Adobe Certified Professional in Graphic Design & Illustration using Adobe Illustrator - Exam Guide

1. About the course: Are you ready to become a certified illustrator expert and take your creative career to the next level? Hi, my name is Martin Perimek Adobe certified instructor with over 20 years of experience teaching Adobe design tools and working as a creative for brands like Disney, BBC, Unilever, and Nickelodeon. I'm excited to introduce you to the Adobe Certified Professional in graphic design and Illustration using Illustrator Exam Guide. I know it's a mouthful, but this course is your complete companion to prepare you for the official Adobe certification exam, the highest industry recognized credential for Illustrator users. You will get in depth video training about all the topics, practice exams, exercise files, and detailed downloadable guides to help you review every important topic. And the best part, you can now take the exam from the comfort of your home. No need to travel to an exam center anymore. Why should you consider taking this exam? Becoming an Adobe certified professional proves to employers, clients, and peers that you have real world job ready illustrator skills. It's an incredible way to boost your resume, your confidence, and stand out in a competitive, creative market. It also opens doors to freelance opportunities, career advancements, or even higher salaries. Whether you are just starting out or looking to solidify your expertise, this certification gives you a powerful, recognized credential that will set you apart. Whether you are already comfortable in Illustrator or starting fresh, this course will help you build the skills you need to pass the 50 minute live in the app exam with confidence. Even if you are brand new to Illustrator, you can be exam ready in less than a week by following this course carefully. It's important to mention that the certification exam isn't included and needs to be booked separately. But don't worry, I will walk you through everything you need to know to succeed. If you are serious about becoming a recognized illustrator Pro, this is your first step. I can't wait to guide you on this journey, so let's get started. 2. How to prepare for the exam: In this video, I'm going to show you how to best prepare for the exam using this course. First of all, the exam is divided into five main topics. You can see these on my screen. And for each of these topics, I prepared a study guide, which you can download from the resources here on Skillshare. Once you download these PDFs, you will be able to open them on your desktop computer or even on mobile devices. And I recommend using this throughout your entire preparation process to keep track of your progress. You can also search within the document. So if I just type something like scope, I will be able to quickly find all the matches, and I can jump over them. I can also highlight them if I need to. And, of course, you can also select any text from these guides, and you can copy and paste them somewhere else. I wouldn't recommend printing all these guides out because it's a lot of paper. So just one topic. This first one would be 18 pages, but altogether, the five topics, so if it's all the guides, probably would be close to 200 pages. Don't worry. You don't actually have to read through all these guides. That's why we have video lessons for every topic. So I actually cover everything that's written down here in each of these videos. And you will also see the numbering at the beginning of each video title, like 1.1 point A, which means it's from the first main topic working in the design industry. And within that, it would be the first subtopic. And then the A is an additional subtopic inside there. So if we look at the guide, it will make more sense. So that's the main topic. Then 1.1 is the identified purpose, audience and audience needs for preparing images. And then 1.1 point A is that first subcategory within this subtopic for the first main topic. So we can see that's determine whether content is relevant to the purpose, audience, audience needs, user experience, and design for devices. It sounds a mouthful. These are always quite long. But all you have to remember is that the video lessons in the course are all recorded according to this guide, and it goes through everything in the right order. So we will see 1.1 point A, then there will be 1.1 point B. And if we scroll further down, we can find that here in the guide as well. Then if I go further down, we will find the next subtopic, which is 1.2, starting with 1.2 A. So once again, that's the next one we can see here. Besides the study guides that you can find in the resources here on Skillshare, you can also find a link to access all additional resources like exercise files, project files, quizzes, and the final test. Now, once you click on this link, it's going to take you to this platform which we are hosting onsmdsigner.com. The reason why we did this is because it allows us to include quizzes and practice tests that currently is not available on Skillshare. It's important to mention that all the video lessons are hosted on Skillshare. So you only have to come here to access these additional useful resources, but you can complete the class without leaving Skillshare. Once you reach this welcome screen, all you have to do is to create a new account by clicking on the icon here at the bottom, and this is going to set up a new student account on our learning platform. Yes, I'm at designer.com. All we need is your first name, last name, your email address, and a password that you can set up. Alternatively, you can also sign up with any of these options. So LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, or Apple. Once you created your student account, you will be able to access all these additional resources, starting with the projects and exercise files. So you can download these from here. Then you can find the quizzes for each of the main topics from the exam. And at the bottom, you will also find the final test, which covers all the topics. But I will come back and talk a bit more in detail about this later in this video. First, I wanted to talk a bit more about the quizzes that we created for each of the topics. What I suggest is to do these quizzes once you completed all the video lessons for a specific topic, and then come over here and start the quiz for that particular topic to test your knowledge and to see how much you understood of all the things that we covered. And it is important to mention that there are a lot more questions for each of these tests than just 20. So each time you are going to take this is going to be different because it's going to randomize the questions from the available pool of questions. And when you are taking these exams, if you are choosing the correct answer, once you confirm, it's going to verify that it's correct once you finish all the 20 questions, at the end, you will get your results, and we set the passing rate to 70%, which would be the same for the real Photoshop exam. So until you reach the 70%, I would recommend to retake the quiz. But the best thing is that you can actually see a list of your wrong and correct answers. So it just gives you a summary of everything that you covered. To summarize, what I would recommend to do for each main topic is to go through the video lessons. First, use the exercise files to practice everything that we cover in these videos. Then go through or skim through the study guide afterwards just to remind yourself of all the important things that we discussed in that topic. And then when you feel ready, then you can take that quiz at the end of the topic, and we take it until you pass the 70% passing rate. In the real exam, besides multiple choice questions, you will also be tested using Adobe Illustrator and performing tasks, and to be able to help you prepare for this particular part of the exam, I created projects. And you can access these projects from this area, which I mentioned already earlier in this video. And once you download the projects dot zip file, which is a compressed file, you will get four illustrator documents out of which two are templates, and these are the ones that you should use to practice. The finished ones are just there for your reference if you want to check how the completed version of each of the projects is supposed to look like. So once you completed that, you can come back here and watch my solution or explanation of how best to do this particular project. And there is no right or wrong order to go through this, so you can pick whichever you want to start with. Just make sure you go through all of them. Now, it's important to mention that some of these projects will be slightly more complex and more difficult to solve than others. And it's also important to mention that these are way more complex than what you would actually have in the real exam. While in this course, for each project, you have several tasks that you have to complete. In the actual exam, you will have individual tasks. So for each project file, have to normally just do one single task. So in case of this particular example that we can see on my screen, there's five tasks that we have to do here. That would be five separate tasks in the real exam. Now, once you completed all of these projects and you also watched my solution videos, and you feel like you are ready to try a final test you can come here at the bottom and choose all topics final test. So instead of 20 questions, here you will get 30 questions, which again is aligned to the real exam, where you will have 30 questions in total. If you complete all of these projects and then you go through this final test at least once, it should give you a very good idea of how the exam is going to work. And once again, most of the things that I'm asking here in this course is slightly more complex and harder that you will end up having to answer in the real exam. 3. What to expect during the exam: In this video, I would like to show you the tutorials that you will be greeted with when you are taking the exam. So these won't actually be taking up the time allocated for your exam when you're doing it live. So you get 50 minutes to complete ten questions and 20 tasks. But before even getting to those, you will need to go through a couple of slides, which just simply explains how the exam is going to work. Now the reason I included this video is just so you can familiarize yourself with these already even before actually taking the exam. And I will walk you through these quickly. First, you will have a couple of things that they will ask about you. It's more about your background and while you are taking the exam. But then this is the slide that explains it well that you will have this first initial tutorial with a couple of slides. Then the first main segment of the exam starts where you will be asked questions. So this segment will include 13 questions. They are all multiple choice questions. If they want you to have multiple answers selected within a question, that would usually be mentioned. But most of the time you would just need to choose one answer. Then once you are done with that section, you will be moving into another short tutorial, a couple of slides about the next segment, which is going to run directly in Illustrator. So that's the more exciting and interesting part where you actually have to perform tasks. And once you are done with those, you will still have the option to go back and revisit any of those tasks that you are not sure about. But once you're ready, you can just submit your answers and you will get the score report straightaway. That's a great thing. You don't have to wait around. You will know exactly what your scores are. Now, on this next slide, we can see that you will be able to track how many questions you've answered so far out of all the questions that are coming up, you will be able to keep an eye on your time, the remaining time that's available. And any question can easily be reset. So if you quickly just want to go back to how it was before you made changes to it, you can reset it. This applies to both the questions and the tasks. And probably the most important option here is the mark for review checkbox that you can check at any time whether you already completed the question or task or not. Checking this option is going to add a little flag, and it will make it easier to come back to that particular question or task at a later time. This is how it would look like when you get to the end of a section. Let's say the section about questions, and there's the little flags showing or indicating which questions were marked for review later. And by clicking on the questions here in the summary, you will be able to quickly jump back to them. And once you finish reviewing that question and you make sure that your answer is final, then you can just go back to the summary, which will take you back to this page. And when all of your questions are done, you can just say submit section. That's going to finalize that first stage about the questions, and you will move to the second segment or second part, which is going to be about the tasks. But first, for the tasks as well, it will give you a short tutorial, a couple of slides, and again, explain where you can find the important elements within the user interface. And for this part, the exam will actually open up Illustrator first. And, of course, Illustrator has to be installed on your computer for this to work. And the exam will set the interface up in a way that you will see the certification questions on the right side in a dedicated panel. So that's what we can see here. And it will always give you the task there, explaining what you need to do. And on the left side, you will have your document where you can work. And the great thing about this part of the exam is that you are completely free to use whatever you want, as long as you complete the task that they ask you will get points for it. Now it mentions that a few features will be blocked during the exam, which is listed here at the bottom, like the help option because they don't want you to learn about the features during the exam. But you don't have to worry about these missing features because they won't be necessary to complete the exam. Now, you are actually also free to move panels around and change the interface. But if you ever want to reset it back to the way it was, just go to the window menu choose workspace and then reset the certification test workspace. I recommend to dock the layers and the properties panels right next to the certification test panel, and to keep these two always visible because these will mainly be needed to complete all of these tasks. So this is my recommended layout. Then similarly to the questions during this task segment, you will also be able to reset the tasks at any time. You will also be able to track how many tasks you already went through and how much of them we still left. You will also be able to mark any of the tasks for review later. You will be able to see your summary as well. And in case you wanted to leave feedback about a particular task, you can also leave feedback here. Now, feedback that you give won't be considered for your final result. It's more of a feedback that they can use to improve the exam if you have the time for that, but I wouldn't worry about that most of the time. It's important to mention that during the tasks, there will be a couple of them where you will also be able to click on Exhibit to see the final result. And that's always useful to check first before you even read the question because sometimes it just makes more sense what you need to create. On the left, you will see your document. On the right, you can check your exhibit. And then once you see the before and after, you will know already what to do. After that, reading the question will make much more sense. Whenever you see something underlined and set in bold and italic, that means simply just by clicking on it, you will be able to copy that text. They just want to make sure that you can quickly put in any text that they ask you to use, for instance, for a layer or a layer group or some other things like saving a file with a particular file name. Now, there is an important thing mentioned here on this slide that you should always only do the things that they ask you to do and nothing else. So, for instance, if there is a dialogue box where there's a lot of options and they only ask you to change maybe two or three of those, then all the others should always stay the default value. So don't mess around with anything else. Always only pay attention to what they ask you to do, and you don't have to do anything else. Once you get to the end of the task segment, and you also make sure that you reviewed everything that you marked earlier on, then you can just click on finish that section as well. And with that, you will be done with the exam, and you will be getting your score report, which will tell you whether you passed or not. So the required score is 700, which essentially means 70%, and out of the 1,000 points, you will see your score just below that, and on the bottom right corner, you will see either a pass or a fail. But most likely you will get a pass if you complete the entire course and you go through everything. But that is all you need to know about how the exam works. So now hopefully you are eager to get started. So move on to the first topic, and I wish you good luck preparing for the exam. I am confident that if you go through everything that we cover in this course, you will nail it and you won't have any trouble passing. 4. 1.1.a Identify the purpose, audience: For every design project, in the beginning, it's very important to clarify a couple of things like the purpose of the design and also the target audience. Now for the purpose of an image or design, first of all, you need to talk to the client and find out more about their business goals and what they want to achieve with that image that you are creating for them. Here is one of our recent design contest briefs, for example, for a charity called Amazon Aid, and they required a series of posters created for the river of Gold curriculum. And this is intended for college students. And here are the topics, the impact of gold mining, rainforest ecology, and so on and so forth. And each of these topics will have a focus, objectives and key activities. So as a designer, the more you know about the intent and purpose of a design, the easier it is going to be for you to understand what elements you should use or how you should frame everything in a composition. And if the brief is not detailed enough, you should always ask additional questions from the client. You can ask questions like, what is the main message that you are trying to convey with this design? Or what action do you want the viewer to take after seeing the design? And also importantly, how is this image going to be used? Is it going to be printed? Is it going to be a small print that people will hold in their hand? Is it going to be a larger print that is going to be on the wall of a classroom? And in case of this brief, we can find that information here in the size. So we know exactly the print size and the color mode, which is intended for print, the resolution that is 300 pixel range. But like always, if there is something not clear in a design brief, you should always consult the client. Now, the target audience of a design or image is just as important as the purpose of the design. And again, that's something that is very clear here in this brief. So we are creating this for high school students aged 15-17. In case of this project, it's very important to know because older kids obviously will be able to understand more complex graphics and designs. So things that we can see here like this infographic would be hard to understand for younger kids younger audience. Maybe for younger kids, something like this would work better, which has a little bit more color and a bit more vibrant and more characters on it. While for a more mature or adult audience, we can have more statistics and information that they will be more interested in seeing. 5. 1.1.b Requirements based on video, print, and web: Another important aspect of the design brief is the deliverables. And that means what are the actual files that you will need to supply to your client at the end of the project? And the type of files or deliverables really depend on the output. So whether the image or design that you're working on is intended for print, web, or video, and the easiest way to compare these and to see the differences is by going to the New Document dialog box in Photoshop. So this is something you can find by going to File New. And then here on the top, you will be able to choose these different categories. So when you choose print, you will see the preferred or suggested settings for it. And most importantly, here, the resolution should be set to 300 PPI or pixel Pyrne by default. Now, the color mode is set to RGB because Photoshop is best to be used in this color mode. Most of the features will be available here. While if you choose CMYK, it will be slightly limited. Some features might not be available. However, this is the file format that is best suited for print, where the four color channels are the four inks that we use for print cyan, magenta, yellow and black. K stands for key color in printing. The best file formats to save into when it comes to print would be PDF, TIF or EPS. And there's one additional thing to remember when it comes to saving for print from Photoshop, and that's how to set up the bleed. It's very rare that they would ask you to do this, but you would have to go to the print options. So the file menu and then choose print. And only here you will be able to find the option for the bleed for which you need to scroll down. And on the printing marks, you will be able to choose corner crop marks and then go into functions as well and choose bleed. And normally we would use 3 millimeters bleed, once we click Okay, this should be all that you need to do to have those crop marks showing up with the right bleed settings when the image is going to be printed out. Now coming back to the new document dialogue box, when it comes to creating images for the web, you would want to use 72 PPI resolutions through a lower resolution and RGB color mode. But besides that, you have to also remember that these files should be saved by using the exports or save for web options from the file menu export dropdown. And the most commonly used three image file formats for the web would be JPAG PNG, and GIF. And we will be discussing these options and all the exporting options in a later topic in this course. For now, is just enough to remember these three options and perhaps one additional file format, which you would be able to find if you go to the file, save a copy option, and then just choose on your computer. And here you will be able to find the web P image format. This is starting to be used more and more on websites, and it's a more modern file format compared to the other three that we mentioned before. And last but not least, from the new document dialogue book, let's just take a look at the film and video category. So here you will see a couple of presets, like the 1080 P or 720 P. These all refer to the size or dimensions of the images that we create. We can see that there are different abbreviation used like HDV, HDTV. This would be considered the full HD format. The 920 pixels by 1080 pixels. But if we click on view all presets, we can also find the four K standards like UHDTV, which would be four times as large as a HD image. So here we can see 3,840 pixels by 2160 pixels. Additionally, it's also important to mention that under the advanced options, you will be able to change the pixel aspect ratio. Most modern video file formats would use square pixels, but some other file formats like NTSC would require a 0.91 ratio between the width and height of a pixel. And we can see these ratios varying here, even having a two to one ratio, which is called the anamorphic format. Just so you can see what this actually means, if I create this document and then click Okay, once I zoom closer in this document, and we start to see the pixel grid, we can actually see that individual pixels are rectangular instead of being squared. So here's a good comparison of the three different outputs that normally we work with in design projects. So whether it's video, print or web, the following considerations you have to keep in mind. First of all, the type of image, whether it's a roster or pixel image or a vector image, which would be resolution independent and can be scaled up and down without losing quality. And that's very useful Fool print because sometimes you need to print in a very large format and you still don't want to lose quality. For color mode, it would be either RGB or CMYK. Resolution would depend on the screen size for video. For print, we would normally want to stick to the 300 dots per inch or DPI resolution. While for web, we normally work with 72 PPI or Pixel per inch resolution. The most commonly used file formats, you can see here for web, print and video, and the key adjustments would be the pixel aspect ratio for video that's unique. For print, it would be whether we want to use or utilize scalable vectors. These file formats like EPS and PDF will support that. And for web, the crucial thing is to think about the compression because we want the images to load faster. So the smaller file size possible is always ideal without obviously compromising on the quality of the images. 6. 