How to Customize Workspace and Documents - Expression Design 2

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Video Transcript

So now that we have taken the time to see how to create this New Document, and also had a Navigator around these documents, let's take a look now that how we can start to customize this workspace to work for us, so that we have a better setup when we are working here inside of Expression Design.

Now the first thing I am going to be taking a look at are the panels on the right hand side. For those of you with dual screens, you might find it useful to be able to float these panels out, and then move them to a second screen to maximize your workspace here inside of Expression Design. Now if you wanted to put those panels back, for when you are working on a single monitor set up, you could simply click this button right here, that says Dock, and once you do they'll snap right back into place as they were with your original workspace. Now you also have the ability to change how big or how small these particular panels are, and you can do that simply by clicking and dragging up or down like this, to increase the size of the Layers panel, or if you had it floated out like this, you could simply bring it out, increase or decrease the size by clicking and dragging around. And if in any time you needed to get back to your original workspace, you could either click the Dock button, or come back here to the Window menu, and simply choose Reset Active Workspace.

Now if you need to have a lot of screen real estate, but you don't have a large monitor, or even a two monitor set up, you could simply hide these panels very quickly and easily by coming up to the Window menu and choosing Hide Panels, or you could simply hit the Tab key, and what that's going to do, it just gives you a complete workspace all the way across your screen, and hide all of the panels out of your way. The unfortunate thing is it also hides the Tool bar over here on the left, so you are going to have to get used to working with the tools by using the keyboard shortcuts, like V for Selection, and B for Brush, and so forth. If you want to get those tools back, simply hit the Tab key, and they'll jump right back on your screen and you are ready to continue working.

Now another way to customize your workspace would be to come over here, and as you can see, when you get between the panels on the right hand side, and the scroll bars, you get this little arrow, and you have the ability then to adjust how far these panels encroach on your workspace, or how much they do not. So you can drag those out like so, or your could simply take them back. Now you can't take them all the way off the screen, they'll stop right here just so you can see every option that's available to you, but if you need a little bit more room to see Layer names or the contents of layers, so forth, you could simply drag that out, and then drag it right back when you are finished with that. So now that we have an idea to how to customize the User Interface options here for our workspace, let's take a look at how we can change both out Document Size, and our Artboard here inside of Expression Design.

Now if I wanted to change the actual Document Size of a document, I can come in here under the File menu, come down and choose Document Size, or simply use Ctrl+Alt+P on my keyboard. Now once inside of the Document Size window, I have the ability to control the overall dimensions of my document. For instance, here I have a document which is 800X600 pixels, with 96 pixels per inch as the Resolution, and I have chosen Constrain proportions. Constraining proportions means that if you change one value like the Height value for instance here, when you innervate a new number for that value, the other value, the Width, will change proportionately with that value increase. So let's go ahead and show you how that works here.

I click in here and choose, let's say 900, when I do that, and then click outside, you'll see that it automatically changes to 900X1200. So that's just going to ensure that everything scales evenly across the board, and I don't have any distortion when I am changing the Document Size. Now if you wanted to distort the Document Size, for instance, if you wanted to change the aspect ration of a particular file from 4 to 3 to like 16X9, you could then go in here and turn off Constrain proportions and then enter in your values accordingly.

Now as I said before, you have the ability to change the Resolution of the file, and since we are working in a vector based program, this is one of those options that it really doesn't matter when you change the Resolution, because all of the objects you create here inside of Expression Design are vector based, and thus they will scale infinitely with no problem at any resolution. So once you have all these options set the way you want them to be here, you can go head and click OK. I am going to go ahead this time though and click Cancel, so that we can take a look at how we can control the size of our artboard. Now to the access the artboard command, let's go underneath the File menu, and we will choose Artboard Size, or you could simply hit Ctrl+Alt+C on your keyboard.

Inside of the Artboard Size dialog box, you will notice here we have the Current Dimensions, Width 800, Height 600, and then we have the ability to enter in New Dimensions here, or we can add Relative space all the way around the outside of this particular document that we are working on. For instance, if I click this, and I want you to say add 20 pixels all the way around the image, you could certainly do so by just clicking and entering the value of 20, and entering in a value of 20 there as well. There is no option here to make sure that both of those constrain themselves, so you have to enter these in manually, and then click to commit to that change. The last thing we'll take a look at inside of this dialog box is the Anchor preference, and what the Anchor preference does, is essentially sets an Anchor point for your document to determine exactly where this new Artboard Size is going to be added to. For instance, if I wanted to add only 20 pixels to the bottom of this image, I would make sure that I have the Anchor point set to the top as it is right here.

Now what we are going to do here, let's go ahead and we'll take off the Width, just to show you what we are doing here. I add 0 pixels around the outside. But I will add 20 pixels to the height, but I am only going to add it to the bottom as you can see here. Now when I do that, I click OK, you will notice there was no visible change to the top, but at the bottom we have 20 extra pixels at the bottom. Now I can go ahead, and I can undo that by simply using Ctrl+Z on my keyboard, and if you'll notice over here on the rulers that my document reset itself to 600 pixels. So let's take a look here, here is the before when I added 20 pixels, as you can see it goes down to 620, and to get back to this data, simply hit Shift+Ctrl+Z on my keyboard. Now if I do the undo again, Ctrl+Z, there you see it resets itself back to 600 pixels.

So let's go back inside of the Artboard Size dialog box here, I come up to File choosing Artboard Size, and we'll take a look at the other Anchor points that you had the ability to set. You have the ability to set top left, top right, and also down here at the bottom, even though these are blacked out, they're still active points that you can select. So if you needed to orient this to the bottom left, or the bottom right, or even the bottom center, you could certainly do so. Now there's no option to control Resolution inside of the Artboard Size dialog box, so you're going to have to do all of your Resolution changes from inside of the Document Setup Window. So once you have all these options set like you need them to be, go ahead then and click OK, and it will commit to those changes, and everything should reflect itself right there on your Artboard inside of Expression Design.