2022 Calendar from Scratch in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Make a Full Year Calendar in Adobe Illustrator - Introduction - A Graphic Design for Lunch Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, create a calendar from scratch in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're going to create a 2017 calendar in Illustrator. But this is also adaptable to any year. You'll learn how to use grids to layout things in Illustrator, and also to use grids with text. Now as you're watching these videos, you'll see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write in just a few words why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read, and I respond to all of your comments and questions and I look at and I respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started making a 2017 calendar in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 - Assemble the patterns: The calendar we're going to create is going to have patterns in it, and if you've bean following my classes, you've got plenty of patterns, then you probably won't want to use those patterns. You're going two start by choosing File and then New, and you're just going to make an any size file. It doesn't matter at this stage, all we're going to do is collect up the patterns. But you will want RGB color mode. Click "Okay". Then you'll go back and open the files that you've made in class. Now, if you don't have patterns that you can use, you can skip forward to the next video and pick it up because I'm going to show you where you can found some patterns that Illustrator comes with, that you could use just to be able to create your calendar. But if you've got pattern files that you've created in my class, then this is what you need to do. You're going to go and open those files. I've got a few here, so let's just start with this multicolored dots pattern. I have from the class a rectangle here that is filled with that pattern. If you open up the swatches panel here, and said I had a couple of patterns here, so this is one of them. I'm going to choose Edit, Copy, and then I'm going to my brand new document. I'm just going to choose Edit, Paste. Now, I'm not interested in this, I am interested in this. As soon as I paste that object into this document, I get the swatch that is used to fill the shape appearing in the swatches palette. I don't actually want this shapes, so I'm going to press "Delete". We can see that the swatch still remains in the swatches palette. I finished with this file, I'm going to go and get another one. Now, this is the pattern from the Mad pattern templates class, so I want to use this one, so I'm just going to select the shape, Edit Copy, go to my new document, Edit, Paste. You'll see that the new pattern swatch is in the swatches palette were all I need to do, is to press "Delete", because they don't want the filled rectangle, I just want the swatch. Then I can go and close the swirly pattern file. Now you'll continue to do that until you have all the patterns that you want to use in your calendar in this file, so you want to 12 patterns for your calendar. Then we're just going to get rid of the things we don't want. Well, we don't want this color group. We don't want this file. We don't want the patterns that came with Illustrator, or any of the gradients, or any of these colors. The reason why I'm saying colors, gradients, patterns, is that I have show all swatches selected, so you want to seen all your swatches so that you can get rid of everything that you don't want. What you should be left with, is the non the registration, because you can't get rid of those two anyway, and your pattern swatches. When you've got that and it's full of all your swatches, you're going to click hear on the down pointing arrow, and choose Save Swatch Library as AI, and we're choosing AI, not ASA, because you can't save patterns to ASA files. I'm going to click "Save Swatch Library", and I've already done this before, and I've got a swatch collection called calendar collection, so that's what you'll need to do, just name it something that you can remember, that's going to be indicative of the calendar we're creating. Once you've done that, you'll just click "Save". Now I'm going to click "Cancel" because I've already done that. Then you can close out of that file because you don't need the actual file later on, you're just going to need the patterns from it, and we're going to get those into our new file, a different way. 3. Pt 2 - Create the Color Scheme: We're going to create a new document to work in. I'm going to choose File and then New. I'm going to print, to start off with. I want two art boards. I want one that I'm going to use a scratch space and one where I'm actually going to assemble my calendar. I've chosen letter size, but if you're in the UK or Australia or Europe, just choose A4, whatever paper size is standard for you. Nothing that we're doing is going to be particularly critical for whatever's paper size you happen to be using. The width and height are going to be automatically added for you, but you do want to be working in portrait orientation and choosing RGB color mode. In Illustrator CC 2017, this align new objects to pixel grid option is not in the New Document dialogue, but if you see it makes sure it's unchecked. If you're working in 2017, the option is a clickable option up here in the top right corner of the screen. Click Okay. Two artboards here, going straight to the art-board tool. I want to just shrink this one down because I don't want it to be very big, I just want it to be a scratch space for me. Now to the colors, I'm going to open up my Swatches panel. I don't want anything that's in here except white and black. I'm going to select all of these colors, click on one shift, click on the very end one, and drag and drop it into the