In this lesson you'll learn about panels and workspaces. So I'm not going to
over complicate this. Basically this is pretty similar to InDesign and Photoshop.
If you're familiar with either of those, you'll will be familiar with how panels work,
but just in case you're not, this is just the basics and of course the customization
of these panels and workspaces are a little bit different than the other programs.
So if your workspace looks like this, if you just go to File, New or you
open one of the support files and things that I drew a while ago, like this chad.ai
or streetlights.ai . You'll see over on the right there are a few
panels that are collapsed and over on the left we have a Tools panel and at
the top we have a Control panel. If it doesn't look like this, this is when we
want to just set it to a workspace. So workspaces can be customized depending
on what you're doing in Illustrator.
In the upper right-hand corner where it says Essentials, or close to the corner,
just click that and just select Essentials. If it doesn't, reset it. Just
go to Reset Essentials and it will reset to the default and it should look something like this.
If you were working say, in Layout or more in Painting, you could select that.
So if I select Painting, it then has a customized workspace where there are
certain collapsed panels here and then certain expanded panels here. Same thing
if we go to Tracing or if we go to Typography or Web and so on.
So I'm going to go back to Essentials and then you'll see nothing is expanded by
default. If you don't ever see the Tools panel or the Control panel appear, you
can go to Window and then Control, make sure it's checked or you go to Tools and
then Default. You can also create customized tools panels in illustrator
and this is also sort of the master list of all the possible panels to open.
So only certain ones... are represented over here on the right.
On the Tools panel you'll see it's docked by default to the left. You can click and drag that
off the edge if you want. If you want to dock it back over there. Just click and
drag it over until you see sort of a blue line there, then like dock it. You can
also click in the upper left-hand corner, that double sided arrow and that will
collapse it to one column and that gives you a little bit more space to work with.
Or you can you click it again and you can have two columns. Up in the control panel, you have
a couple of options that we're going to go over in later lessons. Basically Fill, Stroke,
different stylizings of the stroke or border. You also have shortcuts to
Documents, Setup and Preferences and now over on the right, by default, all of
these at least in the Essentials workspace, they're all collapsed.
So you can click and drag the edge of it over and then it makes it a little bit larger where
You can see the names. You can customize these groupings. Like if you wanted
swatches up in the color, you can click and drag it up like so. You can also click
this upper right hand corner, expand panels, a double-sided arrow and that
will expand all the panels and whatever grouping of panels there were, now they're grouped
in tabs. You have to click on the tab to see each one. You can click that again and it
will collapse it down to the groups, just their names. You can also click and
drag groups of these off the edge and so they're floating out here. You can expand
them out and you can also click, let's say click and drag the color down here and
then you can put that back up in there.
So you can group these. So let's just say we wanted symbols out here,
maybe symbols grouped with this one out in the floating panel, and you can
collapse and expand them here with that arrow. Let's just say you had a custom
setup. Let's just say you had libraries out here and you had some color guide swatches
over here and let's just say gradient over here and you like your setup. You
don't have to keep doing that every time you open up an Illustrator file. What you
can do is up on Essentials, you can go to New Workspace and then name it and then
from then on it will be available up here as an option for a workspace.
You can also right-click or control-click on the MAC and there's a couple of options
like minimizing, closing the tab group collapse into icons and so on.
so that's the basics of panels and workspaces in Illustrator. We'll be going more in detail
with a lot of these tools using the Fill and the Stroke options,
selecting colors and using a lot of these effects in the various panels
throughout this course.