I’m creating posters in Illustrator in separate files (poster1, poster2, ...) but when it comes to making a change in one (say the layout of it as they all follow the same template) then I have to open all of them and make the change.
Is there a better way? Is that what artboards are for?
You could create one poster and select all the elements which will be common to all posters. Turn that into a Symbol by dragging them into the Symbols panel.
Then edit the artboards and Alt+click+drag to create duplicate artboards. At that point you can then edit/add text or elements not common to each poster.
Now, if you make a change to the Symbol, the changes will update in all the posters. Elements not within the Symbol will not update.
Here's a rough example showing the concept. Here the artwork and titles are the common content (contained in the Symbol). The text for the cities is not within the Symbol. Double clicking one of the Symbols to edit it enables you to change the font and colour or change the layout etc. Exit the Symbol by double clicking outside it, and all instances of the Symbol will update on the other artboards.
I havent found a way to import ai files into another file and still be able to work with the layers but I hope this will help you out a bit!
Because you can use artboards to work on different projects next to each other. First you'll have to copy the artboard in the file youre currently working on.
start by:
This way you can place multiple artboards with the same size next to each other and you'll be able to just copy the layers from your other file onto them.
Might not be exactly the answer you were looking for, but hope you can at least get it done faster now!
