Transcripts
1. CLASS OUTLINE: Hi, My name's Dan Styles. I'm a designer and illustrator in Portland, Oregon. I've been designing posters for bands for almost 20 years now. Anybody from Wilco to the Arctic Monkeys to Tom Petty. What I'm gonna show you in today's class is how to make a poster for your band. Every band needs advertising materials. You need fliers. You need stuff for Facebook. You need things to go in the local club rag. So what I can show you is a process of how to not only come up with ideas for a poster, but how to execute that poster in Adobe Illustrator and then take the assets you've created , making that poster and extend them to Facebook to a T shirt. You could make a CD cover really anything you want out of this one suite of graphics that we will make today
2. CLASS PROJECT: So in this class we're gonna walk through a few different things. We're going to start with what goes on a poster, which seems like kind of a stupid question. But trust me and people screw this up all the time. Next we're gonna talk about an easy mess did for generating cool ideas. It seems again like that would be an easy thing to do. But sometimes when it comes up comes toe having an idea. People kind of auger in and they get that writer's block right off the bat and nothing's worse than sitting there staring at a blank piece of paper. We're gonna create your image using Adobe Illustrator. It's not that hard. I'm gonna walk you through all the steps. So as long as you've opened Adobe Illustrator once or twice in your life and have a basic idea of how things work, you should be able to follow along. I'm going to keep it pretty low level. If you're more advanced, feel free to go nuts, but I'm gonna be showing you literally which tools to use and how to use them. We are going to learn how to create custom type out of existing fonts. It's always nice to hand letter something from scratch, but if you don't have the time or the resource is or the skills, I can show you how to use just a normal typeface and make it into something that looks pretty cool, we're gonna learn how to add textures, which is, Ah, great way to make something just kind of dress it up a little bit. And then, in the end, we're gonna extend your new design to T shirts, CDs, Web banners, Facebook and pretty much any place else you want to put them. You'll have a poster you could take down to the copy shop graphics you can share on the Web , and, more importantly, you'll have a process you can use over and over again in the future to create more materials for your band.
3. INFORMATION DESIGN: Okay, Before we get started, we're gonna do a little bit of housekeeping. We're gonna set down some ground rules for what we need to do, because there's really nothing worse than getting halfway through a project or all the way through the project and realizing you did something wrong cause he didn't plan. So we're gonna do a little bit of what I'm gonna call information design. We're gonna talk about sizes and things like that. So right off the bat, let's talk about the purpose of the design. The purpose of the design is we're making a poster, which is kind of like, Duh Dan, we know that. But it's good to think about what kind of poster you're making. We're gonna make an 11 17 poster. It's gonna go on a telephone pole. It's gonna be used as advertising, which means people need to be able to see it when they're riding by on a streetcar when they're going by in their car, riding by on their bike, so needs to be big, clear and functional. A lot of the posters that you might see on eBay or even a lot of my posters, their merchandise posters which means when you go to the show that night, the band has hired me to make that poster as a souvenir type item. So you'll by that on the merch table. It's never going to get used for advertising, which is why the type may be complicated. It maybe 27 different colors on it. Ah, that kind of stuff. It's It's a completely different medium, even though both of them are there called posters, but they have a very different purpose. So we're gonna making an advertising poster today. Size and resolution. Essentially, posters for the street come in three different sizes. You've got 11 17 which is your tabloid size. That's what you're gonna generally see. Telephone poles. You can kind of cheat that go 8.5 by 14 which is a legal size poster. I've done that for a couple of places that just don't have a budget to print slightly larger pieces of paper. A little ridiculous. You can also go in half by 11 which is a copier size paper, but that's really just kind of a handbill. That's kind of a sad little poster, so I would I would stick to one of the bigger sizes, print resolution or print advertisements are sold in basically by the full page, half page, quarter page. That type of thing. The thing is, you never know in advance how big their page is going to be, so they're going to send you specs with the dimensions on it. That's not something we can really plan for in advance, but we know it's either going to be the square or some type of form of a rectangle. Web banners also come in pretty much every shape and size. You can get a wide one like a 4 68 60 Or you could get a skyscraper tall, one like a 306 100 again. The website will send you the size that you bought and let you know what the specs are for that. But it's all over the place. CDs and LPs or square. That's pretty cool. That's easy to work with. But what we want to do is you want to create an image that's gonna work in all these different formats. And if you look at the variables here, I mean, you've got something with super tall. You've got something that square so we need to be able to do is create an image that we can dismantle and put back together to fit in all these different formats and not have it completely fall apart, which is something to really keep in mind throughout. The entire design process is really easy to design yourself into a corner and then make something that works really great in a square format but doesn't work anywhere else because of the way it's, it's all set up. It needs to be versatile. So the first thing we want to talk about when making a poster is the really dumb stuff from your journalism one a one class in high school, which is the who, what, when, where, how, uM who obviously is your band? What you got to tell people what it is they're going to. If it's a concert, they probably know that already. But if it's a CD release, you should tell him that when super important the date. Believe it or not, people forget to say that some posters sometimes where location obviously also super important, how again, This is something you can even easily forget, but ticket info, location info, you are l any hashtags? All of that kind of stuff can go on. They're not as important. Once you've reeled people in with your image and your who when you're what and when, Um, the other stuff could be a little smaller and isn't quite as important because people are already there and they're already paying attention. Double check your information and spelling. Seriously, double check it. It's very easy to screw this up. And nothing makes you look dumber than sending something out in the world with a typo in it or putting something on Facebook and saying, Hey, come to my thing. And then 30 people leave comments. Where is it? You're like, Oh, and you have to change it. So just make sure you have all that stuff on there in advance. It's just called due diligence only takes a minute to run spell check. But again, a lot of people just kind of forget to do it. Lay out. Today we're gonna be doing a pretty basic layout, which is going to be sort of big type on top little type on the bottom image in the middle . This is not by law, the only layout you can use for a poster. You can use a lot of different layouts for a poster. But again, this is what I did for us later, Kenny. This particular image, for instance, would not shrink s. Oh, this looks great. As a merchandise poster. It's super huge. Looks good. But if you were trying to shrink this down and put it on a Web banner, all the type would shrink to the point. You would not be able to read it anymore because it's embedded in this spot inside the tiger's mouth. Ah, and we can't just pull it out and make it bigger without wrecking the design. So again, we're gonna design something that's modular today so we can pull the type out and manipulated separate from the design itself. Here's an example. Just finished this, like last night at 2 a.m. This is the Northwest Folklife Festival poster, which is where we started, and then Web banners, print advertisements were going to doing tote bags T shirts on the usual stuff with that. But you can see that this design has a space to put all this junkie stuff like you know, you're gonna get all these different logos people are gonna send you. Maybe if you're doing an event, you gotta be able to squeeze those on somewhere. You gotta be able to get your type on there. A couple different sizes, move things around. You know, this one here, we've We've actually put the stuff sideways to make it all fit. So this is what I'm talking about. Versatility. If you're doing advertising materials, you're not just making one image and trying to make it look nice in that one particular aspect ratio. We're actually trying to make it work in a lot of different aspect ratios.