1.2.a Key Components of Project Communication: There will be a couple of questions in the exam was about project management, and you have to be familiar with a couple of important terms. So let's just discuss these. First of all, you need to know the three key components of project communication. The first is the project scope, then the due dates, and then the third one is the possible impacts of delays. Already mentioned having a brief for a project. That's essentially what you need for getting the project scope documented and make sure that everyone agrees what are the deliverables that the designer has to produce and what are the expectations from the client? Now, when it comes to this topic, one, I know it will always come up in the exam, and that is the scope creep. So scope creep in graphic design refers to the gradual and often unapproved expansion of a project's goals, deliverables or requirements beyond the original agreement. It usually happens when clients request additional revisions assets or features that weren't part of the initial brief. And it happens more often than not that the client would do these things without adjusting the timeline, the budget, or contract. So obviously, scope creep is something you want to avoid, and that is why documentation and clear communication between all the team members and the client is crucial. It applies to pretty much any type of project management, but it's true also for graphic design. A very typical scenario for scope creep is when an individual, a freelancer working remotely for a client, and they agree on the initial terms, but maybe the brief is a bit vague on some aspects. And then after the designer delivering the work that they were expected to create, the client would request repeated rounds of minor tweaks that will turn into hours or maybe even days or weeks of unpaid work. Unfortunately, this can happen to anyone, even if you're familiar with the term and even if you know how you should manage a project, if you are on your own and if you have a new client that you don't know how to work with or how to manage a project together with, then you can also easily end up suffering from scope creep. The main problem is not just that you will be overworked and you will be frustrated because you will be working on things that were not agreed in the beginning. But it can also strain the relationship between you and your client, mainly because anything that wasn't discussed or agreed on in the beginning will lead to lots of question marks and unclear expectations, and it just makes things confusing. So the way we prevent this to happen is that we always set clear project scope and deliverables in writing. It's highly recommended to always have signed contracts between the parties. And in case the client wants to have a couple of rounds of revisions, that should also be agreed on in the beginning, like limit the amount of revisions that you will allow, and that should be already considered when you set your rate or the price for the project. So if you allow the client two or three rounds of revisions, you should consider how much time that is going to take, and if you get compensated for it, then there won't be any frustration. There's also another term called change order, which again, another signed document that you can have between you and the client whenever they request additional changes that were not agreed on in the beginning or maybe if they change their mind about a crucial part of the project, like the direction they want to change. For these, again, it's good to have documentation you can easily refer back at any time. I Bush comes to shove and the client is not happy with something, these things like the change order will always support and protect you. Now for toDates, there's lots of different tools that you can use like Google Spreadsheets. You can use Notion, Monday, and there's so many other tools out there, especially if you have a team, it's even more important to keep track of everyone's work and what and when they are supposed to deliver. So here's a simple example from our team, the way we manage the publication and advertisement of video tutorials that we publish on YouTube. It has a simple weekly timeline. It also has the tasks broken down and assigned to team members, and there's a clear indication of the status of each of those tasks. For the exam, it's important to also know the term Gang chart, and that is simply just another visual representational method for tracking the tasks and also the deadlines. And you can also be asked a question about what's a critical path analysis or critical path method. This is another visual planning technique which can identify the sequence of dependent tasks that directly impact the project's completion. Both of these methods are useful. Like with the Gen charts, just coming back to them, it's easy to visualize the timelines and how the tasks overlap and again, depend on each other. And there is no right or wrong way to manage the due dates as long as there is some kind of tracking method you are using and you are sharing with everyone involved in the project. Last but not least the third key component of project communication would be the possible impacts of delays. So it's very important to recognize any potential bottlenecks, such as limited resources, like a single graphic designer working on multiple projects and also client availability for approvals. So even if you are the designer and you deliver your work on time, but you obviously need to get feedback on it, and based on that feedback, you have to progress further. If you don't check the client's availability in advance and maybe the client won't be available to look at the work for a week or two, then of course, that is going to delay everything. And you might not feel like it's your fault that the client wasn't available to get feedback. But usually what this leads to is that, again, you will have limited time for the revision that you have to do. And there is another term for this called feedback loop, which means the entire process of you the designer, sending your work for review the client looking at the work, reviewing it, and sending the feedback back to you. And then you, again, the designer looking at that feedback and trying to address it and make the changes. So that would be considered one feedback cycle. And each of these cycles, for instance, could have a separate version name like version one, version two, version three. And it's best to also maybe create separate subfolders within your main project folder where you're storing all the deliverables and files for the project. 7. 1.2.b Basic project management concepts: You also have to be familiar with the five key stages of project management, starting with planning and analysis. Now, we already covered most of the key actions that's required for this stage, like identifying the target audience, finding out the demographics, the preferences and behaviors, also identifying the client's goals, like what is the purpose of the design? What's the main thing that they want to achieve with this design? And the most important documents for this stage would be to get the contract agreement and also the design brief, of course. If you're interested to learn more about the stages of design project, I actually covered this in much more detail in my graphic design theory series. But for the exam, don't worry, you don't have to have an in depth knowledge about this topic. You just have to know the individual stages and what's the order because you might need to put them in the correct order. After planning and analysis, we move on to scheduling. Here, the main objective is to establish a realistic timeline based on the deliverables and the project scope. And we already talked about the different ways we can do the planning, like using a gain chart or timeline. And most importantly, we need to set the due dates or deadlines for all the deliverables. Third stage would be the building part when we begin creating the assets and starting the initial concepts and working our way to fully detailed prototypes or the final designs. And usually the beginning of the building stage would be considered the ideation stage where we come up with concepts, and there's many different techniques that you can use, like mind mapping is a common one where you map out and connect all the important words that you can associate with the brief. And, of course, sketching is something that most designers would utilize, whether it's very simple or more detailed sketches when it comes to web design or user interface design, you would be using wireframes, sketches. And the main purpose of all of these techniques is to save time and to make sure again that you are on the right track so you can check with your client before you invest too much time into producing final artwork that you both agree on what's the best direction moving forward. Here's another nice timeline showing how an idea can start with a simple rough sketch, which then is turned into a more refined sketch with more details than later to include the color palette as well. And only once the composition and visual direction is clear and agreed on, the designers can start working on the final output for which in this case, a three D model was necessary. And from that three D model, once all the lighting and materials are applied, a nice fully rendered image can be created or even a nice animation like this one. After the building stage, we move on to the review and evaluation stage. Here, we first usually would have an internal review to check if we manage to meet the original brief and all the requirements are met. In case a freelancer is working on their own, it's worth asking someone else's opinion before we send the work that we created for the client. So if you have another visual artist or designer that you know, it's always worth to ask for their opinion because they will be looking at things with a fresh eye, and they might notice things that you've overlooked. When you feel confident that everything is ready and you want to show it to the client, you have to make sure that your presentation is going to be top notch. So it's very important to impress the client not just with the work, but also the way you present it, whether that's just a PDF or a PowerPoint. And also, in case you are presenting life, whether it's online or in the same room as the client, it's also important to prepare and rehearse how you are going to talk about the project and what you've created. Once the client is happy and approves the work, then we move on to the last stage, the implementation and publication, where the main objective would be to deliver the final product in the format and medium for which it was designed. 8. 1.3 Copyright, permissions, licensing and how use specific content: During the exam, you will also be asked a few questions about the legal aspects of graphic design work, which mainly focuses on the type of copyright permissions and licensing required to use specific content. Not only, you don't have to be a lawyer to understand these terms. They are fairly simple and straightforward. And there's only a couple of key terms that you need to be familiar with which keeps coming up in the exam. First, let's just clarify what is copyright. It is a legal protection that gives creators ownership over their original work, including designs, illustrations, logos, and layouts. As soon as you create a design, you automatically own the rights to it, and others can't copy, use or modify it without your permission. So why does this matter? Because your work is protected from being stolen or reused without credit or payment? It also means that you as a designer will need permission or a license to use other people's work. So, for instance, if you want to include a photo, use a font or an icon or a template for a project that you're working on, you always have to make sure that you have the rights or the permission to use them. So in a nutshell, if you made it, you own it. If someone else made it, you need permission. Now when it comes to generative AI, right now, there is no clear protection for the copyrighted work that is shared online because for these generative AI models to work, they have to scrape the Internet and devour anything that they can find. So we are talking about billions of images. And most of the big companies like Mid Journey or Open AI, created Chet GPT, will either ignore or try to hide the fact that they included millions of copyrighted work in their training data. The reason why they can get away with this or still continue to do this is because it is very hard to trace back the original copyrighted work because they are not sharing or being transparent about what was used in the training data. Don't worry in the exam. They won't ask you questions about generative AI. It's just something that I am quite passionate about, and it's a gray area really when it comes to how copyright is handled. Let's move on and talk about the next important term public domain. So this refers to creative materials not protected by intellectual property laws, such as copyright, trademark or patent. And in this case, the public owns the work, not an individual author or artist. And compared to copyrighted work, anyone can use a public domain work without obtaining permission. Derivative work would be considered something that was altered or was based on some other original work. So that means that you've taken an existing piece like a logo, artwork, photo, or layout, and you modified it in some way, like change the colors. You addit some elements, or you combine it with lots of other elements to create something new. But here's the catch. Even if you change something, the original creator still owns the copyright. What that means is that you need permission to legally use or share the new version unless that original work is already in public domain, or you own a license that allows you modifications. So again, to put it simply, changing a design doesn't make it yours. If it's based on someone else's work, it is still protected. Now, fair use, another important term to be familiar with, is a legal rule that allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission. But only in specific situations like for education, commentary, news reporting or parody. But fair use is not a free pass to any image or design just because you are not making money from it. And courts would usually look at four different things to decide if something is fair use or not. They would look at the purpose, so what it is intended for, the nature, so is the original work factual or creative, the amount or how much of the original work is being used? And most importantly, the effect, whether you work will affect the original creator in any way, but most importantly negatively, like, financial so fair use is limited. It's case by case, and it's also not guaranteed. So the best thing to do to avoid any complications is to get permission or a license to use someone else's work. Now, I mentioned licensing a couple of times. This is another term you should be familiar with. So it is a way you can legally use copyrighted material by paying a fee established by the copyright holder or stock image provider, for instance, you can use the copyrighted material or stock image for a specific time and in a certain way as outlined in the terms of conditions. Might also be asked about creative commons or CC for short, which is a system that lets creators share their work with the public while keeping some rights. So instead of saying all rights reserved, a designer can use a Creative Commons license to say, you can use this, but here's how. So this is a way to make sharing easier, but you still need to follow the rules of each license. Similarly to licensing, you might also need to get signed release forms if you want to use a person's likeness or a landmark in your composition. You will also need a release form if you want to include a brand name in your project, especially if that brand is not owned by the client that you are working for. And there's two types of specific releases that usually they ask about in the exam. One is the model release, which you need if a person is recognizable in your work and the location release, which is required for landmarks or private properties like Disneyland. 9. 1.4.a File formats: It's also important to know the differences between the file formats that we normally would use in a print design project. Now, it might be a bit tricky to categorize the file formats, but essentially they would be falling into three main groups. First is the working or project files that allows you to go back and make changes to a design. So for Photoshop, it would be the PSD or Photoshop document. For Illustrator, it would be AI, and for in design, it would be a DI and D D file format or in design document. Next category are the assets that you would use in a design project. And these would be predominantly image file formats, including both pixel or roster and vector images. But there can be also text files or Excel files in case of a catalog, for example. And last but not least, the final category would be the print ready files. And most of the time, these would be PDFs or EPS files. Now, I'm not going to spend too much time comparing these to each other because you can just use this chart from the Milanotbard for that. So instead, I'm just going to highlight a few important things or tips that you should keep in mind. When it comes to Image five formats, you have to be aware of compression and the loss in quality. So that is especially important when you work with JPEG images. And it is something that you can best understand when you're using the Export as feature in Photoshop. So in this case, we can see a detail from a design on the left and the right side. And at the moment, I am using the same settings, but I'm just going to switch to JPEG for both of these, and I'm going to change the quality. So here on the right size, I'm going to set it to very poor, while on the left side, I'll make sure it is set to the highest quality option, which is great. If I zoom even closer, you will be able to see the artifacts even better. So I'm sure you can spot all of these messy pixels here on the right side. So that is due to the JPEG compression, and this is what we would call a compression artifact. Advantage of using lower quality JPEGs is that their file size will be lower. So while this one here on the left side is around 350 kilobytes, the one on the right with the lowest quality setting is only around 50 kilobytes, so considerably smaller. Most image file formats, including JPEG, also supports embedding color profiles, and this is something that you should always make sure to include for a correctly color managed workflow. And color management is actually our next topic that we will be covering in more detail. Besides JPEG, another very commonly used image file format would be PNG, which has the advantage compared to JPEG that it can also hold transparency detail. So this is something that you can again disable or keep it turned on here on the top right corner. And the bit depth of PNG files by default is 24 bits. But you can always reduce the file size if you choose the eight bit version PNG. Bit depth is a way of measuring the amount of colors that you can use in a five format. So eight bit, for instance, means two on the power of eight, which is 256 colors. Compared to that, the other format, 24 bit would actually mean eight bit for each of the color channels RG and B, and that also applies to JPEG images. But there is also another five format, GIF which can also include animation. But the main limitation of this five format is that it cannot go beyond eight bit depth. So the maximum amount of colors is 256. To better see what that means, instead of using the Export as command, I'm going to choose Export, save for web, where for the GIF file format, we also get the color table. And here, we can actually reduce the amount of colors. And if I go down maybe to four colors, in case of this design, it wouldn't make much difference because it uses already a very limited color palette. But by using less colors in a GIF file, of course, you will have a smaller file size. And file size in general, doesn't make much difference in print projects. It's more important for web and mobile design. In case you are wondering, where can you find the other type of file formats? You will find these under File Save as in most of the design applications. And in the latest version of Photoshop, for instance, it will only show you a very limited list at first, and you can only see the additional Five formats if you choose to save a copy option. Once you do this, you will see a much larger list. And here you can actually find all the formats that you would normally be able to save from the export or save for web features, but accompanied by a lot of additional specialized file formats, which most of the time you won't require in your work. Another common way we can categorize image file formats is whether they are roster or vector based. So JPECPNG and Gift files are all roster based, while the most common vector file formats would be EPS and SVG. Out of these two, EPS is mainly used in print, while SVG is a vector file format that is designed to be used on the web, and it's an abbreviation for scalable vector graphics. Now, there's one other important file format that is worth mentioning. And even though as a graphic designer, you most of the time won't be required to work with this, but it's still good to be aware of, and it is the camera raw format. Now, this is something that most photographers will be familiar with. And the name Row comes from the fact that this is the unprocessed information that the camera records. And this simple comparison shows really well how it can be different or better than a JPEG image. So if you have your camera set to record JPEGs, that means that the camera will automatically compress and process the information and turn it into a flat image. Compared to that, a afile will record and keep all these layers of raw data and will allow you to access all of those layers later on when you are developing the images. And this is why a camera file will always be much larger in size compared to a JPEG, but it's going to give you a lot more freedom when it comes to editing images. The biggest difference you will notice in the tonal range, which is the range between the darkest and lightest details in an image. In case of a raw file, you would have a much wider tonal range, allowing more details to be captured in the brightest areas and also in the darkest areas of the image. In case of a JPEC file, these brightest or darkest details will be completely washed out or burnt out, so they will become completely white or completely black, which means that there won't be any useful color information recorded. So when you are trying to make adjustments, you are going to start introducing a lot more noise into your images compared to developing a raw photograph. And in case you are wondering, the best way to display the tonal range of an image is by using a histogram, which lists the number of pixels in each tonal region from the darkest blacks to the brightest whites, and reading a histogram is actually very easy. When you look at these three examples at the bottom, you can see an under exposed image would have most of the values closer to the left, while an overexposed image would have most of the details in the histogram on the right side. If you see a peak on the far right edge, that means you will have clipping in the brightest details. And the same can happen with the darkest details. Once again, if you see a peak there, that's also not a good thing. And in general, the easiest type of images to work with and that will provide the most information are these neutral exposures where you have most of the details in the mid tones range. And just so you can see and appreciate the difference that you can achieve by developing a raw photo. Here is the original one, and here is the refined and developed version. And you can really see the amount of details we managed to recover in both the darker and brighter areas. Once again, that's before, and this is after. 10. 1.4.a Resolution: Every print designer has to be familiar with image resolution because this is one of the most important limiting factors when it comes to deciding the size and the quality of a print. And essentially what it means is that how much detail an image can hold. When we refer to higher resolution images, it means that there is more detail in them compared to low resolution images. And it's important to differentiate already in the beginning when it comes to digital images, we divide them into two main categories pixel or roster images, and photographs would also fall in this category and vector graphics, which most of the time would be illustration or type. Now, generally, in graphic design projects, you would be using a combination of pixel images and vector graphics. But the weakest link in terms of resolution and print quality will always be Pixel roster or sometimes also referred to as bitmap images. Better understand the difference between pixels and rosters, here is a very close up look of a photograph showing an eye and magnifying a roster image this much will reveal the actual building blocks, the pixels or rosters, which looking this closely, makes it look like it's a mosaic. But zooming way back, we will start to see this as a continuous image without any pixelation. Good thing about pixels, especially when you have a lot of them, is that you can capture really complex visual information, and it also allows a lot of subtlety that you might not be able to recreate with vectors. Now, the biggest advantage of vectors is that they are resolution independent, meaning that they can be any size you want them to be without losing any quality. To demonstrate this to you, here we are in Illustrator with a simple illustration and no matter how much I zoom into it, we will never see pixelation. So these curves that are used as the building blocks in a vector graphic compared to a pixel image are all made up small anchor points. Everything is mathematically described instead of relying on that roster that we've seen earlier or the columns and rows of pixels. If I move one of these anchor points around, all that has to be registered or recorded is the actual new location of this anchor point. That's simply just these two coordinates that we can see here. The computer will very easily be able to connect two anchor points with a linear straight line, but it can also connect anchor points like these two with a curve, and to be able to describe the curve itself, all that is necessary is this handle that I'm dragging around, and it's relative distance from the original anchor point. This method of visualizing vector graphics and shapes in general is what we refer to as Bezier curves. It's named after the mathematician who invented this method. Another important advantage of vector graphics, apart from them being resolution independent, is that their file size is also smaller compared to roster images. But what's clearly a downside with them is that it's very hard to make things look photorealistic, and that is why we're still relying on both pixels and vectors in our work. So as you can see, they both have their strengths and weaknesses and their use in a graphic design project. There's a couple of ways that you can measure resolution, and you may have heard of some of these units like DPI, as we can see it in this example, 300 DPI would be like a standard that we would be considering a high resolution image or a high resolution print. And DPI actually stands for dots per inch, which refers to the number of dots of ink on the printed image. But when it comes to the design phase, so even before we end up creating something that's ready for print, we would normally measure roster of pixel images in PPI or pixel per inch. And what's great about this comparison is how it shows that resolution on its own doesn't really matter. What matters is the amount of pixels in combination with resolution. So when you have a lot of pixel information recorded in your digital image, you will be able to print and keep high resolution image, even in a large format like a zero. We can see the size of this in millimeters here. So this is a fairly large sized poster. Compared to that, when you have less pixels to work with, you can still have a high quality print, but you will only be able to use a much smaller print size. So pixel print, again, just simply means how much of those pixels of the image will be printed on an inch distance. And the higher the resolution, the more compressed those pixels will get on the printed image, which will result in a higher quality print. 11. 1.4.a Image Size: The best way to understand the relationship between the amount of pixels, the resolution and the print size is to use the image size feature within Photoshop. So in this case, we can see that this is the original amount of pixels that we are working with. So around 3,000 pixels width and 4,000 pixels height, which is roughly around 12 million pixels or megapixels. I don't want to confuse you, but in case you want to be specific, a megapixel is actually slightly more than 1 million pixels. It is actually two on the power of 20 pixels, which is 1 million, 48,576 pixels. But to keep things simple, one megapixel you can think of as 1 million pixels. I took this photo with an iPhone, which has 12 megapixels roughly, and that's why we get this image size. Notice how the pixel dimensions automatically paired with the resolution, which is by default, set to 300 PPI or pixel per inch. But what if I change? And to be able to see the print size, all I have to do is to switch the pixels to either inches or one of these other measurement units. But let's just go with inches first. So you can see that it can be printed in the high resolution standard 300 PPI with a size of roughly ten by 13 ". And that, in case you are wondering is between an A four and an A three paper size. So even though it's a 12 megapixel image, it still won't give us a huge size when it comes to printing it with 300 PPI. But what's also very important to understand, and this is actually very rarely discussed is that the quality requirement of a print also depends on the viewing distance. So strictly speaking, 300 PPI or DPI is something that you require when you are producing a print that is going to be held by people like brochures, magazines, books, business cards, so on and so forth. But compared to that, a large banner where people will be just walking by or maybe even seeing it from much further away. When they are displayed on top of a building or by the side of a motorway, the required printing resolution will be much, much lower than 300 PPI. And here is a great comparison where we can see the viewing distance on the left. And the required resolution for it on the right. And you can see that even when a print is displayed 1 meter away from the viewer, it already can drop down to 180 PPI, which is almost half of the original requirement. But as you are getting further away from the viewer, like five meter away, that already results in the requirement going down all the way to 35 PPI, which is around ten times lower than what we started. I don't think you would ever have to design something that will be displayed 200 meters away from people, apart from if you are doing exhibition design, and it's a huge exhibition hall. But in those cases, the resolution could even be all the way down to one PPI. Now, of course, that is a fairly extreme scenario. But don't forget that the minimum required resolution always depends on the viewing distance. And in case you ever need it, there is also a formula to calculate the minimum resolution based on the viewing distance. To make sure that the relationship between print size and resolution makes sense. Coming back to our previous example in Photoshop, when I turn off resampling, meaning that we are not planning to change the size of the image, so we are not introducing new pixels at all. I I now start lowering the resolution, at the same time, as you can see, the print size is increasing. So what this means is that we are just distributing the original pixel information, and it will be printed less densely on the paper. And, for instance, if I go down to 150 PPI resolution, that will give us exactly twice the size of a print compared to when we were about to print this with 300 PPI. Of course, similarly, if we were to go above 300 PPI, which most of the time wouldn't be necessary. But just for the sake of argument, if I go higher and we check, again, the size either in centimeters or inches, of course, it's going to keep dropping because once again, all we are doing is condensing all that original pixel dimensions into a smaller space. Besides PPI and DPI, you may have also heard of SPI and LPI, out of which SPI mainly refers to scanners and how high resolution they can scan images. And it stands for the samples taken in one linear inch, while LPI or lines per inch is used mainly in commercial printing, which describe the distance between the printed lines of dots. To keep things simple, as a graphic designer, you mainly have to worry about PPI or pixel per inch, because that's something that you will be working with in most of the design applications. 