Rotation of the Artboard
Like in Photoshop it would be great if an Artist could rotate the artboard/canvas in Illustrator. If you draw a line from left to right it's never the same stroke as from up to down.


Hi friends! I have some great news for your today. Rotate View (Canvas) feature is available in Illustrator 25.3 (Desktop) now. Thank you all for your feedback which helped us shape up this feature.
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Andrew Buckle commented
1) Be great if you could just reset it by double clicking the document with the rotate view tool.
2) Shift to limit it to 45 degrees, 90 degrees etc
3) Should be a property in the properties panel ?
4) You should be able to set a rotation center point or perhaps when you select the hand tool /zoom tool etc or the rotate view tool then a permanent marker appears to show the centre of the view so you can use the hand tool to re-position an artboard etc to that centre point
5) Hand tool and zoom tool should perhaps become Hand view tool and zoom view tool to be consistent with the rotate view tool perhaps
6) Should be grouped with the zoom / hand or they should all be accessible top level in the tools - why is hand and zoom together but not with the rotate.
7) Reset rotation view should be reset rotate view in the view menu ... it is not consistent -
RobY commented
Using Illustrator for packaging; there are many instances when designing different panels on a box or similar, where some panels are sideways or upside-down during the design process. There should be a way to rotate the view as we can in Acrobat. It would not move anything or rotate the actual artboard, just the view of the artboard. (same as zooming in and out, which do not change the size of anything but merely changes the view)
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Anonymous commented
The Universal Coordinate System (UCS) on AutoCAD is a good example of how this could work for Adobe Illustrator... art boards are the equivalent paper space in this regard.
Maybe a UCS palette (like the art board palette) would help users switch between different UCS rotation settings.
Tron fights for the users... get him on this.
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David T commented
I'm a packaging proofreader. I can rotate PDFs for that purpose (awesome), but the designers/production artists work upside down and sideways. They make a lot of mistakes because of this. It would be cost-effective for large packaging companies to have more-efficient production artists. The inability to rotate an entire layout in Illustrator is a severe flaw. Even a wire-view with proper type positioning and editability would help.
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Benoit commented
Hello, I use Illustrator daily on my Surface Studio II and with my Surface Dial. It would be really nice if we could rotate the caneva with the touch functions and / or with the Surface Dial.
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Felix commented
Would be really good to have this feature! Just, in the Artboard palette, under Artboard Options, have a "Rotate Artboard", 90, 180 degrees.
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Tony commented
Looking forward to this feature being implemented. I hope Adobe upper management will dedicate the resources to bring it about sooner rather than later!
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Karly Salesky commented
The ability to rotate the canvas temporarily like you can in Photoshop. Wondering if it's possible to be able to align stroke to outside on a text layer without having to convert the text to outlines.
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samtastik commented
Hi Avinash it would be great to have the rulers work as in the gif file you posted. I don't find the rulers confusing at all and would prefer to have them still there. Also yes the ability to use guides would be key. I assume that any guides created in the original artwork would also rotate with the artboard and artwork? That would be excellent. Thanks for working on this.
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Anonymous commented
Please please make this happen
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gabrielle commented
Like in Photoshop it would be great if an Artist could rotate the artboard/canvas in Illustrator. I
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Elayne commented
I'm an illustrator and I would like to rotate canvas as I do in photoshop, for freehand drawing with brushes and pencil. I personally think the company should start with the fastest and easiest solution you can think of, since this feature is more than a must have in a drawing software. Even if you do a free plugin that opens up a separate window for this, like Camera Raw or Liquify do in photoshop. I really don't care about how you do it, if it is beautiful or including 100 accessories tools, right now, because something badly done is better than nothing.
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Abhishek Daniel Philip commented
How is this still not a thing?
Photoshop for photo editing, has this out of the bat, but Illustrator...for literal illustrating, does not have what would be so essential to anyone who draws with a tablet :\ -
Greg Geisler commented
Like Photoshop, pencil and brush tools first and foremost.
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Jim Kopp commented
I just need it for pencil sketching like Photoshop. While I respect the packaging designers and would occasionally use it that way, it's not my primary need. Maybe the two needs need to be separated. Get the easier one done and release it! Then build on it from there.
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Matt Rock commented
Same as Photoshop would be my preference. (guides and rulers rotate with canvas.)
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Anonymous commented
Like photoshop would be my preference.
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Anonymous commented
Avinash Singh
To answer your question, my preference would be that the rulers behave the same way as in your GIF example. I do a ton of packaging, so I'd need for those ruler guides to rotate and remain relevant regardless of the canvass/art board rotation.
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Paul S commented
Hi,
As VincentvE says, there is a needs difference between those doing illustrations and those doing packagings. For the first ones (illustrators) they don't care about rules : they only need to finally be able to draw efficiently and in a natural way by rotating the artboard like one can do it in every drawing software, even the most basics.For the second ones (who do packaging) it would be good if they could have access to these rules at any time. But in my opinion, if the rules work like in Photoshop, they will be of no use to them! In Photoshop, the zero stays aligned with one corner of the artboard and the measurement scale varies over the rotation, (in a way that seems completely incomprehensible to me, and in any case completely unnecessary for mesuring anything!) So, no : if you implement the rules with rotation fonctionality, they must perfectly follow the rotation of the artboard ... otherwise they will be just decorative ...
And if the rules remain aligned with the document during its rotation, not only will they be usefull for something, but in addition one will be able to use them to set guides other than blindly... because in Photoshop, if you place a guide (before or after the rotation), the ruler numbers vary completely while you rotate and therefore makes them irrelevant.
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Magnus Crawford commented
I use a XP-pen for freehand drawing and as the very name of this program claims "Illustrator" - That's what I expect as well. Being able to rotate the canvas the same way I would spin a piece of paper around because a hand that uses a pen simply isnt physically designed to draw lines with the same ease in any direction.
Ability to rotate the drawing surface should have been there from day one of Illustrators release decades ago really!Personally, I dont use rulers for freehand drawings. I'd be happy with the "photoshop style".