Quick! Hide!

Simply hiding things can greatly improve your productivity in Illustrator. Otherwise, you may have a hard time seeing your current creation with all the floating palettes and interface elements in the way.

You can hide all open palettes and the Toolbox by pressing the Tab key (unless the Type tool is selected and a blinking I-beam cursor is on your page — then you just insert a Tab into your text). Press the Tab key again to bring everything back.

If you’re creating exclusively for the Web, hide the Artboard and the Page Tiling feature. These features show you the size of the page you’re printing to and the printable area on that page. This information is useless if you’re never going to print! Choose View→Hide Artboard and View→Hide Page Tiling to make them go away.

Have you ever made an object that contains so many points that after you select it you can’t tell what the object is anymore for all the highlighted points and lines? You can hide these, too, while keeping the object selected. Choose View→Hide Edges to make the highlights disappear.

You can hide everything you have open on your computer (including your desktop) except for the current Illustrator document by clicking the Full

Screen Mode with Menu Bar button in the Toolbox, as shown in Figure 18-4. To hide everything including the Menu bar, click the Full Screen Mode button. (You can toggle through these modes by pressing the F key on your keyboard; this works for both PCs and Macs.) To get a completely unobscured view of your artwork, switch to the Full Screen Mode view and press the Tab key to hide your palettes. Real power-users work this way, using keyboard shortcuts to access all the tools and menu items.