12. 1.4.a Aliasing: Now another term which you most likely will come across is aliasing, which is most noticeable on type when the resolution is too low. We will start to see these hard edges on the curved details on type, which is also referred to as stair stepping. And the method of antialiasing is what can help us to improve this by averaging the colors on the edges and smoothing them out. Here is another close up look which shows this stair stepping perfectly. It even looks like a stair in this case, and the result of anti aliasing and how it can smooth it out even at this close up view. When you are working with type in Photoshop, for instance, you will see that antialiasing is automatically applied. But of course, it's something that you can take off. If I select this text here and change the type of anti aliasing from the default sharp to no we can see the result immediately, and even from a distance, this will be noticeable. But if I zoom a little bit closer, we can probably see it even better. So this is without and with anti aliasing, without and with. You probably notice that there is actually no aliasing going on on the horizontal line. And in some cases, it would also not show on the vertical lines. And that is because these details can perfectly align themselves to the pixel grid. So for them, there is no need for anti aliasing. And I can just show you this. If I zoom closer, eventually, we will start to see the pixel grid, and we can tell that this sharp horizontal edge doesn't need any smoothing. It already looks perfect the way it is. Last but not least, I just want to mention that there is a very interesting new area in digital imaging where artificial intelligence is used or utilized to increase the resolution of raster images. And Photoshop has its own neural filter called Super Zoom, which is powered by the Adobe Sensei Artificial Intelligence. And with this, you can increase the size of an image, I think, up to nine times as large as it is originally. At the same time, you can enhance image details, remove JPEG artifacts, introduce noise reduction and shopening and even enhance specifically phase details. And to give you an example, even a four times increase in size would mean this much difference between the original image and the one that went through the neuro filter. And to see the details, I'm just going to zoom a little bit closer. So around 100% view or actual pixel size view would show the original image quality. And if we jump to the resize version with the same Zoom ratio, this is what we will see. This technology essentially is guessing the information that is missing in the original and tries to make up new pixels. Out of all the AI tools used for resizing images, the most effective one, in my opinion, is Let's enhance, for which the link you can find on the board. And here you can see a comparison of the original image on the left, the result of neuro filter, we've seen in Photoshop in the middle, and the result of the Let's enhance AI on the right. You can see how much better the clarity is on that version and how much details were recovered or added to areas like the eyes and the lips. I predict that these type of technologies in a couple of years will make roster images also feel resolution independent like vector graphics. But until then, keep checking the resolution of every image that you're using in your graphic design project. 13. 1.4.b Color spaces: The ultimate goal of color management is to match the colors that you can see on your screen to the colors on the final printed product. In an ideal color management workflow, you would have all the devices that take part in the design and printing process to speak the same language, which will result in predictable and accurate color results. One of the most important components of a color managed workflow is the use of ICC color profile. We can see, everything starts off with the designer having a color profile created for the monitor that they are using. And later on, we will talk about the calibration of the monitor as well because that's also important. But then for the rest of the process, there is always going to be a color profile attached to the designer's files. So no matter where they show up, the original color information should be carried along avoiding any unwanted transitions and shifts in the colors. A color profile is essentially the description of the color space, gameut and behavior of a calibrated device. Printers will have both their offset and digital presses calibrated, and they will be able to supply you the graphic designer with their ICC color profile. ICC actually stands for International color consortium. It was established in 1993, and it's the internationally accepted cross platform architecture and system for color management. The color topic, we already talked about the differences between RGB and CMYK color modes and mentioned that the main difference between the two is how the colors are combined. So while in CMIK that we use for print, we are working in a subtractive color model, which means black is the most intensive color. In case of RGB or on screen, we are using the additive model where white is the most intense color. So with CMYK, when you're combining colors, they are getting darker. It's the opposite with RGB. As you are combining the colors, they are getting brighter. But the main reason why you will see a shift in the colors from RGB to CN YK is not because they describe colors in a different way. It's because they have a different color gameut. So each color space, and in this case, we can see four of them here on the top right, will have their own color gameut which is essentially the subset of colors that can be represented by that color space. As you can see, SRGB, represented with the green triangle has the smallest area covered, which means that it offers the smallest color gamut. Compared to it, the standard CNK color space is slightly larger, and it is this polygon that we can see here with a pink outline. So even though these two colour gamets overlap, there is still quite a lot of difference between them, especially as you are getting into these more vivid and saturated colors. These cannot be translated into CNK correctly. But SRGB color space is actually more designed for b. While Adobe RGB, which is a much wider color gamet is the standard that we would use for print design. You can see it here in the diagram that it is a much larger triangle than SRGB, meaning it covers a lot more colors. And the largest color gamet in this chart is the P photo RGB, which is mainly used in professional photography workflows. You may have noticed that when you're using the color picker in Photoshop, sometimes when you select a color, you get a warning here on the right. Now, this actually means out of gamut for printing. We can see that the color that I selected is described in many different ways, including RGB and C and K, and also LAB, which we will discuss shortly. But in order to see the closest color to this that can actually be printed with the four colors, C and K, we can just click on this little war the color picker immediately jumps to the actual color that was described with the CNK values. So once again, if I click somewhere up here, we can see that these are the values, 430 hundred zero. And if I click on the warning icon, even though the color sample shifted quite a lot, the CNK values didn't change. That is because essentially all of these very vibrant colors cannot be represented with ink, and that, of course, not only applies to the green hues, you would have the same issue with most of the other hues. So for example, if I come up somewhere, let's say, here, again, moving to the top right corner where we have the most intense colors, I can click on the warning, and once again, we will have a huge shift, which shows the nearest possible color that can be achieved in printing. Once again, from here, all the way down there. Unfortunately, there is no magic formula or feature that will save you from dealing with this difference between RGB and CMYK. But by following a color managed workflow, you can be best equipped and work and see the right colors throughout the whole process that eventually will be possible to be printed. 14. 1.4.b LAB color space and synchronizing Color Settings: Already mentioned that ICC profiles are important for this, but we also have to have color calibration and proofing, which I'm going to cover in the next video. But before we do that, just one final thing I wanted to mention, and that is the LAB color mode or lab color mode, which you might have heard of or maybe just wondering how that is different from RGB and CMYK. So the advantage of this color mode is that it's completely device independent, and it is the closest representation of human vision. To better understand how it works, it's best to imagine this color model as a sphere. So it's a three dimensional representation of all the colors that can be described where L stands for luminosity or lightness, which is measured on a scale of zero to 100 which is from black to white. And this can be imagined as the vertical axis or Z axis in this color coordinate system, while the other two axes are A and B on which A ranges from green to red, red being the positive value and green being the negative. And the B axis goes from blue to yellow. Again, blue being the negative and yellow being the positive value. Now jumping back to Photoshop, I have one of my photographs open, and you can see within the channels panel, when we look at RchB color mode, it's going to consist of these three color channels, red, green, and blue. And each of these are eight bit grayscale images with 256 variations of tonal values, referring to the intensity of each of these individual colors. So in case of the blue channel, the reason why we see the flower being completely black because there's no blue component in it at all. Instead, it is made of green and red resulting in this yellow color in the end. And if you concentrate on the grass, you can see that it is brightest on the green channel, while it is much darker on the red and the blue channel. Now, let's see what happens if I switch to LAB color mode. First of all, I just go back to the composite RGB channel and then switching to the LAB color option from image mode. You'll see that there is nothing actually changing on the image. I can just undo this change, go back and forth. And as you can see, even though the channels are changing on the right, nothing is going to be affected in the image itself. But when we look at these channels, we can see that we have the L or lightness channel and then the A and the B channels. You might recall that the B channel was actually the difference between blue and yellow colors, and that is why we are seeing brighter details here for this channel because of all the yellow flowers in the image. The main reason I mentioned the lab color mode because there are a lot of professionals who would work in this instead of using RGB. And even though it is definitely worth exploring it and being aware of its advantages, using RGB color mode instead, as long as you pay attention to color management, you can still work in RGB, especially when it comes to editing images. Now, even though you are using RGB images in Photoshop, Illustrator, and in design, in the end, when you are creating PDFs, most of these applications would automatically convert these colors to CMYK for printing. Before we discuss the rest of the components of a color managed workflow, I just wanted to show you one more important thing that you need to set up in the Adobe applications, and that is something you can find in the color settings option. This is something you can find in the edit menu in most of the Adobe design applications. In this case, we are in Photoshop, and you can see that my settings for color management policies are to preserve embedded color profiles for all of the color models. This is definitely a good policy to use. And one thing that I have different from the default settings is that I use Adobe RGB instead of SRGB for the RGB working space. Notice that there is a little warning here saying that my Creative Cloud applications are not synchronized to each other. So this is actually something you can do from another application, Adobe Bridge, which you can quickly access from most of the Adobe applications. Just go to the file menu and choose Browse in bridge. And then once the application opens up, just go to the edit menu again and choose color settings. And here you will be able to find all the settings used by the other Adobe applications. And notice that there's one here on the top called Custom. Now that is because I did not save my settings from Photoshop. So it just says custom here on the top. But as soon as I click Save, I'm just going to call it Martin. And then save it. I could add some comments on it as well, but click Okay and Okay again. Now scrolling down, I will be able to see the settings. And if I click Apply, it's now going to be synchronized between all the Adobe applications. So for instance, if I come to Illustrator and check the color settings option, I will be able to see exactly the same settings applied thanks to that synchronization that we achieved using bridge. 15. 1.5.a Design elements and principles: The basic elements of design are fundamental visual building blocks used to create any composition. Designers use these elements to construct and communicate ideas visually, just like a writer uses words to build sentences and sentences to build stories. Each element has its own role. Lines guide the eye, shape, creates structure, color, evokes emotion, texture, adds depth, and so on. The principles of design on the other hand, are the rules or guidelines for how to organize and arrange those elements effectively. The elements are what you use, the principles are how to use them. For example, you might use color, which is an element to create contrast, which is a principle or arrange shapes the element to achieve balance, which is another principle. In short, elements are the tools and principles are the blueprint. Luckily, for this exam, you don't have to have an in depth knowledge of design elements and principles. However, if you're interested to find out more about these things, I have an entire training series dedicated to this topic, covering all of these terms in great detail. Just as an example, for balance, we talk about the visual weight of design, and we look at lots of different examples and also the types of balance that you can see in compositions like symmetrical, asymmetrical, radial and mosaic balance. We look at examples of alignment. Can be vertical, horizontal, diagonal or following a custom grid. We also look at lots of examples specifically on how grids can be utilized in visual communication. And for every term and topic, we look at hundreds of amazing examples, and we discuss them in great detail. 16. 1.5.a Gestalt principles: I like to think of the Gestalt principles as the grammar of visual communication. Every language around the world relies on grammar which sets the rules, creates consistency, and make sure that everyone can understand each other. It's interesting, but if you think about it, we don't actually learn in school how to understand things when we look at them. Visual perception is almost instinctive. It's something that we learn as we grow up. And even as a newborn, we already start to process our environment by looking at it. Of course, at the beginning of our life, we use our other senses more like touching and tasting things. But as we grow older, we end up relying more and more on our eyes to understand our environment and to be able to interact with it. Apparently, almost 50% of our brain is dedicated purely to process the visual stimuli that we are constantly bombarded with during daytime. And even while we are a our brain projects images, which we understand as dreams. And I like to think of dreams being some kind of exercise for the brain. So even when we are looking at things, it is trying to flex those muscles that we are using when we are again looking at things and trying to understand what we are seeing. So coming back to the guesto principles and why it is important to learn about it, remember, I said that we don't have to learn how to see things. That's completely true. However, as a designer or graphic designer, we need a better understanding how people will perceive the designs that we create, to be able to effectively communicate the message that the project is about. In this video, I'm going to give you a brief background where the Gestal principles are coming from. And we will briefly analyze this Unilever logo on the board just to see how the gesto principles can be applied to any kind of design. So first of all, guest all principles are actually coming from the area of psychology. It started by three psychologists in Austria and Germany in the early 20th century. Most important quote that sums up really well, the whole idea behind guest Autism is by Kurt Kovka who said the whole is other than the sum of its parts. And the word other is very important. So it's not more like Aristotle said, but it is something else or something different. Can see the example of the bicycle. When we have all of its parts laid out and when we have it all put together, even though it's the same exact components with the right configuration or assembly, it will be able to carry us from A to B. It becomes a vehicle. And that is something we definitely can't say about all of its parts separately or just laid out like this, only once they are put together in the right way. And this is a great analogy to think about design as well, where you have typography, images, shapes, colors, contrast, so on and so forth. You can use all of these things, but if you're not putting them together correctly or effectively, then your design won't look good or won't get the attention of viewers. Only when you put everything together in the right balance, the right order or right hierarchy, that's when you will create an effective design. Another important underlying term used in the Gestalt principles called emergence. And essentially what this means is that we tend to look at the entire object before seeing its individual parts. So again, thinking as a graphic designer, that means that if you create a poster, for instance, people will look at the poster in its entirety before they start to look at smaller details like people in the poster or the title or subtitle, and so on so forth. Why is it important? Because for us designers, we have to always create a pleasing composition or overall look of our design. But we also have to make sure that people will be able to find all the relevant information once they spend a bit more time looking at what we created. So looking at the current design of the Unilever logo, we can immediately pick up a couple of the gestal principles that are applied here, like simplicity, which is also referred to as law of pregnans, which we can see in all of these little icons here. They are all simplified almost to abstraction. But if we pay attention, we can still make out and recognize a couple of things here, like there is a little bee here. We also have a bird. There is a pepper. There is a palm tree. There is a symbol, which is for recycling. There's another symbol, the heart, which can be interpreted as love. But in this context, it's more likely to indicate healthy products. So why do you think it was important to apply the rule of simplicity to all of these icons in this logo. Well, if you think about it, if they were too complex and there were too much details on them, it would end up becoming too complex and distracting, and definitely it wouldn't work as a logo. Unilever is a massive company with so many brands inside it, and to be able to communicate that complexity, the designer decided to highlight many aspects of these brands without them becoming too overwhelming or overpowering. And this takes us to the other rule that's applied here, which is called figure ground, which means that we can look at something like this shape here as a unified outline of the letter U. So that is something that we would understand as the ground or background. And all of the little icons inside it are the figures or the foreground elements. The figure ground rule is a little bit more tricky to understand, so you will understand it much more once we look at more examples about it. Since there's so many little icons packed into this shape of the there's also a couple of additional rules applied to make it aesthetically pleasing. One of which, which is quite obvious is similarity. So basically, that means that all of these icons feel similar to each other. So they all use the same color. They all have round edges, so there's no sharp corners in either of them. And if you pay attention to the icons, they all seem to be following the shape of the So that is something that we call common fate. They all feel like going or flowing in the same direction. And another interesting thing that we can see here that it wasn't necessary to create a solid outline for the letter U for it to look like it's closed. So we perceive it as a closed shape, even though it has gaps around it, and that is a perfect example and use of the gestal principle called closure. Symmetry is another rule that we can see here. So if we have this line here in the middle, you can see that not only the letter U is aligned to that, but even the text at the bottom, is symmetrically aligned to the letter above it. This helps to create a pleasing balance in this composition. And if you're looking at the text itself here at the bottom, there's also another rule applied there, which is called continuation or continuity, where, again, our brain can easily connect this and understand it as a single word, even though there are gaps in between the letters. And this works well mainly because this looks like a handwritten text or manuscript. While if this text was set in different typeface, like a Serif or Sunserif then it would already cause issues if we had these big gaps between those letters, especially if these gaps are uneven. And finally, one other rule that we can see being used here is proximity, which in this case, connects the letter mark which we have here on the top and the word mark that we have underneath it. So the closeness of these two elements and the fact that they are stacked on top of each other, we'll have to always see this as a single unit, a logo, even when it's placed on an advert, for instance, together with the logos of other brands. So to summarize the importance of guest principles is that as a designer, you need to be able to emphasize visual relationships, and you can only do this effectively by understanding how your viewers will interpret or perceive the visual information that you are presenting to them. 17. 1.5.b Typographic hierarchy, readability and legibility: Typography is the art of arranging letters and text in a way that makes it easy to read and visually appealing. Good typography helps guide the reader's eye, sets the tone of the message, and makes the overall design feel more professional and balanced. When looking at a poster or design, we immediately get an impression whether it's been done by a professional or not, and that's mainly to do with the composition, of course, but also the typography. During the exam, you will be asked questions about a couple of key terms when it comes to typography. Like visual hierarchy, which is a type of grouping and arranging the elements within the composition that will help the reader or the viewer to easily understand the message of the design. You can emphasize hierarchy between the typographic elements in many different ways. You can use skill, for instance, to emphasize the title or the most important and highest priority detail, or you can use color to differentiate important details and put them in focus. Readability should always be a priority whenever you place text in a design, even when it comes to hand lettering or more decorative uses of text. Let me demonstrate in this example, a couple of the most important typographic terms that they might ask you about in the exam. So as you can see, we have a title and the body copy under it. On both sides, it's exactly the same format for now. But I'm going to refine the version on the right. First, I'm going to apply kerning to improve the title. Right now, it just feels like there's a little bit too much space between certain characters like the W and O. If I click there in Photoshop and use option or old left arrow, I can reduce the space between those two letters. I can do the same thing between O and R, and probably I can do the same next to O and S, and then L and O as well can go a little bit closer. So that's already looking better. And if I just place this here above the other version of the text, can see it's very subtle these changes, but it does matter. So if we move this a little bit higher, you can feel that this is feeling a little bit more balanced and more professional than the other one. Now, let me just drop that back here. And then for the body copy, what I'm going to do is to first increase the leading or line spacing that I can do by holding down alter option key again. But now I press the down arrow on the keyboard, so I increase the leading. Then I will also increase the tracking, which is the character spacing. So that's alter option key right arrow a couple of times until I feel like it feels more balanced. And now, if we compare the text on the left and the right, we can tell that the one on the right feels much more comfortable to read, that's essentially what readability means. You might be thinking, what does legibility mean? Well, that just simply means whether it is physically easy to read text or not. So for instance, if I reduce the opacity of this text layer, it is starting to be difficult to read it. So the legibility is getting worse. Similarly, if I made the text size smaller to something like that, the text on the left, compared to the one on the right is definitely more legible. Even though the readability is not as good, legibility is probably always your first priority when setting text in a design. You might also be asked about the four main categories of typefaces, and you just have to know that they are Serif, sanserif script, and display. And to better understand each of these categories, here's a couple of slides. Serifs are fonts with decorative strokes at the end of the letters. So we are talking about these little details that would be considered the Serif. This is also a Serif. These details here are also serifs and so on and so forth. These types of fonts are usually associated with tradition, sophistication, or professionalism. But San Serif category derives from the French word sun, which means without. So without serifs, we get these clean, modern, simple looking fonts with no decorative flourishes. They have more clarity. They are more minimal, and usually they come across more contemporary compared to Serif fonts. Then there are the script type faces which try to emulate handwriting. Of these fonts, legibility and readability won't be as good as the other two main categories, mainly because of the fact that these fonts won't connect the characters as well as if someone is actually writing things by hand. So the continuity or flow between the characters is usually interrupted. And it is definitely not recommended to use these for longer amount of texts like body copy, but perhaps they can work well for certain cases where we would like to draw attention to a specific part of text, and we want to make it feel more natural or organic. And last but not least, we have the display type faces, which are highly stylized and the main purpose of them to really be eye catching and draw attention to certain details or to try to inject personality and capture the essence of the topic of a design. 