4. DO'S AND DONTS: Okay, One last thing before we actually start to draw, I'm going to cover a couple of do's and don't of poster making, So let's start with the please don't please don't use a poster of your band standing on the railroad tracks. This is probably the most cliches image known to poster making. Additionally, do not use a picture of your band standing in front of a brick wall. In general, I would say, Actually, don't use a picture of you or your band at all ever. And last year, like Justin Bieber, level Famous and Justin Bieber level good looking. Otherwise, people they just This is not a compelling image. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to see what you look like. Let's just stay away from photos, Additionally, photos. They have a lot of tonal tonality to him, so they kind of wash out. They become muddy, so it's not graphic. It's not punchy, and what we really want to do is grab people around the neck and say it comes in my band and you've got like, three seconds to do that as they're walking on the street, and this is absolutely not going to do it. Additionally, never used the praying skeleton. It is the most cliche rock n roll graphic clip art that you can ever find, even more so than the brick wall. I think so. Don't do that. Please do make it compelling. I have this thing. It's kind of cheesy, but we talk about sometimes what I'm doing presentations. We talk about the way to make an image compelling is toe. Either Make it in. Ah, and ah ha or ah ha ha! Which is I know that sounds stupid, but I swear to God, you'll never forget it. Now that I've said that, um eyes is to make it really, really beautiful. Just make make people go home. My God, what is this? It's beautiful and they need to come up and they need to look at it. Ah ha is you basically engaged their brain. So when they look at it there, huh? And then they go, Oh, that's a face, dude, you know, so that people feel really engaged in something when they just figured it out like it's a little possible or something makes him feel smart. Call this clever. It's what a lot of people call it. That's really clever. People really, really like that. Ha ha. You know, if you can make somebody laugh, chuckle, go Hey, due to come and check this out again, you've got him. Eso that's really important. This Melvin's poster just if you understand the joke, always makes it the left. If you understand the joke that obviously you don't like the Melvins make it unexpected, so something I do a lot of is mixing symbols and messages. Take something and mess with it, kind of like when you're a little kid and you have a catalog and you start blackening and people's teeth and giving them black eyes. And, you know, whatever. You take something that people are used to seeing and you mess with it. And then again, like the ah ha, that kind of engages their brain. They go. That's funny. That's cool. So, like this is a little sticker. It's also a T shirt and some other stuff that I've done. But people always they're just like, Oh, yeah, that's cool right on And and that's what you want to do you want. Engage them in your graphic. You want it to have a strong silhouette. Make it iconic. So again we're making a poster that people are going to see walking down the street so they don't have a whole lot of time for nuance. They want a whole lot of time for detail. You really just like when you're using a computer, your phone or whatever. You know the icon for Spotify, the icon for Spotify, and you can recognize it in two seconds. We're kind of trying to do that with our poster Today is make something that doesn't require them to stand there for three days, figuring it out because you really like I said, You only have maybe 34 seconds to grab him as they're going by. And you know, there's so much competing for their eyes. So if you can not make something, you know the fuzzy, muddy picture of you guys standing on the railroad tracks and instead give them something that they can immediately latch onto on, then immediately engage in. You kind of won the battle right there. Then they'll walk over and study a little more closely
5. MAKING YOUR IMAGE: So now we get to start drawing and we should talk about making your image. The thing about the music industry is that stuff doesn't actually really need to make a lot of sense. If you're doing editorial illustration about a veteran from Afghanistan with PTSD and you draw a picture of ah, blowing up rainbow or something, it's not gonna make any sense, right? But an exploding rainbow for your band could be perfectly good. So I would say, If it's cool and it kind of goes with the vibe of your band, just run with it. Nobody's really going to judge you on that. And you know your audience. You know your band. So you probably have a pretty good idea of what's gonna resonate with him. Also, don't be afraid to kind of step outside the genre of what other bands are already doing. The world does not need yet another Metallica knockoff logo, so if you're in a metal band, you don't need to feel locked into doing that kind of imagery or that kind of type, you know, with the little dissenters on either side. Um, feel free to make your own thing a lot of bands have a lot of different kinds of imagery, so it's cool to kind of step outside of the norm. That said, depending what kind of music you make, you're going to know what's acceptable. So a J pop band and a metal band are gonna have completely different kinds of imagery, completely different kinds of audience. Don't sit around waiting for inspiration. I'm going to show you today a process I used to force myself to have ideas because, like I said, you know your band, you should probably already have ideas kind of kicking around in your head. But maybe you sit down at that piece of paper and you're like, 00 crap, eso I will show you how to kind of force an idea out of your head. So the technique I'm gonna show you to force an idea out of your head. I call it symbolize and summarised. That's named after a quote by the famous designer Saul Bass. He was talking about how he made graphics for film titles, but I think it's a really good way of what I naming a process where you can sketch out a bunch of ideas and then kind of jam them together into one super idea. I use it all the time. Teoh force myself to have ideas and also just to make things that are unexpected. It's a great way to mess with symbology, and that's really all. Graphics are is taking symbols people already understand and trying to make them new and compelling again. To demonstrate this process, we're going to create a poster for a fake band that I just made up. Called Exxon a ex Elin. They're a psychedelic tinged punk band from L. A with a strong social message. Their first album is called Riot. That's I Mean, that's the kind of brief I get when I'm working with a band. If I've never heard him before, I'll go on Spotify or Soundcloud and I'll listen to their music and try to get a better feel for it. But since you're creating for yourself, you already have a pretty good idea of what you sound like on maybe even what kind of image you wanna have. So the first thing I do when I'm working with this process of symbolizing summarize it is I sit down and I thumbnail a bunch of images. Whatever comes to mind thinking about the ban in the music, Just anything. Don't self at it. Don't try to make nice drawings. Make quick, simple thumbnails. They should take, like, a couple seconds each be the size of a postage stamp. Looking for volume, The more the better. Make 10 make 20. So, I mean, if you're talking about, um, you know, there there is called Riot. So maybe, you know, we've got this idea of the fist, you know, Um, but their social band, maybe peace symbols? I don't know. Maybe an anarchy symbol. Maybe it's a sign that says no war. You know, um, it's L. A. You know, the Suns shines in L. A. So we can have that, you know, maybe that they're having a riot on their album. Apparently. So maybe there's There's police there in riot gear. Looks like a skull, but