Adobe Illustrator CS3 - Manual (Page 42)

ILLUSTRATOR CS3
User Guide
36
About templates
Templates let you create new documents that share common settings and design elements. For example, if you need
to design a series of business cards with a similar look and feel, you can create a template with the desired artboard
size, view settings (such as guides), and print options. The template can also contain symbols for common design
elements (such as logos) and specific sets of color swatches, brushes, and graphic styles.
Illustrator comes with a variety of templates, including templates for letterhead, business cards, envelopes, brochures,
labels, certificates, postcards, greeting cards, and websites.
When a template is selected via the New From Template command, Illustrator creates a new document with identical
content and document settings as the template, but leaves the original template file untouched.
See also
“Create new documents” on page 34
Create a new template
1 Open a new or existing document.
2 Customize the document in any of the following ways:
• Set up the document window as you want it to appear in new documents you create from the template. This
includes the magnification level, scroll position, ruler origin, guides, grids, crop areas, and options in the View
menu.
• Draw or import any artwork you want to appear in new documents you create from the template.
• Delete any existing swatches, styles, brushes, or symbols, you don’t want to retain.
• Create any new swatches, styles, brushes, and symbols, you want in the corresponding panels. You can also import
preset swatches, styles, brushes, symbols, and actions from a variety of libraries that come with Illustrator.
• Create any graph designs you want and add them to the Graph Design dialog box. You can also import preset
graph designs.
• Set the desired options in the Document Setup dialog box and Print Options dialog box.
3 Choose File > Save As Template.
4 In the Save As dialog box, select a location for the file, enter a filename, and click Save.
Illustrator saves the file in AIT (Adobe Illustrator Template) format.
Open a file
You can open files that were created in Illustrator as well as files that were created in other applications.
• To open an existing file, choose File > Open. Locate the file, and click Open.
• To open a recently saved file, choose the file from the Open A Recent Item list in the Welcome screen, or choose
File > Open Recent Files, and choose a file from the list.
• To open and preview a file using Adobe Bridge, choose File > Browse to open Adobe Bridge. Locate the file and
choose File > Open With
> Adobe Illustrator CS3.