18. 1.5.c Photographic and cinematic composition terms: For the exam, you also have to be familiar with a couple of photographic compositional techniques and terms. So we will be covering these in this lesson. First of all, you need to know what aspect ratio means. Essentially, it means the orientation of the image, whether it's landscape, portrait, or square, and also the proportions or relation between the height and the width of the image. When I look at this image, I can tell that it's a landscape format. But more specifically, I feel like it's close to a 16 by nine aspec ratio, which is widely used on computer screens, TVs, and smartphones. Now, how can we tell the actual aspec ratio? By using the crop tool, we can select the image, and we can type in the ratio up here or even use the drop down menu. So for instance, if I choose 16 by nine, we can actually tell that it is exactly that aspec ratio. We can compare that to these other aspect ratios like two to three or four by six, and we can even swap these two numbers around. So this actually is a narrower aspect ratio than the previous one. And that's why the previous one sometimes we refer to as white screen format. And if we wanted to go even further, we could go to one to one, which would be a square format. Another common one would be four by three, and I'm just going to type these two values in here on the top. This was an older video format and was used by previous generations of TVs and monitors. Now, you might have noticed that whenever you use the crop tool in Photoshop, you also get this grid on it, which is actually the rule of thirds. So it's a guide that can help you to compose your image according to the rule of thirds. Essentially, what that means is that it's best to keep the focal point or the interesting detail of your image, not in the center, but slightly off center and more aligned to the thirds of the image frame. So, for instance, in the original composition, the astronaut is placed according to the rule of thirds and also the mountain on the right side. If I wanted to utilize the rule of thirds even more, maybe I can move the crop in a little bit even more, and perhaps we can move it down just a little bit more like that. So not only the vertical lines are going to be aligned to the interesting details in the image, but also the horizontal third lines will point and lead the viewer's eye towards those interesting details. So we can see this is after the crop and this is before. It's a subtle change, but these things can help to improve the composition overall. In the exam, you might be asked about what's a foreground, midground, and background in a composition. And in case of this image, the foreground would be considered the astronaut and the flowers. So roughly around this space here. Then the midground, I would consider these hills and the valley in the center and everything else, the sky and the mountain would be considered the background. So all of these details here on the top. Another photographic term they might ask about is depth of field. And that's essentially means how much of the image is in focus. So in case of this image, we have a wide depth of field because everything is in focus. Everything in the background and the foreground is all in focus. While in comparison here, we have shallow depth of field because everything in the background is completely blurred out. And also notice in the foreground, these details are out of focus. So only, I would say from roughly around here to there, this part of the image is in focus. And of course, the mushroom is in focus, and some of those leaves nearby, but everything else is out of focus. And in general, using shallow depth of field can really help to draw attention to certain details without any distractions that might be happening in the background. Foreground. Contrast is another important compositional technique, and that's, again, beautifully visible in this composition where we have both color and tonal contrast. So on a very dark background, we have a bright and vivid, warm tone on the mushroom. So it really jumps off from the screen because it utilizes all those different types of contrast. White balance is another term that you might be asked about, and we will be using this example later in the course, but I'm just going to show this quickly. If I choose auto color, it will improve the white balance, which basically means that whatever is supposed to be white in the image is going to be white. So gray color should stay neutral gray. So if I go back, I can see the original colors were more greenish, yellowish. Now they feel more natural and gray. Once again, from a distance before and after. And that's just simply by using the image auto color feature in Photoshop. But if we want it to be more specific, we could use the camera raw filter from the filter menu. And here under color, we would be able to improve the wide balance either automatically by choosing auto or manually by adjusting the temperature and the tint sliders. 19. 2.1.a New document: Open Adobe Illustrator, you will be able to create new documents either from the file menu by choosing new or simply clicking on the new file option here. And then this is going to open up the workspace where you can choose presets in these different categories here on the top. So we have mobile, web, print, branding, and so on and so forth, which will include these presets specifically for different formats like iPads and iPros within mobile, or if we go to print, we will find the standard page sizes, and the same goes for b the different browser resolutions. Let's say we are designing for the web, so I'm just going to choose this preset, and all the settings will show up here on the right side. This first option here is going to be the name of the document. I'm just going to call this site for now, and the icon right next to this is to save a custom preset. So if the settings that we will be using here is something that we need in the future to come back to, we can just click on this and create a new document preset. These will be available from the save category here on the top. Now, let me just jump back to web web large, and then we can take a look at the additional options that we have here. So we have the width and height of our artboard. We can decide whether we want the units to be in pixels. For web design, of course, that's recommended. For print, we would normally choose inches or millimeters depending where you are based. And then we can also decide the orientation, whether we want this in portray or landscape format. And most importantly, we can also decide how many artboards we will need in this new document. So we can create a single artboard, or we can have multiple artboards. This can go up to 1,000. So that's the maximum amount of artboards you can create in a single document. That's actually quite useful to know, although they normally don't ask this question, but it's an interesting detail. So if I put in 1001, it will give us an error. Just going to set this back to five Fenw. And now let's move on to the additional options. So we have bleed here. Again, this would be more useful for print, where we can set exactly how much bleed we want on each of the sites. And in case you are not familiar with the term, bleed is the access area that's trimmed off at the print to show that you have print going all the way to the edges of a poster or a business card or other similar printed designs, but borderless printing is required. Further down, we have the advanced options, which you might not see unless you click on this here. Here we can find the color mode selector, where you can choose between RGB or C and K. RGB is for any design that is intended for screens. C and Vk is for print, and then we also have an option to change the raster effect resolution. Now, even though we are working with vector graphics predominantly in Illustrator, are certain facts that require details to be rendered in roster format. So for this, we need to choose the resolution. The higher it is, the better the quality will be, but also the higher the file size will be and the general loading times for the file that we create. I always recommend to set this to 72 PPI, which is the screen resolution, and you can always increase this at any point later on, and I will show you where to find this. So I'm just going to keep it on 72 PPI. And then the preview mode, we also have a couple of options here. Again, this is something we can change later on. And in case you click on the more settings here at the bottom, this will actually open up the legacy format or dialog box for creating new documents. And the main difference here is that we can also specify the arrangement of the artboards. So we can choose to set them up in rows and columns. Or a single row or a single column. And we can also change the order of the artboards if we click on this icon here on the right. Additionally, we also have an option to change the spacing between the artboards. Now I'm going to set them up in a single row like this, and then I'm going to click on Create Document. So there we go. We have our five artboards created for us. And it's already good to mention that if you ever need to move these around, you can just use the artboard tool, which you can also access by pressing Shift on the keyboard. And whenever you select this tool, you will be able to see the names of the artboards and the numbers of them. So we can see that the first one was created on the left, and then moving on, we have two, three, four and five. You can always rearrange the artboards manually by dragging them around, or you can also rearrange them from the contextual task bar, which you can find in the window menu. Just make sure you have that selected and you will be able to choose rearrange all. And if you decide that you wanted to put them into three columns, for instance, we can do that very quickly. The same option you can also find from the properties panel. So here we can choose rearrange all, and we can also choose artboard options for the selected artboard, where we can easily change the size, the name of the artboard, and even additional display options. I mentioned earlier that there is a way to change the resolution for roster effects at any time. So this is something you can find in the effect menu. Go to document roster effect settings, and here you can change from screen to medium and high or even choose a custom resolution by clicking on other, and then you can specify it here on the right side. So I'm just going to set this back to 72 for now, but it's important to remember the settings and where you can find them. And then the preview mode is something you can change from the view menu. And amongst a few useful options like Outline view, we have the overprint and pixel preview options that we've seen in the new dialog box window. If I place a simple shape like a circle on the artboard, when I use the normal preview option and I zoom closer, it will always look crisp and sharp around the edges. However, if I now switch to the pixel preview, depending on the pixel dimensions of my artboard, you might start to see pixelation. And if I zoom even closer, we even see the pixel grid. So once again, if I come back here and turn this option off, we go back to see the sharp vector outlines. Also important to mention that the current color mode and viewing mode can both be visible here in the document tab. So we can see we are currently using RGB color mode and we are in the preview viewing option. Now, if we want to change the color mode, we can actually do this from the file menu at any time by going to document color mode and switch to CMYK. If we want this artwork to be printed. And we can also get back to most of the settings that we used at the beginning when we created this document by simply just clicking away and making sure that nothing is selected with the selection tool, then we will be able to choose document setup from the Options bar. So right here, document setup. So for instance, here we can find the bleed settings, and maybe we can increase this to 3 millimeters. We can actually type in MM or just choose millimeters and once I click Okay, going to include that bleed around all of my artboards. And just so we can see how it works, if I move this object here close to the edge of this artboard and I go to the view menu and choose trim view. It's going to simulate how the bleed is going to be trimmed off around the edges. So we can see once again before and after. In case you are interested how over preview works, this is something we will come back to and talk about later in this course. 20. 2.1.b Templates: It is important to know the difference between an Illustrator document preset and an illustrator template. This is, again, something that they often ask about in the exam. So we've already seen how to create a document preset. This is something you can find in the file new dialog box. So that's where we can create a new document preset with all the settings that we have in this window, and this is where they would be stored under the S tab. So just to demonstrate this to you, I'm going to go back maybe to print this time and choose A four landscape with three artboards, and maybe we will use the three millimeter bleed and the roster effect set to 72. And I'm going to save this as a new preset. I'm just going to call it test and click on safe preset. Notice how it's going to show up here, and it says it's a saved blank document preset. This can be selected at any time, and all the settings will be loaded immediately. However, below this, we also have this other category called templates. This is also under the saved tab, and the main difference is that an Illustrator template can actually include artwork as well. It can have multiple artboards. It can have layers already set and most importantly, like I said, it can include ADD R work. So if I choose this template, for instance, we can see that this is coming from Adobe stock, and these are the details. So we have the size, the color mode, and also the additional information. We can click on C preview just to have a look at it. And then if you like it, we can just click on Open. And there you go, it opened it up for you. And like I mentioned, it includes already the layer set up, and everything obviously is editable here. There is our text objects that we can update. And we have in total four artboards saved in this template. And also important that every time that you open up an Illustrator template, it's going to open as an untitled document. To prevent you overwriting the original source file. So it's always going to create an untitled document, brand new document, but with already all the elements in place. So how do we save a template? If I just come back to our previous document, I can go up to the file menu and choose Save as. And then instead of saving it as an AI file or Adobe Illustrator document, I would choose Illustrator template. So that's the AIT file format. And once that is saved, I can go up and choose File open and then choosing that template. Once I open it up, it's going to open up as an untitled document. If I make any changes to this and I decide to update my template, I can just go back to the file menu and choose saves, and I just have to make sure I override the original file, or I can also just use directly the save as template option here. And then just say overwrite the original file. In case you are looking for free illustrator templates, you can find these from the new document dialogue box. We just have to go to free templates here on the right, and we will be able to see the categories. So we have social media, cards and invitation, logos and icons. Or if you want, you can also look for more templates on Adobe stock. Maybe we are looking for business card templates. So I'm just going to do a quick search. And then this is going to open up in a browser window, so we can scroll through lots of options here. And if there is something that we like, we can choose it. And then once we click on Download, Adobe Stock is going to ask us how we want to pay for this. So these are paid templates. 21. 2.2.a-b Workspace: It is important to be familiar with the terminology of the Illustrator interface. So I'm going to walk you through the most important segments or elements in this lesson. First of all, we have the main menu, which we can find here on the top. Now, if you are on PC, it will look a little bit different because you want to see the illustrator here on the left. I will start with the file menu. But on a Mac, under the Illustrator menu, we will find the preferences or settings. This is actually something that on PC, you will find under the edit menu at the bottom near the keyboard shortcut setting. Below the file menu, we have this section called the Control bar. So this is something you can find in the Window menu. If you check control, it's going to be visible but you can obviously turn it off if you don't want to see it. There is the properties panel here on the right, which serves roughly the same purpose as the control bar. So if you require more vertical space on your screen, perhaps you might want to use the properties panel instead. But for now, I'm just going to turn it back on just to make sure we can see everything. Then on the left side, this is what we call the tool bar. Which can be set in two columns or a single column using these double arrows, we can easily switch between the two layout. And if you click on these three dots here at the bottom, this will allow you to fully customize the tool bar. So you can now start drag and drop any tool wherever you want it, so you can drag tools up and down. We can also remove tools by dragging them off onto the workspace or document window. We can see the cursor is changing to a little minus icon, and immediately that tool is going to show up here in the additional tools category. So any hidden tools will be highlighted. So let me just do this again with the type tool. I'm just going to drag it out. And then if we scroll down, we can see it now here. I can drag it back and place it in a separate place within the toolbar, or I can go up to the top right and choose to reset tool bar to the default state, or I can also switch to basic, which will show less of the tools. So in this case, there will be a lot of tools in here that are currently hidden away. It's also worth mentioning that any tool with a little blue circle on it means that it's been recently edited or introduced to Illustrator. The right side, we have the panels, and panels can appear in lots of different ways. They can be either open or collapsed. So this would be considered open. And if I double tap on it, it will be collapsed. They can also be in iconic state like this, and if I click on it, they can open up, and then clicking away on another panel should automatically hide them. Or if you right click on them, you can control this behavior. You just have to have the auto collapse iconic panels option enabled. You can drag these iconic panels out a bit to be able to reveal the names of these, and you can also expand all of them by using the double arrows or collapse them back again with the same icon. Can also drag a panel out to turn it into a floating panel, or you can dock it back just like before. The blue line will always tell us where it's going to be docked. So I can decide where I want to place it. And when I let go, it's going to be docked back there. Panels can all be found in the window menu. So here's a long list of all the illustrator panels. And on the type, we have also additional panels. And if you customize the interface, it is recommended to save it as a workspace, which you can find and control from here on the top right corner. So here we have the essentials workspace, but we can create a new workspace or also reset an existing workspace. Like, in this case, if I click on Reset Essentials, it's going to set it back how it was originally saved. And last but not least, this is called the contextual task bar, which will change depending on which tool you are using and what you have selected. So for instance, if I select this image, I can see additional options will be revealed. While if I just click away, I will have this again change to different options. And this is a feature you can find from the Window menu contextual task bar, which can be turned off if it gets annoying or it gets in the way. But what I recommend to do is to move it to a place where it's not distracting you and then just click on the additional options and choose pin bar position. So that way, it's not going to move around. It will always be in the same place. 22. 2.2.c Settings: Besides the workspace and the toolbar, you can also customize the preferences or settings by going to the Illustrator menu on a Mac computer or the edit menu on a PC. So here at the bottom, you will find settings or on the Mac. On the Illustrator, you will find the same option. And then from here, in this list, you can find all the different categories. But if you just go to general, which by the way, you can also access by pressing Command or Control K on the keyboard, this will give you a set of features that's considered general settings. And then we have all the additional categories here on the left. So as you can see, there's a lot of settings. And don't worry. In the exam, you won't be asked about any specific setting. However, if they ask about anything, they will usually make it clear and easy to find. What I recommend to do is to familiarize yourself with the general tab for sure, the user interface settings, and also the performance settings. There's a couple of things that they might ask you, like changing the history states, which you can find here. The three options you can switch to is 50, hundred or 200, and they might also ask you to change the real time drawing and editing option, which once again is under the performance tab. Other category they might ask you about is the guides and grid. Perhaps they will ask you to change the color of the guides or the style of the guides from lines to dots. These are both things that you can change here. And in the same place, you have also all the options for styling the grids in Illustrator, even adjusting the subdivisions and also how large you want the general grid to be. A few more important options worth mentioning. Are the units. So you can change the measurement units from pixels to inches or any of these other options you can find here. You can also change the units for the strokes and even text or type. And of course, there's also a type section where you can change the default adjustment size for size and leading of text. This is when you are using keyboard shortcuts to increase or decrease the size or lead the same thing for tracking, you can also adjust here and also the increment for baseline shift you can adjust. And finally, I just wanted to mention that the naming of settings is not consistent in Illustrator and in the other Adobe applications as well. Sometimes they are referred to as preferences. Sometimes they are referred to as settings. So if I go from the main menu, it would be referred to as settings. While if I go through the properties panel, there it will be called preferences. So if I click on this, it actually takes us to the exact same place. Just remember that these two terms are interchangeable. 23. 2.3.a-b Navigation: In this lesson, we will be talking about the navigational techniques and features in Adobe Illustrator. First of all, how do we zoom in and out? Well, that's very simple. The easiest way to do it is by using the Commando Control key and press Plus to zoom in or minus to zoom out. To fit the artboard in your document to the window, you can press Commando Control zero to zoom to the actual size of the artboard, that would be Commando Control one. And of course, you can find all of these options in the view menu as well. So you can see zoom in and out. Fit artboard in window and actual size. So all of the options that I mentioned earlier. Now, the actual size view is based on the Zoom percentage that we can see here in the tab. So when you are in 100% view, that is considered actual size, and that is calculated based on the dimensions of your current artboard. This is actually something you can quickly find from the properties panel by clicking on Edit artboards. And then the width and the height of the artboard is something that you can find here. Can also use the properties panel to turn on the rulers, and they will appear on the top and on the left side. And you can also change the measurement units. So instead of millimeters, for instance, I can switch to inches and you can see it immediately updating here in the rulers. You can also right click on the rulers and change it there. So I can change it to feed, for instance, or I can even change it to pixels if I wanted to. And it is important to mention that if you have multiple artboards in the same document, in this case, I'm using the artboard tool, and I'm just going to hold down Alt or option and click and drag the entire artboard to create a duplicate. Now that I have two artboards, if I press Command or Control zero, it will only fit the currently selected artboard to the screen. However, if I use Command Option zero or Control A zero on PC, that's going to fit all available artboards to the screen. Besides using the keyboard shortcuts for zooming in and out, you can also use the Zoom tool, which you can select from the toolbar or just by pressing Z on the keyboard. And once this is selected, you can click and drag to the right to zoom in or drag left to zoom out. And notice that I can zoom into the area where I'm clicking on. This is called the scrubby Zoom technique, and it's extremely useful. So I highly recommend to use this as well. And besides zooming, of course, it's very important to know the shortcut for panning around, which is spacebar click and drag. So that's for penning. And this is a shortcut that you will be using a lot. But it's worth mentioning that if you are zoomed really close into an illustration and you want to pen around, but you want to move to the other side of the illustration, instead of zooming out and then zooming back in again, you can utilize a dedicated panel called Navigator, which you can find from the Window menu. Navigator. So with this, all we have to do is simply drag that little red rectangle around and we can very quickly reposition our view within the illustration. So this essentially is like a bird's eye view or thumbnail view of the entire document, and it makes it easy to move around. Another technique that's worth mentioning and something that they might ask about in the exam is how you can use the new window feature. So when you have a document open and you choose Window, New Window, is going to open the same document in another tab. Notice how we have the same document name and with a number one and also with a number two. And if I go to the window menu and choose a range tile, I will be able to see these side by side. So why would this be useful? Because essentially, it's the same document opened twice in Illustrator. The reason why this could be useful is because I can set one of these fit inside its own window with the commando control zero shortcut, while on the other one, I can use the Zoom tool to get up close and personal to make my changes. So the cool thing here is that if I make changes on one of these windows, it will also update on the other side. So I can see both close up and from a distance, the same artwork. This could be especially useful if you have multiple monitors. You can set up one of these windows on your secondary monitor while you're working on the close up version on your primary monitor. Last but not least, we can also rotate our view. If we switch to the rotate view tool, the default shortcut for this is Shift H. Once this is selected, we can click and drag and rotate the view. So this is not rotating the artwork itself. We are just changing our view, and this could be useful if you have texts written in an angle, for instance, or even when you are using a stylus and you want to adjust the viewing angle to align with the natural flow of your brush strokes. And if you ever change your view and you want to get back to the original orientation, just press the scape on the keyboard. Or when you are using the rotate view tool, if you want to constrain it to 15 degrees increments, just hold down the Shift key on the keyboard. And as a final note, I wanted to mention that at the bottom in the status bar, we can also find the Zoom ratio options. So we can choose maybe 100% once again, you might recall is called the actual size view. And to the right of this, we have also the viewing angle or rotation. So if I choose 30 degrees, for instance, we can also get to the same result that we had before with the rotate view tool. And in case you are wondering this third drop down here would be useful if we have multiple artboards in the document because with this, we could easily jump between the available artboards. 