that's a gas mask. Trust me. Um, you know, the maybe they're a bunch of hippies and they like flowers. I don't know. Uh, you know, we got the Hollywood's on. That's pretty L A. It's a riot. So maybe there's Molotov cocktails, you know, um, maybe they were combat boots, whatever that looks like. Um, maybe it's the bottom of the combat boot. That could be kind of cool. Like the tread. Um, you know, what else is there? You know, maybe they got the little bandannas. They were over their mouth cause they're, like, crust monks or something. I don't know. Um, where would be happy? Maybe they drink a lot of beer. Beer can. Good old skulls. Man, you can't go wrong with skulls. Everybody loves a good skull. Um, you know, other symbols, lightning bolts or whatever, you know, So you can keep doing this all day long. I would advise making a page of these types of things, um, and then kind of sitting back and looking at him, and that's that's where the summarized process comes in. And so now I've got this page and I literally sometimes Philip ages in my sketchbook with just these little things, and I start to look at him. I say, Well, you know, any one of these symbols on its own is kind of boring, right? Like we've all seen a gas mask. We've seen this fist way too many times, but just like I showed you with the kitty throwing the devil horns, you know? Is there some way to take this stuff and jam it together into being amore effective and more interesting symbol like, let's just say, for instance, you know, we got the flour and we got a skull, so, you know, like maybe maybe you gotta sco with the flower around, you know, like suddenly that's a little more interesting. Like if I saw that on a T shirt ago. It's kind of funny, right? Um, the Molotov cocktail. You know, maybe the name of the band. It goes on the label. That could be kind of cool, too. I wouldn't do that for this particular poster, because again, if you think about that shrunk down, that's gonna be some really tiny type. So you can't do that. Um, something that really jumps out at me. Is this gas mask like this gas mask idea? So, you know, what can we do with the gas mask? Big thing on the front. You know, maybe maybe we put the anarchy symbol in a circle on the front. You know, this circles already made. It's asking for something, but that's like to punk symbols rolling one, you know, anarchy, gas masks. So that's not very interesting is not very compelling. You know, again, get this gas mask. Maybe we put the peace symbol on the fronts, and now we have it kind of contradicts. It's like, Wait, what's this riot cop, you know, doing with, uh, with a peace symbol on his gas mask. So again, you can You can just keep doing this kind of stuff. Sometimes you could even get two or three different ideas rolled into one. You know, maybe the Hollywood Hills are reflected in the lenses of the of the of the glass on the front of the gas mask. So this is a way to take a lot of symbology and cram it into a cool looking image that actually has some meaning because it's it's easy to make a cool looking images just sort of like, Oh, that looks cool. I don't want means only school. You see that all the time. But if you're really trying to make something iconic on something that resonates with people really helps to have some meaning. So, you know, something like this that could be our hero idea. This sketch looks terrible, but I can show you how to take something that's this raw and make it into ah finished product. Next we do some research. What is a gas mask? Actually look like? Google images will definitely tell us so. Gas mask, gas mask, bond, gas masks for sale, Good with gas mask. Go to images and we have a 1,000,000 examples to choose from. In looking through here, I would just pick the ones you think Look the best, you know, like this one's got a canister on the sides a little bit lopsided, like the ones that the canister on either side nice and symmetrical. You've got different kinds of eyes, got round ones. You've got the ones that look kind of like alien eyes. Lots of different stuff going on here. This is pretty cool. This guy's got a helmet on. Makes him look militaristic. I think we should add the helmet to our design. Makes it look more like a riot cop. So, you know, you find a couple you like and ah, you can either just sit here and stare at the screen and sketch from that or you can even like, just grab that one. If you want, you can grab it, toss it on your on your desktop. Or you can option click if you're on a Mac and to save image as. And you can save that wherever you want to save it. This is just something I was working on my sketchbook here. You know, this doesn't need to be the final art. This can still be kind of rough because we're going to take it to the computer and work it a little more. But it's good to Ah, like I like this. I better than that one. But that doesn't matter. You know, we're gonna put our peace symbol on the front here right about there. So we're gonna work over this file later. So, like I said, don't kill yourself making this thing perfect, But give yourself, you know, a good outlined to work from something like that ought to be just fine. And then to get it into the computer, you really have two options. One is a scanner. If you own one. Obviously you can scan it in. The other one is You could literally just take a picture of it on your phone you hold your phone right above it, make sure you're straight on and then just take a photo and you could email yourself that photo. You can throw it in Dropbox however you want, but just get it over to your computer somehow. Ah, and you could work with it from there. Now we finally get to the computer, we're going to create a new document, and we're going to start working with the sketch you just made and turn it into an actual vector graphic. Okay, now we're at the computer and we are going to launch Illustrator. I have Adobe Illustrator CC 2015. That's the most recent version of Illustrator. It doesn't matter if yours is 10 years old. Everything we're doing today is going to be very basic. So any version of illustrator can handle this here. All your pallets on the side there close because I'm on a laptop. You're on a stressed out version. They probably open with safe space that closed Pathfinder pad I usually have open just cause I really like using the tools down here on then these air your regular tools over here. I'm gonna walk you through which ones we need to selecting which ones we need to use. Eso you won't get lost. Hopefully first thing we're inducing and create a new document. You can do that by doing command and on a Mac, a similar Believe it's Ault in on a PC or over here under file command and new Your dog gonna set a tabloid. We're gonna make sure it's vertical and we don't want a horizontal one vertical document. The rest of these settings are absolutely fine. Just leave them as they are. We can name this something just so that when we save it, it doesn't save is entitled a document. Weaken. Name this Exxon Coaster one. And there we go. All right, So here's your document. Here's your art board to move around the art board. This is important to this little hand tool here. You can drag. You are bored, but much easier than that. Hold down the space bar. Now you can drag and you can move. That will allow you, Teoh. Manipulate this and get to the point you want to get to without having to kind of work up in the corner of your screen somewhere zooming in and zooming out is also really important . You see, you've got your zoom tool over here. Uh, it will allow you to zoom, but again, faster if used the keyboard shortcut, which is shift command option. Those bottom keys kind of on the left. There, that zoom out and then zoom in is just command and the space fire. So that will allow you between those three. See how I can kind of get in and out of this thing really easily. First thing I want to do is you want to place that image that we just took the shortcut to command for. Places shift command P. But again, you can also