Here are twelve shortcuts and two actions I’ve assigned to F keys in order to ease my workflow and save time. How you ultimately use these features will depend greatly on what type of work you’ll be creating, but when it comes to building vector graphics, I have customized a handful of commands to make routine tasks easier. If you don’t do this Illustrator won’t retain them the next time you open the application. Make sure to save your action set by going to the fly-out menu in the top-right corner of the Actions panel and clicking on Save Actions. You now have a customized action at the ready. Once done, click Stop in the Actions palette.

(Remember that not all functions in Illustrator are recordable.) In the pop-up window that opens, name your action, assign it to an action set (mine is GS Actions), then bind your action to an F key, and click Record > Proceed to compile the series of commands you want to record (see Figure.jpg). On the Actions panel, click the fly-out menu in the top-right corner. To create an action, go to Window > Actions. Click Save, and your keyboard shortcut is ready to use. Illustrator will tell you if the key is already assigned, and you can decide to ignore or override it. Select a specific tool or menu command, and then enter in the key you want the task to be assigned to. To create your own keyboard shortcuts, go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts > Select, and pick either Tools or Menu Command from the pulldown menu in the pop-up window. How to Create Your Own Keyboard Shortcuts Anything you do routinely is a good candidate for an action.įor example, I have an action that converts all text to paths and then saves my artwork out as a PDF onto my desktop so I can email a design to a client.

The best way to determine how you can best use actions is to simply experiment. The end result gives you a one button push, that can run a series of commands instantly, which obviously saves time. Once you are done recording, you can assign the recording to a specific key command. In those cases, actions are your best bet.Īctions allow you to record multiple keyboard commands. Not all functions in Illustrator allow you to add a shortcut command, though. They help make your workflow more efficient. Keyboard shortcuts are just what they sound like: the ability to use a key command instead of hunting down the command in a pulldown menu. The ability to customize your own keyboard commands and create actions in Adobe Illustrator are, in my opinion, two of Illustrator’s most underrated features.

We've also included the AI file Von is using in the video so you can follow along (file is for education purposes only):Ĭlick here to download the reference file Implementing the information in this video could easily cut 20% of the time off projects in Adobe Illustrator. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to save a ton of time in Illustrator by creating and leveraging smart keyboard shortcuts.

Illustrator keyboard shortcuts pdf