I was helping out a friend who is almost completely new to design, and discovered that there is very few tutorials explaining the very basics of Illustrator and how to use the tools. The variety of panels and menus can be quite confusing to a beginner and there is very few guides out there to ease a new user to the program. If you’ve not had any training it can be a struggle to teach yourself in the beginning, so here is a simple beginners guide to using Illustrator that I wrote for my friend.

The basic anatomy

The workspace

1. Artboard – This is the main page area that you are drawing on
2. Tool bar – Where all your main creation and editing tools are. This is shown in front of the artboard as a floating panel or attached to the side of the artboard
3. Panels – Where you control and change your shapes. These can be shown attached to the side of the artboard with icons to denote the panel, or they can sit over the artboard.
4. Top menu – This is the usual type of top menu that includes ‘File’, ‘Edit’ etc. This is where you’ll find all tools and options in the menu list format

Tool Bar

Panels

The tool bar

This bar contains the main tools you’ll use.  If you can’t see the tool bar on the artboard then use the top menu to find it.

Window > Tools

There are a few different types of tools in the tool menu, so here is a quick run down of them.

Selection

1. Selection tool - Select an object or grouped objects on the artboard
2. Group selection and Direct selection tools – This lets you select a single object (Group) or a single point/line (Direct). This is useful if you want to edit an object that is part of a group, or edit the shape of an item
3. Magic wand – This lets you select objects with a similar fill colour/pattern
4. Lasso tool - Also a selection tool, just draw a shape and it will select everything within the shape

Object creation (Drawing and typing)

1. Pen tool – This selection of tools let you draw out a shape point by point then edit it. Clicking once and releasing creates a point. If you click and drag you can create a curve.
2. Type tool – Write text with one click, or create a paragraph shape by dragging, then click on this to write text within this text box
3. Line tool – Allows you to draw different types of lines, such as straight, arcs, spirals and grids
4. Shape tools – Draw different types of shapes
5. Paint brush tool – This creates a stroked line using a brush (This can be found in the Stroke and Brush panels)
6. Pencil tool – You can freehand draw a shape or line. If a shape is selected you can also go over the same line again to adjust its shape

Reshaping

1. Rotate tool – Select and object before you select this tool, then you can either double click to enter a rotation, click once on the artboard to the the rotation registration point, or click and drag to rotate the object
2. Scale tool – The scale tool works in a similar way to the rotate tool, but with changing the scale of an object
3. Warp tool – Drag across an objects to change it’s shape
4. Free transform tool -This tool lets you scale and rotate an object using the bounding box handles. These are the little squares shown on the object when it is selected. To maintain the proportions of the object, hold down ‘SHIFT’ while you drag. Holding ‘ALT’ will let you transform the object from the center point rather than a corner.

Additional tools (Painting, graphs and more)

1. Symbol tools – This tool lets you spray paint and edit symbols on the artboard from the symbol library (Symbols can be found in the Symbol panel)
2. Graph tools – This tool lets you create a variety of types of graph. You can select a size and enter the graph details.
3. Mesh tool – You can create and edit mesh lines on an existing shape. Click to create a mesh point then you can adjust the shape and fill.
4. Gradient tool – If you have a shape with a gradient fill (i.e. by using the Gradient panel), then this lets you drag across the shape to change the gradient.
5. Eyedropper tool – If you have one item selected and click on another item it will copy the colour/styles over to your first item.
6. Blend – You can blend two items together. Select either an anchor point or in the middle of each item and the blend tool will blend these together.
7. Live paint tool – Lets you fill in sections of shapes on the artboard. A shape with a hole or different sections in the middle is called a ‘Compound path’
8. Live paint selection – Selects the shape you want to fill

Artboard

1. Crop area – You can select what area of the file you would like to export  (i.e. File >  ‘Save for web’). Double-click to select the options, or you can click and drag.
2. Erase – This tool lets you erase sections of your selected item.
3. Drag – Drags your view of the  artboard
4. Zoom – Click to zoom incrementally, or click and drag the area you want to zoom to.

Colour

1. Colour selections – You can double click on the fill square or outline square to change these colours of the selected shape. You can also click the arrows to switch them. If the colour is white with a red line through it, this means that there is no colour.

