Subtitles of the Movie

For the most part, the entire Adobe Illustrator workspace is divided between panels and menus. You'll find menus in various locations based on where you are in the application. And what I mean by that is not only do we have our standard, main menu bar, where you can access many functions, but you'll also find menus all over the place based on where you click. So let's say I grab my swatches and I click on it. Well, in the upper, right-hand corner I can click on a pop-up menu and I can access functionalities that are associated with that particular panel. Likewise, if I grab something else, let's go grab the colors, we see that we have different options in its menu. What we can also do is right click anywhere and open up what's known as a contextual menu and this will change based on what you have selected. So if I draw some artwork and I give it a color and I right click on it, as you can see it now says Undo Color, I can zoom in and zoom out and I can select things and when I click over here, we see the menu is the same but if I go ahead and overlap things, like so, and I right click, you see what happens now? A whole different set of instructions such as Group, Join, Average that we did not see when we clicked over here. So the contextual menu is aware of where you are at all times and what you're right clicking on. Let's hop over to the Main Menu very quickly and I just want to emphasize to you that if you are going to make Illustrator a major part of your workflow, as in your main application or your secondary application, you might want to take some time to get familiar with the keyboard shortcuts. This will help you to alleviate going to the menu for simple operations such as printing, which you'll find by going to Command or Control P based on whether you're on a Windows or a Macintosh platform. So just spend some time in these menus and where available you'll see the shortcut and just try to master that. Commonly used ones are things like Select All. So you'll press Command or Control A or things like Grouping and Ungrouping. So the Main Menu is going to have our Preferences. If you're on a Macintosh you'll find the Preferences under the Illustrator Menu. If you're on a PC you'll find it under the Edit Menu. So what kind of things can you do up here anyway? Well, the File Menu allows you to create new documents, to open documents, to close them, to save them, to print them and to find out about the document itself by going to Document Setup. Edit allows you to cut, copy, paste, define things, check your spelling, edit the dictionary and do all kind of other things as well. The Object Menu allows you to transform objects, arrange them, group and ungroup them, lock, hide and show and quite a few other options as well. Type of course deals with any kind of typography you want to work with. So you can choose a font, the size and other things. Select of course does exactly what it does; select things, deselect things and inverse, which simply means to choose what you don't have currently selected instead of what you have selected. Effects you'll find Illustrator Effects and Photoshop Effects and we'll talk about how these work later on. The View Menu allows you to look at your artwork in outline mode, which just lets you see the paths that create the artwork and, of course, the center point so you can easily align things. So I can put this X on top of this X and try to match that up. We can also go to Preview Mode and see the colors. We can also zoom in, zoom out. You can show slices, lock slices and hide and show your rules, for example. The Window Menu is where you're going to go whenever you accidentally put away a panel or you lose one by mistake. For example, Let's say I get rid of my color so I want to go ahead and click on this guy here and it's gone. I can get it back by going to Window, Color.