Adobe Illustrator Quick Start Guide Illustrator allows you to draw, create and manipulate graphics. 1) Opening Illustrator and starting a new document 2) Navigating around Illustrator 3) Inserting text 4) Inserting images 5) Saving your document 1) Opening Illustrator and starting a new document When you open Illustrator, you will begin with a blank workspace. To begin a new project you have the option of opening an existing document or creating a new document. To create a new document, select File and New. Then name your file and use the default settings or change them depending on your project and preferences.
Illustrator also provides a variety of templates such as business cards, brochures and labels. To access these templates chose File and New from Template. To expand the folders to see all the template options, click the arrow to the right of the folder.
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Navigating around Illustrator
Tools panel
Control Panel
Panels
Artboard
The Artboard is where you will create your project; it is designated by the black lines that form a rectangle in the document window. The gray space outside your artboard can be used as “scratch paper” you can add things to this area you might want to use, or try out different tools and effects without changing your actual project. The Tools panel contains drawing and other related tools such as shapes, lines, and rectangles to create and manipulate graphics. You can fill shapes and text with color and patterns. When you select a tool, additional options appear on the Control panel. Many tools have additional popup tools, which are tools that appear only when you click and hold (or right-click) the mouse on the default tool. Panels provide easy access to many task-specific commands like color control and brush size. To open or close a panel click Window, and click a panel name. A panel name with a check mark indicates the panel is open. An open panel can be repositioned on the screen by clicking and dragging it to the desired location.
3) Inserting text To type text in your document, select the text tool in the toolbar. Click a blank area of the artboard and a flashing insertion point will appear. Type your text. Press return to start a new line. You can click the small arrow in the bottom right corner for more text tool options.
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4) Inserting Images To insert an image, first go to the File menu at the top of the page and choose Place. Navigate to the location of the image you want to place into your document and select it. Click Place.
You can move the image once it has been placed by clicking and dragging it. To resize an image, drag from the corner of the image towards the center of the image to make it smaller, and away from the center to make it bigger. This can sometimes result in a distortion of the height-to-width ratio of the picture; to resize and keep the ratio the same, hold down the Shift key while dragging.
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5) Saving your document To save your document as an Illustrator document (with a file extension of .ai), go to the File menu and choose Save. However, if you save to this format, you will have to come back to the library or use another computer with Illustrator CS5 or later if you want to edit it. You can also save your document as a PDF (Portable Document Format), which will make a perfect copy of your document that you can read or print from any computer. To save as a PDF chose this option in the drop down box under File and Save As.
If you want to save you artwork in another file format other than the five listed above, you’ll need to export it. Illustrator allows you to export your artwork in 13 different file formats including Flash, Photoshop, Bitmap, JPEG and PNG. To Export a document, click the File menu, and then click Export. Here you’ll be able to choose from a wide variety of export file formats.
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