Adobe Illustrator CC – How to Set Up a New Document │Ep. 2

Transcript:

Since we now understand how the Adobe Illustrator user interface works, we can begin working on creating a new document.

So now, we are going to go to the “File” menu and click “New.”

The “New Document” dialog box will pop up

Now I am going to give you a brief overview of how each feature of a document works.

On the very top, you can name your document.

You can name it anything. I am going to call mine “project_one.”

In the “Profile” drop-down menu, you can select the type of document you want to create.

For example, if want to create website mock-up template, choose “Web.”

On the other hand if you want to create something like a business card, choose “Print.”

After selecting the kind of document profile you are going to work on, you can select the amount of artboards you need.

As mentioned in the previous video, artboards are basically different pages of a document.

This is great if you want to create multiple versions of a particular design or artwork.

If you are not sure of how many artboards you need, don’t worry about it, because you can always change the number artboards later if you need more.

Next, you can set the size and units of your document.

Now the size, is this white canvas area on the center of the screen.

The default size of a document depends on the profile you are on.

For example, if you choose the “Print” profile, you will notice that you now have options to choose between “Letter,” “A4,” “Legal,” and so on.

Notice how the dimensions change when I choose a different size.

Just to the right of that, you can change the units to whatever you are comfortable with such as points, picas, millimeters, centimeters, inches or pixels.

Under the units, you can change the orientation to portrait or landscape.

Portrait for longer height and shorter width. Landscape for longer width and shorter height.

Under of all of that you can set the bleed sttings.
This is especially important for commercial print.

By default, you can increase the bleed size of all sides at the same time.

If you don’t want to, you can click this chain icon to unlink them. When you do so, you can make the size for each side different.

At the very bottom is the advanced section.

The first thing you can change is the color mode to RGB or CMYK.

Here is golden rule: if you are working on a document for print, choose CMYK.

If you are working on a document for Web or to display on screen, choose RGB.

For raster effects, it is best keep this high for print. If you working on Web, leaving it on 72 ppi is fine.

As of right now, you can keep the preview mode on default.

At the bottom of all of this, you can choose to align pixel grid.

This helps you to be more exact, so that you don’t have anything between individual pixels.

This is not something you should worry about right now, so you can leave this unchecked.

When you are done with everything, click “OK” to create your new document.

As I said, you can always go back and change these settings, by clicking “Document Setup” on top.

Now, take a look at the tabs on top.

As you can see, it gives me information about the color mode that I am on.

This is very important, because you don’t want to be on CMYK when you really needed to be on RGB.

Another thing to pay attention to are the rulers. The way the rulers are displayed depends on how you had set the units.

For example, because I set the units to pixels in this document, the rulers will show pixel units.

Alright! So now, you have a pretty good idea of how you can create a document on Adobe Illustrator

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And thanks for watching!

Duration: 00:04:33

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