zero)

Switch between open documents Ctrl-Tab -~ (tilde)

Move to next artboard Shift+Page Down Shift+Page Down

Move to previous artboard Shift+Page Up Shift+Page Up

Video Lesson 1: Navigation

you’ve downloaded the lesson fi les from

www.oreilly.com/go/Deke-IllustratorCS5,

as directed in Step 2 on page xiv of the

Preface. This should result in a folder called

Lesson Files-AIcs5 1on1 on your desktop.

We’ll be working with the fi les inside the

Lesson 01 subfolder.

Before you can take advantage of Illustrator’s fi rst-rate drawing

functions, you must know how to open a fi le, set up a new docu-

ment, adjust columns and guides, and save your work to disk. In

this lesson, you’ll learn how to:

• Open an illustration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 7

• Organize your artwork . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 10

• Make a brand new document. . . . . . . . . . . . . page 15

• Change the document setup and use artboards . . . page 18

• Work with layers and guides . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 24

• Save the positions of panels and other

interface elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 28

• Save your fi nished document as a native

Illustrator or template fi le. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 33

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Lesson 1: Starting a Document