24. 2.3.c Guides: In this video, we will be talking about features that can help us to work precisely in Adobe Illustrator. First up, let's see how we can work with guides. Now, for guides, it is recommended to have the rulers visible that's Commando Control R on the keyboard, or you can also select it from the Properties panel. So once we turn them on, remember, in the previous lesson, we mentioned that by right clicking on these, we can change the measurement units or we can also change them from the properties panel. But more importantly, if you click and drag onto the artboard, you will be creating a guide. If you drag from the horizontal ruler, it will create a horizontal guide if you drag from the vertical ruler, it will create a vertical guide. However, if you use the alt or option key, you can actually create a guide in the opposite direction. So I started dragging from the horizontal ruler, but because I'm holding down the Alt or option key, it is actually creating a vertical guide. And guides I use mainly to align objects too. So if I, for instance, draw a rectangle, notice how I can align the corner point of it to that intersection point of these two guides. Since we mentioned creating an object, it's also important to know how you can create an object with an exact size. Because in the exam, you might be asked that you have to create a square which is 50 by 50 millimeters. So the way to do this is first, of course, select the tool that you need. In this case, that's a rectangle tool. And then instead of click and dragging on the screen or on the artboard, you just have to click simply anywhere on the artboard. And here you will be able to input the values that they ask you. So 50 by 50 millimeters, and then we can just click Okay. So this is going to create the object exactly in that size, and we can double check here in the properties panel, we can see the correct size. Now if you by accident created something in the wrong size, of course, you can always come here and change the value. So for instance, if this was meant to be a 75 by 50 millimeters rectangle, what we could do is to turn off this link that way the width and the height is going to be independent. So the proportions of the shape is not constrained, so I can just type in 75 and press Enter and there you go, we updated the shape. And right next to the dimensions, we also have the location or position of this object within the artboard. So right now, we can see the X and Y values, and they correspond to the position of the top left corner of this object. So if I change to the center point, the numbers will update. If I change to the bottom right corner, again, the values will update. But if I keep it on the top left corner and I type in zero and zero, it's going to move it straight up to the top left corner of my artboard. Useful feature, which again, you might be asked about in the exam is that you can actually turn objects into guides. By having them selected, you just need to go to the view menu and choose guides and then make guides. The shortcut for it is Command or Control five. And what will happen is that this object is going to turn into a guide. And it's important to mention that it is still going to be visible in your layers. So I will be able to still find it. It's still a rectangle. But this is considered to be a non printing object or non printing element, so it won't show up in the if we go to the view menu and choose presentation mode, that's always a good way to see what is actually going to be visible if an image is printed. You can press escape on the keyboard to exit the presentation mode. And if you ever need to revert back to the original shape that you used to create this guide, you can just go back to the same menu, and instead of make guides, you just say release guides. And it should remember the original appearance of the object as well. Now, besides creating guides, it's also important to know how to remove them. Of course, you can click and drag to move them as long as they are not logged. That's again an option you can find under the view guides. So there will be the Log guides option. And it would say unlock guides in case they are locked already. Or you can also use the layers panel. In the case they are locked, there would be a little padlock icon next to them. You can unlock them to be able to move them again. And if I click and drag, I can even select multiple guides, and just simply pressing delete on the keyboard will remove them. However, if you have a lot of guides in a document, it might be more efficient to go to the view menu, and the guides, you can just choose clear guides. This is going to remove all the guides from the document, not just from your current artboard, but from the entire document. It's also important to know what's the difference between normal guides and smart guides. So while normal guides or guides that we've seen so far are manually placed and kept in the document, smart guides only appear while you are moving or scaling objects. So for instance, when I move this object around, notice these pink lines and text also appearing according to where I have the object. As I move it, for instance, here to the left side, we can see it will indicate distances between the existing illustration and also aligning the center point to specific points within the illustration. And in some cases, it would even indicate the actual distance from a particular point in the illustration, like here at the bottom near the skateboard. Like I mentioned, these are only temporarily visible while you are moving an object or scaling it around. So instead of moving, now I'm just going to scale, and you see that these smart guides are still showing up. And similarly to this, if I have multiple objects and I start rotating one of them, if I then rotate the other object, the smart guides can also help me to align their rotation to each other. In some cases, you might find smart guys to be distracting in your work, and that's why it's good to know where you can turn them off. So from the view menu, you can find the option here or you can remember the shortcut, its command or control. And once this is turned off, they won't be showing up anymore, no matter what I do in the document. Last but not least, another non printing feature that can help you to work precisely is the grid, which again is something you can find from the property panel. This icon can turn it on. And off. And whenever it's turned on, we can zoom a little bit closer. We can see it's going to have this division within the artboard. And once again, if I create something new, it will be able to align to those division lines or the subdivisions. And if we go to the preferences, that's Command or Control K on the keyboard, we will be able to find the settings for both the guides and the grid here. Most importantly, you want to decide whether you want to see the grid in front or behind the illustration. So in case I choose this option and click Okay, because I have a field shape in the background, I can only see the grid outside of the artboard. So in this case, that is not really convenient. So I'm just going to turn this off. But you can see we have also an option for the size of the grid lines and also how many subdivisions we want to see in between. Besides the preferences for guides and the grid, we also have options for the smart guides. And one last thing that's important to mention that whenever you are using the grid, you have to also make sure that the snap to grid option is turned on. Because without this, whenever you create a new object or you move objects around, they won't actually automatically snap align to the lines in the grid. Once this is enabled, we can see that this object is automatically going to snap to each of those division lines and the main lines as well. The same thing. If I start scaling, it's going to be snapping to those squares within my grid. 25. 2.3.d Views and Modes: In Illustrator, we use layers and groups to organize our illustrations and make them easier to work with. And in case of this illustration, for instance, I have a group created for the skateboard. If I click on this and start moving it around, you can see how it can be easily accessed. And that's because once again, it is a separate group within the illustration layer. Groups can be used to organize multiple objects into a single unit. Layers can be used to separate more complex details. For instance, keeping all the shading details on a separate layer. Like, in this case, we can see all of those textured shading details I have on the separate layer, and also all the lines, those white lines, I have yet again on another separate layer. And I even have the original sketch that I used on this layer on top, which is set up as a template. If I double click on this layer, we can see the template option here. I can turn this off. And that way, we will be able to see the illustration or that sketch more because now it is not dimmed however, it is still set to multiply blend mode, which is something that we can change by selecting the layer, not just clicking on it, but actually selecting it from the selector icon. And then from the control bar, I can click on opacity and change the blend mode to normal. So this is the actual illustration. But having it set up in multiply blend mode allows me to be able to see it but still work underneath it on the additional layers that I have in this document. And by turning this layer into a template, I can make sure that it is not going to move around because it's going to lock the layer, but also reduce the visibility of it. So it just lets me work and concentrate on my vector shapes while still seeing this hand drawn sketch on top of. Whenever you have a complex illustration and you want to focus on a specific group and making sure that you are not accidentally going to change anything else around that particular set of objects, you can utilize a feature called isolate object. So if I select this group, for instance, all I have to do is to double click on it. And now we are in isolation mode. And here on the top, I can see that this particular group is called skateboard, and it is inside the illustration layer. When you are in isolation mode, it's like as if you are inside the group. So you will automatically be able to move anything around, even though these elements were grouped together. Now I can access them individually and start moving them around if I wanted to. Once I made my changes, I can just double click outside and go back to the original view of all of my elements. Isolation is something you can also access from the layers panel. If I just select the skateboard object, for instance, I can go to the panel dropdown and choose Enter Isolation mode. And similarly, you can also use the panel menu or drop down to exit the isolation mode. Another important feature in Illustrator you have to be familiar with is called the outline view, which you can find in the view menu. If I switch to this, it will only show the outlines of the shapes in this document. And you can also use the keyboard shortcut, which is Command or Control Y. With this, you can toggle between preview and outline view. And we can always see these written also here in the document tad. In case of very complex illustrations, sometimes it might be easier to switch to outline view because illustrator will be much smoother and faster when you are in this special view. But it can also be useful to identify overlapping objects which you might not be able to see in the preview mode. In case your document has bleed on it, which you can check from the file menu document setup, and in this case, I have five millimeter bleed on all the edges. If we use the view menu and choose trim view, we will be able to simulate how this document will look once it's trimmed. And once again, if I go back here and choose the same option, I can disable this special view and we can go back seeing the edge of the artboard and also the bleed guides. Another important feature you should be familiar with is the pixel preview. Which is a great way to simulate the resolution of your document. So if I zoom a little bit closer now, even though these are all vector shapes that are resolution independent, this special view will demonstrate how this particular size that we are using for our artboard is going to hold up in terms of resolution and image quality. So if I come back to the view menu and turn this off, it's going to refresh the screen, and I will see again my vector shapes. But once I turn the pixel preview back on, we will start to see that pixelation and the roster details of the simulated print. Last but not least, you also have to be familiar with the three drawing modes, which you can find here at the bottom of the toolbar. So by default, you will have the draw normal option selected, which means that anything that you draw or create will be always created on top of the existing object. So for instance, if I use the brush tool and draw, it's going to appear on top of the additional objects underneath. However, we can change this to draw behind. Now, if I start drawing, it's going to appear behind the current object. But notice that this brush stroke is actually still in front of that background shape, the orange shape, and that is because that is on a separate layer. So draw behind will only be able to go behind objects on the same layer. It won't go behind additional layers underneath your currently selected layer. And last but not least, we also have the draw inside mode, which you will only be able to access if you have an object selected first. So because I clicked on this shape, I can now choose draw inside, and then using the brush tool, I will be able to draw inside this object. And in this case, Illustrator is creating a clipping mask using the circle as the mask. So we can see it created this clip group and the ellipse is underlined, meaning that is the shape used as the mask. If you have a changed your mind and you want to free up the brushstroke, instead of having it clipped into that circle, you can just right click on this clip group and choose release clipping mask. And now we separated these two objects. However, notice that the circle still has this frame around it, which means that we are still in the draw inside mode. Now, it's important to remember to switch back to draw normal whenever you use this feature. Instead of coming to the toolbar to make these changes, you can also use the keyboard shortcut Shift D, which is going to toggle through these three variations. Draw normal, draw behind, and draw inside in case an object is selected. 26. 2.4.a-b Placing assets: Open an existing document in Adobe Illustrator, you can either go to the File menu and choose open or open recent files. You can also access the open feature from here on the left and the recent files from the main home screen. And you can preview these in ThumbnO or as a list. You can even filter the recent files by typing in something, let's say, skater, in this case, we could very quickly find that document that we had in the previous lessons. If we switch to your files here on the left, we will be able to find all of our Illustrator Cloud documents. The extension for these are AIC, and the main advantage of saving any project in this format is that it will allow you to open them on any device anywhere you are without having to take the file with you on a hard drive. As their name suggests, they are stored in the Cloud. We can also see the little Cloud icon next to them. It's important to mention that in case you are opening a Cloud document, it might take long if you haven't already used that on your current device. So for instance, if I click on this one, you will see that there is going to be a bit of loading time before this can appear in Illustrator. Now, besides opening documents, we can also place illustrations into existing documents. For instance, I might want to place another similar illustration into this document. So I want to keep them next to each other. Now, instead of opening it up separately, I could just go to File and choose Place. And once I find the Illustrator file that I was looking for, it's important to check this option here called Link. When it is turned on, it means it's going to maintain a link to the original source file. And if that changes, this current document will also be affected. I'm going to explain and show you how this works. So I'm going to keep it as a link. In this case. I click on Place, and I'm just going to click simply in the document. Notice that I had the sketch layer selected when I did the placement. That is why it is semi transparent. But if I move this object onto the illustration layer, it's going to be visible in its original colors. Now, it would make sense to create a new artboard for this illustration, which we can do by using the artboard tool and simply clicking on this illustration. When the illustration is selected with the selection tool, we will see the original source file mentioned here in the control bar. So it's Girl tutorial AI file. In case you don't see the control bar, just go to the Window menu and turn it on, or switch to the properties panel where you will be able to see the linked file section, and by clicking on that, you will be able to find the actual file that it is referencing. The same feature you can also access by clicking on the Link file here in the Control bar. Now, if you click on the Linked file's name, you will get additional options can choose to edit the original or even relink it, so you can update it with a different illustration. Or right next to this, we have a button for embedding the illustration. Now, I wanted to bring up this warning because it's important to be aware of the fact that if you are using an Illustrator cloud document and then you place a linked asset inside it, that is not going to be saved in the cloud. So in case you are opening the same Cloud document on another device, that asset is going to be missing. The way to avoid this happening is by embedding the linked asset. So I'm just going to click Okay here, also turn this off, and then click on the Embed option. So there's a button up here, simply click on Embed, or from the properties panel, you can also choose ABD. While this is definitely the best way of working with cloud documents, this feature will definitely increase the file size because it's not going to rely anymore on an external source file. It's going to include all the necessary elements for this new illustration that we placed here in the same file. Now, let me just go back one step while it was still linked because I wanted to show you what happens if I choose Edit original. So by doing that, I can select this illustration and maybe turn it a little bit around like this. And if I choose file, save, and then switch back to the other document, inside the linked file drop down, I will notice this little icon. When I come back to my original document, I will be greeted by this warning that some files are missing or modified in the ink s panel. Would I like to update them? I could just say yes or I can show you where you can find the Link panel. So it's in the window menu links, and there is the little icon indicating that this asset needs to be updated. Or we can also access this from the drop down. Once again, we can see it there, and the icon you have to use is this one. So this is for updating it and the same thing we can do from the Links panel as well. So once I update this, it's going to show that rotated variant that we created in the source file. Just to demonstrate what happens if I embed this now in this state, it's going to be taken out of the links panel because it's not a link that set anymore. It will be fully editable because all of the elements of the illustration were now carried over into this document, and of course, it's going to be maintaining that rotated version that we set up. But I can still go back to the original document, and since I haven't closed this, I can undo the rotation here. Save the file in this original format. But now if I come back to this other document, since this illustration was already embedded here, it's not going to prompt me to update this because there is no link between this and the source file anymore. This is a really important concept to understand because there will be lots of questions about this in the exam. So make sure to practice placing assets into illustrator documents and learn the difference between embedding something or linking. And just to go back to the actual place command once again, going to use the same illustration, but this time, I'm going to turn off the link option. And what this means is when I place this onto my artboard, it's going to come automatically embedded, so it won't show up in the links panel. Last but not least, you also have to know how to use the package feature. This can be extremely useful if you have multiple linked assets in a project and you need to move that project to another device, or you need to provide it to a client, for instance. So in this document, I have only this single illustration. But if I choose File place and I bring in another illustration, let's just say it's the same one that we used before. I can just click to place it in. And just like before, it shows up here in the Links panel. Now if I go to the File menu, I can choose package. And by the way, this feature won't be available for Illustrator Cloud documents. That's also something that you might be asked about in the exam. But with a normal Illustrator document that's offline, you can choose package. You will just have to make sure that your document is safe before you do this. So I'm just going to save it. And then all you have to do is to just choose where you want to store this package on your computer so you can set up the location. You can give the main folder a name. Then you can also control these options. Most importantly, you want to make sure that all the linked assets are copied into the package folder, and ideally, all the linked assets should be also stored in a separate folder just to keep things tidy. Now, if you used any text in your document, even the font files will be collected in this Illustrator package. 27. 2.4.c Links panel: This video, I'm just going to show you a few additional important things to remember about linked assets in Illustrator. First of all, there is a shortcut to quickly place assets in that's Commando Control Shift P. And in this case, instead of placing one asset, I'm going to have two of them selected and notice how I have the linked option turned on. If I choose place, will be able to place these one by one. I can either just click or click and drag to define the size that I want to use for these illustrations. And within the Links panel, we can see how both of these are edited, and I can see the little chain icon, which means that it's a healthy link meaning that the source file is available and everything is good. However, let's see what happens if I rename one of those source files. So I'm just going to call this bike one, for instance. As soon as I come back to Illustrator, I will see a little warning sign appearing here that the link is broken. Now, in this case, I can still preview the object, but I won't be able to embed it or edit the original anymore because there is no link to the source file. Compared to this, if I select this other illustration where the link is still healthy, I can see embedding and editing original are both available options. So how can you fix a broken link? You just have to select that asset and then click on the chain icon here and then locate the renamed file and then choose place and O. And as you can see, the name also updated here in the Links panel, and now the link is working again, and this fix allows me to continue working normally as before. Last but not least, if you're working in a complex Illustrator document with lots of linked assets, if you quickly want to find an asset within your document, you can just select it here and click on the GT Link icon, and that will take you there and also have it selected for you. 28. 2.5.a Fill and stroke: Basic appearance of an illustrator object is made up of the fill and stroke attributes. And whenever you are drawing a shape, if you press D on the keyboard, you can revert back to the default appearance, which would be white fill and one point black stroke. When you create the object, you will be able to see these options showing up here in the control bar. So there's my white fill. There is the black stroke, and there is the stroke width, which is one point. Can also find these in the properties panel as long as the object is still selected under the appearance section. So white fill, black stroke with one point size. You can quickly swap the two colors between these two attributes. So the fill and the stroke colors can be swapped by pressing Shift X. You can see how it's updating both in the properties panel and also here in the ardbard. Or if you just press X on the keyboard, you can switch between the selected attribute this will only be visible in the toolbar here at the bottom. So by pressing X, I can have the stroke attribute selected or the fill. Now, if the field is selected, for instance, I can press forward slash on the keyboard to set that to none that basically removes the color or the visibility of that attribute. Or if I then press X again and have the stroke selected and press forward slash once more on the keyboard, I can also set that to none. And that basically will render this object invisible because both of the attributes are now hidden. Doesn't mean that the object is deleted. So from the layers panel, I can still find it. Or if I go to the view menu and choose Outline view, I can also easily find it. And by going back to the properties panel, I can either assign colors to both the stroke and the fill, or I can just press D on the keyboard again to revert back to the default white fill and black stroke. Whenever an object is selected, you can quickly update its appearance based on another object in the same Illustrator document by using the eyedropper tool. So I'm going to select it from the toolbar, but you can also use the eye key on the keyboard, and I can just click on any of these other objects, and I can quickly change the appearance. In this case, these objects are only using field colors. But if I click on this line, for instance, that is going to use a white stroke. Worth mentioning that by double clicking on the Eyedropper tool, you can customize how it works. So you can decide what the eye dropper can pick up and also what it can apply on selected objects. And you can even change the sampling size from point sample to an area. It could be either three by three points or five by five points. And in these cases, it's going to use an average of the color values in those sampled areas. 29. 