- [Instructor] In this movie I'll show you
how to acquire symbols,
as well as how you trade them between documents.
And I'll also show you the best way to preview symbols,
so that you know exactly what they look like.
And so if I bring up the Symbols panel,
you can see here that I have
a very long list of symbols indeed.
In fact, as the title of this document indicates,
this file contains a total of 464 symbols.
And symbols, by the way, are saved along with the document.
And these are symbols that I have acquired over time
from the many versions of Illustrator
that I've been working with.
And so notice this guy right here,
it's called At Symbol.
And let's say I wanted to create a new symbol
that's based on this one.
And so to duplicate a symbol
all you have to do is select it
and then drop down to the little page icon and click on it.
And you can see that Illustrator's offering
to call this thing At Symbol 2.
I'm just going to call it Ampersand
for reasons that will become obvious in a moment.
I'll leave it set to Static Symbol,
we're not doing any 9-Slice Scaling this time around,
and so I'll just click OK.
Unfortunately, it appears at the bottom of the panel.
It'd be nice to move it up to a different location,
but you're going to spend forever doing it,
you're just going to have to continue to drag that thing,
so I'm just going to leave it down here at the bottom.
Another thing that would be nice,
I'll just go ahead and find that symbol again right there,
it'd be nice if you could Alt or Option + drag it
to create a duplicate,
but notice what happens,
you do get a little plus sign, see that,
but we're also seeing a square around
this little Ghostbuster icon,
and if I release then I've gone ahead
and replaced one symbol with another.
And that would affect all the instances as well.
Of course, I just don't happen to have any.
Anyway, I'm going to undo that change,
because obviously I don't want to mess things up.
And let's see if I drag this out
to make it really super wide.
There's my new one,
so I'll go ahead and drag him and drop him right there
in between the old one and the house.
And now I'll go ahead and make my panel a little narrower.
And let's say you really want to get a sense
for what this thing looks like.
Well, we have these pretty dinky thumbnails.
You can switch the thumbnails, if you like,
from Thumbnail View, which is your best bet frankly,
to Small List View.
At which point, you're not going to be able to see anything.
And Large List View doesn't make things that much better.
And so I'll just go ahead and switch back to Thumbnail View.
If you really want to see what something looks like
then just go ahead and double-click on it
and that's going to show you the symbol
directly inside the document window,
because after all, you've just switched
to the symbol isolation mode.
All right, so I'll go ahead and select this guy
and I want you to note that this is a dynamic effect,
and so if I were to press Control + Y,
or Command + Y on a Mac,
to switch to the outline mode
I can see that this is editable point type.
And so that means I can change it
by selecting my Type Tool
and then dragging over the text
and entering an ampersand instead.
And now I'll press Control + Y,
or Command + Y on a Mac,
and you can see that the 3D object updates in real time.
And now I'll change its color to, let's say, red,
and that's going to update as well.
Now if you want to update the 3D effect
you would go to the Window menu and choose Appearance,
at which point you'll see this guy, 3D Extrude & Bevel.
We're going to be seeing how that works in a future chapter,
but for now I'll just go ahead and click on it
in order to bring up this dialog box.
And I'll just lift the bottom of the box upward, like so.
That's it.
And then I'll click OK
and that goes ahead and updates that effect in real time.
All right, now I want you to see,
currently its thumbnail is still showing
the purple at symbol,
but if I were to press the Escape key
then I would update the symbol.
Another way to update the symbol
is to just double-click on a different thumbnail.
So for example, if I want to see Tiki doll
I just go ahead and double-click on it
and notice that the Ampersand went ahead and updated,
which means that you can edit a lot of symbols
in rapid fire sequence by making some changes
and then double-clicking on a different symbol.
It also means you can use double-clicking
in order to get a better preview of that symbol.
All right, I'm going to scroll down here to the bottom
and I want you to notice this last set of symbols right here
that starts with the Florid Vector Pack
and ends with the Regal Vector Pack.
And these are some awesome symbols.
Notice this guy right here, 08,
ends up looking like this.
And this one is 13.
And so they're all these lovely bits
of fully realized artwork.
And these are packs that either ship now with Illustrator
or have shipped with the program over time.
But there is one pack that's not represented here.
And to load any one of the packs
all you have to do is click on the little library icon
down here in the bottom left corner of the Symbols panel,
and then you can choose, for example, Florid Vector Pack,
we've got Regal Vector Pack as well,
which are these guys by the way.
And so you can check those out as much as you'd like.
There is one pack that is not represented,
and that's this guy right there, Grime Vector Pack.
And so I'll go ahead and choose that
to load those symbols in a separate floating panel.
And notice that we have a total of 15 symbols in all.
If you want to see what one of those looks like
you first have to click on it in order to add it
to your own Symbols panel,
the one for the local document,
and then you would double-click on it
in order to preview it on screen.
Now let's say you just want to add all the others,
then click on one, notice that gets added,
and then Shift + click on the last one right there,
and now notice if you drag all of them over,
even though strictly speaking there's a repetition,
Illustrator ignores that repeated symbol.
And now you can double-click on any of these guys
in order to check it out at full size
here inside the document window.
All right, now let's say you want to save these symbols out
so that you can load them into other documents.
In that case I'll go ahead and close the floating panel
and I'll click on the library icon once again
and choose Save Symbols.
And that's going to take you to a special system folder,
which is going to work out great
if you just want to share your symbols between documents
on the machine that you're working on right now.
If you want to take them over to a different machine
then presumably you would select a different folder,
like the Desktop.
In my case though I'm just going to leave it here.
And I will call this guy 480 symbols,
because I added 16.
And then notice we're just going to save a .ai file
that has nothing in it but symbols.
All right, now click the Save button.
And now I'll switch over to this document,
Updated Photoshop shapes,
and I'll save its symbols
by clicking on that little library icon
and once again choosing Save Symbols.
And now I'll call this guy 379 Photoshop shapes,
just Ps shapes actually, and I'll click Save.
And now check this out,
I'll go up to the File menu
and I'll choose New from Template
and I'll just go ahead and load my center guides document,
which contains almost no symbols at all.
I really don't want the ones it does contain,
so I'll go ahead and select them
and I'll click on the trashcan icon,
in which case you'll get a warning.
If you want to skip that warning
then press the Alt key or the Option key
and click on the trashcan.
And then let's load up all those symbols
by clicking on the library icon
down here in the bottom left corner of the Symbols panel,
choosing User Defined, and then choosing 480 symbols,
and that's going to bring up those symbols
in their own floating panel.
And so I'll just go ahead and click on the first one
and I'll Shift + click on the last one
and I'll go ahead and drag them all over.
Now we're moving an awful lot of symbols here,
so it is going to take a moment to pull things off.
And I should tell you that the document
is going to save a little sluggishly as well.
And now I'll click on that icon again, choose User Defined,
and choose 379 Ps shapes
in order to bring up these guys.
Click on the bone
and then Shift + click on the World Wide Web
and go ahead and drag these guys
into the bottom of my Symbols panel right here
and that's going to add them as well.
And now I'll just go ahead and dismiss these panels.
And I now have a document that contains 859 symbols in all,
which seems like about as many symbols as you need
to create some high quality artwork.
And so I'll just go ahead and grab this banner right here
from the Regal Vector Pack
and I'll place it in the center of the document,
and then I'll press the S key to get my Scale Tool,
and I'll go ahead and scale this guy
while pressing the Shift key
in order to achieve a proportional effect.
And that's how you create a new symbol
based on an existing one,
how you acquire symbols,
how you move symbols between documents,
and how you preview symbols
inside the document window here inside Illustrator.