trash can. Now where you get your colors from really depends on what you have available to you. If you're familiar with using color adobe.com, and if you've got color schemes, then you may found them in your color themes option, but right now my color themes aren't sinking. I need to go to the web just to see what's going on. Here I am in color.adobe.com, and I've got my color schemes that I actually want to borrow some of the colors from these schemes. Here you just go to explore and you can just type in a description of what you want. If you wanted to go to forests stuff, you could type in forest, press Enter, and you'll get some forest themed color scheme and you can choose any that you like. You'll just click on the one that you like Click Save to library and then you can save it to your library. Now I went and chose a whole lot of themes that were more city oriented. I've already done that. Here are my themes. It seemed like this one jumped in anyway. Here are the color themes that I want to borrow some colors from, but as I said, it's not sinking right now with illustrator, so here's my solution. On a page say, I have here a Snipping Tool. What I'm going to do is, I'm just going click New and I'm going to take a snipping of this group of colors. On the Mac, you also have a keyboard shortcut for doing that. That's Command, Shift four. You'll hold down Command and shift press the number four and you can just drag over the area to make a selection of it. It's going to be saved probably on your desktop in this Windows Snipping Tool, I can just click to copy it out of this Window. You can also use the Print Screen key on your Windows keyboard. I'm just going to close this down and I'm going back to Illustrator, and I'm just going to choose edit paste. What that does is it just pastes in this box of colors and I'm only going to use it temporarily just to get my colors. I'm going to go now and select the Rectangle Tool and hold the Shift key as I drag out a small rectangle. I'm going to the Eyedropper Tool and I'm going to sample one of the colors from this selection of colors that I like. I'm going to the selection tool, I'm going to Alt or Option Drag a duplicate of this square away. I'll press Control or Command D a few times to create some other boxes for the colors that I'm going to use in this calendar. I'm going to select this box, select the Eyedropper Tool, which I can also get to by pressing the letter I and sample another color. I'm going back to the selection tool by tapping the letter V, press I for the Eyedropper and go and sample a color, V for the selection tool, I for the eyedropper, sample a color. I'm probably only going to use about three colors here, but I'm sampling a few extra just in case. When I'm done with that, and I selected the colors that I want to use from those colors games and click on this pasted object and just press to like. I don't need a day longer, I just need the colors. I'm going to select over all of these colors and go to the color swatches palette. I'm going to click here on new color group. You can see that one of the options here, the selected option, is to create a color group from the selected artworks so all of these colors are going to automatically become color swatches. I'm going to make sure that convert process to global is selected so that if I make changes to a color later on, it's going to be reflected throughout my project. Now I'll just click Okay. There's my color scheme. Don't need these boxes any longer, but if you want to leave them there, that's fine too. Now we've got our color scheme, we need to go and get our pattern paces. I'm going to click here on the down pointing arrow, choose Open Swatch Library, user-defined, and then you'll go and select the file into which you placed all the patterns that you wanted to use in this calendar. Now I've got heaps, so don't be scared when you see all I've got, but you probably got 12 or so to use because that was what you came here to do. I'm just going to click calendar collection. Here are all the swatches that I had for this project, including some colors, but I don't really want those. I'm just going to select this shift click on the first pattern here, and just drag and drop them all into the Swatches palette here. I've got a lot of patterns to choose from here. But as long as you've got 12 or so, that's just fine. If you didn't have enough patterns to do this project and you're looking for some patterns to use, this is what you can do, click open the drop down list again, Open Swatch Library, but this time go to patterns. If you select decorative, you'll see that there are two sets of patterns here that you could use and you could also use the nature one's. I'm just going to choose Nature Foliage. You can see here that there's lots and lots of patterns that you could use and you can just select them same way as I did. Click on the last one, shift, click on the first one and just drag and drop them into the palette. If you're using these patterns, you probably will need a few more colors to work with because these tend to be multicolored patterns, whereas mine are a little bit more simple. By now you should have your color scheme to use. You should have your patterns in your Swatches Pallete and we're ready to go ahead and to start to create our calendar. 