Illustrator - UI & Web Design using Adobe Illustrator

Getting your workspace & Illustrator preferences ready for UI work

Daniel Walter Scott || VIDEO: 1 of 45

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In this course, what we're going to do is look at setting up our Illustrator for working with web and app design. There's couple of things we need to change, because at the moment, by default, when you install it, and when you're using it, it's kind of assuming you're dealing with print based stuff, so it's using physical measurements like mm, cm, or inches, so we need to go off and change a few things.

The first thing we're going to do is-- Let's open up a new document, let's go to 'File', 'New'. There's a lot along the top here, we'll go to 'web' and we're going to start with 'Common', and just click 'Create'. What's going to happen is, it's going to default so there are a few things we need to change. To do it, we go to 'Illustrator CC', 'Preferences', and we're going to 'Units' first. If you're on a PC, it's under 'Edit', "Preferences', so it's 'Edit', and all the way down the bottom here, it will say 'Preferences', and we're going to go to 'Units'. So the first thing to change is 'General'; yours is probably going to be set to inches if you're in America, and if you're anywhere that doesn't use inches it's going to be set to mm, or cms. We need to change it to 'Pixels', that is the measurement we use when we're dealing with UI design, so pick 'Pixels'. Same with the stroke, it deals with points traditionally, but we need to deal with pixels, and same with the 'Type'.  The fonts are designed to use pixel sizes rather than-- but they aren't far off. Pixels and points aren't that far off in terms of measurements, but use pixels. Let's click 'Ok'.

The other thing we need to do is get our document set up the same in terms of our workspace. You can see here, mine's all kind of mixed up because I've been messing around with it. What you need to do is, go along the top here, go to 'Window', 'Workspace', and yours is probably set to 'Essentials', so it looks something like that, but we're going to go to 'Window', 'Workspace', and let's set it up to 'Web', unsurprisingly. And you can see, if yours is still mixed up like mine, what we can do is we can go back to 'Web', it does say 'Web' but we're going to say 'Reset Web'. What it does is it kind of resets. It's kind of a web space, this thing always pops up, it's kind of annoying, go away. So that's the interface to make sure yours looks like mine, so we can move on.