do file place that's going to give you this. We're gonna have to find the project's gonna be in this folder. I know it's gonna be in skill share. I know. I put it in its own folder called Scans. So there's that on. We're gonna just put that somewhere. Doesn't really matter where there's our scan. Ugly scammed. It doesn't really matter, because we're gonna delete the art. Anyway, I'm going to zoom in on that and then what we're gonna do now we're gonna trace it we're gonna trace it with the pen tool. This tool over here, Penn duel. Also just a P on your keyboard. He's one. Use the shortcut command because this is a symmetrical image. One thing we can do, which is pretty cool, is we can actually just trace half of it and then flip it. And so the both sides of this will be exactly symmetrical to one another. So the way the pen tool works is you're gonna tap once you're gonna create a point here, you're gonna go to wherever your next point wants to be, click again and hold down and drag and you're gonna see that line you're making there. And I kind of want to get that where you want it. And then if this handles too long, you can you can grab it. If the option key grabbed that guy kind of shortening up there under another point. Draw another point. That could be a straight line because that doesn't have a curve to it. This one here is gonna want to be curves. We're going to click and we're gonna drag again. This takes some getting used to makes people insane. At first But trust me, you get used to it pretty quickly. Now, if we just draw again, you'll see we have this weird curve to that. So again, option. Grab that handle. Come down here to this. Go across there to that. Get to about the halfway point here So you can see what we've been drawing with Up till now is a black line with a white Phil zoom in here and show you that we don't really necessarily need that fill color. Right now. We're just concerned with the line because, as you can see, the fill is actually blocking a good part of what we're trying to draw. So just you can select these two things by clicking on the white Phil, we're gonna clear none. We're just gonna go back to this line. All right, So now we have traced half of this guy's head. We could do the same thing. I'm gonna go back to the pen tool. We're gonna start tracing this, I hear. And I make this look easy that I've been doing for years. It's gonna be kind of annoying to get the exact shape you want. If by chance some part of this is wrong and you want to adjust it. You can use this white arrow, the direct, select tool you can grab individual points. Zoom in to show you you grab individual points and tweak. Um, you can also grab it right on the point and drag it and that allow you to manipulate individual points on it. This black arrow here, which is known as the selection tool, also V on your keyboard. You can grab the whole thing and move it around again a rumbling and going to do one of the eyes because I don't need them both. When it comes to doing the mouth, we can use the Ellipse tool over here. That's L on your keyboard or just grab it right there and we're gonna draw on the lips. If you hold the shift key while you do this, you will get a perfect ellipse. If you don't hold shift, you can see that you get You can adjust the size of it, squash it and stuff, but we want a perfect circle, so there's one perfect circle into another perfect circle inside it. If these don't line up, we could line them up later on to grab that again using select. There we go. We're gonna line us to you up a little bit, and I believe it or not, that's actually a really good starting point. Now we can take this whole thing. We're gonna use this again the selection tool and grab it. We're gonna believe it. You can see we have now have half of a gas mask. Uh, these two things don't line up. A cool thing that illustrator will do is down here. We have in a line palette also appear under windows. You turn it on and off line, and you can grab the two things that you want to select. Another individually Grabem, or you can just kind of draw a box around him. What idea? And you just hit this one boom. But this one boom, now they're perfectly aligned, Computer aligned. Ah, Now we're just gonna reflect the other side of this face, and we're gonna have a complete face. You can do two things with that again, we're gonna use this selection tool. We're gonna drama a bit of a box to get him both. And you can copy paste, which is command. See I'm in command, V. You get that? Both of those are I believe under here Copy paste under the edit menu. But I use the keyboard commands again faster. Most programs have command C Command V is their copy paste. Another thing, kind of cool thing you can do is you can grab them both on, grab a point on it and then shift command option, which is it feels really weird. It's like kung fu grip. But you can grab him and you can slide him like this and you will have created a perfect duplicate and it's gonna be perfectly in line. Still, because you're holding the shift key. Eso all you need to do. Then it's flip this thing over and you're gonna be lined up where you want to be. The way you're going to want to flip this, you're gonna use the reflects tool. There's two ways to do that. There's a keyboard command, which is just Oh, so you can see I can select this. Oh, and if I hold the shift key again, it'll flip it right over. There's also over. Here's what it looks like if you just want to collect it click on it. You get the reflect tool. Grab that reflect. Remember to hit shift cause he had a nice, clean flip then. All right, so there's the other side, and then we can grab it somewhere else. Say that point right there. Bring them together. Right about where we want. How about that? Looks good. Right. Um, some of these points aren't exactly lining up perfectly. We can clean that up. You're gonna zoom in, remember command and then space by. I'm gonna grab these two Just the points on the ends. We want this white tool here, which is your direct select. We're just gonna grab this point. We're gonna grab this point. We're gonna join them on. There's, uh, the keyboard command is command J or and Command Z will undo just like any other program. So, Jay, do that. I'm gonna show you where you can find that, and that's under object path join. And that's kind of clunky to have to go up there and do that. So keyboard commands a lot faster. And then up here. This is kind of funny, too, because you can see these Don't line up. There's a lot of different ways. We can clean this up. What I'm going to do has just emerged this whole thing. So I'm gonna grab it all both sides. Good on Pathfinder. Hit this 1st 1 here. Unite! Clunk! Now it's one big shape with these two weirdo things sticking off the top. Use this white aero we're gonna select. That was hit delete, which is just delete on your keyboard to leave. Don't wait. Grab that point. At that point. Join them like we did on the bomb. If it bothers you that there's a little bit of unevenness which, quite frankly, what we had were more than 2000% zoomed in. Trust me, nobody's going to see this. But if if you're kind of anal retentive like that, there is a smooth tool over here. Shaper, pencils Note is that they love it. A lot of stuff on here. Smooth tool will actually allow you, Teoh, select a path, go to smooth and like do that. It'll turn it into more of a curvy, nice organic shape. Good for cleaning stuff up and there we have it. This looks a little off center here again. We can grab it all we can go back to our aligned palette Boom aligned. Move these over a little bit. There it is. That is our gas masks shape taken from the sketch. Last thing you probably want to do to this is group it. So you're gonna select it all, And this means so that when you grab it, you're not gonna be like Whoops. I didn't mean you move the whole thing, not just his head. So you gonna select it all? Command G is group. That's a keyboard shortcut. Or you can go up under object and then group. All right, that's that.