4. Pt 3 - Create the grid: Before we go ahead and start on the calendar, let's have a look at the basic layout that we're going to be using. What I have here is a series of patterns and each pattern has a month of the year underneath it, that's why we wanted our 12 patterns. We've also got a banner area across the top. What we need to be able to develop this is a grid, so we're going to start with our grid. Now, Illustrator has a tool for making a grid, and it's called the rectangular grid tool, and it shares a toolbar position with the line tool. That's where you're going to find it. Just click on it to select it. You're going to click once in your document. Now, when creating your grid, really the only thing that you need to get right is the number of dividers. The number of dividers is the number of rows or columns that you want minus one, because what we're talking about is dividers, not columns or rows. I want seven rows, but that means I want six dividers and I want four columns, so that means I want three vertical dividers. Just choose six and three and just click "Okay". Now, this is a really small grid and we've got a hole sheet of paper to fill in. But that's very easily solved because what we're going to do is just drag it out and it's just going to scale automatically. What we have here is the spot for our banner and then patterns, dates, patterns, date, patterns, dates. Let's go to the last pallet because we want this grid to appear so that we can set, but we don't want it to move because that would be very inconvenient. I'm going to click on the stroke tool. Now that I've got the grid visible, I'm just going to click and make it black so that we can see it as we're working, even though we're going to turn it off at the end. I'm going to lock it down. That means it's not going to move, but it is going to be visible. I'll need a new layer so that I can work on a new layer. What I'm going to do now is to create the boxes for the patterns. I am going to zoom in here to this topmost box here. I'm going to my rectangle tool, and I'm going to select over this area. This is going to be the box into which my pattern is going to go. I'll press "Control" or "Command zero" just to zoom back out. For now, I'm just going to fill it with a color. I'm just going to click here and just click to fill it with one of my colors. In fact, one of the colors that I don't plan to be using. Now let's zoom in again, and I want to see this box and the area next to it. Going to the selection tool, I'm going to alt drag a duplicate away from it and just make sure that it lines up perfectly. I'll press "Control" or "Command zero" to zoom back out. Now that I've done that alt drag process or option drag on the Mac to create the second box, I'm going to re-select my second box and I'm going to press "Control" or "Command D" twice. That's just going to copy those boxes at exactly the same spacing all the way across the document. Now, I'm going to select them and I'm going to alt or option drag them down so that they snap into position in this row here. If I add the shift key, I'm going to make sure that they travel in a perfectly vertical direction. I'll let go of the left mouse button and then let go the shift and alt keys. Again, this combined objects of four squares is still selected so I'll press "Control" or "Command D" to create the last set. That does save a lot of work copying and pasting yourself if you can get Illustrator to do the work. Now that we've done this, we're ready to go and create the dates. 5. Pt 4 - Add the Dates: We're going to start out working in the scratch area to create our calendar just because it's going to give us a little bit more room. But you will want to see not only the scratch area, but also this box here on the screen. I'm just going to drag over this area so I can see both, because this is where I'll develop my calendar but this is where it's ultimately going. I'm going to start with the Type Tool, I'm going to click in this area and I'm going to start typing out the days of the week. I'm using Myriad Pro Bold 5 points, because that's pretty much the size of type I'm going to need here. But you can choose a font and font size that you like, just be aware that small is probably better. You're going to start typing the days of the week and if you just want letters, then just type SMTW, etc. If you want three character days then type those, and you can start with whatever day you like, I'm starting with Sunday. You can see I have centered my texts, I've aligned center selected. You want to use some other option, you can select either the text with the Type Tool and just click on left, center, or right, however you want your days to line up. I want them to line up centered over the numbers. I'm going now to the selection tool. You might think that if you want to do something to do with type, you would be using the Type Tool, but this feature that we're about to use doesn't work when you have the Type Tool selected. You need to select over your type with the selection tool and choose Type, and then Convert To Area Type. Do that, and then choose Type, Area Type Options. What we're going to do, is we're going to convert this text into a grid of columns and rows. First of all, we're going to turn Preview on, then we're going to select a Text Flow, because later on we want to fill up each column before we start on a new row, that's going to be the sensible way to put dates into a grid. In terms of rows, I need one row for the names of the days of the week, and then I need six rows for dates. The largest calendar is going to go to six rows, I'm going to type in seven here. In this case we're telling Illustrator how many actual rows we want, we want seven, and we want seven columns, one for each day of the week. Can't see anything right now because the width and height are way to small. Let's start winding this out to a bigger width, and I'm going to increase the height as well. But there's also a Gutter setting here, I'm going to take that out and just set it to two. The default is about anything that's really quite big, when I adjust the gutter you can say that I can now say that the text has appeared in the columns. I'm just going to click ''Okay''. I'm going back to the selection tool, select over my shape and I'm going to drag it into my box down here. I can resize it a little bit