Subtitles of the Movie

The document window is where you'll be performing your designing and illustration tasks in Adobe Illustrator CS3, and this area in the middle of the screen is pretty much it. But there's a lot more to this document window, and understanding how it works can really help you to get more enjoyment out of Illustrator. Now I have taught Illustrator in New Jersey, and I've also discovered a strange propensity by some of my students to try to draw everything exactly where it belongs in the document. And they tend to forget that this is a computer. And in Illustrator you don't have to draw everything on the exact location. Instead, you can put it on the side. I'm going to zoom out, and all I did was press Command or Control and the zero key on my keyboard to zoom all the way out. You'll notice we have all this area here. This is your paste board. You can design all over the place in Illustrator, and then when you're ready to place your elements, you simply click and drag it where it belongs. It's pretty simple actually. And I had this thought in my class several, several times and say what are you doing? They would take the tool and draw everything right where it belonged. I was like, That's not how you do it. You draw it somewhere else and then you compose it, and then you group it if you need to, and then place it where you want it to go. Now that we've talked about that, a way that I like to work, let's talk about some of the other elements in the document window. We have the scroll bars, which of course allows you to move around in your document. But as you see it moves pretty fast. I tend to hold down the space bar instead and click and drag to move my document around. I can also zoom with my document properties here in this little arrow on the bottom left hand corner. And you can see I can zoom in as high at 6400 percent, which is pretty astronomical. Let's go ahead and do that now. So right now we're pretty much as far into the logo as we can get. And of course this high in, I really can't do too much work. I can also choose to fit on screen, and I can zoom all the way out to 3.13 percent, and this is what the document looks like from the moon. So I'm going to go to the fit on screen option, and I'm also going to hold down the command or control key, and hit the plus key on my keyboard to incrementally zoom in, or hitting the command or control key on my keyboard and hitting the negative key to zoom out. And once again, I'll hit the space bar to reposition manually my document. I can also use this arrow here down here to show different elements in my status bar on the bottom. So I can look at the current tool, the date and time. I can also look at the number of undos. And I can also reveal and bridge if I want to, or see a document color profile. So the document window in Adobe Illustrator is where you're going to perform your tasks of design and illustration. And once again I highly recommend that you get into the habit of drawing your elements wherever you have space so you can focus on that, and then move it aside and do something else, and then when you're ready to compose everything, drag everything into position. And also take advantage of layers which I will discuss in depth in upcoming lessons.