6. MAKING YOUR TEXT: all right. Next, What we're gonna do is we're gonna make your type. Um, type is actually kind of hard. A lot of people mishandle their type a lot of images when you got in the world to see something really cool, really great poster, really great commercial even. And the imagery will be really great. But the typography will kind of stink, and it's because it's it's kind of a hard thing to manage. There are really three ways to make type. There's there's using an existing typeface, which means just go in there, click on the type tool, start typing in Helvetica. There's taking an existing typeface and modifying it, which is a really great way to do this because it doesn't require a ton of typographic background. The third way is to create type yourself, whether that's just scrawling something with a Sharpie and scanning it or spending a year creating the absolute perfect typeface. We're not gonna get into that today. We are going to go with that second method where we use regular old typeface. You could take almost anyone, and there's just things you can do to it to make it more interesting, I remember the first time I sat down on the computer and looked at the type on it, and up to this point had been hand drawing on my type and it was crazy stuff, and I was like, Oh my God, these type faces, They're so incredibly boring. It was Helvetica on future and all these things that I'm like these are always like the same type over and over again. Where's the really exciting stuff? Trust me, you can make something more interesting out of out of something pretty basic. And if you look at a lot of band logos from the past over the last 30 years, you know the Beatles or whoever a lot of them actually have really, really simple logos today. It's just the who you know. It's like, says the who, and it has a little arrow coming off of it. Um, you don't need to go way over the top toe, have good typography. Sometimes going way over the top actually is the antithesis of good typography. Um, so let's get going, OK, now it's time to do your type. We're going to use the type tool over here, which is either T on the keyboard. Or you can see it's that tool right there. We're also gonna use a character power, which is over here. Open that up. If you don't see the character palette for some reason, you can goto window and then it's kind of hidden here under type character and has lots of different things to do with that. But you want that one character, so we're going to click anywhere, and we're gonna write the name of the band. Our band is called Exxon. Your band might be called Foster the people or something like that. Uh, we're gonna grab that. We're going to scale it up using the scale tool. Remember, that's over here. Or just asked on the key board member to hold the shift key. Important to hold the shift key when you do this. Otherwise you're gonna make it all wonky. Eso there is our name. The next thing we want to do is we want to convert this to a graphic because right now this is called live type on. You can, you know, type. But we don't want that because that really limits what we can do it. So we are going to convert it to a graphic. The way to do that is ah, Keyboard Commando's shift command. Oh, so shift command. Oh, or if you want to use the pull down menus that you can go to type and then create outlines and I have a graphic, you see, it's got points on it. Just like your image down here has points on it. This guy is a lot more leeway. Um, I picked future a medium you could really pick Whatever typeface you think is most appropriate for your band. Most typefaces that are gonna come preloaded on your computer or not going to be the most exciting typefaces. But what we're trying to do here today is create something illegible. So you don't need to make the Metallica logo or or something insane like that. We're gonna want something that people can still read while they're passing by in their car or what not. So we're not gonna go over the top on create something really insane, but you'll see there's, you know, you're gonna have 2030 different typefaces to pick from, all of which will probably be pretty basic. Sarah Sanders their faces. Sarah said the little feet on which had nothing is really appropriate to our band today. Eso back to this future a medium here. I'm going to zoom in on it and you can see with this bigger typeface. You know, it's geometric. It's from the geometric period of type, which is kind of cool. So we've got we've got a perfect triangle Perfect circle the and it's kind of like two triangles or even a square eso. One thing we could do, for instance, is take our pen to well, over here on, we could we could kind of highlight the fact that this is made out of basic shapes. That would be sort of cool right now. So you got Yeah, that that always closed. You see, I get that will circle. That means I'm closing my shape. If you don't close, your shape you're gonna want is drawing lines all over the page. Been like, How do I turn this off using the ellipse tool over here or settle on the keyboard? You can draw that. Fill that in on. Then we're gonna go back to our pen tool command p or just pee on the keyboard or clicking there fill that in, You know, so I mean, that's kind of neat. The issue with this is this doesn't really feel particularly heavy metal. I got this extra point down here. We can grab this with the direct, selectable white one there with that up. You know, like, this doesn't feel very punk. Rock this. This feels to me like, almost like it's, uh I don't know, New Wave 80. Use improbable lines across it there. Totally inappropriate to what we're doing. It's kind of united by Benetton. Remember that around anyway, so we're gonna get rid of that. You're gonna grab the stuff you did to lead it. That's not working. Eso you know. What else could we do? Well, we've got this. We got this gas mask. It looks pretty militaristic. You know what might go with that? You know, one thing I'm thinking is maybe, uh, maybe we could make this into a stencil. Fun. So it looks like, uh, it's stenciled up here. May be kind of cool. The way we're gonna do that is we can grab our rectangle tool, which is over here. That's just em on the keyboard. We go, I'll just draw a line. We're going to select that. We're gonna rotate it. Rotation is this tool here? It's also just are on the keyboard. We're gonna spin that around, try to kind of line it up with the angle here, we're gonna move it into place. We're gonna make it white double click there. This upto wait. Not quite a perfect fit. Rotated a little more. If the ends air sticking off weaken, grab just those ends. So you use this tool here. Direct, Select. Just just grab these points. Hold the shift key. You can grab more than one point at a time. Stretch that down. So that's kind of like, uh, stencil now and we can grab this. Remember the slide? The shift option Command, slide that over. Or you could just command C Command V doesn't quite fit on. They're gonna rotated again. Grab it, slide it over. But that in place. Grab it, slide it over. Split this guy here in half that rotated again. Grab the end points on this one shift key. Grab it, slide it again. That's adapting you. You switch tools, rotated a little, make it fit, you know? So that's still legible. but starts to look a little more interesting, Van. Just using a normal typeface again room one group, this whole thing, but something we want to do first. If you look at this, you see all these little bits and pieces on here, You know, that's like, for instance, if we put this on top of a color, let's just grab some color here, Gray. You know that's gonna happen, and that's not cool. That's gonna mess us up at some point in the future. So what we're gonna want to do is we're gonna want to get rid of all these and knock him out out and make these shapes a lot cleaner. First thing we do not need to do is ungroomed the type. Anytime you convert a word Teoh outlines like we did to make a graphical, it's going to make it into a group just with illustrated as un grouping is shift command G , or you can go appear under object. And there's the UN group already on grouped it. But it's right there under group. Now, each one of these things is an individual letter, which makes it a lot easier for us. We're going to use our selection tool. The We're gonna just grab this 1st 1 here and we're gonna go down here to the Pathfinder tool, which is again, something you can pull down from the windows. If you don't have it open, I keep mine open. Could use it all the time. There's a lot of different things. There's the merge