Setting up an Illustrator document for creating a floor plan
Setting up an Illustrator document for creating a floor plan
For the second Illustrator training session, we’ll take what we’ve learned about creating artwork in Illustrator and put it into practice by creating elements we can use in a floor plan. Afterwards, we’ll gain some experience working with a new panel, the Symbols panel, and see how to save the elements we’ve made in a way that makes it easy to reuse them in other documents. Finally, we’ll talk about some logistics for creating a floor plan document in Illustrator and make a new file to design a floor plan in.
Creating a new document for designing a floor plan
The first thing we’ll cover in the second session is what you’ll need to know for setting up an Illustrator document to be used as a floor plan.
There are a few pieces of information you’ll need to know ahead of time to help make the process of creating a floor plan easier:
the size of the area you're working with
what scale you’ll be working in (for example, 1 foot = 1 inch in the document)
Knowing these two things will help you make sure the document the right size for you to design your floor plan without running out of room.
Let’s create an example document for a space that’s 50 feet long by 40 feet wide, with a scale of 1/4 inch = 1 foot. In order to make sure we’ve got enough space to work with, we’ll need to make a document that’s a little bigger than the area we're working with so we can include extra information outside the floor plan, such as the name of the store or the scale of the document. For the 50' by 40' space we'll be working with today, we'll create a document that's 14 inches by 12 inches to accommodate the space's size at the scale we're working with (which, when scaled down, is 12.5 inches by 10 inches) and allow for extra space between the floor plan and the edge of the document.
To start creating a new document, in the Menu bar,
Click File, Click New…
To switch to using inches for the document's unit of measurement, in the units drop-down menu of the New Document dialog box,
Click , Click Inches
To indicate the width of the new document, in the Width field,
Press & Drag value, type: 14 Tab key Tab key
To indicate the new document’s height, on the keyboard, type:
12
To finish creating the new document, in the lower right corner of the dialog box,
Click
To turn on the rulers, in the empty area outside the artboard,
Right-Click the empty gray area, Click Show Rulers
To display the grid, in the empty area outside the artboard,
Right-Click the empty gray area, Click Show Grid
To check the size of the grid squares, if necessary, in the Menu bar,
On Windows: Click Edit, Point Preferences, Click Guides & Grid… On Mac: Click Illustrator, Point Settings, Click Guides & Grid…
The values for the Gridline every: and Subdivisions: fields should be as follows:
Gridline every: 1 in
Subdivisions: 4
To activate the Rectangle tool, in the Tools panel,
Click
To set the colors to the Illustrator defaults of white for the fill and black for the stroke, on the keyboard, press:
D
To change the fill color to none, in the Swatches panel,
Click the Fill swatch, Click
To start the process of creating a rectangle, with the Rectangle tool active,
Click on the artboard three grid squares in from the left and two squares down from the top of the artboard
To set the width and height of the rectangle, in the Rectangle dialog box,
Press & Drag value in Width field, type: 12.5 Tab key 10 Enter key
To lock the shape in place so it can't be moved, on the Menu bar,
Click Object, Point Lock, Click Selection
NOTE: To unlock a locked shape, on the Menu bar, Click Object, Click Unlock All.
At this point, we now have a document with a rectangle representing the area our floor plan will focus on, and you’re ready to start designing a floor plan! Here are a few additional things to keep in mind when creating a floor plan:
Make sure to include the scale measurements somewhere on the page! It can be as simple as a line of text in the bottom right corner of the page that says “Scale: 1/4 in = 1 ft”.
If it turns out you need more room to lay out the floor plan, you can resize the artboard you’re working on as needed to give yourself more room. To learn how to resize an artboard, read through the section Resizing artboards on the page Understanding and using artboards from the full version of Illustrator: The Basics.
Next, we'll work on creating elements to use in a floor plan.
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