- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you how to use
symbols as stand ins for master pages.
Now, Illustrator doesn't provide master pages.
That's more in the domain of a dedicated page layout program
like InDesign.
And so the idea is you can use master pages to repeat
commonly used elements such as headers and footers and
page numbers and so forth.
The thing is, while master pages are super useful, they're
best suited to lots and lots of pages that are the same
size and orientation, which is not the case for this
particular piece of artwork.
Instead what we have here is a book cover laid out flat.
So we have three art boards in all.
The left one is for the back cover, the center one's for
the spine, and then the right hand one is for the
front cover.
And so if you were to print this out onto one sheet
and then wrap it around a book, you would have a cover.
And we do have some repeated elements such as the author's
name and the publisher's logo.
But these elements appear sometimes in different locations
from the front cover to the back cover, and definitely
different angles on the spine.
So this is a case where symbols are going to work better
than a master page.
And so I'll go ahead and switch over to my starter
document here, and I'll select the author name with my
black arrow tool, and notice that I've hidden my right
side panels by pressing Shift+Tab, and that just gives me
more room to work.
But I do need to bring back the symbols panel, and so I'll
move my cursor all the way over to the right side of the
screen, at which point my panels will come back and I'll
grab the club there for the symbols panel, and I'll drag
it and drop it so it's a floating panel like so.
And then I'll expand it.
All right, now what we want to do is take the author name
and save it as a new symbol.
And you can do that by clicking on the little page icon
at the bottom of the panel.
And I'll go ahead and call this guy Author.
I'll set the registration point to the bottom right corner,
and I'm going to go ahead with the static symbol, just because
it's easier to keep track of and we don't have any need
for a dynamic one.
And now click Okay.
And we end up with an instance of a symbol as we're seeing
indicated by the word symbol on the far left side of the
control panel.
Now you may see that right now, the author's name is just
set to author name.
That's because I don't know what the author's name is.
And yet I can still go ahead and lay out the design.
And so I'm going to go up to the view menu and choose smart
guides in order to turn them on.
And I'll go ahead and drag this guy so it snaps into
alignment with the right side of the back cover, and then
I'll press and hold the Shift and Alt keys, that's Shift
and Option on the Mac, in order to constrain the angle
of my drag to exactly horizontal and create a copy.
And then, I want you to notice that my keyboard increment
is set to one point, and I'm confirming that by pressing
Ctrl+K here on the PC, or Command+K on the Mac.
After which I'll go ahead and press Shift+Left Arrow three
times in a row, to nudge the author's name into the
desired position.
All right, now I'm going to create another copy of this guy
by Shift+Alt dragging it, or Shift+Option dragging it into
the spine art board.
And then I'll switch to the rotate tool, which you can get
by pressing the R key.
And then notice that by default, the transformation origin
is located in the bottom right corner of the instance,
and that's because that's the way I set things up when
I designed the symbol just a moment ago.
All right, so I'll press the Enter key or the Return key
on the Mac to bring up the rotate dialog box.
Notice that the angle is set to 90 degrees, at which point
I will click okay to accept that change and then I'll just
nudge this guy a little bit to the left.
All right, now I'm going to go ahead and zoom in on the
publisher, and I'm going to press the V key to switch back to
my black arrow tool, and I'll click on this thing right here
which I've expressed is one big compound path, just to make
it easier to select.
And I'll convert it into its own symbol by clicking on the
little page icon and calling this guy Ribbon.
And for now, I'll leave it set to dynamic symbol, so I can
show you that it's not always the best setting.
And then I'll select the bottom left point in this
registration matrix right here, and I'll click okay.
And now I'll grab this guy and I'll turn it into a symbol
by clicking on the page icon and I'll call it Publisher
and I'll go to static symbols so I can keep track of it.
I don't care about its center point, so I'll just go ahead
and click okay.
All right, so we've got a couple of instances now.
I'll go ahead and Shift+Click on this guy.
We can't really see its bounding box, but I can see a little
plus sign, so I know it's selected.
And then I'll click on the page icon in order to bring up
the dialog box.
I will call this guy Logo this time around.
We want a static symbol, and I want its orientation point
to be bottom right by default, at which point I'll
click okay.
All right, now let's make a couple of copies of this guy.
I'll go ahead and drag him until he snaps into alignment
with the top left corner of this rectangle, and then I'll
press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac to create
a copy of it, and I'll press Shift+Up Arrow a couple of
times, let's say, in order to move the logo upward.
And then I'll drag another copy of it, which I'm doing by
pressing and holding the Alt key or the Option key on
the Mac, and let's go ahead and rotate and scale this guy.
So I'll press the R key to switch to the rotate tool.