while I'm here by just dragging on it. I want room at the top for the month name and I also want to a gap between this month and the next month, so that the dates don't get too close together. I'm actually going to make this a little bit narrower because I've got plenty of room to move here. I've got my days as a week in place, I need my date. I'm going back to my Type Tool, and I'm going to click just after the letter T here and I'm going to press the Enter key. I'll type 1, and then Enter or Return, 2 Enter or Return, 3, and so on all the way across and continue even when I get to the end. Each number has Enter or Return pressed immediately after you've typed it. Once you've done that, you can just click away from the shape. You want to make sure that you've got your dates right before you go to the next steps, and let's press ''Control or Command 0" just to zoom out, so that we can see everything here. I'm thinking that I could probably increase my font size a little bit. What I meant by getting your dates right is that the numbers are all the right size and the font and font size look really good, not that you've got the actual dates correct because that's going to happen much later. I'm just going to increase this and we don't want it to be bold, I'm just going to use regular for this. I could probably get a little bit of extra size into my days of the week here. If it breaks it's going to be really obvious that it's broken and you can just down size your font a little bit. This is looking pretty good, I'll press ''Control or Command 0'' to zoom back out. If I'm happy with this, I'm going to select the entire date panel, and I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key and I'm going to drag it into the next box. If I add the Shift key, I can make sure that it's going perfectly horizontally. You can see that Illustrator is also giving me a center guide there too, to tell me that it's aligned to the center of this particular column. I'm going to let go the left mouse button, let go the Alt and the Shift keys, and Control or Command D twice, and that's added the calendar all the way across. The data right but that's fine, that's an easy thing to solve in a minute. I'm going to select over all of these shapes, again Alt or Option, drag this down and sit it in position here. If I add the shift key, I'm going to make sure that it's perfectly aligned vertically, and then Control or Command D to get the last set in position. I have all the dates in the calendar and we're ready to go a head and to put in the months of the year. 6. Pt 5 - Months and the Banner: For the months of the year, you're just going to use the type tool. I'm going to go and get the type tool here. I'm going to click in position where I want to start typing. It's not probably a really ideal position, but we'll sort that out in a minute. I want this to be a right aligned, so I'm going to click that option and now I'm going to go and choose a font to use. So the font that I'm using is payzant pen, but you can use anything you like. So I'm going to type January into this box here and then I'm just going to place it and size it appropriately, so I can get a good idea as to how it looks. Having done that, I'm going to grab January and Alt Shift, drag it across to make February out of it and again, go back to the type tool and type February. I'm going to do that all the way across, but there is a quick tip that will help you a little bit. You can press the Escape key as soon as you finish typing and that will take you back to the selection mode so you can Alt drag and add the Shift key and put the type in position in the next box, press the T key to go to type mode and you can start typing the next month. Press Escape and then you can select it. Let's Alt, Shift, drag it into position, press the letter T for type and you can type the next month. Press Escape. I'm going to press Control or Command zero to zoom back out. Now with the selection tool, I can select over these dates and Alt Shift drag them into position down here. I've got them in Control or Command D to create the last slot, and then I just need to go and type over the top of them, put the correct month in place. I'm going to do that and will come back in just a minute. Now I've gone ahead and finish the month names and we're ready to go and create our banner. For the banner, I want a rectangle that is sized so it fits all the way across the top of this document and I'm going to fill it with one of the colors from my swatches palette. So I'm going two use a lighter color here and for the text, I'm going to use this sort of maroon color. I'm going to type 2017 and then I'll type a subtitle for my calendar. So my banner is just reading 2017, a celebration of patterns, but you can do whatever you like in your banner. Now we're up to the fun stuff. We're ready to go and to fill each of these squares with our pattern payzants. 7. Pt 6 - Add and color the patterns: To create our pattern swatches, you're going to first select either one of these rectangles here and then add a pattern to it so you can choose any of the patterns. I'm going to choose this one, which is my meandering hexagon. I'll choose Object Transform Scale. I'll disable Transform Objects so when you resize the object I just want to resize the pattern, and I'm going make this about 20 percent and click "Okay". Now I need to recolor it, but I've got a really big color swatch here, not all of the colors of which I want to actually use in my patterns in fact, I'm just going to use three colors in my entire project. For me, I can just move these colors out of the way and that will give me a color group that I can then use for my pattern recoloring. If you want to use a different subset of colors, or if you want to create a brand new color group just fill patterns, this is what you're going