Moving and modifying artboards in Illustrator CS6

In this movie, I will show you how to modify a document by moving its artboards to different locations. Illustrator CS6 Tutorial Video This works a little differently inside Illustrator than it does inside other programs. Quite a bit differently than you would reasonably think as well but once you come to terms with it makes a fair amount of sense. Working inside of a document called 8-page newsletter.ai, it's found inside the O2artboards folder. Notice if you go up here to the File menu, you have a Document Setup Command, that allows

>Moving and modifying artboards in Illustrator CS6

 you to modify the existing document. The keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+Alt+P, or Command+Opt +P on the Mac, I will go and choose the command. Notice that we have a whole slew of options that we did not see in the new Document Dialog Box, and we're missing a lot of those options as well, we have no control over page size. The only options that we have that are the same these Bleed values, and the option to change the unit of measure. We do have this button right here called Edit Artboards, and you can either click on it,

Illustrator CS6 Tutorial Video which will take you to the Edit Artboard mode or going Cancel out of this dialog box. You also have the option of selecting the Artboard tool, so you have to switch tools in order to edit the Artboards, and this tool has a keyboard shortcut of Shift+O. I'm going to go ahead and click on it in order to switch to the Artboard mode. And notice now that the active Artboard is highlighted, and I can drag it to a different location to move it, and this area back here on which the Artboards rest, this area of gray is known as the Pasteboard, or you sometimes see it called the Canvas as well inside of Illustrator. I prefer Pasteboard, however, because you can move objects into the Pasteboard if you want to get them off the printed pages just to keep them around for later. Notice up here in the Options bar, we have this icon that says Move/Copy Artwork with Artboard, and by default it's turned on.

Illustrator CS6 Tutorial Video So that means if I drag this Artboard with a 1 in it, the one moves along as well, and now that if I put Artboards in this location, it thinks that the 2, 5 & 6 are part of the gang, and I would move them along with. Now I have got the 3 & 7 involved and ultimately I could get all the numbers on to this one Artboards if I like.Illustrator CS6 Tutorial VideoOf course, there's no reason to do that I've made a mess of this document, which is why it's fortunate that Illustrator not only provides an Undo command but it also provides you with multiple Undo's. And you perform the Undo's either by choosing this first command from the Edit menu or by pressing Ctrl+Z on the PC, or Command+Z on the Mac.

 And I'll just keep pressing that keyboard shortcut until I get my pages back to where they were. Another option for restoring the appearance of your Artwork is to go up to the File menu and choose the Revert command. Now my case revert is dimmed and that's because I went ahead and undid everything that I've done since opening the document. So, go ahead and redo the last operations by going up to the Edit menu and either choosing the Redo command, or you can press Ctrl +Shift+C, or Cmd+Shift+C on the Mac. And again, we've got multiple redo's as well.

So if I press Ctrl+Shift+C, or Cmd+Shift+C, again, then I go ahead and remove the 1, 2, 5, & 6. Now let's say I want to get back to the original version of this Artwork. Go up to the File menu and choose the Revert command, or you have a keyboard shortcut of F12. When I choose this command I get a warning that tells me hey, you're about to lose everything you've done that you didn't save associate with this document. And this is not an undoable operation. So, it's something of a defcon if you really messed things up. This is a command to take care of things, and then you click on the Revert button everything goes back to the way was you notice up here in the Edit menu, the Undo command is dimmed because as I say reverting is not undoable, so take care with that one. Now let's say you want to move in Artboard but you don't want move the contents of that Artboard. You want to everything stay where it is.

Then you go to the Options bar and turn off Move/Copy Artwork with Artboard, and then you drag the Artboard any where you like and notice that the contents of that Artboard never move along with it.Illustrator CS6 Tutorial Video That's how you move in Artboard either with or without the Artwork. Just remember, anytime you want to change your Artboards, whether you're moving them or changing their size as we'll see in the next exercise. You want to go ahead and switch over to the Artboard tool which you can get by pressing Shift+O. To leave the Artboard mode, you either switch to any other tool here inside the toolbox, or you just press the Escape key, which will take you back to your last used tool which in my case is the Black arrow.Illustrator CS6 Tutorial Video