Well friends, here I am at the Desktop level of my Macintosh computer. You could just as easily be at the Desktop level of your PC and I want you to open the new application that's included along with Illustrator CS2. In addition to Adobe Illustrator, you get the Adobe Bridge which is a deluxe modified version of what used to be the file browser that shipped only with Photoshop but is now an independent utility/application that ships with each of the CS2 applications as well as the big old Creative suite if you buy all the applications together.

On the Macintosh side, in order to find this wonderful application assuming that you have installed the programs provided to you by Adobe, not by us by the way. On the Macintosh side, under Mac OS 10, you can go to the Go menu and choose Applications or press Command+Shift+A in order to bring out the Applications folder here and then you should see the Applications in more or less alphabetical order, you may have to sort of ride full through all those folders of applications that you have on your machine and somewhere in there, you will find something called the Adobe Bridge. Go ahead and twirl it open or double-click on that folder to open it up and then double-click on the Bridge.

On the PC, go to the Start Menu, go to Programs, go find your Bridge inside the Adobe sub-menu. In any case, I want you to go ahead and launch the Bridge. You should open up this new sort of cataloging program right here that allows you to look at previews of your graphical files, whether they come from Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign or GoLive that are located in various folders on your hard drive and on CDs and other removable media as well.

Now notice at the top in the top left corner here, you have got two tabs available to you. One is Favorites and one is Folders. When you first open up the Bridge, you will probably go to the Folders view which allows you to see the many folders inside of your hard drive which will differ from those folders you are seeing right now for me, especially if you are on the PC where the organization is totally different.

I am going to go ahead and switch over to Favorites so that we can sort of get on the same page here and notice you have a bunch of different favorites to choose from and you should see most likely unless you put your Project Files folder elsewhere, you should see the Project Files - Illustrator CS2 folder. In your case, you will probably see a lot of other stuff on your Desktop as well, depending on how you organize the files on your computer. In my case, I only have the Project Files folder available. Go ahead and find that folder and double-click on it in order to enter the folder and you will now see a Part 1 and a Part 2 folder.

Now at this point, I want you to go back to the Folder view and the Folders view here will take you to where you are inside of your computer's directory hierarchy and on the Mac, I am several folders deep at the Desktop level. Go figure but that's the way things are organized. On the PC, it's different as I say. But if you took the exact same steps I took, you will be able to find these Part 1 and Part 2 folders with the Project Files - Illustrator CS2 folder highlighted here, wherever it may lie, I want you to twirl that folder open, either by clicking on this little arrowhead or clicking the + sign, if you see a + sign there instead.

Then I want you to twirl open Part 1 and you will see a litany of the many lessons inside this most excellent series and inside that Part 1 folder, you will find a folder called Lesson 02. I want you to go ahead and click on that Lesson 02 folder. Now, this time you don't have to twirl it open, just go ahead and click on it because we are at the end of the road as it were. We are now inside of this folder that has no more folders inside of it.

Now, you should see a bunch of thumbnails on screen here. Your thumbnails may not be so big, however. They maybe sort of dinky little thumbnails like those right there and that's fine. No shame in it whatsoever, I swear to you because you can always change the size of the thumbnails at any point you want here inside the Bridge. The thumbnails are 100% scalable so they can get very very tiny or very very big and to control the size of those thumbnails, down in the lower right corner of the Bridge, you will see this little slider here.

Now this is assuming by the way that you have this first item of these right hand icons here selected. The ones that's called Thumbnails view. Make sure that that's active for now, just so that we are on the same metaphorical page and you will have this little slider that allows you to make your thumbnails bigger in case you want to be able to scrutinize them in more detail but see fewer thumbnails on screen at the same time or you can make the thumbnails very very dinky in order to see more thumbnails at a time but not to be able to see them very well.

You also have the option of clicking these little sort of icons on either side of the slider bar. If you click this very little icon here, you will switch to the smallest possible thumbnail size. I am not going to do that because of a drop off screen. You can also click on this thumbnail to get the largest possible thumbnail size where a single thumbnail fills up as big an area as you have available to you inside the Bridge and that's entirely determined by how big your monitor is and how big you have scaled the Bridge window by dragging this lower right size box right here. So, if you have got a really wicked big monitor, then you have got a really big wicked display of your preview of your illustration or image.