Setting up artboards with the Page tool in Vectornation

An artboard is the page inside your drawing: the area that prints, exports or becomes a single file. One drawing in Vectornation by Zaweba can hold many of them, and the Page tool, on Shift+O, is how you make and manage them directly on the canvas.

Several artboards in one file is a habit worth forming. A logo, its reversed version and a small icon variant can live side by side. So can the front and back of a flyer, a set of social media sizes, or every page of a small leaflet. Shared colours, styles and symbols stay in one place, and you compare versions just by looking across the pasteboard.

Making and arranging artboards

With the Page tool active, drag on the pasteboard (the empty space around your pages) and a new artboard appears where you dragged. Click an artboard to make it the active one, which matters for commands that work on the current page. Drag an artboard to move it. You can choose to move the artwork on it at the same time, so a finished layout travels with its page instead of being left behind.

Alt-drag duplicates an artboard. That is the quickest way to try a variation, since the copy starts as an exact match and you change only what you need. The handles around the active artboard resize it. Double-click to rename it, which pays off later when you export, because sensible names are much easier to find than numbers. Press Delete to remove the active artboard.

The context bar

While the Page tool is in use, the context bar offers presets, the artboard's name and its rotation. Presets save you typing in sizes by hand for common formats. Rotation turns a page between portrait and landscape without rebuilding it. Naming from the bar is handy when you are working through a row of new pages one after another.

Locking, colour and linked artboards

Artboards can be locked, so a finished page can't be nudged by accident while you work on its neighbours. They can also be coloured, which helps when a drawing holds many pages and you want to mark them by job, by status or by size at a glance.

There are also linked artboards. They are useful when several pages belong to one job and should be treated together. The packaging work added in version 0.10 leans on the same idea, linking panels such as a bag's front, back and gussets into one job, so it is worth understanding early if you design for print.

How artboards connect to the rest of the app

Plenty of other tools work through artboards. The Hand tool's double-click fits the artboard to the window. The Print area tool moves the printed page over an artboard's artwork. Slices made with the Export cutter sit on the canvas alongside them, and layout grids from the View menu help you place things within a page. When you set up artboards with care at the start, everything downstream is simpler.

Good habits

Leave some space between artboards. Bleed, crop marks and artwork that runs off the edge need room, and pages packed tightly together make it easy to drop an object onto the wrong one. Name each artboard as soon as you make it. Lock pages that are approved. And if you are moving a page with artwork attached, glance at the result before you carry on, since anything sitting half on and half off the page may need putting right.

Once the Page tool is second nature, you'll find yourself using one drawing per project rather than one file per page, which keeps related work together and makes changes across a set of designs far quicker.