From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Fundamentals

Using the Artboard tool - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Using the Artboard tool

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- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you how to move an artboard with and without its contents using the Artboard tool. And I want to warn you up front, especially if you're new to Illustrator, that we're going to take a bit of a slow and winding approach to this topic. And that's because Illustrator handles artboards differently than I've seen any other program handle just about anything. And so if Illustrator's way seem bizarre at first, I want them to make perfect sense in the end because this really is a practical and powerful feature. So let's say I want to take artboard one right here and I want to move it to a different location here inside this document. Well, artboards inside the Illustrator work very differently than pages inside other programs. So you may remember from the previous chapter that we went up to the File menu and chose the New command and that gave us the ability not only to change the size of the artboards but to change the number of artboards as well. And if I were to click on the More Settings button, then I can decide how those artboards are arranged, how many columns we have, the spacing between the artboards and so on. Well, that's great for creating a new document and it's a pretty traditional approach, but that's not how it works when editing an existing document. All right. So with that, I'll go ahead and cancel out here. Now, before I go any further, I want you to go up to this workspace option in the top right portion of the screen, and if necessary, choose Essentials Classic from the menu. Then go ahead and bring up that menu again and choose Reset Essentials Classic. And that way we can see both the very large properties panel on the right side of the screen as well as the more streamlined control panel which is this horizontal strip up here at the top of the screen. Now you don't usually need to see both of them because they mostly duplicate each other but I want you to have a clear understanding of what's going on. Now notice when the black arrow is selected up here at the top of the toolbox that we have a Document Setup button both in the horizontal control panel and down here at the bottom of the properties panel. Now in another application, you'd expect this Document Setup button to let you change the quantity and even location of your pages. But in Illustrator, clicking on either one brings up this dialog box right here which allows you to change the bleed values if you like and you can modify your unit of measure. But otherwise we're not seeing anything in the way of those width or height values and we're not allowed to change how many artboards we have. What we do have is this Edit Artboards button which also appears in the properties panel but that's pretty deceiving because notice if you click on that button, it closes the dialog box and it switches you to a different tool, this guy right here toward the bottom of the toolbox which is known as the Artboard tool. So the better way to work, assuming that some other tool is selected, is to avoid the Document Setup button and you can safely ignore the Edit Artboards button in the properties panel and just go ahead and switch directly to the Artboard tool in the first place, because this one tool does pretty much everything we're where managing artboards is concerned. Now notice that we're seeing handles around the selected artboard and you can switch to a different artboard just by clicking on it. And each time you do, you'll see handles for that specific artboard. We also have labels so that we know that this guy is artboard three and its neighbor is artboard four and so on. Now, one of the confusing things about this tool when you first start using it, is that clicking with the tool selects a different artboard but if you then click again, say on the three, you're going to create an artboard inside of that artboard. And Illustrator is going to automatically size that artboard in order to accommodate its contents. That is to say, the big number three. Now you may look at this and say, how in the world does this new artboard match the size of the three when the three is so much shorter? Well, bear in mind that every character of type is bigger than it appears because it's actually designed to accommodate other characters in this font. And those other characters may be taller than the three or they may have descenders such as the bottom of a lowercase G. And you can confirm this is the case by switching back to the black arrow tool which Illustrator calls the Selection tool and then notice if I click on that number three that its big blue bounding box here is the same size as that new artboard. Now, obviously I don't want that new artboard. So I'll go up to the Edit menu and choose the Undo command which has a standard keyboard shortcut of Control + Z here on a PC or Command + Z on the Mac and that goes ahead and restores our eight original artboards. All right now, as I was saying, I want to move my first artboard to a different location and so I'll go ahead and select the Artboard tool and notice that its tool tip tells us that it has a keyboard shortcut of Shift + O. And that's the letter O by the way, not a zero which matches the O sound in the word artboard. And incidentally, if you get that missing fonts warning when opening this particular document and you subscribe to the Creative Cloud and you are connected to the internet, then make sure the Activate checkbox is turned on for each and every missing font and then click on the Activate Fonts button. All right. So I'll go ahead and switch back to the Artboard tool and notice that it remains again selected even if I switch between different documents. And