which are not gonna user unite. We're not going to use that right now. We are going to use minus front. What that's going to do is it's gonna take whatever object is on top the other object and knock it out. So seeing that assume means you can see a little better, you know? Now that thing doesn't have that little square in front of it anymore. Make sure this lines up a little better. Select both of these by drawing the square on him minus front. It's like those minus friend. This one's a little tricky because we have two of them and I'll show you what happens if you tried it in about the same time. Oh, it worked. Usually it doesn't. We got a little extra points in there. You can actually, if you want to get rid of that. You can go to your delete anchor point, which is under your pen tool. Just knock that off of there. Soon back out. And there you have it. Stencil type to go along with your image. A couple of notes about type before we go any further is one of which is don't stretch your type. It's really like, let's say we want to take this down here. We're gonna fill the space. A lot of people will go. Well, you know, we have this awesome ability to scale things an illustrator. So I'm just going to I'm gonna take it, and, uh, I'm going to scale this up by doing this. And OK, so now it kind of fits the space, But, like, look what happened to the letters. Look. Fat parts of it got how thin parts of it got. If you're not really familiar with tight, maybe that won't bother you. But, you know, the thing is, let's just say, for instance, we're gonna find a picture of Angelina Jolie. It would help if I spelled her name. Right. All right, So we're gonna find an image of her. I'm gonna do it do an example of the reason this makes designers nuts and makes your stuff look almost immediately really amateurish. Copyright image going. Take it back over here. So, Angelina Jolie, it looks really good to some people. I think she looks like kind of an alien, but, um, let's just say she needs to do a role where she needs to be thinner. So they the c g I guys do this and I don't like immediately. She just looks really warped, right? You know, you don't you don't do this to somebody's face type is the same way. So you really don't want to be stretching and screwing up type like that because everybody knows you know what a pretty normal face looks like. And so the minute you you do this crazy stuff to it, it just trash. Is it? Somebody spent a lot of time making these letters look good. So don't ever do that to your type. If you haven't have more typographic skills than what I'm showing here, go nuts. You know, like go to town and make yourself a new type. But what I'm just trying to show here's a real simple, easy way Teoh modify existing typefaces. So next up, we're going to combine this all and make it into a poster
7. ASSEMBLING THE PIECES: So the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna assemble all our pieces into an actual poster. We already have our type up here. We can just select that. Moved in a spot we want scale it up a little. We have a gas mask here which is looking a little bit naked, so we're probably gonna want to fill that in with color. If you remember, we group that's we want ungroomed it. Shift command G. We're gonna take that back to our composite pieces. Uh, let's for right now, I will just make that background black. There's a couple different ways you can do that. Obviously, one of them is with your pallet over here, under swatches again, under window. You can pull that up if you don't have it. We can just fill it with black Easy enough. Of course. Now you can't see the eyes so we can go in there and find those and select the whole thing . And if your shift you can diesel ect stuff. So now you can see we have selected the eyes, the mouth of the gas mask. Fill those light. One of them did not fill. I'm guessing It's probably an issue of this. I actually being behind. Yeah. See, I can't click it. It's behind. So we're going to want Teoh. Use the scent of front and center back commands. We're gonna want to send this particular piece all the way to the back. If you imagine a deck of cards, the cars aren't shuffled quite right yet. And this is somewhere in the middle. We want that I to be on top. Eso under object, arrange sent back. There it is. We're gonna grab this middle piece here. We're gonna fill it with black to something we can do is select all of these and we can turn off the black stroke. We don't really need that anymore. And there we have it. We can regroup that we can scale it to the size we want using the scale tool. Now we can add that peace sign on the front. You could do that Just using the rectangle tool here we can holding the shift key. We'll get bad, but we don't really want it. That Why that? So we're gonna let go the shift key and that's going to give us I rectangle there we can actually sample the color using the eyedropper, which is something I dio sample the white offer here. Or we could just go over here and use that to We're going, Teoh do the drag to duplicate again. Remember, that's shift command option. We can scale this down and then we can rotate. It rotates over here again with the are rotate. Behold the shift it'll rest. Rotate on seeing rotates on even increments 45 degrees each time Drag that into place, We're gonna slide and duplicate again And now we're gonna reflect that. Remember, Reflect is over here. Or you can just use the are on the keyboard, reflect Hold the shift key. It's gonna flop back the other way. And we now have a peace sign on the front and drag these up. Weaken group these again. We don't need him to be separately. More command G on G group. This, uh now we're still missing. We got the who were missing the what and when and where and all that stuff so we can find that information. I have it here just in a text document, but say it can do in an email or something like that. You could just copy that. Use your type tool again. Click again. Type two Ochlik and paste. We can use the scale to old scale, this all up and, um, dragon in place. And you can see it doesn't really fit. It's kind of ugly. So what we should probably dio is make this look a little better, make it a little bigger and get the information hierarchy into place. Meaning, what's the most important information that you're probably the biggest? I would say the special guests, gristle and night soil action. Pretty cool bands. Everybody wants to see them too. So we are going to grab this. I'm gonna go to the type to again. We're just gonna select that little bit that we want there. Go back here. We're gonna gonna kick Command X. We're gonna cut that out of there. Go back to the type two. We're gonna taste that. It's gonna be its own line. I would advise doing that all three lines so that we can treat them all individually. We're gonna highlight that Command X, we're gonna cut it paste. So now we have all this stuff. I'm three separate lines of type, which is gonna allow us work it a little bit better scaling up, scaling down when it comes to selecting a typeface for these, I tend to use narrow typefaces going over here, for instance. I know right off the bat that didn't convince Condensed bold is a nice thin typeface. You can see how it takes the same information and really makes it. Then scale that up with scale, too. Looking at this, you can see this is kind of a typo in that that really doesn't belong there. So we're gonna use the X. We're gonna stick it over here where it goes. That information is not that important. That could go smaller. Um, one of the cool things about the eyedropper tool is that it works for type two, not just color. So let's just say we picked both of these. Select the eyedropper. Now, look at that. We can, uh, for matter type, but having to do anything else to it. Uh, this this is pretty pretty, you know, not so important information. We're just gonna make that smaller. Stick it down. Here, take this. Put it here. Depending on important. We think that is do we do something like that. And now we have what is essentially a finished black and white flyer. I would say that this is actually a little bit boring, so I think we should add color. And I think we should add texture. But if you were just looking for a really simple, straightforward way to make a poster that was gonna get hung on the street, you know, you could do this, photocopy it in black and white on toe, you know, like yellow red or something. And you would have, you know, your basic, straightforward street flyer that I think would be catching up. People would come up in. I have to take a look at it.