2.5.b Gradients: It is important to know everything about gradients for the exam because that's something that they really like to ask questions about. So in this video, we will dive deep into all the features that you can find about gradients in Illustrator. So first of all, you will need an object. It could be any object. You will be able to apply a gradient on if you use the gradient tool. So with the gradient tool, having the fill color selected, which you can do once again with the X key on the keyboard. So having the fill on top, you will be able to just click on the object to assign the default gradient, which would be a linear black and white gradient. Notice that we get this gradient annotator automatically, which can be used to control everything or all aspects of the gradient from the endpoints or color stops to the midpoint, which is the transition between the two colors to even the spread or distance of the gradient and even its rotation. If I go close to one of these endpoints, just slightly further away from it, I can adjust the angle. Can even click on the gradient and move the whole thing around. And by double clicking on any of these color stops, I can choose a different color. So let me just jump here and change that also to a different color. And by clicking somewhere close to the gradient annotator, we can add additional color stops. Once again, I'm just going to click on this and adjust the color maybe to something different that we already have. Now when you have multiple color stops, you can easily adjust their location, even swap them around, so you can move one beyond another existing colors. And at any point, you can switch between the types of gradients, which is linear, radio, or free form. That's the third option here. Now, keep in mind when you switch to free form, you will lose your original colors because it's a completely different way of setting up gradients. Here we have four color stops that we can move freely within the object. But similarly to before, we can easily adjust their colors, and I'm just going to have two of them here, just so you can see how these can update live as I'm moving them around. Let me just pick another color here. And once again, I can move it around even between the other two color stops, and it's a really cool feature that you can utilize for your illustrations. If a color stop is not needed, you can just select it and press delete on the keyboard. Or if you click anywhere on an empty area within the object, you can add a new colors. Can also control the spread of color stops by dragging this dash line circle or the perimeter around them and make it bigger or smaller. Or you can also control this by double clicking on a color stop and adjust the spread value in this pop up window. So if I set it to 100%, that's the highest it can go to. Another quick way to remove a color stop is to simply drag it outside of the shape. Besides drawing points within a free from gradient, you can also decide to draw lines. You have to switch to this option either in the control bar or in the properties panel. And then if I click a couple of times, I can create these curved lines and I can change the color on them easily. Maybe I'm going to use similar color on all of these color stops. By having these four points connected into a line, I can easily adjust their position by still having them connected to each other, essentially, this could help to create a division between additional color stops. But depending on your illustration, it can be utilized in various other ways. Another way to apply a gradient to an object is by going to the field color drop down and choosing one of these default gradients. Like this one here, it's a swatch, a gradient swatch, which already has these two colors in it. And if I press G on the keyboard, I can reveal the color stops. So even though it seems like it's only two colors, it's actually made up of five color stops. And just like before, we can change this to a radio gradient if we wanted to, in case of a radio gradient, we can also reverse the gradient. If I click on the additional options here in the properties panel, I will find the reverse icon there. I can just click on that and we can see how it quickly reverses. In case of a radio gradient, we have a couple of additional control points that is worth mentioning. This one right here is for increasing and decreasing the size of the gradient, while this field point up here is for changing the shape and turning it more into an ellipse, or we can also drag it in the other direction. And in case you want to revert this back to the original circular shape, just go back to the additional options in the properties panel and make sure you set this to 100% also, if I use this little point here in the middle, I can move the gradient within the object. So I can change the center point to be closer to the edge or drag it back to the original center point if I want to keep it more symmetrical. But as you can see, when I move this to the edge, it's going to create a nice boundary or silhouette that is more noticeable compared to the other edges. Besides applying gradients to the field attributes, we can also apply it to stroke. Just have to select the stroke color and choose the gradient. This case, I'm going to use the black and white linear gradient for now, and I'm just going to increase the stroke value maybe up to 20 points just to make sure we can see it better. By the way, if you hold on the Shift key on the keyboard and click on up or down arrows, in most of the input zones like this, you will be able to increase or decrease values by ten points instead of one point at a time. But as you can see, now I have this gradient stroke, and to be able to have more control over how this gradient is applied on the stroke or the outline of the object, we would have to click on the additional options here. And there we will see the three icons for the gradient on the stroke. So the default option is what we can see here. But then there is the second option and third option. And it's important to remember the names of this. So the first one is called applying the gradient within the stroke. The second one is along the stroke, and then the third one is across the stroke. You can still, of course, reverse the gradient so decide where the colors should go. And the tricky question in the exam could be which of these three will allow you to change the angle of the gradient. So when you are applying a gradient on a stroke, which of these will allow you to change the angle? Well, it's the first one. So the one that is called apply gradient within the stroke. Here, as you can see, we can change the angle. So we can choose maybe -45 or 90 degrees. And why you would be able to easily change this with the gradient annotator or the gradient tool in case of fill gradient with a stroke, you can only change this here with this drop down. Notice how when I come over the object with the gradient tool, it actually is not allowing me to use it because I am editing a gradient on a stroke. It's worth mentioning that, of course, besides the properties panel, you can also use the gradient panel to have a little bit more control over all of these settings. So you won't have to keep coming back and opening the additional settings. Here you will be able to see all the settings all at once. Just make sure that from the drop down of the panel menu, you have the options visible because by default, you might see only the color stops. So if you go to the show options, it's going to reveal all the additional options that we already talked about. Last but not least, it's also important to mention that you can save gradients as swatches as long as they are linear or radial gradients because you can't save free form gradients as swatches. There's other ways of saving them, but as swatches, they won't work. So if I select this other object here, I can go to either the fill and save it as a new swatch, simply have to give it a name. Or I can also go to the stroke and click on the swatch and choose New Swatch to be saved based on this. And this will show up here in my swatches panel. Finally, just one last thing I wanted to mention that besides the location of color stops, you can also control their opacity so in this case, if I move these two objects on top of each other and I go back to my field color and edit the gradient, let's just say we will select this color stop here. Notice how we can change the opacity. If I said that to zero, it's going to transition into a transparent part within the object. So we will start to see the object underneath it. 30. 2.5.c-d Swatches and Color Guide: This video, we will be talking about swatches, and for this, we will have to open the swatches panel naturally. So go to the window menu and choose swatches. I already have it open here on the right, and I also went into the panel menu and set this to medium thumbnail view. It's good to know that you can change the size of your swatches and even whether you want to see them as a grid or as a list. So you can find all of these options here. And I recommend having the show fine field option turned on because that can help you to find swatches as long as you give them names. Like, I know one of these is called Sky. I can just type it in, and it's very quick and easy to find it. In case you have lots of swatches in a document, you can group them by creating a new swatch group. And you can obviously call this whatever you prefer. But I'm just going to maybe select all the brown colors and drop them in this group. With this icon here at the bottom, we can filter what type of swatches we want to see in this panel. So we can only show gradient swatches, for instance, or only show pattern swatches, and also we can decide to only show the grouped swatches. So in this case, any ungrouped swatches won't be visible. We can, of course, switch back to seeing all swatches again. And to create a new swatch, you can just click on New Swatch option here, dial in the values that you want to use, decide what the swatch name should be instead of the default values that you are currently using. And you can also decide whether this is going to be a process or a spot color. Spot colors are premixed inks, so they are supposed to be printed with a dedicated color that is already premixed. By process colors would be mixed from Sian magenta, yellow and black. Whenever you create a swatch, you will be able to double click on it to go back to its settings, and we can even change the color type at a later stage. So if I change my mind and I want this to be a spot color, I can select that. And then there will be a small triangle with a dot inside indicating that it is now a spot color. But coming back to the settings, I can just as easily revert this back to a process color. Now notice that there is also an option called global color. If this is turned on, what this means is that whenever this color is used, it's going to keep a link to the swatch. So any object that is utilizing this watch will be linked to the original swatch. So for instance, if I select this object and apply it as a field color there, and then I also apply it maybe on the stroke on this other object. Now, even if I have both of these objects de selected, I can double click on the swatch itself. And as soon as I start updating its definition or makeup, it's going to also update those two objects that are using the watch. So that is how the global swatch feature works. We've already seen how to create gradient swatches in the previous lesson, but there's also another important type of swatch called pattern swatch. And by default, we have these two pattern swatches, the foliage and pompadour. So we can see how these look like, and they can be applied either to the field of an object or even to the stroke. So if I select the stroke attribute, I can also apply the same pattern there. Similarly to editing normal swatches, we can also edit pattern swatches by double clicking on their thumbnail. And this is going to open up the pattern editor where you have lots of options in this panel and you have a preview of how the design is going to look like and how it's going to be repeated between the tiles. Works a little bit similarly to the isolation mode, where here on the top, we will be able to accept the changes that we make or cancel and undo all the changes that we've done, or even save this change version as a new pattern swatch that will duplicate the original one. We will talk a bit more about patterns later. Now, besides using these two pattern swatches, of course, we have a lot of additional template swatches that we can find from the swatch libraries drop down. So here you have all kinds of swatches. But for pattern swatches, you would want to go to patterns, and then there's a couple of additional groups here like basic graphics, decorative and nature. Let's just go with nature animal skins. This is going to open a separate panel, and if I select an object, I can start applying these patterns. And each time I choose a pattern, it will automatically be added to the Swatches panel. Let's just check out this zebra pattern. Once again, it appears in the Swatches panel. Can create patterns from anything in Illustrator. So even if I just draw a circle, for instance, and set it to the default white and black, or maybe I just change it to a different color. By having this objects selected, I can go to the object menu and choose pattern make. And here I can control everything I want. Like the size of the shape within the tile and even the tile type. So instead of a grid, I can use maybe brick by row. So quickly, we created this nice polka dot pattern. And if I click on Done, this will also be added to my swatches panel, and I can apply it easily to any of these objects. Another useful panel that you need to be familiar with is the color guide, which will help you to find alternative shades and tints to selected colors. So, for instance, I choose red. We will be able to see the tints here on the right side and shades on the left side. And by clicking on either of these, I will be able to add these to my swatches panel if I need them. And essentially, these are just lighter or darker variations of the original hue that you pick. Additional thing you can do from this top drop down is to apply harmony rules like complimentary colors, and we can quickly choose the complimentary color of red, which would be green. But of course, we have a lot more options here. We can choose analog colors or triadic colors, and so on and so forth. In case you find a collection of colors in the color guide that you really like and you would want to save all of them into your swatches panel, you can just click on this icon here, so save the entire swatch group, and it's going to be organized automatically into a swatch group. It's also worth mentioning that if you end up having lots of unused swatches in a document, you might want to go to the panel menu and choose Select all unused and then click on the trashcan icon to remove them. You can just say yes, and that's going to simplify things a lot. The contrary, if you have colors used in a document that currently is not saved into the swatches panel, you can access the drop down and choose ad used colors. So this is going to generate swatches from all the existing shapes in your document. But it's worth mentioning that this might end up duplicating some of the existing swatches. You may have noticed that there is a swatch called registration, and this is actually something you can't delete. It has to be in every illustrator document. And when you apply this on an object. So for instance, on this circle, I apply this on the field color. I will look black. But this is actually not a normal black color where only the black value would be 100% ink coverage. But this is a color that is used for alignment in print process. So for elements like registration marks or crop marks, but it's important that the object using this color is showing up on all the printing plates. So make sure that you don't use this on illustrative details that actually is part of your illustration. Instead, use the black color or if you want to create a rich black swatch, which could be useful for text, you can dial in the following values on a new swatch, 25, 25, 25 on the CMY values, and 100 on the black. So we can even just simply call this rich black. And last but not least, it's also important to know how you can export all your swatches to make it easy to reuse them in other documents. You can do this by going to the swatch library icon and choose Save swatches. And you will just have to give it a name and choose the location you want to store it and it's going to actually be an illustrator document file, so AI file. But once it's saved, you will be able to import it into other illustrator documents by going to the same icon and by choosing other library. 31. 2.6.a Graphic Styles and Symbols: Besides the Swatches panel, you will also find a couple of additional panels in Illustrator, where you will be able to choose from preset libraries or templates. So these panels are the brushes, symbols, and graphic styles. So notice how each of these have the library's menu on the bottom left, just like the way we had it with the swatches. And if I click on any of these, we will be able to choose additional categories. So there's a lot of brush categories, for instance, but we also have symbol categories or templates. And then, again, we have the same thing available for graphic styles. Now, we will talk a bit more about brushes in the next video. This time, I want to concentrate on symbols and graphic styles. And first starting with graphic style. So first of all, what are they well, instead of saving something as a swatch, if it's a complex appearance that includes multiple strokes, maybe and multiple fills or maybe even effects, this could all be saved as a graphic style. So this object here on the left, for instance, has a gradient on both the stroke and the fill. So if I decide to save this as a graphic style, I will be able to quickly reapply it on any other object, simply just by clicking on the style icon. So while you can save a particular gradient as a swatch and then apply it to either the fill or a stroke of an object, with a graphic style, you can record both of the gradients and also remember whether they were used on the stroke or the fill of the original object. Like I mentioned, there's lots of additional things you can save into a graphic style, essentially, anything that you can create using the appearance panel. So if I click on one of these template styles, notice how it changed the selected object. But if I go to the window menu and choose appearance, it will actually list all of the applied attributes. So we will see there's actually one, two, three, four, five, six field attributes, and most of these will have effects applied on. Like this field here has two transform effects and the feather effect and also a changed opacity value. Remember when I mentioned that the basic appearance of an object in Illustrator is made up of a single fill and a stroke, you can see that once you start using the appearance panel, you can introduce additional fill attributes and also additional stroke attributes. So you can have multiple strokes and fills on the same object. And each of these attributes can have multiple effects on them. And that means the variety of options you can come up with is almost infinite, and that is why it's important to know that we can save these complex appearance settings as graphic styles. Now, symbols can be similarly useful when you create an illustrative detail that you would want to reuse within either the same document or in other illustrated documents. So for instance, if I select these three shapes together and I click on the plus sign in the symbols panel, it will be able to save all three of them as a single object, which means that I can easily place them back into the composition. And you might notice that there is a little plus icon that appeared here on this new symbol icon. That means it was saved as a dynamic symbol, which is similar to global swatches, when you have a source defined, which can be updated and it will update all the instances, in this case, of the symbol that you created. So we can just double click on the symbol icon, and maybe I can just move this shape over here. And then when I go back, you can see how both of the instances immediately updated. Whenever you create a new symbol, of course, you can choose it to be aesthetic symbol. So in that case, the instances won't be linked to each other. 32. 2.6.b Brushes and Width Profiles: Similarly to the symbols that we talked about in the previous video, you can turn anything in Illustrator into a brush. Let me demonstrate this to you. I am going to draw a circle with the Ellipstool and I'm just going to set it up with a color and then drag and drop it into the brushes panel. Now, there's these five main categories or types of brushes you can create. And depending on what you drop into the brushes panel, it will give you different options. But a shape like this could be either saved as a scatter, art or pattern brush. Just going to go with the pattern brush and click Okay, and you will see straightaway how it's going to look like. And if I wanted to space them out a bit, I could just increase the spacing percentage here maybe to 50%, and then let's click Okay. Now I can just select any objects in Illustrator and apply the brush on it. Or of course, I can use it in combination with tools like the paintbrush tool. So if I paint with this, I will be able to draw the circles along the path that I draw. The great thing about brushes is they can easily be adjusted at any time. By double clicking on a brush definition, you can go back and change the settings on it. And this applies to all the other brush types as well, of course, not just the pattern brushes. And by default, every brush acts like a global brush or a dynamic symbol, meaning that if you use a brush in a document once you update the brush definition, all the brush instances can be updated. So let me just demonstrate this to you. I'm just going to draw a few more lines with the same brush like that. And then if I double click on the brush definition and maybe reduce the size of the brush, immediately updates in the background. Once I click Okay, Illustrator actually gives me the option whether I want to apply this to existing strokes or leave the strokes as they were and only use this updated brush on future brush strokes. I'm just going to say apply to strokes in this case. Now, I mentioned this in the previous video that there are lots of template brushes that you can access from this drop down. We just need to decide what type of brush we are looking for. I'm going to choose maybe the image brush library. Most of these will be pattern brushes apart from this one, which is an art brush, and this is a calligraphic brush. But each time you select a brush, it will automatically be added to the brushes panel, even if you haven't yet used it in your document. Now, there's one additional important feature called the it profile that you might be asked about. And although these are not brushes, they are quite similar to how brushes work. So if I have an object like a circle selected, I can change the width profile from the uniform thickness to any of these additional profiles, and they will start to be more noticeable once the stroke size is increased. So we can see how this looks or these other profiles. And with the width tool, we can actually control these and create our own unique profiles as well. This is the icon for the Width tool, but you can also use Shift W to select it. And notice when I hover over these with profile points, I can adjust the thickness of them. I can also adjust their location by moving them up or down, and I can also create additional points along the path. Once you create a With profile you wish to use in the future, just go to this drop down and choose Add to profiles. Although there's a lot more we could cover about all of the features mentioned in this chapter, I am not planning to go any deeper because in the exam, they don't ask more complex questions than the ones that we already covered. And to be honest, we already went a little bit beyond what is expected in the exam. However, having said that, I still recommend to spend more time exploring each of these panels in your own time. So spend some time with the brushes panels, swatches, symbols, appearance, graphic styles to make sure that you are fully familiar where you can find things and how things work. 33. 3.1.a.1 Why do we need layers: Working with layers is crucial in all Adobe applications, and Illustrator is no exception. To find the layers panel, you can just go here on the right side. You can also find this also from the window menu, of course. So here's a list of all the panels. There's layers right there. Now, Illustrator handles layers slightly differently to Photoshop. If you're accustomed to working with layers there, you might find some differences here. It's a bit more similar to using layers in design. So these two applications, Illustrator and in design share a couple of common behaviors. So if you learn to work with layers in one of these applications, you will be familiar with it already in the other one. I have a couple of files open here. I have a website design. Also we have a logo, and we have an illustration. While I was flicking through these documents, if you kept a close look at the layer panel, you probably notice that some of these documents already have multiple layers like these first two. But this last one with the city, it has only one layer. Whenever you click on an arrow next to layer, you can open up or expand it and see the contents of that layer. And there is a layer hierarchy, meaning that whatever is closer to the top in the layers panel is going to look like it's closer to you. So it's going to be in the front instead of being at the back. In this case, this sky detail that rectangle is all the way at the bottom of this layer. This hierarchy we also refer to as the stacking order, and of course, this is something that we can change. But most importantly, what I would like you to remember first is that every time you create a new document in AOB Illustrator, is going to start with a single layer. So if I just create a new document now, we can see this in action. Let's just create an empty new document, as you can see, a single layer. And because there's no object in here at the moment, there is not even an arrow showing up there next to it. As soon as I draw an object, let's just say a rectangle, that's going to show up, and it's created as an object inside layer one. But let me just switch back to this document where we had the city. And let me open that layer called building. Now, each of these buildings are already grouped together. So in a way, this document is organized, but still it only has a single layer. Now, when does it make sense to have multiple layers? Whenever you have a bit more complex illustration, and especially when there is depth involved in your illustration, it is highly recommended to start setting up a couple of layers. You shouldn't go crazy creating so many layers, especially for simpler illustrations. Usually around two to three layers already is enough, and we can see that in these examples. For instance, with this logo, you can see that there is a background layer, and there is also a texture layer. And in between the two, there is a sandwich layer called objects where all the elements for the logo are placed. One of the best things about setting up multiple layers is that you can easily isolate them and lock them to make sure that you will only affect and work with the elements that you wish to change. So in this case, if I have the texture layer turned on and also the background layer with the little icons, by the way, is how you toggle the visibility. So if I lock these, by clicking on the icon next to the icon, there's the padlock now. That means if I click anywhere in the illustration, even though there are things above it, the texture and things below it, I won't accidentally change those because those are currently. So even if I make a big marquee selection with my main selection tool, notice how it's not going to select anything else, just those elements in the middle. You might remember the isolate feature that is a little bit similar to locking layers. But in this case, we don't even have to double on the logo to isolate it from the background and the foreground. In this case, that's the texture, which allows us to see everything the way is going to show up in print. Compared to if I double click on this, of course, it will give us a different view where we can concentrate on the selected objects. But like I said, this is not ideal because we can't really see the background color. The way is going to end up in print. But since we are in the isolation mode, it's just worth having a quick look at the layers panel. It actually tells us that we are in isolation mode and we are seeing the layer that we double clicked on as a group. And within that group, there are subgroups for each of these elements. Now notice what happens if I double click outside here. We go back to seeing that part of this file again as a layer called objects. But if I open the objects layer, we actually see exactly the same group and subgroups here. So what actually happens when we double click on this is that we won't see the layers anymore. Those won't be showing up in the layers panel because we entered the objects layer and we are now inside it. So we only see its contents. We also already talked about grouping objects, we can see lots of subgroups created here, and I can select these either by clicking them on in the artboard, or of course, I can also use these little circles in the layers panel. So in Illustrator, it's important to remember that if you just click on around the name of an object in the layers panel, not going to select it. The way to select it from the layer panel is by clicking on the little circle next to it. And it's also worth mentioning that Illustrator actually indicates the complexity of a selected object by having it either represented with an empty circle or a filled circle. So if I have an object selected with field circle, that means it has more complex appearance than just a simple stroke and fill. So it either has some effects on it or maybe a different transparency setting or blending. So in this case, if I have this group selected, I can see that it's a field circle, and the best place to check what's going on here is to go to the appearance panel. So if I go to Window appearance, we can see that in here for this text object, we have a couple of effects applied, like the warp which we can see use for the distortion of the text. And we also have two drop shadows that we can individually turn on and off. 34. 