7 Custom Adobe Illustrator Keyboard Shortcuts
7 Custom Adobe Illustrator Keystrokes for Stationery Designers
If you’re a stationery designer, chances are you love Adobe Illustrator! I design all of my invitations in Adobe Illustrator, with some help for certain tasks from Adobe Photoshop and InDesign as well. Setting custom keyboard shortcuts can also improve your overall design productivity!
If you are brand new here – why yes, I do have a free beginner Illustrator course! I’m glad you asked. You can sign up for that here!
One thing you’ll see in the course is that Illustrator lets you customize your working environment to what suits you – with so many tools to offer, every designer has some functions they use more often than others. So it’s a good idea to set up some customized workspaces and keystrokes that will improve your efficiency as a designer.
Here are 7 custom keyboard shortcuts that I set specifically for stationery design that I think you’ll love!
If you prefer to watch in video form, you can do that here!!
How to Set Custom Keyboard Shortcuts in Adobe Illustrator
I’d be remiss if I didn’t explain how to set these shortcuts of course. Here’s the step-by-step:
Click Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts
Swap this Dropdown from Tools to Menu Commands
This will allow you to see more options that you can change!
Choose the Command you want to change, and Type in the new Shortcut
It’ll give you a pop-up if the shortcut you type is already in use by another command. You *do not* have to use the same shortcuts that I will use, but none of them were occupied by commands I use very often. As an example, you wouldn’t want to use CTRL+C as a shortcut, because it’s already in use by the “copy” command which is one you probably use a lot!
The shortcuts can either be CTRL/CMD + something, or SHIFT + something, or CTRL/CMD + SHIFT + something.
You can save sets of shortcuts if you want to have different shortcuts for different types of projects, and always restore the defaults if you feel like you messed up something you didn’t mean to! Now, onto the 7 shortcuts I would recommend creating!
Custom Illustrator Shortcuts for Designers
Horizontal Align Center – CTRL / CMD + L
I am constantly aligning things to the center, so I love this one. The one drawback is that it will default to a type of alignment, so if you only have one object selected, it defaults to “align to artboard” and if you have multiples selected, it’ll default to “align to selection” unless you have something else selected. That’s unfortunately just something you have to work around though!
Vertical Align Center – CTRL / CMD + K
Same as above, just for vertical alignment. I like that these are next to each other because I’m often using them together!
Open the Glyphs Panel – CTRL / CMD + H
The lesson here is that ANY panel you use a lot, you can set a keyboard shortcut to open. I use the Glyphs panel a lot, so I like using “H” because it’s the last letter in “Glyph”. But you could do this with any panel that you frequently open to save yourself some time.
Convert from Area to Point Type – CTRL / CMD + Y
This works in reverse as well. I am often converting to area type from point type, but I don’t often go the other way, personally! Not sure what this means? Watch this video!
Select All Text Objects – CTRL / CMD + T
I absolutely LOVE the Selection panel in Adobe Illustrator. There are so many options for making really easy selections amongst tons of different objects. I often need to select all the text, in order to outline my text when prepping my files for print. This shortcut makes that super easy and ensures I don’t accidentally miss any!
Select Same Font Family – CTRL / CMD + I
If I need to get more specific, then selecting everything in the same font family can help too! The one downfall of this one is that if you have multiple font families in the same text box, it’ll get confused and generally just not select that text box at all.
Select Same Fill Color – CTRL / CMD + U
Lastly, if you change colors on designs a lot like I do, you’ll love this one! I used “U” because it reminds me “colour” in the British spelling. This will help you easily change everything that’s green to blue, for instance (or change it back if your client decides to go back to the original colors).
Adobe Illustrator is such a powerful tool, so powerful in fact that it can feel overwhelming at times. However, you can use the customization options to really make it work for you. Focus on tools that you use the most, and bring those to your keyboard or closer to your working space by putting them on a sidebar. The easier it is to access the tools you need, the faster (and better) designer you’ll be! And again – there’s always our free Illustrator course if you want to learn more.
