If you have read some of my Tips & Tricks before, you know that I am all about saving time and increasing productivity when using Illustrator. Creating custom views in Illustrator is another trick I use to save time. Custom views are great for viewing complicated illustrations, documents with many Multiple Artboards, or sections of an Illustrator document you are constantly revisiting.

Defining Custom Views

First, use the Hand and Zoom tools to adjust your Illustrator document to your desired view. Custom views also works with layer visibility, so toggle the visibility of your layers to you liking. Next, chose View > New View and assign a name to the new view. You can repeat this as many times as needed. After the new view is created, the view will appear at the bottom of the View menu, allowing you to quickly jump to a custom view.

The custom views are saved with the document, so they will be available even after you’ve save and reopen the document.

Below is an example of using custom views in a series of icons I sell on istock. I create all the icons on multiple artboards in one Illustrator document. Continually zooming and adjusting the view from artboard to artboard gets cumbersome, so I use custom views to quickly jump to common views, hiding layers, and a overall view of the icons.

Setting Up Custom View Keyboard Shortcut

To make custom views even more time-saving, you can create a Keyboard Shortcuts for your custom views. To do this, go Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts and chose Menu Commands from the pop-up menu in the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog. From here, scroll down towards the bottom until you get to the View drop-down menu. Now you can set keyboard shortcuts for up to ten custom views. These keyboard shortcuts will apply to any custom views within a document, so you don’t have to define the keyboard shortcuts every time you create a custom view. Check out the Vectips post Custom Keyboard Shortcuts for more info on custom Keyboard Shortcuts.