TOP 10 Adobe Illustrator Shortcuts (Most Helpful Shortcuts)
TOP 10 Adobe Illustrator Shortcuts (Most Helpful Shortcuts)
One of my favorite tools as a designer is using Adobe Illustrator where I spent a lot of time dealing with typography, and use keyboard shortcuts to up my productivity and save time.
illustrator offers a plethora of these shortcuts to modify basic character formatting, such as type size, letting tracking, kerning, and so on. So let's dive into it and see how we can use those keyboard shortcuts.
Inside Adobe Illustrator, let's go ahead and type something going to use the Type tool. And let's say I'm going to type Welcome
to the tutorial, like so.
And I'm going to center this in relation to the artboards. So I'm going to bring up the alarm panel here. And I'm going to align this to the artboard. Because I don't have any selection, I'm going to align these horizontally and vertically like so. Okay, I'm also going to bring up the Character panel so we can see certain numbers.
Now the most common task, the most common shortcut that you will be using probably inside Adobe Illustrator when you type something is to actually increase or decrease the type size. So the shortcut for increasing the type size is Ctrl-Shift, right angle bracket or Command Shift, right angle bracket on the Mac, in the right angle bracket sits right on top of the period inside the year's keyboard at least. So let's go ahead and do that ctrl shift right angle bracket, and that increases the tab size. Now if you want to decrease the type size, that will be ctrl shift left angle bracket or command shift left angle bracket inside the Mac. So let's go ahead and do that ctrl shift left angle bracket and then decreases the type size. All right now
the increments depend on the values we set inside the preference panel. So let me show you what I mean. Let's go ahead and bring up the Preferences panel here. And the shortcut is Ctrl K or Command key on the Mac. And under the type here category, you can see that the size and the lettering are two points. So whatever increments here I do is always by two points right now I have sitting on 20 points. So if I run the shortcut again Ctrl-Shift or command shift left angle bracket or right angle bracket, it will increase or decrease by two points. Now there's one more thing we can do actually increasing the type size. If we throw the Alt key or the Option key into the mix, the type size will increase by or decrease by 10 points. So that would be Ctrl Alt Shift, right angle bracket, or Command Option Shift right angle bracket inside the Mac. And that will increase the type size by 10 points. So let's go ahead and do that Ctrl-Shift Ctrl Alt Shift right angle bracket and pay attention to this number here right now says 26. And the next one will be 36 like so 46 and so on. And if you want to decrease this by 10 points, it will be Ctrl Alt Shift left angle bracket or Command Option Shift left angle bracket on the Mac, like so. And actually, that's about it when it comes to increasing or decreasing the type size inside Adobe Illustrator.
Now let's talk about letting is the amount of vertical space between lines of text. And the increments are the same as the font size we set inside the Preferences panel. So let's go ahead and bring up the preferences file one more time. That will be a ctrl key or Command key on the Mac. And under the type here as you can see size and lettering is the same with two points. Alright, so how do we do the letting let me give you an example here. First, I'm going to get some dummy text. So I'm inside lipson.com. And I'm just going to select this text, this paragraph here I'm going to right-click, I'm going to copy this. And then again, I'm going to select the type tool. And then I'm going to click and drag
and create an area which I'm going to fill this with type so that would be Ctrl V or Command V or Mac to fill this with the type.
And let's go ahead and center this
like so. And before I continue let's also decrease the type size as we did before. So that would be a ctrl shift.
Left angle bracket or command shift left angle bracket on the Mac, like so. And now let's increase or decrease the lighting. Now the lighting here inside the Character panel is this value right here. So if you just roll over here you can see set the lighting. So what kind of a shortcut we use, quite simple. If you want to increase the learning, it will be an alt down arrow key or an option down arrow key on the Mac. So I'm going to go for alt,
and that will be the down arrow key or the option down arrow key. And the up arrow key or the Option up arrow key will decrease the lettering. And you could see the values changing right here. Okay, so increase and decrease. And actually, that's about it on the learning.
In typography, tracking refers to the amount of space between a group of letters, which means controlling the uniform spacing between all the letters in a piece of text. kerning, on the other hand, refers to the spacing between two specific letters. So let's go ahead and demonstrate this, I'm going to open up the Layers panel, and I'm going to toggle on the visibility of the Welcome to the tutorial text. And the first thing I'm going to do is increase the size of the type. And I'm going to use the same shortcut we used earlier, that would be Ctrl, Shift, right-angle brackets or Command Shift right angle bracket on the Mac, like so.
Okay, and then I'm going to center this to the artboard.
