Real World Adobe® Illustrator® CS2 [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Creating New Documents

Clicking the New Document icon creates a new Illustrator document, and Illustrator presents you with the New Document dialog (Figure 1.2 ), allowing you to specify certain settings for the document you're about to create. You can change any of the settings in the New Document dialog later.

Press Command-Option-N (Ctrl-Alt-N) to create a new document while bypassing the New Document dialog. The new file uses the same settings as the last document you created.

Depending on the kind of project you're working on, the document height and width aren't that important. For the most part, Illustrator is used in two ways: to create art that is printed from Illustrator itself (such as a single-page advertisement), or for art that is placed into another application (such as a logo or masthead). By default, when you place Illustrator art into other applications, the art's bounding box is what determines the dimensions of the file, not the page or artboard size that you specify in the Illustrator document.

The New Document dialog is sticky, which means that it remembers the last settings you used. So if you create an RGB file to create a Web graphic, the next time you create a new document, the dialog is set to RGB.

Anatomy of a Bounding Box

Every Illustrator file has several different regions, or

boxes , that determine how the portions of a file are displayed (Figure 1.3 ):

Art box. Also called the bounding box, this area is defined by the art that appears in the document.

Trim box. This area is defined by the Illustrator artboard and is the size you specify when creating a new document.

Crop box. This area is defined by using the Object > Crop Area > Make command in Illustrator.

Bleed box. This area is defined by the Bleed setting you define in Illustrator and extends beyond the trim box area.

Media box. This area is defined by the size of the page on which you choose to print your file.

Most applications, when placing a file saved from Illustrator, honor the art box so that you can easily align the Illustrator art with other elements in your layout. Some applications, like Adobe Acrobat Professional, InDesign, and Photoshop, allow you to choose between the different boxes.

If these box terms look familiar, that's because they are part of the PDF specification. Illustrator's native file format is actually PDF, and later in the book, we'll talk more about the benefits of this.

Choosing a Color Mode

When creating a new document in Illustrator, you can choose between two color modes in the New Document dialog: CMYK and RGB. Although it isn't necessary to take a course in color theory to learn these two color modes, it does help to get a basic understanding of what they are so that you know when it's best to use them.

Since version 9, all Illustrator documents are restricted to either RGB or CMYK, and you can't have both in the same file. Even though Illustrator lets you specify an RGB color in a CMYK file, as soon as you apply that color to an object in the document, that color is converted to CMYK. If you ever select an object and see that the CMYK breakdown contains odd decimal values (like C=59.43, for example), you may be working in an RGB document.

If a monitor uses RGB to display color, how do you see CMYK colors on a computer screen? That's a good question; the answer is that a computer simulates what CMYK looks like. Remember that RGB has a significantly larger gamut than CMYK does, so an RGB device is able to display just about any CMYK colors.

When opening some older files, you might see a dialog telling you that the file contains mixed color spaces (Figure 1.4 ). You can choose what color mode to convert to when opening the file. Illustrator conveniently indicates the document's color mode in the Document title bar. You can convert files between the two color modes at any time by choosing File > Document Color Mode. Remember that each time a color conversion is applied, information is lost and color shifts can occur.

If you plan to use the artwork that you're creating for both print and Web applications, it's recommended that you use RGB, which gives you brighter colors for your screen presentations and more options (certain filters or effects are only available in RGB). You can then convert to CMYK as you need to.

Chapter 8,

Mixing It Up: Working with Vectors and Pixels for more information.