In Adobe Illustrator, artboards are regions that can be printed or exported. You can define your own custom artboard size or build artboards from predefined sizes.
Creating PDF documents, setting up a workspace, and isolating particular aspects for applications like Adobe After Effects are typical uses of many artboards.
Depending on the size of your artboards, you can have more than one artboard per document. Using the Artboard tool, you can create, resize, or remove them as necessary.
My name is Aly, I have been using Adobe Illustrator for years now as a graphic designer, and I am also Adobe Illustrator certified. In this article, I will show you how you can add and delete an artboard.
Key Takeaways
- Artboards are great to keep certain elements separated and organized.
- In Illustrator, the artboard serves as your canvas. You will develop each design you wish to generate in this area.
How to Add and Delete an Artboard in Illustrator
Follow the steps below to learn to add or delete an artboard.
Step 1: Have Adobe Illustrator up and ready to get started. Once you are on the home screen of Illustrator, click New File in the upper left-hand corner to create a new document.
A new document window will appear, and you can now decide the size of the artboard you would like to work in. Pick any size, as it doesn’t really matter for this tutorial.
One quick way if you would like to start out with more than one artboard is in the new document menu, Illustrator will actually ask you if you want to add an artboard. You can see how to do this in my image below.
The default setting is one artboard. If you want to add more, just click the up arrows on the Artboard section in the new document window to add the number of artboards you want. Once you have chosen your desired size and artboards click Create.
Step 2: If you did decide to add another artboard in the New Document window it will look something like my image below. You will see two blank working spaces (or however many artboards you’ve chosen).
Step 3: Now, let’s say you didn’t choose to add another artboard in the new document window. I will show you how you can add from just the one artboard you already have. Go to your left-hand menu icons and click on the Artboard Tool shown in my image below.
Step 4: Once you click on the Artboard tool another menu setting window will pop up to the right of your working area, and the current artboard will have circling dots around it.
If you look in the new menu window to the right you will see an Artboard section with a + sign next to it. Go ahead and click that as many times as you need the artboards. There is a to the left of the + sign as well that will let you label your artboards if you need to.
Once you have the number of artboards hit the escape button on your keyboard.
Step 5: To delete artboards, you will want to click back onto the Artboard tool to the left in the icons menu, until you see the artboard window pop up and right next to the + sign you will see a trash can.
Click on the artboard you want to be deleted and then click the trash can. Once you’re done, hit the Escape key on your keyboard.
And that’s how you can add or delete an artboard in Adobe Illustrator!
Final Thoughts
Knowing how to work artboards in Adobe Illustrator is essential since you will always be working with at least one artboard. It’s important to know its settings.
Either of the ways to add an artboard work the same. If you know how many you need it may be quicker for you to add them in the new document menu, compared to adding them after. Although there must be at least one artboard in every Illustrator file, there can be up to 100 in a single project, and you can remove 99 of them.
Any questions about how to add or delete an artboard in Adobe Illustrator? Leave a comment and let me know.
