Understanding Illustrator's Artboard Functions

Matt Hobbs
Sep 17, 2015
2 min read

Adobe programs are formulized to work succiently with each other, and Illustrator's Artboard Tool displays this characteristic. In Adobe Illustrator you create multiple pages within the same document like inside In Design, although your purpose might be for logo or portfolio purposes rather than books or magazines, it has the same effect. It's also very useful for illustration projects. Here is facts about the Artboard Tool.

Creating An Artboard

Like within In Design, Illustrator allows you create multiple pages within a single document. It saves disk space, is good for art comparison and can create portfolios. After selecting the Artboard tool (Shift + O is the shortcut), click on an empty space and drag.

Equal Size Artboards

What if you want the artwork boards to be the same size? To do this, make sure you have the "Artboard Tool" selected and then hit "New Artboard" on the settings panel. You can then click anywhere on the empty space and it will create an artboard of equal size to the original.

Naming Artboards

This doesn't seem like a big deal but naming your artboards will save a whole bunch of trouble later, when it comes to exporting your pages. Make sure you have your desired artboard selected with the "Artboard Tool" and type a logical name or number in the name panel.

Artboard Settings

You would like to alter a single artboard as oppose to the whole document. Head over to "Artboard Options". You can change a lot here, including size and orientation.

Removing Artboards

This is pretty straightfoward but worth knowing. There might be a time when you want to delete an artboard. There are two methods: 1) Clicking on the "Delete Artboard" function or 2) Hitting the Backspace on the keyboard.

Guidelines

Along with the red outline - which will be there if you turned on bleed at the beginning - you can have other guidelines to help you. These include a Centre point, Cross Hairs and a Show Video Safe Areas guide. Turn them on and off on the settings panel.

Presets

A magical trick in the Artboard Tool panel is the Presets. In here, you can set canvases to very specific sizes to cater for purposes, without having to find out the measurements yourself. Examples include: Widescreen and HDTVs, tablet sizes and smartphone applications.

Exporting as PDF

Like inside In Design, Illustrator allows you to save numerous pages on one document. To decide which pages, you'd like in the PDF portfolio, you can either set to save "All" or a "Range" of your choice. Each artboard will have it's name on the canvas.