From the course: Illustrator 2023 Essential Training

The Illustrator workspace - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2023 Essential Training

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The Illustrator workspace

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- [Instructor] If you've just worked through the quick-start exercise at the end of the introduction, then you can stay exactly as you are. But if you're opening Illustrator at this point, you will probably be greeted with a welcome screen like this. What we're going to do is just quickly create a new document. The type shouldn't matter too much. So if we go to the File menu and choose New from there, you could go to something like web and choose Common Just double click on any one of those presets to get where we are now. What we're going to do here is we're going to have a very quick tour of the interface because we'll be seeing more of it, of course, as we work through this particular course. So at the very top here, we will have the top-level menu system that will be in a bar on Windows. And the very first place I'd like you to go in the menu system is to the Window menu and come down to Workspace. And if it isn't chosen already, choose Essentials Classic and if it is chosen, just in case you're working on a machine that is shared with other people, choose Reset Essentials Classic and then the interface will look very very similar for both of us. Okay, so, at the very top then, we have the top level menu system. Underneath that, we have an options bar or control strip as its proper name is in Illustrator. So that will change depending on what is selected. On the right hand side, we have an arrangement of panels. Now some of mine here are iconised. If I just click here at the one at the very top for the color panel, you can see that this relates to all things color. Now, on occasion you will find panels that have a small icon just to the left of their name. You can click on that and it will expand the panel. Sometimes there are a couple of panels that will do this twice. They'll go to one state and then another, clicking on them will not hurt at all. The other thing you'll need to know right at the outset about any panel, is that it will have this small icon. It's like three horizontal lines on the top right of the panel, and that's called the panel flyout. We'll be visiting that throughout the course in various different places. So we have this very big properties panel here. There's another panel underneath it and all panels live inside of the Window menu. Okay, so that's where we can find those. At the bottom of the window, just here, we have this information bar. So we have some things like the current level of magnification, the art board rotation, and the currently selected tool, although that can change from time to time. And then most importantly, on the left-hand side, we have the toolbox, and this is where we pick up all of our various tools. Now, don't be intimidated by it, it does look like there are a lot of tools there, and there are, of course, but I'll be guiding you through the majority of those or the essential ones you need to know in this course. And quite often I'll ask you to press a certain key. So if you did the previous exercise the quick-start exercise, I would've asked you to tap "L" which gets you the ellipse tool. And you can see how that highlights inside of the toolbox. Sometimes there isn't a key that you can press, so I will tell you to press a key to get you started, such as "L", and then I'll ask you to long press on that tool in the toolbox to access the other tools that are nested with it. You can always tell if there's a nest of tools because the icon has a small triangle in the bottom right hand corner. Okay, so at this particular level, that is all you need to know about the interface. You know that you have a control strip, or options bar if you like, at the top of the screen there. We also have panels on the right-hand side and we have a toolbox on the left-hand side and an information area towards the bottom of the document window. And we'll also often frequently go up to the top level menu system. And that's it. So in the next movie, we'll open an actual document and then we can look at how we navigate around inside of a file.

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