From the course: Illustrator 2021 Essential Training

Working with groups - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2021 Essential Training

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Working with groups

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- [Instructor] Organizing our content into groups makes it easier to work with, and is much more efficient than just having lots of single items. Making groups is really, really simple. So let's go ahead and make some, so we can have a look at how they work. What I'm going to do is bring this window, actually called a portal, I think, here on the boats. And I'm going to just grab those two things together and group them. I'm then going to bring the roof down here, as well. But I'm not entirely sure whether I'm going to have this pointing that way, or that way. So I think I'm going to go with this at the moment, and then group those two things together. Then I've got this part of the boat, which I believe is called a gunwale, just there. So I'm going to bring that in, nudge that into place, select that and the hull of the boat, and group those together. And then I've got the mast here and the sail. I'm just going to bring those closer together. Okay, then select them and group them also. Now, you can tell when you're working with a group, because if you have it selected and you have the control strip at the top, you'll see on the left-hand side, it says group. And you can also see that at the top of the Properties panel, and additionally, inside of the layers. If I go into the layer here, I can see I've got all three groups there. So now I'm going to bring these in, like so. I'll bring the mast down to about this point here, and just nudge that into place. I'm then going to right click and send that to the back. And then I'll bring the front here down, like so. And again, that needs to go to the back or backwards, either of those will work. And then I can select all of those and group those together. And now I've got a nice group that I can move around, and if I need to. There we go, make it sail for a minute. And if I need to, I can transform that, as well, as a single unit. So I'll click here in the rotation field at the top, and let's make that, there we go, make it rock live for you right now (laughing). Let's make it so that it's steaming in there, even though it's a sailboat. It's moving at quite a rate there to come in, and that's it. Groups are really easy to work with.

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