then I'll go ahead and click on that first artboard and I'll drag it fairly arbitrarily to a different location like so. And then just so that I can see all the artboards at the same time, I'll go up to the View menu and choose Fit All in Window in order to zoom out. All right, now I can move this artboard to any location that I like, and I can even move it so that it snaps into alignment with the other artboards. And so notice under the View menu we have a command called Smart Guides, which is turned on by default as indicated by this check mark. This is an exceedingly useful feature inside of Illustrator as we'll see in this and future movies. And so if you're seeing a check mark in front of the command, great, if not, choose the command to turn it on. And so when working with artboards, I can go ahead and drag this guy down and notice that we're seeing these magenta snap lines emitting from the bottom right corner of artboard one. The problem is that I'm snapping into alignment with the wrong portion of my document. Notice that I've snapped the bottom right corner so that it aligns to the neighboring bleeds which is not what I want. So I'll just go ahead and press Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac to undo that move. And then I'll try again. And this time I'm looking to snap to the center of both artboard two on the right and artboard five down below. Now the only problem with Smart Guides is that you sometimes end up snapping into alignment with a previous location of the artboard as we're seeing here, which obviously is not what we want. And so if you encounter that behavior just try moving the artboard to yet a different location and then drag it down so that it snaps properly. And again, we're looking for the center snaps that you're seeing here inside the video at which point I'll go ahead and release in order to put that artboard back in place. Now there is a kind of artboard gotcha that can snag you when you're first using the tool. Notice if I drag artboard one down so that it overlaps artboard five, and then I drag it again, I ended up moving the five along with the one and that's because the five has become part of artboard one and we're moving all of the contents at the same time. Which is why it's so useful, by the way, that we have multiple undos inside Illustrator. And so all I have to do to back step is to press Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac a couple of times in a row in order to undo those changes. Now notice the same will happen if I select artboard five here and then I start dragging it, I'm going to end up moving the one along with even though the one doesn't appear to be on artboard five at all. But recall that the number is actually taller than it appears because it has to accommodate the centers that are associated with the lowercase letters inside of that font. And so the one actually descends down into artboard five. All right. So I'll just go ahead and undo that change by once again, pressing Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac then I'll go ahead and switch back to the Artboard tool. Now, the reason this is happening is because of this icon up here in the control panel, Move/Copy Artwork with Artboard and that it's turned on by default. And what that tells you is when you click on an artboard and drag it, you're going to move the artwork along with it. Now you might wonder why in the world you'd ever want to turn that icon off and let me show you. I'll go ahead and switch over to this document here and notice that artboard five over here is positioned out of alignment with its contents. And this kind of thing happens, frankly, all the time. After all, even in the world's most powerful drawing program, it's possible to make mistakes. And so notice if I drag that artboard back to its proper location so that I have those center Smart Guides even though I've moved the artboard exactly where I want it, I've moved the contents out of alignment. And so if I then had to switch to a different tool and move all those items back into place, that would be a very big pain in the neck. So the better thing to do is to undo that move by once again, pressing Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac and then I'll go ahead and turn off that icon, Move/Copy Artwork with Artboard and now notice if I drag that artboard where it goes, it moves independently of the artwork which is exactly what I want. Now notice this option also appears in the properties panel as this checkbox, Move Artwork with Artboard. And so if I turn it on, the icon and the control panel turns on and they both turn off together as well. And in fact, every single item that you're currently seeing in the properties panel is one way or other duplicated up here in the control panel. So for example, we have name over at this location and we have name up here in the middle of the control panel. Even this button right here, Artboard Options, is duplicated in the form of this icon. The only difference is that the properties panel consumes a bunch of extra space on screen, which is why I very much recommend that you do yourself a favor and free up that screen space by right clicking on the Properties tab and choosing this command right here, Close Tab Group. And now notice if I go up to the View menu and choose Fit All in Window, that we have room to magnify the artboards so we can see way more detail inside the document. All right. Now, assuming at this point you're done working with the Artboard tool, all you have to do is switch to a different tool in order to use it or you can just press the Escape key to switch away from the artboard editing mode which returns control to the black arrow tool. And that's how you use the dedicated Artboard tool in order to move artboards along with or independently of their contents here inside Illustrator.

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