Understanding and using artboards

Before we continue creating more logos, let’s take a moment to explore how to use artboards in Illustrator. Artboards allow you to create multiple pieces of art that are all contained in a single file. It might help to think of artboards as individual sheets of paper where you create your artwork, and the Illustrator document as a folder that contains all the sheets of paper with artwork on them. You can use artboards to create individual graphics for a website (such as a header and other needed elements), or to create multiple different versions of a logo. When you’re ready to use your graphics outside of Illustrator, each artboard can be exported to its own individual file that can then be used wherever it’s needed.

In this section, we’ll explore how to create, resize, and rename artboards as we prepare to create two more logos.

Creating a new artboard

In Illustrator, a document can hold up to 1,000 artboards, allowing us to create plenty of artboards for whatever our needs may be. For Logos.ai, we need three artboards — one for each logo. Let’s create another artboard, with the help of the Artboards panel.

Exploring the Artboards panel

The Artboards panel gives us a place to access and manage all of the artboards in a document. 

The Artboards panel contains the artboard list, which shows all of the artboards present in a document. We can easily navigate between artboards here by double-clicking on an artboard’s name. (We currently only have one artboard, Artboard1.)

At the bottom of the Artboards panel, we have a number of icons that allow us to manage our artboards, including:

• Rearrange All Artboards, which makes it easier to reposition all artboards in a document
• Move Up/Move Down, which moves the selected artboard up or down in the list of artboards
• New Artboard, which creates a new artboard
• Delete Artboard, which deletes the selected artboard

Let’s zoom out a bit so we can see the full artboard we've been working with, then create a new artboard for our second logo using the New Artboard button.

We now have two artboards - one that contains the star logo we made previously, and an empty one to the right of the first for us to create the next logo on. However, both of these artboards are much larger than we need them to be — we can fix this by resizing the artboards.

Resizing artboards

In the previous section, when we made a new document, we chose the Letter preset, which determined the size of our first artboard for us — in our case, it was 8 and a half inches wide by 11 inches high. However, we’re not constrained to working with artboards of that particular size. We can change an artboard's size to whatever we need it to be.

The artboard for the star logo is much larger than the logo itself. If we were to try to export the star logo now, we would end up with an image with a lot of empty space around the star. We can fix this by changing the size of the artboard and removing the extra space. The quickest way of doing this is through the Object menu — from there, we have options that allow us to resize our artboard so it’s the same size as the art on it. Let’s try this method out now with the star logo’s artboard. We’ll need to select the star first, then resize the artboard to match the size of the star.

Using the Fit to Selected Art option resized the artboard so it is exactly the same width and height as the logo, as seen in the following image:

When this logo is exported, the image will be exactly the same size of the logo, instead of the size of an 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper with a small star floating in the middle.

The second artboard also needs to be resized, since the logo we’ll be creating there will only be two inches square. We’ll resize this artboard so it’s a little larger than the logo we’ll be creating, and we’ll use the Artboard Options dialog box to do this.

To make sure we’re resizing the correct artboard, we’ll want to make sure the second artboard is the active artboard. The active artboard is whichever one you’re currently creating artwork on, and you can see which artboard is active by looking at the Artboards panel. We can also change which artboard is active from the Artboard panel.

Let’s make sure Artboard 2 is the active artboard, then open the Artboard Options dialog box.

The Artboard Options dialog box appears:

Here, we have many options for working with an artboard. We can change its size, adjust its position in the workspace, change its orientation, display different marks to help guide us as we create artwork, and more.

Let’s change the width and height of Artboard 2 to 2.5 inches square. Afterwards, we’ll zoom out so we can see both artboards at the same time.

At this point, we have two artboards that are more appropriately sized for holding logos. It’s currently easy to tell the two apart, as one has a star logo on it and the second doesn’t have any artwork yet. However, what if we had many artboards in our document and needed to find the star logo? We could zoom out like we just did, then zoom in on the artboard we need, but there’s a better way to find a specific artboard.

Renaming artboards

In Illustrator, we have the ability to rename artboards to help make it easier to tell what each artboard contains, as well as help us navigate to a specific artboard more quickly. For an example, let’s look at a document that has five artboards, which we can see in the following image:

This document has five different folder graphics, each on their own artboard — and each artboard has the default name Illustrator assigned when the artboard was created. When we can see all the artboards at once, it’s easy to tell what’s on each artboard. However, if we’re working zoomed in on one artboard and need to move to another one, the names in the Artboards panel don't help us much:

With only the default names visible, it’s difficult to tell which artboard contains what art, as the names don’t tell us what’s on the artboards themselves. However, once the artboards are renamed, it’s a different story:

With the new names for the document's artboards, we have a better idea of each artboard’s contents without being able to see the artboards themselves. Giving artboards descriptive names will help us in the long run, especially if we end up working with a document that has many artboards in it.

Let’s rename the two artboards in Logos.ai - we’ll change the name of Artboard 1 to Star logo, and Artboard 2 to Atom logo. We can rename artboards in the Artboards panel.

Now both artboards have been renamed to reflect the contents of each artboard.

Earlier on it was mentioned that we would be creating three logos — however, we only have two artboards. We’ll create a third one now, and learn how to use a new tool in the process.

Introducing the Artboard tool

So far, we’ve used a number of different panels and menu options to make, resize, and rename artboards. However, there’s a tool that allows us to do all those things and more — the Artboard tool. The Artboard tool lets us create new artboards, resize artboards, reposition artboards inside the Illustrator workspace, and gives us easy access to many of the options available in the Artboard Options dialog box.

Before we create the third artboard, let’s reposition our existing artboards so they’re closer together. We can do this with the Artboard tool.

Repositioning artboards

There might be times when we want to rearrange the artboards in the Illustrator workspace. For example, when we resized the Star Logo and Atom Logo artboards, we likely ended up with a lot of empty space between the artboards in our document workspace, similar to the following image:

We can use the Artboard tool to move the Atom Logo artboard closer to the Star Logo artboard. Let’s do that now.

Now we can create the third artboard.

Creating a new artboard using the Artboard tool

When we created the Atom Logo artboard, we used the New Artboard button in the bottom of the Artboard panel to accomplish this. However, if we want more control over the size and placement of a new artboard, the Artboard tool will help us with this.

Let’s create a new artboard that’s a little bigger than the Atom Logo artboard — we’ll make an artboard that’s approximately two and a half inches square.

We now have our third artboard — however, we might want to make it a little bigger, to give us enough room to work with when we create the final logo. With the Artboard tool active, we can easily change the size of the artboard with the help of the Control panel. Let’s resize the artboard now.

Now the artboard is the size we need. The last thing we’ll do is rename this artboard — we can do that in the Control panel as well. After we change the artboard’s name, let’s save the file.