And I'm going to bring up the Character panel so we can watch the numbers changing. Alright, to change the tracking in the rear tire group of letters, we have to select all the letters. And if you hover over here, you're going to see it says to set the tracking for the selected characters. And that's the keyword for the selected characters. In this case, I want to select everything. So I'm going to double click, and then my keyboard, I'm going to press Ctrl-A or Command-A on the Mac, to select everything. All right now, the keyboard shortcut to increase the tracking is the ctrl shift right bracket or Command Shift right bracket on the Mac. So let's go ahead and run this. In the meantime, do pay attention to these numbers here Ctrl, Shift right bracket. And as you can see, I'm increasing the tracking. If you want to decrease the tracking, that will be Ctrl-Shift, left bracket, or command shift left bracket on the Mac, like so. And if you notice, increasing or decreasing the increment score by 20. Again, let's go inside the Preferences panel. That will be the Ctrl Kor Command key on the Mac. And under the type, we can see that increments are by 20 the tracking is set to 20. Alright, so now if we want to reset the tracking to zero, the keyboard shortcut is CTRL ALT q or Command Option key on the Mac. And pay attention to this number here it will be zero after we run the shortcut Ctrl Alt q or Command Option q on the Mac like so.
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Now for the kerning what I'm gonna do is I'm going to place the cursor in between two characters in this case between the T and the hue and the keyboard shortcuts are actually the same. So to loosen up the kerning and give characters, some breathing room. The keyboard shortcut is ctrl shift right bracket or Command Shift right bracket like so here and pay attention to these values right there because this is where the carding is.
And again, we're going to increments of 20.
And then if you want to decrease that would be Ctrl, Shift, left bracket, or command shift left bracket automatic like so. Okay.
All right. Now if you want to set the kerning to zero, it's again the same shortcut Ctrl Alt Q, or Command object corner mark, like so. And then the accordion goes to zero. And that's about it's the tracking the kerning
Baseline Shift is a great tool for fine-tuning your typography. It shifts a character or a group of characters up and down relative to the baseline in tiny increments. Some examples of using Baseline Shift include register copyright and trademark symbols or even prices. So let's look into this. I'm going to select the title here and I'm going to type 499.
I'm going to increase the
The size here. Again, the shortcut is Ctrl, Shift or Command Shift, right angle bracket. So let's do that.
I'm going to center this
on the artboard. And then I'm going to also bring up the Character panel, I'm going to double click and then select the 99 cents. And I'm going to use the superscript, which appears above will make the 99 cents appear above the baseline. And then I'm going to use the Baseline Shift to increase or decrease. Alright, the keyboard shortcut is Alt Shift up arrow, or Option Shift up are on the Mac, which will increase the Baseline Shift. So let's run this Alt Shift up arrow or Option Shift up arrow on the Mac, like so. Or Alt Shift Down arrow or Option Shift Down arrow on the Mac. And that will decrease the Baseline Shift.
Okay. And as you can see the values right here. And if you notice, the increments are by two points. That's because if you go back to the Preferences panel, control care command K, and under the type, you will see that the Baseline Shift is set to two points. And that's why we get these increments by two points.
One of the most commonly used text modifications keyboard shortcuts is the ones that align text to the left, the right-center, or justified text. So I'm going to go to the Layers panel here and I'm going to bring up the paragraph we said before with the lorem ipsum placeholder text. And first I'm going to align the text to the right, that will be Ctrl Shift R or Command Shift r on a Mac, like so. So Ctrl Shift R
is the next to the right or Command Shift R
to align text to the left Ctrl-Shift l or Command Shift L and to the center is Ctrl Shift C or Command Shift c like so. So let's run them again with the L with the R and with a C. Okay, let's go back to align left. Now, if you want to justify text, well, actually, let's talk about what is justified text is one it is aligned on both edges. You can justify all text in a paragraph, either including or excluding the last line. So first, let's justify the text with the last line flush to the left. In our windows, a shortcut is Ctrl Shift j or Command Shift J on the Mac,
like so you can see things have been justified from one side to the side to the other. And the last line is flash to the left. Now, if you want the last line to be flushed all the way across the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl Shift F or Command Shift F like so. But in this case, since we don't have a lot of text, this doesn't really look good. Alright, so let's go back to
Ctrl-Shift j or Command Shift G on the Mac, to flush the last line to the left like so.
The last keyboard shortcuts that I want to mention is the ability to change something while keeping your hands on the keyboard and text. So let me show you that. I'm going to bring up the Welcome to the tutorial text. And the first keyboard shortcut will jump to the font family field. So let's bring up the Character panel here. And this is the font family field. And the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl Alt Shift F or Command, Option Shift F automatic. So let's try this Ctrl Alt Shift F or Command Option Shift F. And now we are inside the form family field, we can use the up arrow key or the down arrow key. And you can find the font that would you like to use. And when you do so just press enter and now you're back to the text again.
And then the second keyboard shortcut that you can use to jump to another field is to jump to actually to the tracking field. And that is on Windows CTRL ALT K, or Command Option k on the Mac. So let's run this CTRL ALT K or Command Option key on the Mac. Now as you can see here, you can press you can tap the up arrow key or the down arrow key
And you will increase or decrease the tracking. But if you throw the shift into the mix, if you press the Shift key, then you go by a comment of 10 See that?
Like so
try to incorporate these Adobe Illustrator shortcuts into your workflow, which will help improve your productivity. And as you can see that does come in very handy. This concludes the tutorial and thanks you for watching
