Blog Post 31 - Stage 2 - Adobe Illustrator - New File

New Document Options

After a brief introduction to that of Adobe Illustrator it was important to get to grips with this new piece of software and understand how the different functions work so that when I came to creating my On Disc label I would be very familiar with how it worked and so that a very professional end result was produced. I found found out, there are quite a few similarities between that of Illustrator and also Photoshop such as the different tools that are on offer, however there are also differences as were expected in regards to the difference between a bitmap and a vector editing piece of software.

To begin with, it is important to ensure that I was fully aware of how to create new file to work from in Illustrator, and in this case a New File is named as a New Artboard which is where you can create your design. Once the program has opened up, navigating to File -> New... will produce the following screen of information. Within this pop up screen this means that in a similar fashion to that of Photoshop, I have got a lot of options in regards to the set up of a New Document or Artboard that I will be working with. To start with, an adequate name can be given to the file and then you can create a custom profile or select from presets. The pre sets include such options as for Print, Web and Flash Builder, however in my case sticking to Custom is the order of the day. With this in mind, the Size can also be chosen (such as 640 x 480 pixels), or a custom size such as 1000 Pixels sqaure can be used. Unlike Photoshop, there is also an option for a Bleed Area to be selected and used which could be particularly useful if you was looking at printing a piece of work. 

Sample New Document Artboard

Finally, in the Advanced Options you can change the Colour Modes (between RGB and CMYK depending on your end application), and Raster effects for DPI, such as 75 DPI or 300DPI once again depending on your end application. As an example, here is a file created with a Width and Height of 1000 pixels and a bleed area of 10 pixels.

Having now looked into creating a New File within Illustrator, now I can look into the different tools that can be used within the program, starting with the Shape Tools.