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Matt Fons/3 min read

Customizing Your Interface Workspace in Illustrator: Adding Bars and Panels

Illustrator Workspace Setup

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This Illustrator tutorial walks through customizing your interface workspace in illustrator: adding bars and panels, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

In this video, we'll be customizing our interface workspace. So, let's begin by first adding an additional bar to our workspace.

To do this, we can go to Window*, and we'll be selecting Control*. The Control Bar gives us many additional options that can be used as a quick resource while we're working with Illustrator. So, this is an important bar to add to our workspace.

Next, let's add one more panel. We'll go back to Window*, and we'll be selecting Color*. Our Color Panel gives us different options for selecting colors.

Let's now take this Color Panel*, which is free-floating. We can select and drag it by clicking and holding the top bar. We're simply going to drag it to the right. Let's now dock our Color Panel by clicking the title and dragging it over to the right until we see it within the blue box where Properties*, Layers*, and Libraries are docked. We'll release, and we've now docked the Color Panel with Properties*, Layers*, and Libraries*.

We'll then close out Color Guide by clicking the X on the top-right-hand side of the panel. Next, we're going to remove Libraries from our right-docked panels. To do this, we'll click on the title, then right-click and simply select Close*. We now have Properties*, Layers*, and Color docked on the right-hand side of the screen.

Let's next move our Layers Panel down to the bottom of this right panel bar. To do this, we'll click on the title and drag until we see a blue line on the bottom-right-hand side of the screen. We'll then release, and our Layers Panel is now docked beneath Properties and Color*.

We'll go back to the Properties Panel*, and we'll see that the Layers Panel is docked below. To give ourselves a little more room, we'll click on the separator when we see the arrows, and we can simply drag down to adjust. Next, to give ourselves a little more space on this right-hand side, we can move these docked panels to the left by clicking the separator when we see the arrows and dragging to the left.

We now have plenty of space for our file and artboard, and we can also see the Layers*, Properties*, and Color panels. As one final change, we're next going to go to View and deselect Snap to Pixel to make sure that it’s unchecked. We've now set up our workspace, so let's save it.

To do this, we'll go up to the top where Essentials is selected and choose New Workspace*. Here, we can create our custom workspace—let's title it VDCI and hit OK. We've now created a new workspace, or an arrangement of panels and bars, so that we can return to this workspace whenever we need.

If we'd like to rotate between workspaces, all we need to do is click on our current workspace and switch to a different one. As we can see, there are many different workspaces designed for different purposes. In this case, and throughout this course, we'll be using the VDCI workspace.

Let's now save our work using CTRL+S on the keyboard as a shortcut, and in the next video, we'll be going over tools. See you there!