to do. Make sure that you've got little boxes with those colors in it. You will need to unlock this layer if you want to add more boxes or if you want to access them in any way shape or form. I'm going to make a color group of just those three colors. select all of them, back to the color swatches palette, click on "New Color Group". Make sure I have Selected Artworks, selected and convert the process to global click "OK", and that would give me a color group that I could use just for my patterns. Now I don't need that but you may want to do that. Of course, if you unlocked this layer here to get access to these little swatches, you want to lock it again later on before you go ahead because that's the grid underneath there and you don't want your grid to move. I'm going back to this layer, I'm going back to the shape I'm going to click on "Red color", and I'm going click on "My Color Group", From here I can just rotate the colors around to get a really nice rendition of my pattern with the limited color palette that I want to use. I'm thinking this is pretty good, so I'll just click "OK", and I don't want to save the changes to my color groups. I'm going to click "No". Now I'm going to the next box and I'm going to found a pattern to go in it. Well, let's choose a pattern here that has more colors than we have available to scale it down a little bit and click "OK" and now I'm going to the recolor dialogue. But here you'll seen that this pattern has five colors in it, but I've only got three colors and my color group, well, that's just fine. Going to click on the "Color Group" and you can say that the colors have been applied to this pattern. Now I can drag them into a different band if I want to. This will give me different effects by remapping the new colors in my color group to the original colors in the pattern. I can just move them around until I get something that I like and when I'm done, I'm just going to click "OK". You'll find that you probably have some multi-color patterns that you will want to do in just the same method. Here's one with six colors, but I want to remap it to a smaller subset of colors and then I may want to play with the color allocations myself. You can also click here to randomly change the color order until you find something that you like and when you find something that you like, you can just click "OK". Now I'm going to continue and replace all of these boxes with patterns from my pattern collection. You're welcome to come on the journey with me. But if you want to skip ahead you can do so and just go ahead to the next video. In the last video we're just going to fine-tune various aspects of the project and just get everything looking great. This is the 3D y-shaped pattern that I'm using here. Now, in this case, I don't want to use this dot color, but that's the color I'm being offered. So I'm going to double-click here and click "Color Swatches" and that will allow me to select the actual color from the color swatches that I do want to use. You probably want to mix up your really liked patterns with some of your heavier patterns, just to get a good variety. You will find that the recolored versions of your patterns are all available hear in the swatches palette. If you think you want to use this pattern here in this area, you can go and find that pattern in the swatches palette and just resize it but you don't have to recolor it because it's already bean recolored for you. I'm going to do that so that I can switch this pattern out for a different one. This is the pattern swatch from my made pattern templates pattern class. It's a really nice little swatch there. This is going to be the Argyle pattern from the diamonds and Argyle pattern class. This is a dot pattern from the dot pattern with texture class, but this is the dot pattern that doesn't have the texture in it. Again, this is a pattern that has a lot of colors in it that were just remapping down to a smaller variety of colors here. 8. Pt 7 - Customize Dates and Print: Now once you've added and recolored your patterns, there are a couple of patterns in here that you possibly have that have transparent backgrounds. This is one of them here. I known that this pattern piece is just the moroccan trellis and there's a transparent background behind it. I maid this a really light color because I want to add a really dark color behind it. With this rectangle selected, I'm going to the Appearance panel and I'm going to add another fill to this. This fill at the top is going to be the top color and so I want to select the bottom one here and just fill it with a solid color and that lets me achieve this lighter pattern over a darker pattern so we're just filling the transparent area of the pattern with a color. There are others here that probably have transparent backgrounds and you can experiment with them from your knowledge of when you made these patterns, and see if you've got sum alternatives for building a little bit of extra color into the design. Add another fill go and target the bottom most fill because that's going to be the one behind everything. Now, I've seen here that I've got a spelling mistakes so one of the finishing touches is obviously to go on spell check your document. I'll choose Edit and then check spelling. Click "Start". October is being picked up as a misspelling, so I'll select the correct word and click "Change". It's also picked up this lowercase a, but I want to leave that as it is. I'll click "Ignore". There are no other spelling errors, I'll click "Done". My type at this stage is black, but I want to use the dark maroon color that we've been using. I'm going to select over my type and I'm going over hear and I'm going to select the maroon color. I'm going to do that over all these type elements. Now we need to sorted out the date. I'm going to come in here to January