3.1.a.2 Moving objects between layers: Let me jump back to this project where we have a website designed or at least the first fold of a website designed in Illustrator. So we can see that here, the text objects are on a separate layer. The additional illustrative details are on the objects layer, and then we also have a background layer, which we can also toggle on and off to see quickly what's placed in there. Now, whenever we open these layers, we can see that everything else inside them is also nicely organized. What I wanted to show you here is how you can move items from one layer to another or even combine layers together. So if I select maybe this, let's dance with us text. Let's say I decided that I want to put this on a separate layer on top of everything else. So the way I could do this is to first create a new layer with this icon here at the bottom. We can do that, and I'm just going to call it main title. And then if I wanted to move this in that new layer, all I have to do is to drag and drop it in there. Now, if I open that one, we can see we managed to separate this onto that new layer. It is also important to mention that every layer in Illustrator will have a highlight color. And in our case, because we have a dark blue background, and the currently created layer is also dark blue, it is hard to see the outline of our selection. So to change this, you can double click on the layer's name or next to its name. And you can then change the color. So if I change this maybe to green, and then I click Okay, now it is much easier to see any objects that will be in this layer. But similarly to this, we can also change the highlight color for the text layer. If I double click on that, once again, we can change it maybe to cyan and now if we select something there, that's also going to be more visible. Now, it might sound a little bit confusing, but you can actually turn layers into sub layers simply by dragging them inside an existing layer. So notice how we have our main title layer here on the top. If I just drag this and place it inside the text layer, it's actually going to turn into something like a group. So the main title layer that we created is still there, and inside that, there is this other group of the two text objects. Of course, we can also reverse this step. So if we change our mind and we want the main title to be again a separate layer, we can just drag it back up once more. So moving things in the stacking order or layer hierarchy is very simple, and everything works as expected. For instance, if I move this group back here and the main title layer is now empty, we can easily delete it by highlighting it, and then clicking on the trash icon here at the bottom. Or you can also click on the panel menu, and from there, you can choose delete main title in this case. It's also important to mention that you can search within your layers panel. So if I'm looking for the text object with the text join now, I could just start typing in join and it should find it for us, even though it wasn't open, but there's the object right there. If you have an even more complex illustration, you might even want to then add additional filters. So if you are looking for something specific like text layer, you can click on that and then it will only be looking for text objects within your document. Just remember to clear your search and also clear your filters if you found what you were looking for and you want to see all your objects again. Another important feature that's worth mentioning is that if you select something from the artboard, and in this case, I'm going to use the direct selection tool because I want to directly select that star shape. Now, I know that it must be somewhere inside the object's layer because I can see that little square there indicating but if I want to quickly find it and maybe move it up or down in the stacking order or I want to change the name of that object, I can just click on this search icon or locate object feature at the bottom of the layers panel, and that will jump right to the object that I selected. So I can just simply rename it here or I can rename the group that it's inside. So I can just call this one star, and by the way, I can see there is another object there similar to this, which I can also just quickly rename. 35. 3.1.b.1 Selecting objects from Layers panel: Now we already mentioned these circles. You can click on the circle next to the name of a layer to select everything inside the layer. Or if you want to select individual objects or groups within the layer, you can also click on these circles individually. You can hold down the Commando Control key to select multiple items within the same layer or even within multiple layers. So again, holding down Command key, I could make selection from each of these layers, and by Commando control clicking on them again would remove them from the selection. And in case you want to make a continuous selection, maybe from this item to this item, I can also hold the shift key down, and that way, it will select everything in between using the stacking order from my layers. Now there is a useful technique if you only partially selected objects from a layer. So in this case, I only selected four and two of these other objects are not currently selected, but I want to move these quickly to another layer. Let's just say I want to place them in this new layer that I just created. Instead of dragging them one by one, I can also drag them by click and dragging this smaller target icon, which is on the layer's name area. And the reason why it's smaller is because it's indicating that it's not selecting everything from that layer. So this is like a partial selection of the contents of the layer. I can drag this over to this new layer and notice how those other two groups are still staying there, the ones that were not selected, and I only moved these four groups thanks to that partial selection movement technique that I just explained. Times you might actually want to simplify your Illustrator document and reduce the amount of layers you have. So if you quickly want to revert back to having a single layer, there is a feature for that. From the panel menu, you can find the flattened artwork option. And remember this well, because there are cases when I've seen this coming up in the exam. So you might have a very complex file that you need to quickly simplify. So they might just ask you to turn this document into having a single layer. So this is exactly the feature you want to use. Once you click on that, notice how it's going to retain the topmost layers name, and it will place all the other elements from the other layers inside here. So they end up becoming sub layers instead of being individual layers. The only thing that is lost is the way it was organized, having the objects in a group or a layer as they were originally, and the background also to be actually called background. So because these were the names of those other two layers, they are actually lost. But of course, we can easily combine these elements again into another group. And then give the name for that group if you wish to. But if you don't want to lose the names, remember what you can also do is to drag the layer inside your other layer. So that way, it becomes a sub layer, but still retains the name. And again, I can drag the background layer in there. So now it looks more organized, but technically we achieved the same thing as before with the flattened artwork option from the panel menu. 36. 3.1.b.2 Practice using layers: Now I would like you to practice a little bit with me the things that we talked about already, and we will be using this file where the task is to organize this illustration a little bit more to make it easier to move things around. So the way I'd like to organize a scene like this is to have a foreground, midground, and background. So, again, we will have three layers. So in this case, what would make sense first is to separate the background. I'm going to select the sky and I'm going to select the clouds. So I'm holding down the Shift key with the selection tool, and I selected these two. And maybe these silhouettes here can also be added to the background. And this is actually the bottom three objects. So now that we have these selected, we could just press Commando Control G to quickly group them together. I'm going to rename this group by double clicking on it, and I will call it background and maybe just write sky. But right now, this is still sitting inside the original layer. And notice that if I double click on it, it's actually not handled as a layer. So because this is just a group and there is a single layer in this document, I won't be able to move it outside just yet. What I need to do is to have this selected, and then I can go to the panel menu and choose collect in new layer. So once I do that, now notice how the color is different, which means that this is actually now a layer. I can double click on it and I can see the layer options as well. And now I can drag it down a bit and separate it properly, so it's not locked inside the building layer. So I can just now go in here and maybe copy the name that we created on the group, put that up here, and then actually, we don't need this to be grouped anymore. We can just press Command or Control Shift G. So that ungroups them, but still keeps them inside this new layer that we created. And this is another very important thing to remember. So groups and sub layers, they might look similar, but technically they work differently. And especially if you want to take an illustrator file into applications like after effects and build some motion graphics out of it, or an animation. It would be important to have everything that you currently have in groups to be set up as layers instead. So this is a very useful feature here in Illustrator, which again, you might be asked about in the exam, and it's worth remembering. So in case of this file, I have all of these groups inside the same building layer. And we can see that if I double click on these, they don't give us the layer options, simply show and log and the name. However, when I double click here on the building, that is actually a layer, so we get the layer options for it. Now, if I want all of these groups to be turned into sub layers, so convert all the existing groups and parts into sub layers, we can do that by selecting first the entire layer with the target icon. And then from the panel menu, we have two released layers options there's one for sequence and one for build. I would normally use the sequence option, and as you can see, now each of these turn into sub layers inside the main building layer, and the quickest and easiest way to tell that they are actually layers is that we have different color highlights for each of them. But we can, of course, double click on any of these, and then we can see that, yes, it is actually now a separate layer. Of course, if I wanted to, I could just select all of these now and drag them above the building layer if I wanted to. So they are not sub layers anymore. They are independent layers. But I'm going to undo and go back to just having them as individual groups because I don't need that many layers for this composition. Like we mentioned before, I would like to have a foreground layer. So I'm going to actually create that already. I will name this foreground, and I'm going to keep the building layer, maybe just rename it to buildings. That's going to be our midground, and the foreground is going to be the road. Just so we remember what we were planning to do. Now I'm going to select the root from the artboard, and I can see it showing up here in the layers panel, and I can just drag and drop this onto the foreground layer. So now it's separated. And if I wanted to have maybe these palm trees and the lampposts and also maybe the sidewalk, this can also be moved. So I'm just going to shift click on these elements one by one, the trees, and we also have another lamppost and some plant there and another tree. So now I believe I have all of these selected. Remember the technique. Instead of dragging them one by one, we can use this target icon and drag it onto that foreground layer. Or the other option to do is to use the edit cut feature, which is Command or Control X, and then select that foreground layer and then use edit paste in front if you want to have those elements in front of whatever is in that layer or pasting back if you want them to be behind. In this case, I think paste in front makes more sense. So let's do that. Yeah, that is looking good. So that's our foreground details. That's our midground details, and that is our background details. Now, there's only one additional element here, this lens flare probably would make sense to place on a separate layer. So once again, I'm going to create a new main layer, and I'll call it lens flare, maybe have effects in here, and then simply just drag and drop that in there and maybe place it all the way to the top, making sure that it's in front of everything else. So now we can very easily turn everything on and off the lens flare, foreground, the midground, and the background. So that is a good little exercise just to make sure that you get used to doing all these different things that we talked about when it comes to organizing your layers and sub layers. And there's one final thing I wanted to mention because I remember that this is also something that they might ask about in the exam. Let's just say this lens flare effect is something that you don't actually want to end up in the print. So when this file is going to be printed, you don't want that to be appearing there. Perhaps you want to use it in a banner or in other formats, but when it's actually printed out, you want that not to be printed. And there is a simple way in Illustrator to prevent a specific layer to be included in the print, and that is by double clicking on it. Remember, this brings up the layer options dialog box. And here you will see the option print. Now, if you turn that off, the layer will still be visible in your artwork. Whenever this file is going to be printed, that is not going to be included in the print. I can click Okay, and yeah, we can see it's still there, but there is a subtle indication that this current layer is not going to be printed. They're just simply having italic formatting on the name of the layer. Again, this might be a question. They show you the layer spanel and one of the elements is set in Italics and they might ask you what does that mean? Now you know that means it's not going to print. Of course, we can always undo this, double click on it, turn the printing on again, once it's enabled, the formatting goes back to the way it was before. 37. 3.2.a.1 Blend Modes and Opacity: There's a couple of additional important features in Illustrator with which you can affect the visibility of objects besides simply using the visibility toggle, the I icons. And to see an example, here on the left side, I have this word dense which I can move around and we can see actually is see through. So when I move it around here, we can see through it and see the details behind it, and that is because it has a lower opacity value. Now, if I go over to the property panel, we can find the opacity here, and we can easily change it. So if I go back to 100%, we can actually see how it looks normally. So it's white text. But with a lower opacity, let's just say to 25%. This is how it's going to look like. So it's going to reveal whatever it is underneath. Now you can also open up the transparency panel if you want to see these options permanently on your workspace. So go to Window transparency, and there you will be able to see the opacity of your current selection. But besides opacity, there's also blend modes, and that's the drop down, which you can use to access all the blend modes. And by default, every object that you create will be set to normal mode. However, if you want to create special blending between your layers or objects that are placed on top of each other, you can start choosing these blend modes. Now, if I change it here on this particular object, it won't make much difference. But if I select the clouds in this composition, it's going to have a much more dramatic effect because these clouds already have gradients on them, and also the sky behind has a gradient on. So in these cases, blend modes can make a big difference how the final look is going to be. So if I change the clouds back to normal, notice how it actually looks completely different, like different colors as well. However, once it is set to screen, which I used in this composition, it already looks so much better. And that is because with screen blend mode, you will always get a brighter result. So the selected object that is set to screen is going to be edded onto the background and make things look brighter. While multiply, for instance, works the opposite way. That's going to act almost like a shadow, so it will cast its darker tones onto whatever is in the background. So that's the big difference. Once again, multiply and screen. And somewhere in between the two, we will have the blend mode called overlay, which is going to both blend the brighter details and the darker details, but it's going to also slightly saturate whatever is underneath it. Don't worry, you don't have to remember and memorize all the blend modes and what effects they have. If you just remember these three that we covered here, that's already going to be a good start. And notice that there are small division lines between some of these blend modes because they are actually grouped together. So there is a group for multiply, which will make the final result look darker than the starting color. The screen and its neighboring plant modes lighten and colour dodge will always make a brighter result. And overlays light and hard light is, again, a mixture of these two other categories, or it's somewhere in between the two. I'm just going to set this back to screen, the one that I think works the best here. And I just want to mention that, of course, you can combine opacity and blending together. So you can have an object that has a blend mode on it and also at reduced opacity, for instance. Now, let me switch over to the layer panel because I just want to show you that whenever you change the opacity of a group or an object or the blend mode, the circle icon in the layers panel will update to be filled that's again, just showing that it is a more complex appearance than the default one. So if I change the opacity back to 100% and I set the blend mode back to normal, notice how the circle reverts back to being empty, just like the other ones in this document. Now, let me just change this back to screen like we had before, and I'm going to keep the opacity on the maximum 100%. 38. 3.2.a.2 Opacity Mask: But what I would like to do is to fade these clouds out or maybe just focusing on this particular one here. I want it to fade out as it goes further down. So I would like to create a gradient mask for this. And for this, the best is to use an opacity mask. So what you can do is to click on M mask here in the transparency panel. Can also access this from the property panel if you click on opacity and then click on Make mask. I just prefer to use the panel because I can keep track of that easier. And then here, what happened is that a black mask was added, which means it's completely hidden now. The object is not visible because black hides white shows when it comes to opacity masks. And what I recommend to do is to click on clip to have the original details showing up again. So this way, your mask is going to be empty. It's white. It means that all the objects inside of this selection are visible. And then don't forget to click on the mask icon. This is a way to switch between the object or its opacity mask. And you can actually see that if we go into the layers panel, we are inside the opacity mask. So we don't actually see the other objects. Now we are working inside the opacity mask for this selection, the clouds. And now what I'm going to do is to create a rectangle first. So just a shape and because it's black by default, that's going to hide the cloud. But then I'm going to switch back to the property panel, and I'm going to change the field color of this object to a gradient. Simple black and white gradient will work. Once I clicked on that, I can also press G on the keyboard or select the gradient tool, and now I can just drag this up or down to define how I would like that blend to work. This is that nice transition or fade that I wanted to achieve. Which is now achieved using this gradient opacity mask. So inside my opacity mask, all I have is a rectangle, which has a black and white gradient on it. And this I can move easily up and down, and you can see how it's going to affect the visibility of the cloud. Now, don't forget that whenever you want to go back to make changes to your objects, you just have to leave the opacity mask editor so by clicking on this other thumbnail in the transparency panel, you can do just that. And once you see all your objects on the right side, that means you are back to normal editing mode. So you are not in the opacity mask anymore. It's worth mentioning that you can alter option, click on an opacity mask to see actually the contents of the opacity mask. And then if you alter option, click on it again, you will see its effect. So how it affects the object's visibility. If you shift click on an opacity mask, you can disable it temporarily and then shift click again, we'll enable it. And if you click on release, that's going to extract the object or objects inside the opacity mask and place them outside in a separate group or as a separate object. I'm going to undo this last step because I would like to keep it as an opacity mask, and I'm just going to switch back here and just wanted to mention that if you see a strong on the line on a group, that means it has an opacity mask. A thinner line is going to represent another type of mask which we will be talking about shortly. I just wanted to mention this is how you can quickly tell that there is an opacity mask on this group. 39. 3.2.b Clipping Mask: Now let's take a look at another important feature called clipping mask, which is also another way of affecting the visibility or controlling the visible details or parts of your objects. And notice here on the left side that these shapes, the one on the top and the bottom, those wavy shapes, they look like they are only visible inside that door like shape or window like shape. And it feels like we would be able to move them around and change their position. However, the way they are currently set up, this is not going to be easy because they actually cut off at the same place where that other shape is. So if I make a selection on this, it actually turns out to be a shape that's placed on top of this other shape. And just because they had the exact same outline, they work fine in this current state. But as soon as I start moving things around, if I want to change the curvature of these, it's not going to match the outline of the original shape behind it. So what I recommend to do instead, if you want to create something like this, is to first select that shape in the background and then change the drawing mode to draw inside. This is, again, something that we already talked about, but I'm just going to select it from this drop down, and draw inside will show us this frame for our selection. So it means that it's going to be fixed, and whatever I'm going to draw now will only appear inside this bounding box or shape. So I can now select the pencil tool, for instance, and I can start drawing a shape maybe here on the top, like that. And then we can apply that color that we had originally, which I believe was something like this, maybe make it a bit brighter. Something like that. And now the biggest advantage of doing this is that I will be able to still move this shape around. I can also change its size and rotate it around as well if I want to so I can find the best curve that is going to work well for this illustration, and I can even duplicate this object. So if I zoom out a bit, I can hold alter option key, click and drag, and then now we have two shapes within the same clipping mask. And if we look at our layers panel, this automatically created a clip group from these three shapes. So the rectangle, which is called rectangle, but that's the original silhouette of this window is underlined, meaning that is the mask, and then these two other shapes are clipped inside. So they are only going to be visible inside that other shape. Now, I'm going to switch back to draw normal. So this restricted way of working only inside of that shape is now deactivated. But the good thing is that we can still see how this is still in effect. So the connection between these two new shapes that we drew and the original outline is still in effect until I decide to release the clipping mask. Or move either of these shapes outside of the clipping group. So if I drag it outside of it, notice how it's now completely independent, so I can move it away. The original shape is not going to affect it. However, if I drag and drop it back in there, the clipping mask will immediately come in effect. If you quickly want to release a clipping mask, you can just select the clip group and then go to object clipping mask release. There's also a shortcut for it if you want to use that. Once I click on this, it will just extract anything that was inside the clipping mask, and now they are independent from one another. Going to undo this last step, and I just wanted to show you that the same result can also be achieved with another method. So I'm going to use the Ellipse tool in this case, and I'm just going to use the same color we used here before. And I'm just going to draw an ellipse at the bottom and maybe an ellipse on the top. Something like that. And now I'm going to select these two shapes and I'm going to send them all the way to the back. That's Command or Control Shift left square bracket. And then I am going to use the direct selection tool and shift click on that outline shape. So now, these are all selected. And if I press Commando Control seven, but then we get this warning that it's not going to work currently because these objects are in different groups. So when you have elements that are already grouped or maybe in different stacking order in your layers panel, you might not be able to turn them into a clipping mask. In this case, I can see that this shape that window shape, needs to come down maybe around here. And then I'm just going to drag this down as well. So now these three shapes are right next to each other in the stacking order. So the rectangle, which is the window, let's just renamed that window is on top. That's your Cookie cutter, the one that is going to turn into a mask, and the two ellipses are the ones that will be enclosed inside it. So as long as we have all of these selected and in the right order, we can just press Command or Control seven, which is the shortcut to create a clipping mask, or you can right click and also choose make clipping mask. Notice how, even though this created the clip group for us as expected and turned the window object into the mask itself, however, whenever you use this technique or method, the original colors that you had on your mask shape will disappear, and essentially the mask will become completely transparent. So to be able to change that, you just have to go back and select it, and maybe we can sample this color here on the left by pressing E on the keyboard. That's the eyedropper tool, and now the clipping mask shape is using the same color as on the left side. And if I select the ellipses, I can move them around just like in the previous example, once again, I can select that one, move it around easily. By the way, using the direct selection tool is probably the easiest way to access them without having all the entire objects selected. Now, you can decide whichever technique you prefer the draw inside method or the menu method when you place objects on top of each other and then turn them into a clipping group. The final result is the same. It's just a slightly different way to get to it. And last but not least, I just wanted to mention that from the select menu, there is actually a quick and easy way to find all clipping masks in an illustrator document. So by going to object clipping masks, it's going to automatically highlight all of these masks. And this way, you could even release both of these masks at the same time by going to object menu, clipping mask release. But I'm not going to do that. I will keep the inside the shape. And I highly recommend to play around with clipping masks and also opacity masks because these could be a bit more confusing and more complex features of illustrator. So before you take on the exam, just really get familiar with using both types of masks and, of course, also blend modes and the opacity attribute. 