How to Organize Artwork With Layers and Artboards in Adobe Illustrator

1.2 How to Organize Artwork With Layers and Artboards in Adobe Illustrator

[MUSIC] Hi there. My name is Sue Mona and you are watching a Coffee Break course here on the [INAUDIBLE] test plus. In this Coffee Break course we will explore layers in artboards in Adobe Illustrator CC. So let's have a look. I created an example for us about a stationery. First let's talk about layers and artboards. What is an artboard? Let me zoom out. Here you see a white board so to speak. This is the artboard. And the rounded, if I zoom out even more you can see a gray area and this gray area here in Adobe Illustrator is called Canvas. Now if I zoom out even more this is the full size of your canvas and the wihite part here is your artboard. You can place anything around on this canvas here. So imagine you doing a lot of designs, you have tons of elements and you're running out of space you can zoom out and place it around on your canvas. And as you can see I'm zoomed out to 3%. So imagine how much space you actually have to create your designs and elements here in Illustrator. Now let me zoom back in and now we see our artboard again here on the bottom of our panels we have the layers. And underneath we have the artboards. The same way we can find over here, the artboard tool. And if I click on the layers, we'll get the flyout. They're group together here, so right next to my layers I have my artboards. As you can see, I have one layer here. I have several elements, I have some texts and I have some design elements some objects and they're all on one layer. If you create something new. Let me show you for example, if I make a copy here. It's always created on the same layer that you're on. Unless you otherwise specify that you would like to have it on a new layer. Now let me show you how you can easily create a new layer with this particular element. So I selected, on the bottom here you can see Create New Layer. I'll click it then it created a new layer for me called layer number two. But you can see here that my element is still on layer number one. How I can tell that, it is highlighted here with a red square. Now all I have to do is actually select the square and move it into the new layer number two. You can see that now we have the square here. If I let go of it, I move this copy onto a new layer. Just to prove that I did this, let me hide it and let me turn it back on. Of course every single time I create a new layer it will call it layer, number two number three number four and so forth. Sometimes it's really a good idea to get organized right from the start so how can we change the name of a layer easy. We just double click it and then we can type in here the name of the there that we want. Or we can simply, instead of double clicking on the text, double clicking on the site and then we'll get a pop up. It's the layer options panel. Here again we can change the name, we can also change the color from red into something else. Now what does that mean? If you quickly go back to the Layers panel you can see here on the side. We have the color red. Now if I create a specific there that I'm going to give a specific name. I can also give it a specific color. So let's change this into green. Now if I just ignore all of the other things here and click OK, you can see now that my layer has this green stripe on the side. Now this is about layers. And here we have the outputs. As you can see here, we have one output and on the bottom, we have a button called new output. So if I click this, I have a new output and it created the same size of the original output next to it. But I don't want to go into that right now. Let's just get organized first with our layers. So back to the layers, and I'm going to delete the layer that I've created. And let's zoom in to explore what elements we have here. Again, this is an example for stationary design. So the elements are pretty simple. I have some color happening, I have some shapes. And I have text, of course I could group things by Logo text and art. So let's do that so for example this part here is the logo. So I'm going to select it. I'm creating a new layer. I'm dragging it on to this layer I'll double click the layer. I call that logo, change the color into green or any other color you like and I click OK. Now of course I have another logo here on the site much smaller. So all I have to do is select the logo elements. I see my little square here that indicates that I have the art selected. Then I will just simply drag it on to my logo layer. And you can see my square now changed from red into green. Next we want to select the text. I have only a few lines here. And again we can select all of the text at once, it is still on the layer number one I'm going to create a new layer and then I'm going drag it on to this one double click it. Call the text, change the color. Into, let's say, orange. And then I click okay. Now, my first layer only has this art left. So I can actually just double click it, and then call it art. And change the color from red, let's say, into dark blue. And then I click OK. Now we've already organized our art. Now let me show you how we can actually create our artboards. First let's explore the artboard tool. So if I select the artboard tool and I zoom out you can see that it highlighted the one artboard I have here in my canvas. I can't delete this artboard even if I tried. I'm going to hit the Delete button on my keyboard, nothing happens if I move over to the artboards, I cannot select the Delete button either. You always need one artboard with your art on your canvas. But I can resize it. As you can see here I have my bounding box and I can resize it. I can make it this small, I can move it around. I can just move it behind one element or totally away from the elements and on top of here, I see the name and I can actually give it a name. So first we want to have actually an artboard that is letter size. As you can see here we actually have buttons for landscape and portrait, and we have presets. Now let's select one of the presets here, and as you can see we already have a letter size. Now if I select a letter size from the dropdown, it will resize it into letter size. And as you can see it is landscape. Now instead of having to rotate something or change the values here on the right side where you can see the height and the width, we can just pick the Portrait button. And now I can actually move it just behind our element here for the stationery. If I select this button and now I create a copy of the artboard by pressing the ALT or Option key, it will move all of the artwork with it. I don't want this, so I'm going to make sure this button is not selected and then create a copy and move it next to our first artboard. And of course I can give it a name, in this case I'm going to call it Letterhead and the second one I'm going to call Letterhead back. And now I can move my elements into place. Now if I move over, you can see that we now need a business card. Now again we can go and select the artboard tool and see if you already have a business card in place. And if we don't we can just drag a size onto the canvas, approximately the size of what we think is a business card. Now we've created an artboard but it's not the right size. So we're going to go to the values of the width and the height. And there we're going to set 3.5 inches for the width and 2 inches for the height. And now we have our business card. And then I can move it into place. And again since I know I need another one for the back, actually, it's 2.5 inches here, I can just grab it and make a copy onto the bottom. Now I have my output. Altogether right now I have four outputs, you can see this here, and two have a name and the other ones are just randomly added. Now here if I double click on the art boar,d see what happened? It zooms into the artboard and you can see exactly what's happening. And again I can rename it. I called it Business Card and the other one I called Business Card Back. Now if zoom out we have created four artboards for the stationery design. And we can see them here in the artboard panel. And at the same time I could even reorder them. In the fly out here I want to show you one last thing. We can rearrange the artboards. We're gaining a pop up window and here we can actually choose how many columns we would like to have. Since I have four artboards, I can have them in two columns. I can choose from the layout on top of here, grid by row grid by column and so forth. And the spacing in between. And of course we want to check Move artwork with artboard. If not your art stays where it is but your artboards will be rearranged. So let's click OK, and now let's zoom out. And now you can see that you're pretty organized here with layers and artboards. Again, we have four artboards, and you can easily change them, move them around either with the artboard tool or you can actually add new artboards. We had the button here, the new artboard button, and of course, when we have a look at our layers we're pretty organized here too. We have the art on one layer, we have the text on another layer, and we have theo logo on its own layer and this is pretty much it with layers and artboards. We don't often think of the layers and the artboard, but they can really help us speed things up and keep us organized, especially when you have to present something and then you have to make lots of changes.