and we're just going to look at this. Now in January 2017, Sunday is the first day of the week and there are 31 days. This calendar is perfect. But February is not because there are only 28 days in February. We're going to take still here and we're going to select over the last three dates and just press Delete. Now February starts on a Wednesday. I'm going to position myself right in front of the number 1 and I'm going press Enter, and I'm going to push the number 1 across to Wednesday because that's the starting date for this month. Now, if I go too far and press enter 1 too many times, I'm just going to press the backspace key to come back. There's February. Go back to the selection tool. Let's checked March. In this case, March starts on a Wednesday. I'm going to the type tool position myself right in front of the number one and I'm going to press the Enter Key. Of course March has 31 days, so that's fine. Go back to the selection tool. For April starts on a Saturday, so I'm going to the text tool. I'm going to position myself in front of the number 1 and just press Enter or Return until I push number 1 across to Saturday and of course April only has 30 days, so I'm going to take out the 31st. Going back to the selection tool, let's just move everything across. I've got a few fracture lines in my patterns. But I'm just noting as I'm going through. May starts on a Monday. I'm just pushing that across, but it has 31 days. June starts on a Thursday and of course it only has 30 days. July starts on a Sunday. It has 31 days. August starts on a Tuesday. It has 31 days. September starts on a Friday, and it has 30 days. October starts on a Sunday and has 31 days, so it's fine. It doesn't need any alteration. November starts on a Wednesday, and of course it only has 30 days. December starts on a Friday. At this point, we don't need the grid any longer, so I'm just going to turn off the visibility of this back layer that has the grid in it. There we have the design for our calendar and you can go ahead and save it at this point if you haven't already done so. It's easy to print, you just choose File and then print. We've got two artboards here and right now, Illustrator is defaulting to the first Artboard. But we're just going to click on "Range" here and I'm going to type 2, so the Illustrator is focused on the second artboard and not the first. If your printer can print boardless, then you can go ahead and print it. Now my printer can't print boardless or at least not the printer that's set up here right now. I'll need to scale it. I'm going to select Fit to Page. That will ensure that the calendar itself is scaled down so that it can print successfully on my printer. But again, as I said, it's going to depend on how your printer prints and then I will just go ahead and click "Print". 9. Pt 8 - Finishing touches: There are a few more customization options that you may want to look at in terms of your calendar. I'm just going to turn back on the bottom layer so I can see my grid. I'm going to drag out a rectangle. I'm going to place it immediately over where the dates are, and I'm going to go ahead and fill it with one of the colors from my swatches. Now it just needs to be sized a little bit to fit in this area here and I want to move it to the back so I'm going to choose "Object", "Arrange", "Send to Back", and that sends it behind the text on the page. I'm going to select it again, Alt, drag it down, add the "Shift" key as I drag it to place it behind the next set of dates. I'm going to do that once more or I could've pressed "Control" or "Command D" to do that. I'll turn my grid back off. Now another thing that I can do with this design is to totally recolor it, because everything in this design has been colored using these three colors and they're all global colors. I'm just going to double-click on this color and I'm going to make it a totally different color. I'm going to move it into the sort blues. If I click "Preview", I can see how it's looking throughout my calendar. I'm pretty happy with that blue, maybe just a little bit less saturation in it, and I'll click "Okay". I'm going to take this color and recolor it. Now you can work using RGB color mode or you can switch to HSB. It really depends on what you want to do or which makes better sense to you. If you turned "Preview" on, you'll be able to see it in place in your design so you can determine whether you need to make some changes to this particular color. I'm going to leave this other color in place because I like these three colors together. I'm just going to click "Okay". You can see that now we've got a very different look to this calendar, and because we used global colors, these three colors can be easily changed at any time to totally give the entire calendar a different look. Using global colors is always a smart option when you're doing a project like this. There's our 2017 calendar created to showcase some of the patterns that I have created in classes for you here during the year. Your project for this class will be to go ahead and create your own calendar of patterns, whether you use patterns that you've designed in my classes or other people's classes, or whether you use patterns that are shipped with Illustrator or you find online. Post an image of your calendar in the Class Project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and you've learned something about creating using grids in Illustrator. not only grids for aligning various objects, but also how to turn text into usable grids. As you're working through these classes, you will have seen a prompt to recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs-up, and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help others to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and I respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.