8. TEXTURE: all right. So the next day we're gonna do is we're gonna make some texture. Like I said, that poster look fine. But, you know, the background was a little little flat. Really? It didn't have a whole lot going on eso An easy thing you can do is make textures to fill in backgrounds. You can also do masking techniques and what not Teoh give everything a little more depth. It makes it look a little more handmade to which keeps it from looking to computer so you could make a texture out of anything. I mean, literally, you can take a photograph of the carpet on your floor and take it into Photoshopped, making it into a texture. In this particular instance, we're going to just Ah, we're gonna splatter some ink, and then we're going to scan that and then, ah, use that as a texture. I'm gonna show you how to make files and photo shop that will allow you to import this texture pretty easily and use it. Um, I just have a brush. I mean, you can use a paintbrush or you can use a toothbrush is pretty cool, actually. And some Sumi ink and I'm just I mean, I'm literally just doing this. Get a few You like trying to make a huge mess and then just let that dry and we're going to scan these pieces of paper, and we're gonna turn them into a texture that we're gonna drop into the background. All right, Once your papers dry, ah, you can take it and you can do the same method that we did before with your camera on your phone. But if you have a scanner, I would advise using a scanner cause you're going to get a much cleaner, sharper image for this. Since this isn't a sketch, this is actually going to go into the final piece. It's good to have it a tight as possible. So we're gonna just scan this in. I'm gonna load it on my scanner. This is not any kind of like fancy scanners just of three. And one printer probably cost me 100 bucks loaded on there. Fire up the scanner software, which is actually part of my printer. Ah, The only thing I would advise doing is making sure that you're scanning this kind of stuff at the highest possible resolution that your scanner Condo's, um if you can do 1200 DP, I go for it. Most scanners like this one here, the maximum resolution is 600. So, um, go with that. And the reason for that is the bigger the image, the more you can scale it up in Illustrator, cause this is not going to have victory. Um, and just gonna be just old school pixels a certain point, they're gonna get blurry. So if you want to be able to scale this stuff, you're gonna want to have as much resolution is possible to play with So outline that thing and my scanner bed and I'm gonna hit scan, and then the next step is taken into photo shop and make it into a bit Matt tiff. Okay, Now we're gonna take our images into photo shop and make them into bit map tiffs. The first thing you're gonna want to do is find your two images saved my end of the scans folder texture, one texture, too. Taking a photo shop here and you can see now that, um, they look a little rough. They're not bad, but you can see there's some gray and then. This is not white. This is not really black. So what we want to do to fix that is we're going to go into your curves, which is command M brings up your curves or image adjustments, curves. There's a lot of ways you can do this. Levels will do it. Brightness contrast will do it. You know a lot of ways to adjust your your tones, but I just use curves because it's what I'm used to. Um, you can kind of see this right here. This shows you where all the color is all over here. Does not your typical bell curve. Um, So you're just gonna grab this point appear you're gonna really make your blacks rich? Yeah, that's really blackening those up. Uh, you grab this point down here and you're gonna bleach out your whites, and eventually you want the two to meet in a straight line. And this means you've gotten rid of all the gray anywhere because we don't want any. Great. We just want solid black and solid white. Uh, so there you have that. You okay? Could do the same thing to your other one. Uh, somewhere around there, you can see here what it's doing. If I zoom in, you can see it's getting rid of all that gray color, and that's about that. All right, So now you have that, Then you're gonna want to go up here into your mode and this is already gray scale. I scanned a minute grayscale. You might bring him in, they might say RGB, which means you have to do this twice. If they're RGB, I'll just turn this one RGB Alright, So RGB is ah, three color mode that anything online typically comes in at. So your photograph you took a photograph on your phone would come in and rgb ah scan If you told the skin in a color were coming at RGB even though the image looks black and white, um, you're gonna want it to be grayscale gonna switch to gray scale. It's going to give you all this. You want to get rid of color information? Absolutely. And then you're gonna go after done grayscale. You're gonna go up here again because it can only do this from a grayscale image. You're gonna select bit map output. You're gonna want to keep it at 600 cause that's what it came in at again. We want as much resolution is possible here so that we can scale the image this down here is for turning it into 1/2 tone screens. But since we don't have any graze, nothing is gonna have tone. So you could actually pick any of these? It won't matter. 50 within 50% threshold will simply get rid of anything. It kind of rounds up in rounds down. But like I said, there's no gray, so it doesn't. Doesn't matter. You don't leave that alone, All right? Okay. And now we have turned this into a bit mapped image. Zoom in there real tight, kind of See what we did, and they were going to save it. Now, the important thing with this is we're going Teoh, if you just save this is going to save it as a J peg, which is what it came in as we don't want that, what we want is we're going to save it, adds something. So say that's what instead of just a regular command as a shift command s and, uh, we're going to tell it to be a tiff, and this is important. It only works if you say it is a tiff, I'm gonna change the name BNP em. They're just stands for bit map. So texture, one BMP tiff. This is all finally, that all alone it okay to do the same thing to the other one, and then you're gonna have to files you gonna texture one tiffin. A texture to tiff. That will be your texture. So image mode were already a great story. And tell it to bit map. Leave it. 600. Threshold is fine. There we have that shift commanders for save as change. The name just we don't screw ourselves up. It's already doing It is a tiff. There we go. So both of those are now saved their in my scans folder in my project folder. I'm gonna reopen this document here and now. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna place that image. Um, there's a couple different ways to do that you could go up into I don't even do it with the pull down. So I've forgotten where it is. File place. There it is. Under file is placed. You can also do shift command. P mine is already set to go straight to that scans folder cause I've placed stuff from this folder earlier in this, uh, tutorial yours might land you somewhere out here. You haven't find it, but you're gonna go to scans or whatever you call that folder. You're gonna grab your texture. If you hit Link, your file will be a lot smaller when you save it. When you save this file here, your flyer file, it'll link to an outside image which will be this. The issue with that is, if you go someplace in this outside, image isn't in the in the image folder where you left it. You're gonna get this warning. It's a dialogue box of public. See, I can't find this image. They just won't have it. So sometimes I'll just actually embed it on Click the Link Place. Nice. You get this thing? Got a little preview of what you're placing. You can draw square and there's that again we can do with the 2nd 1 For the 1st 1 I forget which when we just did draw square place it at the same one. I don't know. Maybe that goes in the O again. We don't want to mess up the type so bad you can't read it. But you do wanna use this stuff now, the really great thing about bit mapped ifs because here, you if you're doing a black and white fly, or maybe this is it, maybe you're done. Now you're gonna actually copy Paste by doing that slide. Copy that. I showed you earlier. You can rotate this stuff course. Right now it's blocking all your type. You know what? That but, you know, play with it, get it on there. Starts to make it look a little more interesting. But the really great thing about bit mapped ifs is you can actually color them. So in the next, uh, session, we're gonna go into color and you can see that you can start doing stuff like that with it . No other imported image can be colored. So that's why I always save it as a bit mapped. It
9. ADDING COLOR: Okay, next up, we're going to talk about color. If you have the budget for color prints or if this graphic will be used online, feel free to add some color to it. First thing I would do probably is get rid of your black. Um, we're gonna grab these things again, using your directs electoral or your selectable doesn't matter. Either way, you're gonna grab those, get him off of there because right now they're sitting on top of everything else. So when you try to grab, you know your guy's face you're gonna like, and I grab them because you're getting this image, which is actually even though it's clear, is a big square, so you can see through it. But you can't grab stuff to grab that stuff moved to the side for right now, a Sfar as color goes, You know, one thing you could definitely do is add color background. Seeing his draw square back there, maybe not make a full bleed, because when they print this thing FedEx print, you know they're not. Or wherever you get a printed, you can leave a little bit of a margin. Um, so let's just say you know, we want a red background back there in your swatches. Over here, you can pick red or whatever color you want. I'm going thread. Remember, you can send this to back. This is now sitting on top of everything. So your brackets, your shift command and your brackets will bring these forward and back. That's also under object. Arrange. Bring the back in front. Uh, you know, black is boring. So, like, why does this guy need to be black? He totally does not. One thing I try to do with color oftentimes is fine colors from opposite sides of the color wheel. So instead of doing multiple tones of the same kind of thing, you can find something that contrasts it and looks a little like funky, you know, maybe orange there or something. You can also adjust your colors. You don't need to stick just with the ones out of the palate. Go up here into your color wheel and color mode thing, and you can you can actually slide these things around, makes your own colors. You can pick ones, offer here if you want. I find the power just a good place to start. But it has sort of one of every possible color, and then you can find tuned them from there. Uh, you know your type. You want a little read that black and red on screen seems to have pretty good contrast. In the real world of print, Black and red actually have a very similar tone ality. So you're I can't read it very well. It's just one of those weird things. So, you know, maybe you want this to be some kind of yellowish color. Maybe this type down here goes in some kind of yellowish color. You know, these lenses and whatnot? They don't They don't need to be white. You can certainly make them the same. You'll see. I'm using the eyedropper tool toe. Just select colors instead of you going over here, you can just use the eyedropper, which is also the I key. They, uh, zoomed in too far again. Now, you can bring this stuff back on if you want, and it could be whatever color you want it to be. No, it doesn't need to be the same. Red is everything else. You can leave that black. Maybe it's white for that kind of Frank Miller blood. Look at look kind of cool. So this is kind of thing these air finishes. You can go go to town on this, Do as much as you want. One kind of cool thing I'm gonna show your real quick is masking. And that is you can take a vector shape, and you can actually use it to mask something else. For instance, this pattern or really anything you want a mask. So I'm gonna grab one of these. I'm just going to use this direct selection tool just going to grab this from a copy and paste that I want to put it on top of something else. Make sure it's on top and then command seven, We'll turn that into a mask, and you can see I've now masked that thing inside that shape. So let's just say, for instance, for one reason or another, you just wanted the texture on the lands. You know, you can do something like that, which is pretty cool too. So I'm gonna leave color up to you. You can certainly go to town. And And the nice thing about a computer is that you could do this all day long. Just keep messing with it. Keep adding textures, keep it in colors, keep adding patterns and continue to work with this. Or you could just stop where you are and and call it good.
