Overview

Learn how to effectively use artboards in Photoshop and Illustrator to enhance your animation design workflow. Explore the concept of artboards as multiple canvases within a single document, allowing for efficient creation of multi-frame artwork without the need for separate project files. Discover techniques for customizing artboard sizes, working with multiple artboards simultaneously, and exporting artboards from both software applications. Follow along with provided project files to gain hands-on experience in implementing artboards for sequence animation design, streamlining your creative process in the motion graphics world.

Syllabus

Jake Bartlett : Hey, it's Jake Bartlett for school of motion. And in this tutorial, we're going to learn about art boards in illustrator and Photoshop. I'm going to talk to you about what art boards are and why you should be using them, how we can work with them in both illustrator and Photoshop, as well as exporting multiple art boards from both pieces of software. Now I'm going to be working with some project files a little bit later in this video. And if you want to work right along with me, then you can download those project files for free right here at school of motion. Or you can follow the link in the description of this video. So go ahead and do that. And then you can work with me.
Music : [intro music]
Jake Bartlett : Now what are art boards? You can think of an art board in either of these programs as the canvas that you're creating your artwork on. What's really nice about them is that they allow you to have multiple canvases within a single document illustrator and Photoshop, both used to only allow you to have one canvas within a single document. So if you needed multiple frames to come out of the same document, you would basically have to layer things, turn them on and off and export them. It was a mess. Neither program was ever designed to handle multiple documents within the same document. InDesign is the program that was really from multi-page documents and that's what it has always been. And it still is a really great tool for that purpose, but that's much more for the print world, whereas in the MoGraph world, the reason you would want multiple frames within a single document is so that you could create artwork for multiple frames without having to create more project files.
Jake Bartlett : Just think about designing boards for a sequence of animation. This way you can keep all of your assets that will eventually be in the final animation, all in the same document and just use these art boards as multiple frames for that sequence of animation. And that's exactly what I'm going to show you how to do in this video. So let's start with illustrator and take a look. How art boards work in that program. All right, here I am an illustrator and we can actually customize art boards right when we're making a new project. So I'm just going to click on the, create new button and take a look at the new document window. This, uh, panel right over here is where we can determine the size of our frames or art boards, as well as how many art boards there will be when we start the document.
Jake Bartlett : So I'm just going to change this to the standard 1920 by 10 80 HD frame. And I'm going to say four art boards and all four of those art boards are going to have the same size. Uh, under our color mode. We have RGB PPI is 72 that's pixels per inch. That's how I want it all set. So now that that's already, I'm going to click on create, and we're going to get this blank document that has those four art boards. Now I'm going to go ahead and close up some of these extra panels, just so it's a little easier to work with, and you can see what's going on here as zoomed out a little bit. So we can see all four of these art boards at once. And you'll notice that illustrator them in this nice little grid for me. Now, like I said, each one of these art boards is basically a canvas for multiple frames of whatever you'd like them to be.