In this lesson you'll learn about creating new documents in Illustrator and things
to consider during the process. So go ahead and open up Illustrator if it's not open already.
Go to file, New and you'll see we got some options here. We can go ahead and
give it a name if we wanted and then down at the bottom, there are some defaults so it
might say Print. If not go ahead and select that. Make sure it says Print and
then you'll see that we have Letter size, there's Legal, Tabloid, A4. There are a bunch of different
preset sizes, but there's also the option to do customized sizes right here.
Points is the default. You can also do Picas or Inches if you have a specific size
that you know that you're trying to create. If you need a bleed, that would be in a
print context so if you're going to send this to a printer, ask them what kind of bleed
that you need to add. If it's in a visual context, then we don't need a bleed.
And you'll notice then that we selected Print down here. It has C,M,Y,K short
for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key or Black and that is the default color mode
for printing. Some printers will work with RGB but the default is CMYK and of
course we have a higher resolution because we're going to send it to print.
Then we get 300 pixels per inch. Some printers are fine with 150 but 300 is preferred.
We wouldn't want to do 72 pixels per inch if we were sending it to print..
We're printing it at pretty large size, and the orientation here is Portrait where the
width is lower than the height. If you wanted to flip that, you can just click that
for Landscape orientation and that will flip these two values. We'll cover in a
different lesson creating multiple artboards, so for this example, we'll just have one.
So we go ahead and click OK, then it creates our document. If you go back to that and go to
File, New. Instead of Print, try out Web. What can be useful for this is if you're creating
something for a web page, it automatically goes to 960 pixels width which is pretty
common. Now you might be designing for something else or a wider web page and if
so you could customize it but it does use pixels as the unit of measurement here
which makes sense because, if you're designing for the screen, then we want to
use pixels. We don't need a bleed when we're designing for the screen and then
notice down here, RGB. That's the default color mode for designing for
the screens or Red, Green, Blue. That's correct and then 72 pixels per inch
is fine for the internet for screen graphics and then Align New Objects to Pixel Grid.
What that means is if you have an object, it's going to align perfectly
with a pixel grid so it's not slightly off or it kind of has a blurred edge.
If you go up to the top again, instead of web, try Devices. It's got a couple of presets here
so there's iPads, iPhone, Nexus, Galaxy and so on and it's going to each have its
own width and height if you're'creating a graphic for one of these devices.
And of course RGB screen 72 pixels per inch for those and there's also video and film.
So depending on what you're designing for, it's going to vary for size
and also pixels per inch in color mode. One other option is, if you go to File, New,
New from Template, there are a bunch of templates here that you can use like
Banner Ads, Boxes, Brochure. I'm not saying you need to use Illustrator
instead of InDesign for a brochure for example, but you can create some
graphics in here or even banner ads if you wanted to just do an illustration
based banner ad and you were'nt going to use Photoshop to add any effects or
you were going to maybe use Photoshop later. You could export it and import it
into Photoshop or open it up in Photoshop. But this is pretty neat because it's a
template and it just has a bunch of different industry standard size banner
ad sizes so explore that as well, New from Template. There's a bunch of
different ones. You can also download ones online. Say you're creating a t-shirt
design, you can do that as well, so depending on what product or design you're making,
there are a bunch of templates in here that you can use like a CD case for example.
So that's creating new documents and also new templates in Illustrator.
I will see you in the next lesson.