And you can see that the origin point is the bottom right,
so I'll just press the Enter key or the Return key on the
Mac to bring up the rotate dialog box, and I'll reapply
that same angle value of negative 90 degrees and click okay.
I don't want this guy to be way over here on the wrong
art board, so I'll move it over to this location.
And then I'll press the S key to switch to the scale
tool right there, and I'll press the Enter key or the
Return key on the Mac to bring up the scale dialog box,
and I'll change this uniform value to 60% and click okay.
And then I'll press the V key to switch back to my black
arrow tool, and I'll go ahead and move this guy up a little
bit, now obviously it's a big mess at this point, but we are
going to address those problems in just a moment.
After, news alert, I have found out the author's name here.
And so I'm going to associate it with the symbol by double
clicking on author name, at which point I'll see this
warning telling me that I'm about to edit the symbol
definition, that's exactly what I want so I'll click okay.
And then I'll just go ahead and double click inside the
text in order to automatically switch to the type tool and
position the blinking insertion marker.
Press Ctrl+A or Command+A on the Mac to select all that text
and I will enter Barbara and Warner, is what
I'm looking for, just an arbitrary name, of course.
You can enter anything you like.
After which point I'll press the Escape key to accept my
text edit, and I'll press the Escape key again in order
to update the symbol.
At which point you can see that all the other instances
of the author's name have updated as well.
All right, now let's make some modifications to the
publisher's logo here.
I'll start by double clicking on this symbol and saying okay
in response to the alert.
And now I want to take this guy and I want to scale it.
Obviously it's way too big, so I'll press the S key to
switch to my scale tool.
By default, in this case, the origin point is the bottom
left corner, that's what I want.
And I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac
to bring up the scale dialog box.
And I'll change the uniform value this time to 50%, and
notice how all the strokes are glomming together.
That's in part because I had the scale strokes and effects
check box turned off, but even if I turn it on, it's not
going to make a difference.
Now if it had been on before I brought the dialog box up,
then it'd work, but it doesn't seem to work if you turn on
the check box on the fly.
And so I'm just going to click copy and I want to show you that
that is ultimately the result of the fact that this is a
dynamic symbol.
And so the easiest way to fix the problem in this case
is to make sure the ribbon symbol is selected, and then
click on the dialog box icon to bring up the symbol options
dialog box, and then I will set it to static symbol and
click okay and notice that solves the problem.
All right, but I do want to make a change to this symbol,
so I'm going to double click on it with the black arrow tool.
And I'm going to go ahead and click on this compound path
to select it and I'm going to take the line weight value
down to 0.5 point.
And I'll go ahead and change the color of the stroke
to this shade of red.
And now I could either escape all the way out if I wanted to
or I could just go back to the logo by clicking on the
word logo in the top left corner of the document window.
And I'm going to go with the latter because I want to add a
registered trademark to this text right here, so I'll go
ahead and double click on it in order to edit this
sub symbol, and so you can see I've now wiggled my way
back down to the point type and so I'll just go ahead and
double click inside the text to switch to the type tool.
And I'll move the blinking insertion marker to the end
of the text.
And I'll enter a registered trademark, you could type
Option+R on the Mac, or on either platform you could go to
the type menu and choose the glyphs command.
And if you loaded D keys you have that shortcut of mass
surface G, and then locate the registered trademark
which is this teeny little guy here.
Just a few items before the copyright symbol.
And so you may have to scroll down to it, and then just
double click on it right there in order to enter it, and
then because this panel takes up so much room on screen,
I'll just go ahead and close it.
And you can see you get a super scripted character.
But not super scripted enough in my opinion, so I'll go
ahead and bring up the character panel by clicking on the
word character up here in the control panel.
I'll take the type size value down to 10 points.
And then I'll select the baseline shift because notice it's
moved way down, and so I'll set the baseline shift value
to 6.5 points right there.
And now I'll dismiss the panel and I'll press the right
arrow key in order to move my insertion marker between
the trademark symbol and the S.
And then I'll bring back the character panel and I'll change
this kerning value right here to negative 75 and I'll
press the Enter key or the Return key again.
Now I'll escape all the way out by pressing the Escape key
once to accept my text edit, and then pressing it a second
time in order to escape out of the symbol mode.
All right, now let's see what's happened.
Notice that all of the publisher logos have updated
regardless of their position, size, or orientation.
Just one more change I want to make.
I want to take this guy right here, and I want to move it
over so the top of the S is aligned to the bottom of the R.
And I'll press Shift+Down Arrow a couple of times in order
to move that publisher over.
And now I'll press Ctrl+Alt+0 or Command+Option+0 on a Mac,
in order to fit all the art boards on screen.
And those are a few ways to use symbols as stand ins
for master pages here inside Illustrator.