Illustrator - 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.

Rotate canvas functionality is now available in Beta. You can download this beta through the Creative Cloud Desktop app’s beta section.
You can easily rotate the canvas and change its direction. All your artboards and visible onscreen objects will be rotated according to the specified angle. Like zoom, the rotated canvas view will be saved with the document. We are working on enabling artboard guides in a rotated view and shall be available updates soon.
This has been one big missing functionality in Illustrator and we would love to hear your feedback in helping us refine it further. What do you like? What do you think is missing? Please share.
341 comments
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Davey M commented
When I rotate the view and use the arrow keys to move something around, it moves around according to original view and not rotated view. It would be helpful for the arrow keys to move objects in the correct direction according to the rotated view. Thank you!
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Gabriel Saul commented
Cant seem to find the Beta nor where to send my Adobe ID to get it!
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Davey M commented
1. It would be nice to have it like the zoom tool and pivot from where you click. That's what I prefer, but it would be great to have both options. Maybe double click on the tool to pick or have it as an option in the preference panel.
2. Presets would be great in the status bar! It would be great if we could somehow assign shortcut keys to those presets. I guess there would need to be a rotation menu under view to be able to assign shortcut keys. That way I can do a quick flip.Thanks for all of this hard work and thought put into this tool!
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Ivan Doganov commented
Hi.
1. For me there will be OK, if rotation pivots from center of the screen. I even prefer that - for example, if I'm looking at a rotated text block or any other element, I will expect when I rotate the artboard, that same block/element stay on screen.
2. Good idea - rotating with mouse and preset on bottom of the screen will be OK, Better, than rotate with slider, imho -
Thank you all for your feedback so far. We wanted to seek your input on two things that we are deliberating:
1. Currently, rotation via mouse pivots the canvas from the middle of the screen. This is how it works in Photoshop. We wanted to ask you if providing the ability to specify a reference point for rotation (similar to Rotate tool) will be useful or not?
2. Based on feedback we are also thinking of replacing the slider on the status bar with presets. What do you think about it?
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iMark commented
The image I referenced below...
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iMark commented
I'm probably late to the party here, but I don't need to rotate the view contents. What I need are rotated artboards. Basically, I'm creating maps. I have a base map and want to create smaller maps using artboards. But those maps are not always north-south oriented, so I need to have artboards at a variety of rotations. See the attached image. I know this is probably not what most people would use it for, but it might be something you could consider.
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Anonymous commented
Yes, the blob brush is crashing my application also.
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Davey M commented
BUG: Not sure if this is after adding the Rotate View feature or a bug for the current beta version, however if I try to use the Blob Brush at all, Illustrator crashes. I restart and it still does the same thing. Anyone else have the same issue? Thanks!
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Davey M commented
BUG/OR FEATURE REQUEST: When you rotate view, and select an object, line, etc, the bounding box doesn't rotate with rotate view. The bounding box remains relative to the normal view. It would help to be able to rotate view and then resize and object with the bounding box in the new rotated view. Thank you!
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VincentvE commented
BUG: Adding to Davey. Mousewheel zoom (alt+wheel) is also quirky. As is 'fit artboard to window'..
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Davey M commented
BUG: When you rotate view, then use the zoom tool performing a click and drag, it seems to zoom in on random spots. I think it's zooming in on the relative location of the screen prior to rotating the view. I switched back to a non-rotated view to double check and it zoomed normal again to the spot where I placed the zoom tool and clicked and dragged to zoom in.
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Davey M commented
BUG: When you rotate view, and select lines, sometimes it selects all lines but only shows some of the lines selected. I attached a screenshot of how it looks. The two red lines on the left are selected, even though they don't appear to be. You can see they disappear when I delete them in the other screenshot. There appears to be an anchor point selected though where those two lines are on the left.
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Davey M commented
BUG: When you rotate view, and use the Selection tool and drag a box around some line strokes, it doesn't grab all of the lines every time, even if you give it a wide birth going past the line.
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Cesare commented
Can you make this function available via the 'crown' on Logitech's Craft keyboard?
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Justin Whitehouse commented
would be awesome if this could be a function of Surface Dial
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Anonymous commented
Hello I wonder when will this feature be available as an regular update instead of beta, is it possible to know?
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Anonymous commented
Tony, all great suggestions! I am thoroughly enjoying this rotation functionality!
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Tony commented
Hello, thank you for adding me to the 25.3 Beta! The functionality is excellent!
I notice it seems to really take advantage of the GPU as it is super smooth, while rotating the view using the CPU is very sluggish.
Here are a things I think are missing:
- Double-Clicking the Rotate View tool icon should reset the view
- Shift-Click during rotation should Hard-Stop at rotation 45 degree increments
- Pressing "Enter" should bring up dialog box where we can set specific angle for the rotation.Otherwise, it's great. I'm loving it so far!
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People not seeing 25.3 Beta that has Rotate Canvas, please send me your Adobe IDs. I will enable access. Send it to kotwal at Adobe.com.