From the course: Time-Saving Tips Using Illustrator

Save and use custom views - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Time-Saving Tips Using Illustrator

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Save and use custom views

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- [Instructor] Sometimes when working in Illustrator it feels like you spend more time zooming in and navigating to different areas of the document than you actually do working on it. Custom views can help with this situation. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna zoom in on an area of this map. I'm gonna zoom in on the grapes here 'cause that's the area that I wanna focus on and I'll go ahead and get it in view where I'd like to see it when I wanna access this area and if I come up here to the View menu, I can scroll all the way to the bottom and choose New View. And I'm gonna call this Vineyard. And I'll go ahead and click okay. Now, I'm gonna zoom back out and I'll zoom in down here to, say, the turtle. That looks pretty cool. And I'll go to View, New View, and call this one Turtle. Now, what this allows me to do is as I'm working, if I ever wanna access a specific area of a view in which I've saved, I can go to my View menu, scroll down to the bottom, and choose, for example, Vineyard, and it's gonna take me exactly to that area in my document. If I go to the View menu and I choose Turtle, it's gonna jump to that area. So it's a really efficient way of navigating specifically to where you wanna get quickly and easily. Now, to take this one step further, one of the things we can do is we can add a custom keyboard shortcut. So if you go to the Edit menu and choose Keyboard Shortcuts, I'm gonna come up here and choose Menu Commands. And if I go to the View category, and scroll all the way down to the bottom, I can assign keyboard shortcuts to all of my custom views. So in the Shortcut field, if I add a custom keyboard shortcut, I'm gonna use Command + Option + One, and then if I choose Custom View 2 and assign Command + Option + Two, you'll notice here I have a conflict and I'm gonna go ahead and leave that alone. Even though it's a conflict, I really don't use that shortcut to unlock all items. So I'm just gonna go ahead and click OK and we can give this keyboard shortcut set a name. I'll call this Chad's Shortcuts, and now, using those keyboard shortcuts, when I execute them, it's gonna jump to the grapes, then it'll jump to the turtle with a very simple keyboard shortcut and using the keyboard shortcut Command + Zero, which will fit my art board to my window, I can zoom out and see everything in that document.

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