10. EXTENDING THE DESIGN: all right. The last thing I want to show you how to do is to extend this design on to some other items . T shirts. We can make a little J peg for Facebook. Uh, really can go on anything because this is a vector piece of art, which means you can scale it. You can copy, paste it, and everything is its own separate little unit, Which means you can reconfigure it without messing up the art. You know, one thing you can do, for instance, is a T shirt. This is a template. I used to just show T shirts to clients on that I made previously. But you can see now that you can take this guy on guy through a mask on him while you weren't looking just so that, uh, all the splatter stuff is inside the shape. Here's that's all. Nicely mask down to that same masking technique I showed you with the eyes. You can grab that, drop it on their shrink it down, make whatever size you feel it's necessary using the scale tool. You can distract this over here. Now it's behind. Member. Bring it to front with the object. Arrange remember that? Eso You know, maybe you want to change the size on some of this. Maybe you're gonna decide the type goes on the bottom. All the usual and t shirt would go top. Um, bring that to the front, you know, and just like that, you have a t shirt design. Uh, you're using the red. It's in the blood of the shirt. So that's not an ink colors that really. It's only a two color T shirt. Really cheap. Different. There you go. Ready for the merch stand. Another thing you could do, for instance, is make a graphic for Facebook. So we're gonna want to make a new document. For that We're gonna do command, and or you could go into file new on this one. We're just gonna call this f B to give it a name we do not want tabloid. We also do not want inches. We're gonna take it over to the pixels, which is what everything on the web is measured in. Everything on Facebook is square. They are 504 by 504 pixels. I don't know why they picked that size, but that's what it is. So There's our new document for that, um, waken draw square using our square tool right there. Rectangle. Go edged edge with that. What kind of snap into place to make that read. Go back to our previous document, which is just open in another tab. Here, we can grab all our stuff. There's our head. There's our type. Here's our support. Copy. We're gonna copy that command. See? Take it over here. Command V. And we can rearrange all of this stuff too. To fit using the scale tool. Scale that up. Maybe Drop that and back on this stuff here, you can leave it like this. You can also remember how we showed you how to do type converted to outline, shift, commando or type. Create outline. This will be a little easier to work with when it's just not live type like that. We already know we're not going to change anything. If you do need to make edits, unfortunately cannot go. You cannot undo this really once you start working with it. So make sure you're committed but a time you commit. You converted to outlines. Put that there. This is gonna be a little small. So maybe we make that bigger, you know? So I mean, you obviously you could dress this up a little more, do a little more with it, but you get the idea. Now we've got something to put up on Facebook to tell everyone that you're gonna play. Uh, illustrators got this great feature called Safer Web. So, you know, you could just command as to save something. Um, but you can also do something called safer Web, which is a shift option. Command us. Uh, or just go up here and do this, give you this great interface that'll show you what size it'll be. How it'll look. You can pick with you on a J peg R J for gift. As the kids called him these days, paying whatever format you want. Just stick with J. Peg. And you say that there it is. Ready to go on the web. I'm gonna save it, Teoh. Let's see. Where are we? Here I was put it in its own folder under skill share. We're gonna call that f b, create the folder, save the image. And now all you need to do is post that from Facebook like it was a photo. You can also do the same thing. For instance, with a Web banner. Brianna creating Web banner were already set up in pixels. The size, for instance, for this one will be a with of 700 and a height of 3 20 That's a standard banner size. Like I said earlier, they all changed. So check with the website First banner, grab this whole thing copy based, and you can see it's absolutely the wrong size. But the interesting thing about this graphic is that we can reshape it. So we're gonna again draw background like that read. And I think in this instance maybe what we do is we take his head, bring it to the front, put it over here. Oops, that sometimes, you know, hold the shift key. But that over here, then maybe the type goes there, Yeah, from that to the back So you can see it and this stuff lines up underneath it. Scale this up a little bit. Remember to hold the shift key Asean stretch Angelina Jolie's face. That stuff can go whatever size you want. Grab it all, slide it over. Delete this stuff down here. Even though It's off the image area. It won't show up on your final J peg. But again, you can do the safer Web command. And boom, There's your web graphic. And you can keep going like this all day. You can make it into a CD cover. You could make it into anything you want. You could make a sticker out of it. Sticker might be kind of cool. Like I was gonna show you on this page. Maybe you take his head, you take your type, scale that down and run it right across the helmet. And I got a sticker. You consent to the sticker printer, just like this sentiment file right there. And they can print that up for you. Now you got stickers, so I mean, you can keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Because this is a pretty versatile graphic we've made for you. Uh, and I think that is all I have to say today. Thanks for joining. And I'm going to sign up
11. FINAL WRAP UP: So there you have it. There is a poster for your band and everything you need to know to do it again. Moving forward. I encourage you to do the project. I also encourage you to have fun with it because, honestly, making band graphics is probably the most fun job within the world of graphic design you could possibly ever imagine. I really try the symbolizing summarized thing. It's a really effective way of coming up with ideas when you don't have anything to go on. It's also, you know, if you have something a great way to create kind of a super idea by bombing a lot of smaller ideas together into a larger, more expressive idea. I would also encourage you to do it again and again and again because, honestly, I've been doing this for 20 years, and I get better every time I make a poster. So make one poster, make two posters, make 10 posters. By the time you've made a few of these things, they're going to start looking really good, and you know there's always gonna be a new gig. So make a poster, make another one for another gig in two weeks. Another one gig in four weeks and you're really going to see your skills start to climb as you grow more comfortable with tool and as you go grow more comfort with process. So, you know, thanks for hanging out with me today, and I really hope you take the time Teoh make a project.
Dan Stiles