There can be little arrows on the bottom corners of a tool. This denote that if you hold the mouse down there is a choice of tools.With some tools, such as the line and shape tools, you can click once and you will be able to type in options for the object, rather than just clicking and dragging on the artboard. Also, for some tools you can also double click to change the tool options.

The panels

These panels I normally have on the right of my screen. If you can’t see them use the top menu:

Window > #Panel Name#

The panels are grouped together with each other and can be selected with tabs. There is also a little arrow on the right that will give you more menu options.

I’ll order these in the approximate order I have them in on the screen

1. Colour – RGB for web stuff and CMYK for print. This lets you drag the arrows to create a colour, or double click for the colour picker
2. Swatches – These are saved colours. You can drag the colour square to the swatches panel to keep it. If you double click on this you can give it a name, change it, or set it as a global colour. Making a colour swatch a global colour will let give you a colour slider for the swatch when selected and you can change the tint.
3. Brushes – These adjust your stroke lines and can be used in conjuction with strokes around the shape and the paintbrush.
4. Symbols – These are little symbols you can re-use again – You can also create your own by dragging them into the symbol panel.
5. Stroke – This lets you set the outline of the shape. You can change different options for your stroke in this panel.
6. Gradient – You can change gradient colours by dragging them on the gradient bar from the swatch panel, you can also drag these little colour squares and change the angle and location options
7. Appearance – This allows you to change the order of the fills, strokes and effects (Shown in the Effects top menu item). You can also add strokes and fills using the arrow option to the right i.e. to create double lines etc.
8. Layers – This allows you to have different shapes on different layers, you can view, hide or lock these as well as change the order
9. Transform – This lets you change the position and size of the shape you have selected. You can also change the angle or skew it. The little link icon on the right after the W and H, lets you either keep the shape in proportion if on or just change one dimension if off.
10. Align – This lets you align shapes against each other, i.e. centre them all together
11. Pathfinder – Use this to cut out or join shapes. Select all the shapes you want to change, then click on one of the pathfinder icons.
12. Character – Basic text options such as font, font size and leading
13. Paragraph – Further text options if you have created text within a paragraph shape

The top menu

1. File – This has your usual, ‘New’, ‘Open’, ‘Save’ and ‘Print’ type options
2. Edit – Basic edit controls such as copy and paste, as well as preferences and settings
3. Object – Controls the shapes on the screen. Some of the basic object controls are:
   • Transform – Changes the shape using ‘Move’, ‘Rotate’, ‘Reflect’, ‘Scale’, ‘Shear’ etc.
   • Arrange – Changes the order of the shapes on the screen. This will change the order only within the selected layer
   • Group – group selected items together
   • Lock – Lets you lock an item so you can’t select it – you can ‘Unlock all’ from here if you want to select them againExpand – This lets you expand text to outlines, and expand compound shapes, effects and fills
   • Rasterize – Creates a flat bitmap image from the object(s) you have selected
4. Type – This is for controlling and editing the text/fonts
5. Select – Lets you select specific items, such as if they have the same fill colour
6. Filter -This menu lets you distort vectors, as well as having a filter menu that can be applied to bitmaps – I suggest you stick to Photoshop for these though.
7. Effects – This menu lets you add effects to items such as Drop shadows and rounded corners as well as other fancy effects. You can find anything you’ve added in the Appearance panel mentioned before. These can be edited or deleted.
8. View – Viewing selections for the artboard, as well as options such as ‘Ruler’ and ‘Guides’
9. Window – Where you find all your panels/tools if you can’t find

Now, getting started…

Hopefully the above has given you a bit of help with how Illustrator is put together, and although it’s not a completely comprehensive guide I know I’ve learned a few things writing this that I hadn’t know before. So, now you’ll need to learn about to actually use Illustrator, for how here is a few useful places to visit.

Useful beginner tutorials/articles

Create an envelope icon – Lovely tutorial to start on
How to create a cute Hippo character
Getting started with Illustrator
Use Adobe Illustrator to create a clean website layout

Resources

Vectortuts+ – Great place for Illustrator tutorials

Smashing Magazine -  find useful tutorials and articles

Blog.Spoon Graphics – 50 Illustrator Tutorials Every Designer Should See