From the course: Illustrator 2020 One-on-One: Fundamentals

Five ways to resize artboards - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2020 One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Five ways to resize artboards

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- [Instructor] In this movie, We'll take a look at the various ways you can resize artboards using the artboard tool and it turns out there's five different methods in all. Now you can see I've made some slight modifications to this document. Specifically, I changed these numbers in the lower artboards to letters and so I'm ganna start things off here by switching to the artboard tool, which you can get by pressing shift + O and then I'll click on artboard 9 and I'm going to drag it down a little bit so that I have more room to work and thanks to the fact that my move slash copy artwork with artboard icon is turned on, that went ahead and moved the 9 along with the artboard. Now, the most obvious method for scaling an artboard is to drag, either a corner handle as I'm doing in this case or either a top or bottom handle or one of the side handles. And assuming that your smart guides are turned on, you'll see the width and height of your artboard inside that heads-up display. All right, that's looking a little messy to me, so I'm going to go ahead and undo all those modifications by pressing Ctrl + Z or Command + Z on the Mac as many times as it takes to get back to my original artboard. Now, let's say you're happy with the artboards proportions. That is you like the relationship between the width and the height of the artboard, which is known as the aspect ratio, incidentally. Then, you can press and hold the Shift key as you drag any handle by the way. It doesn't have to be a corner handle. It could be a side handle or a top or bottom handle as well. All right, I'm going to undo those modifications as well because notice when I drag specifically a corner handle, I'm resizing the artboard with respect to its opposite quarter. If I want to scale the artboard with respect to its center, then I would press and hold the Alt key. That's going to be the Option key on the Mac. And so notice when I have the Alt key down or the Option key on the Mac and I drag a corner handle, I am scaling all four sides. If I just want to scale a couple of sides, I could drag a side handle and notice if I go ahead and press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and keep that key down. Incidentally, then I'm moving both sides either away from each other or inward. And the same goes if I were to alter option drag the top or bottom handle. And then, if I add the Shift key to all that, then I can constrain the aspect ratio while scaling with respect to the center. So, in this case I have both the shift in all keys down. That's going to be shift and option on the Mac and perhaps surprisingly this works with multiple artboards as well. So, if I click off the artboard in order to de-select it and then, I shift marquee these bottom guys right here, then I could drag a corner handle in order to scale all four of these artboards. And notice, that I'm scaling with respect to the opposite corner in this case. And as a result, I'm no longer aligned with the type and that's as things stand now Illustrator's not equipped to scale artwork and artboards together. So, I'll go ahead and undo that modification and I'll just drag this top handle upward like so, so that the artboards are taller, but they're not any wider and I might not want them to be quite this tall. So, I'll go ahead and move these guys down because if I make these artboards too tall, then they'll start to include the numbers above them. All right, so that's method number one. Now the other methods are going to go a little quicker here. Another way to work is to select an artboard just by clicking on it and all of these methods by the way, work whether one artboard is selected or multiple artboards. And now, I'll go up to this item on the left side of the control panel, which currently reads custom. click on it, and then I could go ahead and choose a preset such as the letter size page if I like, or I could go with an iPhone six which surprisingly is much larger. All right, so that's method two. Method number three is to resize the artboard to exactly match the artwork. And you do that by not clicking on the number zero because that's going to create a new artboard, but instead double clicking on it. And so if you double click on any object, you're going to resize the artboard to match. All right, I'm going to undo those last couple of modifications again by pressing Ctrl + Z or Command + Z on the Mac. And I'll draw a new artboard so that we can see method number four, which is easily the most obscure method. But I just want you to know it's there. You go to the object menu, choose artboards and then choose fit to artwork bounds. And that's going to resize that new artboard to include everything inside the document. All right, now I don't really need that artboard, so I'll just go ahead and press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac to get rid of it and notice that gets rid of the artboard without getting rid of any of any of the actual objects inside your illustration. All right, now for method number five, which is probably the most practical solution there is and that's to dial in your own custom numerical values. And so, I'll just go ahead and select artboard zero once again and then notice that in addition to the X and Y values, which are the physical coordinates of the artboard, we've got width and height. And so, I could go ahead and dial in a width value of six inches, six double quotes, and then press the Tab key and you can see that Illustrator goes ahead and converts inches to points on the fly. And then, I can dial in the height value of eight inches. That is eight double quote and press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that change. Now, if you want to lock down that aspect ratio, then just go ahead and turn on this link icon right here and now notice if I were to dial in the width value of 12 inches, let's say, then the height value will change in kind. Now that doesn't lock these values into absolute agreement with each other. Rather, it expands the width and height values by the same amount. And, it can even do simple math if you like. If you decide for example that you want this page to be half as wide, you would enter /2 after that width value and that will go ahead and divide the height value by two as well. If you want to make the height twice as tall, then you'd enter *2 and then press the Enter key or the Return key on a Mac and that goes ahead and makes the width value twice as wide as well. All right, I'm going to drag this guy over a little bit, to give myself some more room. Now, notice that everything is happening with respect to the center of the artboard and that's a function of this guy right here, the so-called reference point matrix, and you can change that by the way. You can scale with respect to some other portion of the page. So, for example, if I select this top point right here and I turn off the link and then I increase the height value by 200 points, let's say by entering plus 200 and then pressing the Enter key with the Return key on a Mac, notice that the page grows taller and it does so downward because that top point is fixed according to that reference point matrix. By the same token, I can click off the page to de-select it and then shift drag to marquee these bottom artboards and I could make them taller by selecting this bottom point in the reference point matrix. And then I could click after the height value and enter plus 300 this time around and press the Enter key. Or the Return key on the Mac. And you'll see that the pages grow taller because that bottom point is fixed. All right, but once again, that's going to encroach on the numbers. And so I'll press Ctrl + Z or Command + Z on a Mac to undo that change. And I'll go with something a little more subtle, such as plus 50 let's say for that height value, just to bring the height of those artboards up ever so slightly. And I'll go ahead and drag these guys down to provide us with a little more room as well. And then, I'll go up to the view menu and choose fit all in window so that all of my artboards fit on screen at the same time. And finally I'll go ahead and escape out of the artboard editing mode just by pressing the Escape key, which returns control to my black arrow. And those are the five different ways you can resize artboards using the artboard tool here inside Illustrator.

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