From the course: Illustrator 2021 Essential Training

The Illustrator workspace - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2021 Essential Training

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The Illustrator workspace

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- [Instructor] When you launch Illustrator for the first time, you'll be greeted with something like what we are seeing right now. This is known as the Welcome Screen. Now, frequently you'll find things on here, like big images at the top with all bits of different information and marketing messages in, that sort of stuff, and other small panels that have a similar function. Once you've had a few different documents open, they will populate the area underneath where it says Recent, just here. And we've got a few other things we can visit there too. For now, though, we're going to take a look at the general interface that we work with in Illustrator. I'm going to choose one of these document types. The one nearest on the left-hand side is A4, so I'm just going to click that. Okay, and a document opens up. Now, going from the top of the screen, what we have on a Mac is we have the top level menu system there. On Windows, that's one of the few differences between Mac and Windows, it's actually in this bar just here, which is known as the application bar. Underneath that I have something called the Control Strip. Some people call it the options bar because that's what it's known as in Photoshop. And you might not be seeing that in your workspace. And what a workspace is, it's an arrangement of all of the different things that make up the Illustrator interface. Now, I'm going to go across to the right-hand side and just to the left of this search field, I have a small icon. If I click on that, I have various different workspaces I can choose from, as well as ones I may create myself. I'm going to go to Essentials, just here, and this may well be what you're looking at right now. However, if I choose Reset Essentials, it goes back to the way it was originally designed. And that now probably looks exactly like what you're looking at. Now, for the majority of this course, we are going to work with Essentials Classic because it gives us the full tool bar and the control strip at the top. So if you choose that, a good idea when you choose any workspace, is to reset it as well. And that just brings it back to the default. Okay, so underneath the Control Strip, on the right-hand side, we have the Properties panel and a Libraries panel just there as well. Okay. And then some other panels arranged just to the left of that. These are various different things that store information, also can execute certain commands and make certain modifications, which we'll investigate later on. At the bottom of the screen, we've got an information area that tells us things such as the current zoom level and what art board we may be on. And also what tool we have selected. If I tap v on my keyboard, that gives us the selection tool. If I tap p that gives me the pen tool as well. So if I just try that, p, you can see I have the pen tool, and it reflects that down here. If I tap v again to go to selection and so on. And you can modify what that actually shows as well if you need to. The toolbox on the left is, of course, where we'll be picking our various different tools and I'll be showing you how we can actually pick different tools up as we move through the course. But just so you know for now, some tools actually have nested groups of different tools with them. And if you long press on a tool, you'll be able to see all the tools in that family, and if you move to the right edge of that and click, you can actually detach them as a tray, which may be useful in some circumstances. I'll just close that, and don't worry, all the tools are still there, it's just a handy access thing. Finally, what we're going to look at here is scaling the interface, because in these days of high DPI screens some of these icons can be really tiny. And for me, from a teaching perspective, I want you to be able to clearly see what I'm doing. Now, scale the interface, on the Mac you need to go to the Illustrator menu and into Preferences, and that's in the Edit menu on Windows, and go to User Interface. Then you can bring up the scaling for the interface. It gives you a preview of what that's going to look like, just here, and then you can hit okay, and what it will do is restart Illustrator and you'll be ready to go from there with your new interface. I'm going to be leaving mine at large. And the more options you have have depends on how big your screen is with how much resolution that you have, but mine will work there. Choose whatever works for you, restart, and then we'll be ready to go in the next movie.

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