From the course: Illustrator 2020 Essential Training

Touring the interface - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2020 Essential Training

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Touring the interface

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- [Instructor] Now, if this is your first visit to Illustrator, or even if you're changing from an earlier version, this movie will get you around the interface so you know where things are. And there is a small difference between the Mac and Windows version. And on the Mac, the top-level menu system is pinned to the top of the screen. Whereas on Windows, it's in the area beneath, which is known as the Application bar, and there are some items in here. It's there where I want to start off actually. Just over on the right-hand side just before the Search field, you should see the word Essentials, although don't be alarmed if you do see another word because this is a Workspace menu just here and that could be any number of different workspaces and they're just different configurations. Just for the purpose of demonstration, I'll just switch to one here. So if I go to Essentials Classic, you'll see that it redraws the interface a slightly different configuration. And if I go back to Essentials here, and it sets it the way it was a moment ago. And I'm just going to choose Reset Essentials just in case anything has moved. If we've done all of those things together, then we should, theoretically, be looking at the same thing. So beneath that, we've got the main document area here and just to the right of that, we've got three panels, the Properties panel, and then nested with that, the Layers panel, and also the Libraries panel. Going down to the bottom of the interface, we've got a few different things here. We've got this small informational area here which is telling me the current tool which happens to be the Mesh tool. I'm going to tap a key on my keyboard, which you'll find out about more later on, and you'll see it now says Selection. And you can change what it shows by using the menu just here. And there's some navigation stuff just to the left of that. And moving further to the left and up the left-hand side of the screen, we've got the default basic toolbox. So, there are far more tools than this in Illustrator but if you're just starting, these will do just fine to begin with, and we'll look at that in a subsequent movie. Then right at the top of the screen, we've got this small Home icon here and this will take us back to the place where we can review documents we've had open already or start new documents from here. This is the first run screen that we're seeing at the moment with some information in here that we might be interested in as new visitors. And to return to our document, we go to the Illustrator icon at the left and that small arrow just to the left of that and it will take us back to our document. Beyond that, the final thing we have here is a small icon which will allow us to arrange multiple open documents if that is the case for us, and that's useful sometimes. But there you are. In essence, that's it. That is your quick penny tour of the Illustrator interface for Illustrator 2020.

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