The workspace

The tool rail

The rail runs down the left edge. It is not a flat list of every tool, and it is not the same on your machine as on mine.

Four buttons at the top are always themselves and never move. Select (V) is the arrow. Pan is the hand, which moves the viewport without touching artwork. Edit paths by nodes (F2) drags anchors and handles on whatever you point it at. Zoom (Z) does what it says. Under those sit twelve group slots. Under those sit three tools that belong to no group and get their own permanent slot: Live Paint Bucket, Connector and Artboard (Shift+O).

The rail also carries the three Drawing Mode buttons. Those are not tools. They decide where new art lands, and the next lesson covers them.

Group slots and flyouts

A group slot shows one member at a time and carries a small triangle. Click the triangle, the flyout opens, you pick a member, and that member takes over the slot. Your pick sticks. It is saved per slot in your browser, so a rail you have arranged stays arranged across sessions.

This is why our documentation says "the shape slot, Rectangle by default" rather than "the fifth button down". We have no idea what your fifth button is. You changed it.

• Shape (Rectangle by default): Rectangle, Ellipse, Star, Flare
• Line (Line): Line, Arc, Spiral, Rectangular Grid, Polar Grid
• Pen (Pen): Pen, Add Anchor Point, Delete Anchor Point, Anchor Point (Convert), Join
• Pencil (Pencil): Pencil, Smooth, Calligraphy, Blob Brush, Shaper
• Type (Type Tool): Type Tool, Area Type, Type on a Path, Vertical Type, Touch Type
• Eraser (Eraser): Eraser, Scissors, Knife
• Transform (Rotate): Rotate, Reflect, Scale, Shear, Free Transform
• Width (Width): Width, Tweak
• Wand (Magic Wand): Magic Wand, Lasso
• Paint (Gradient): Gradient, Mesh Gradient, Paint Bucket, Spray
• Build (Shape Builder): Shape Builder, Intertwine, Envelope, Blend
• Probe (Dropper): Dropper, Measure, Dimension, Perspective Grid

Two entries in that list are thinner than they look, on purpose. The four extra type tools are the one Text engine with a preset armed, so Area Type is the Text tool told to flow into a shape. Free Transform is not its own engine either: it mounts the Select tool and enters its bounding box handle mode. Both are worth having. Neither will surprise you, because they behave exactly like their parent.

The canvas, artboards and the view

The canvas is infinite. An artboard is a named crop frame drawn on it, not a container: objects float in the scene and a board declares that one rectangle of it is a page. A document can carry one board or twenty. The Artboards panel manages them with presets for A4, Letter, Instagram post and story, YouTube thumbnail, 1920×1080 and square. The Artboard tool (Shift+O) draws them by hand.

A single artboard left at the origin writes nothing extra into your SVG, so a simple document stays a plain, portable file. Boards only start serialising themselves once you have two of them, or one you have moved.

Rulers sit along the canvas edges and are on by default. View ▸ Zoom holds the view commands: zoom in and out, 100%, 50%, 200%, fit page, fit page width and fit drawing. Picking the Zoom tool puts those same commands in the option bar, which is usually the quicker way to reach them.

The menu bar and the command bar

Eleven menus across the top: File, Edit, Select, View, Layer, Object, Path, Effect, Text, Filters and Help.

Some menu items print a keyboard accelerator beside the label that is not wired up, and a few print the wrong one. Treat those labels as decoration for now. This documentation lists only keys we have tested. Click the item and you get what it says.

Down the right edge is the command bar, a vertical rail of icon actions in six groups: file, undo and redo, clipboard, zoom, object, and panels and dialogs. A magnet button is pinned above every group and opens the snapping options.

There is no Window menu. Panels open from the command bar, from scattered menu items (Layer ▸ Layers and Objects…, Object ▸ Transparency…, View ▸ Swatches), or from the ▾ All panels menu at the end of the dock's tab strip. That menu also carries Reset dock layout, which is the escape hatch when you have made a mess.

The dock and the option bar

The dock holds the panels: Fill and Stroke (open on boot), Layers and Objects, History, Swatches, Align and Distribute, Artboards, Effects, Transparency, Symmetry, Assets, Generate, Brushes, Symbols, Path Effects, Character & Paragraph, Appearance, Graphic Styles and the AI Assistant. Tabs collapse to icons, so the full name lives in the hover tooltip. Each tab has a small × that closes it, and the ▾ menu brings it back.

Drag a tab out of the dock and the panel tears off into a floating window. Drop it on the dock's left edge instead and you get a second column. The splitter to the left of the dock resizes it and collapses it if you drag far enough.

Panel bodies are built on first use. A panel that looks empty for a moment after boot is filling in, not broken.

The bar above the canvas is the option bar, and it belongs to whichever tool is active. Pick the Pencil and it offers path mode, smoothing, caps, cross-section shape and scale. Pick the Eraser and it offers delete, cut and break-apart modes with width, thinning and tremor. Pick the Blend tool and it shows the Select bar, because Blend has no options of its own to show. A tool's real personality lives in its option bar, so read it whenever you pick up something new.

Common questions