40. 4.1.1 Selection Tools: There are a lot of tools in Adobe Illustrator, and there's so much techniques and settings that we could talk about if we wanted to cover everything. However, luckily, for the exam, you don't have to know all of them. And in this first part, I want to focus on the essential illustrator tools or as they refer to it, the core tools. Now, we will be coming back to these later in this topic. But first and most importantly, let's talk about the selection tools. The first tool in the tool bar, the black arrow is the one that we use to make selections, and it's always going to select an entire group or even multiple groups joined together into a larger group, like in this case. However, you can use the double click method to dive deeper into your selection. So that's what we call isolation or isolate mode. Now we are inside the main group and I can select individually these groups. Or if I then double click again, I can dig even deeper and select even smaller elements. I double click outside, I can go out of this special viewing mode or isolation mode, and we can again select the entire group like before. Now, the white arrow tool or direct selection tool works differently. This will always select the smallest available object. So if I click maybe on this circle, you can see, we'll only select that circle, nothing else. Or if I click on this shape here, again, I can select that individually. This is always for individual shape selections. Of course, you can hold down the Shift key and add multiple shapes to your selection, or you can also do a marquee selection to select multiple elements, and then you will be able to move those at the same time. It's also worth mentioning that you can also select individual anchor points. So if I select maybe one of these points here, I can move that individually. So even down to an anchor point, which is the smallest building block in case of a vector graphic. If you right click on certain tools where you see a little arrow on the bottom right, that means there's additional tools available inside that specific group. And we have the lesser tool, for instance, with which we can draw around the shapes that we want to make selections of, and then we can start making changes to those details. However, it's worth switching back to the direct selection tool to actually make changes or transform the selection that you made with the LessoTol. The group selection tool is really useful. With this, you can click on any item or object. Then when you click again, it will select the next level up in terms of the layer hierarchy or stacking order. So in this case, it selected this group which is inside another group. So we can see that. That's for the pace. Then if I click again, then it will select the next available group. So again, it went one level up. And so that's only these details here. And if I click one more time, then it will select everything. So the same thing we can do maybe with this I here, click again the face, then more details of the face, and then this whole group right here and then once again select everything again. So you can think of the group selection tool as an inverted isolation mode where you already start at the very bottom of the selection. So the smallest available object, and then it works its way up. While with isolation, you dig deeper from the top down. So yeah, this is very useful tool. I highly recommend to use it. And since we are talking about the tools and how to access them, it's also worth talking a bit about the tool bar itself. Although we covered this when we were talking about the interface, I just wanted to make sure that you know you can change the view of the tools from a single column to a double column layout. And you can also click on these dots at the bottom, where you will be able to find all the hidden tools. So that's a quick way to access and see everything. And it's a very good way also to see which tools can be used for drawing, which tools can be used for making selections, for working with type, and so on and so forth. So it's a great overview of the tool categories. And you will see a lot of tools here that are not in the main build of Illustrator because I have lots of plugins installed on this computer. These are the ones mainly Astute graphics plug ins that I'm using. But I wanted to also mention that on this drop down, you can switch between basic and advanced toolbar. So if I switch to advanced, it will show all the tools, including my plug in tools or tools that come with plugins, or if I switch back to basic, then again, it will go back to more limited set of tools. It's also worth mentioning from the edit toolbar, you can actually drag and drop tools onto the toolbar. So for instance, if I want to see the Magic One tool, I can just drag it here, and that will make it quick and easy to have access to it. Similarly, if you want to remove one of these tools, just drag and drop them back in here in the tools selection. By the way, you can also see all the tools with their names next to them if that's easier instead of just seeing the icon. So you can see them as a list like this. And if you want, you can even create your own custom tool palettes, which you do by going into the tools and then clicking on this icon here, you can turn that group into a floating palette tool palette. So I can easily select the tools, and they still will be selectable from the toolbar. But now I can find them also like this. 41. 4.1.2 Drawing Tools: Let's talk about the drawing tools, including the Pen tool, which is probably the most commonly used tool in Illustrator. This is the most precise drawing tool as well, because it allows you to define each anchor point individually. And if you just click, click click, you will draw straight lines. Or if you click and drag, you can create curved line segments. And when you click and drag, you essentially define the handles. So there's one handle there. Illustrator automatically creates another handle on the other side, which allows for the next curve segment to continue smoothly. So to continue from the previous segment to the new one in a smooth way. So we can see if I click again, this looks like a really nice smooth curve. However, if you want to create a single curve segment and then go straight into another straight segment, you can click and drag, but then click on this anchor point once more, just simply click once and notice how we can now draw another straight line. Hold down the Shift key, you can also constrain drawing in 45 degree angles. So I can draw diagonals. I can draw horizontal and vertical lines, and we can close our shape by going back here to the top and clicking on it again. While you still use the Pen tool, you can hover over any existing anchor points and clicking on them will remove them. Or if you click on an existing path segment, you can just add a new anchor point as well. And if you hold down the command or control key, you can also reposition any of the anchor points. So you just want to make sure you have only one of them selected and then drag it around. So the same thing here, I have one point selected, I can drag it up or down, and so on and so forth. Now notice that we have another similar looking tool in the tool bar called the curvature tool, which is going to give you a slightly different drawing experience. It almost inverts the way the pen tool works. So while the pen tool by default wants to draw straight lines, the curvature tool wants to draw curved lines or curved part segments. And even if I have an object selected, with the curvature tool, what I can do, and that's a very useful feature is to quickly convert the corner points, which are sharp corners into smooth corners. So notice I just have to double click on it and I can switch between the two. So corner and the smooth point. And I can do this on any of these shapes very quickly and easily. And I can also interact with these path segments in a slightly different way than using the pen tool. So with the Pentl I would have to use the handle as well to adjust these curves. Here, I just have to simply move this single smooth point around. By the way, you can also add additional points, simply just clicking anywhere on the path. And if you want to remove a point, you can just click on it and press Delete on the keyboard. It will only delete that selected point. Just so you can see how this tool works, I'm going to start a new shape by simply drawing here at the bottom. Clicking once creates the first anchor point. Then when I click again, it seems like it's working similarly to the pent, but as soon as I start moving my mouth and starting to define the third anchor point, it automatically turns the previous segments into curves, and it's always going to try to create a perfectly smooth result. So I am just drawing over the previous object. And if I change the field color on this, it will probably look a little bit easier to see what's happening. So yeah, as you can see, I could create a shape like this. So essentially, the curvature tool is better for these organic smooth shapes whenever you want to draw these, while the pen tool might be easier to use for more geometric shapes with straight lines. Using the direct selection tool can also be useful to reveal how a path was constructed. So by simply clicking on it somewhere in the center, as long as it has a feel color, which in this case, it has, we just can't really see it, but I'm just going to give it a color just so it is more visible. So having it selected like this, we will see the corner points and the smooth points with the handles. But also, we will see these white circles with little blue circles inside them. Those are called the corner widgets. Now, if I have all of the points selected now, I can control all of those corners at the same time. Or if I select only an individual one, I can just simply adjust that. So when you are using the corner widget, you are not changing that anchor point into a smooth point. You are just adding an attribute on it. So it's a completely non destructive attribute that can be changed back to being a sharp corner again. So it's important to mention this because they might also ask about this. What is the permanent way of changing a corner point into a smooth point, that's not the corner widget, because that's like a temporary state of corner point. So just to make it clear, again, I'm going to change this one here with the corner widget, and I'm going to change to the curvature tool and maybe select this other point here and double click on it. So that is permanently changed now, so it's not a corner point anymore. And I can demonstrate this to you by using the direct selection tool. When I select the shape, that point there has the handles directly on it, and there is no corner rigid around this because it's already a smooth point. While here, we can see the corner widget, and when we hover over it, it also highlights or indicates that area or the corner which is affected. And even though we have the handles there, they are split. So there's two handles and two points, and this can be changed back either by dragging it all the way back there or by double clicking on it and setting the radius back to zero and then clicking Okay. Although it might seem like a different category of tools, but the line segment tool would also be considered a path drawing tool like the pen tool and the curvature tools. So with the line segment tool, you can click and drag to draw lines. And each time you do this is going to create a new shape, so they won't be connected to each other. You can drag either the end or the start point around, and if you want to move the shape around, just click in the center, and that way you can move it away. And if you go into the properties panel, and click on stroke. You can also easily change the endpoints, so you can add arrows on them like that. You can also turn it into a dash line and you can specify how many points distance you want for each of these dashes. And then if we just zoom a little bit closer, you can see how this looks like. So essentially, it started out as a line, but very quickly, it can be turned into something that looks a little bit more interesting. Similarly to the line tool, we also have a tool called Arc tool, which works very similarly, but it's going to create curved lines. So if I select the Arc tool with this, you can see we can draw these curved lines, and it just remembers the previously used attributes from the property s panel. So it keeps using that dash line as you can see it. But of course, we can remove that if we just go here and turn off the dash line option. 42. 4.1.3 Brush and Painting Tools: We also have painting tools like the paintbrush, the pencil, and the blob brush tool. So I would like to show these as well to you. I'm just going to extend my artboard a bit so we have a bit more space here. So with the paintbrush tool, you are going to essentially draw lines or parts similarly to the pen tool. But the main difference here is that this tool automatically adds the anchor points for you. So when I use the direct selection tool, we can see where these anchor points were created. And if I select them individually, they will all have handles on them because I created a smooth path. So you can consider the brush tool, in a way, an automatic pen tool where you don't have to worry about adding the anchor points manually. But of course, it's not as precise as the pen tool. So while with the pen tool, I could go in and create these parts very accurately and exactly in the shape I want. By the way, you can press and hold the space bar to move around the preview of the next anchor point. So I can place it there, let's say, a bit further down, and then I can add the next one here. So you can see that this one, I managed to create from four anchor points while this other one that I created with the brush tool has a lot more anchor points on it. Now, there's also an important thing to mention. When you use the brush tool, even though the stroke size is set to one point it will feel thicker or different depending on the brush tip that was used for creating it, compared to another path that was created with a tool like the pen tool. So once again, they have the same stroke size. But the main difference is that this shape here is also using the brush attribute. So you can see here, it's a five point round brush. I can change that to being a smaller one or a thicker one or even to add some visual appearance on it and make it look like pencil or charcoal drawing. Don't be confused, though. You can actually assign these brush appearances even on parts that were not originally created with the brush tool. So the way you do this is to select the shape, then go to the window menu and choose brushes. And from the brushes, you will be able to choose any of these options, and you can see that we managed to achieve the same result. When I right, click on the paintbrush tools icon, I can also switch to the pencil tool, which works quite similar to the paintbrush. So again, we can click and drag to draw, and it automatically creates the anchor points for us. But the main difference is that the pencil tool by default doesn't assign any brush preset to your path. So it's just going to keep it a generic one point black stroke. So you can see there is no brush attribute here, while these two have the same option on them. And that's essentially the main difference with the pencil tool. But it's also worth mentioning that if you double click on certain tools, you will get additional settings and options for them. And one of the useful features with the pencil tool that I like to use is to have the path selected. So when I draw, it will keep it selected. And also to allow the pencil to edit selected parts. So just to show you how this works, I can use the same tool to continue drawing that path, as you can see, as long as I draw close enough, it's going to pick up on the fact that I want to change this path. And if I want, I can even redraw segments of it. Again, as long as I connect into it correctly. And then once again, if I wanted to continue, I could go the other way again. And then there was one additional option worth mentioning the option key to toggle to the smooth tool. So if we turn it on and we hold down the option key, we can paint over segments of the selected path and we can smooth it out, so we can refine it, and that might reduce the amount of anchor points we have and simplify the path in a. So the pencil tool is actually a really useful tool. I highly recommend getting used to it. But once again, it's not as precise as something like the pen tool or the curvature tool where you individually and manually define all the anchor points. 43. 4.1.4 Shape Tools: Let's also talk a bit about the shape tools, even though they are quite self explanatory. There's a couple of useful shortcuts worth mentioning. So the first one is the rectangle tool. With this, you can draw rectangles, or if you hold down the Shift key, you can draw perfect squares. With the corner widgets, like before, we can easily turn this into a perfect circle as well. So anything that was a square can be turned into a perfect circle, or it can also be a rectangle with round corners. And if you want, you can, of course, use the ellipse tool to draw ellipses. Or again, holding down the Shift key to draw perfect circles. And with circles and ellipses, you will have this option to be able to create a pie chart or just split up the shape and create a curve segment. And you will be able to adjust both the start and end angle, and simply double clicking on either of these widgets, we reset the circle and make it full again. We also have a polygon tool with which we can click and drag to start drawing a shape, hold down the space bar to reposition it, and we can also hold down the Shift key to make sure it's straight. And it's important to mention that while you are drawing with this shape, you can also use the up and down arrows to increase or decrease the amount of points. And this is how we can get to a triangle, for instance, or we can increase it all the way up until it starts to look like a circle, but it's still made up of individual corners. Once you created a shape with the polygon tool, you will also have this little star or diamond icon here on the top right with which you can drag up and down to increase and decrease the sides, which is also quite useful. So if you ever change your mind, you can just again, select the shape and then use that, drag it up or down. Only goes down to 11 sides with this feature, but it is still very useful quick way of making changes. And similar to the polygon tool, we also have a star tool with which we can start drawing a star. And again, up and down a rows can change the amount of corners, going to keep it here. And while I'm drawing, I can also hold down the commando Control key. To adjust the length of each of these points, and I can even go inside or outside. And once you let go, you will be able to again increase and decrease these points easily later. And if you hover over this point here, you can also increase that inner radius, make it smaller or bigger, or even go beyond the original outer radius of those additional points. It's very important to mention that with all of the shape tools, you can also just simply click on the artboard, which will give you more control and you can be very precise setting up everything. So I can have radius one to be 40, radius two to be 20 and have five points. Then this is the start that we created. So we can replace this and just put this right there. But as a general conclusion about the core tools in Illustrator, could be that you can see anything you create can easily be adjusted later, so everything stays editable. And Illustrator offers you many different ways to interact with the anchor points, the past segments, and the shapes that you create. There's actually no right or wrong way of creating things in Illustrator. So it's good to be familiar with various ways of achieving the same result. And depending on the specific illustration or artwork that you're creating, you will realize which tool or combination of tools is best fitted or that you are most comfortable using. In the next lessons, we will continue to explore more tools, and we might also come back and use the tools that we already covered so far. So you will have plenty of time to practice and get familiar with them. 44. 4.2.a Type Tools: Let's explore what you need to know about the type features and tools in Illustrator. First of all, the type tool is right here, and you can either click to create a point type, which is going to just keep writing the text without breaking the lines. So in this case, if I just paste some text in here, notice how it's going to just continue creating these never ending lines. So the line length is something you will have to manually control if you're creating a point type. And the way you do that is simply by pressing Enter. So break the lines like that manually. Compared to this, if you use the type to then click and drag, you can create an area type, which automatically fills in that text box with placeholder text. But if I just press Command or Control V, I can paste in the text that I had selected and notice how this created this text frame or box for us, which I can easily use to adjust the line length or measure by adjusting the width of the frame. So, yeah, we can see how that works, and we even get hyphenation on by default in Illustrator, so we can see a hyphen up there and also down here. Now, there's a lot of formatting options which we will talk about soon. But first, just wanted to make sure you remember that if you ever create text in either a point type or area type format, you can easily change it by going to the type menu and choosing the convert option. So this is an area type, which I can convert to a point type. It will remember where the line breaks were, but we are going to lose the hyphens. And if I have this one selected here, I can again go up to the type menu and convert this to an area type, which means, of course, that now I will be able to have the text flowing automatically and adjusting to the shape and size of this box. Ever I placed in my manual, line breaks will be still there. And the best way to see where the line breaks are is to reveal the hidden characters. This is something that you can do from the type menu at the bottom. You will find a show hidden characters option. So here at the bottom, we see the soft return icons, while these are the hard returns or actual manual line breaks. So if I remove those, I will be able to adjust the text again normally, and we can see the paragraph sign as well there at the bottom. Going to turn these off now just to make sure they don't get confusing or they get in the way, but it's important to remember where you can find this feature. Now, you can also add text on a path, whether that's a shape or an open path. So if I use the ellipstool, I can draw a shape maybe we can even use color from here. I just use the eyedropper tool. When you have a shape selected and you press the E on the keyboard, you can sample any shapes from your composition to pick up the colors from it. So I'm going to use now the pencil tool and draw a shape like this. I hold down the old key. I can refine it a bit, maybe just to have less anchor points on this. And I'll press D and remove the field color. So we will only have a stroke color on this shape. And then if I use the type tool, notice what happens if I get close to the edge of this circle and then I click, it's going to place the text inside the shape. So we lose the original colors, but we can adjust the shape and the text will reflow inside it. So in this case, the circle became the container or the text frame. However, if I use the type tool, and when I get close to the edge, I hold down the alter option key, I can use the type on a path feature with which I can place the text on the path, and it's going to fit the characters and text along the path, not inside the path. Of course, we can paste in our text there as well. And if you see these small red plus signs showing up, that means that there wasn't enough space for all the texts to be fitted. So if I select all of this text by double clicking on it, I can actually go to the properties panel and we can reduce the size of the text until the entire text fits on it. So that's four points. Obviously, that's very small. But if I zoom closer, we can see how that worked. Now if you use the type on a path feature, you will also be able to control the start and endpoints. So that's the start point, that's the endpoint. I'm just using the selection tool for this, and I can set them up. Maybe I want the start point to be here, and I want the endpoint to be there. So this way the text starts here and it flows to the right. We can also use the middle point to move the text around, so I can drag it up, or I can also drag the text inside. So this way the text is fitted in the inside of the shape and not outside of it. And similarly, if you have an open path use the type tool, you can just simply click on it here. You don't have to hold down the Alt or option key, and the text will be fitted along the path like that. And once again, you have a start point which you can move around the path. You also have a center point which you can use to flip the text up or down on the path. And then you also have this one here, which is the end. Last but not least, you should also know about the touch type tool. For this, I am just going to use the normal type tool first, and I'm going to type in something here like sale, and I'm going to make this bigger, maybe using this font. And you can use the character formatting options to change the font size like this. Or you can also drag the corner points with the selection tool and hold down the Shift key to quickly increase the size or decrease the size of your text. It's just important to make sure you hold down the Shift key. Otherwise, you might end up stretching the text and distorting it. So you might not see the touch type tool here by default. If you are using the basic toolbar. But if we go to the old tools, we can scroll a bit down, and we will find touch type here. We can actually drop it in here just so we can access it easily, or we can also put it inside that text category or group so now we can use the touch type tool. And the way this works is that you can select editable text objects, and you can individually move the characters or letters around. So you can position them anywhere you want, so you can freely move them around, and you can even rotate them. So I can move there. Let's just move this here, move the A a little bit closer. Maybe the L can go that way, yeah, something like that. We can, of course, scale them up and down as well, so we can make the S bigger if we wanted to. But the most interesting thing about this tool is that it's still an editable text. So if we switch back to the normal type tool, I can still make a selection of this and I can even change the text. I can, for instance, select this L and rewrite this to save. 45. 4.2.b Character formatting options: Let's talk about character formatting options. I'm going to make some space, and I will work with this text frame here. So you can access these formatting options from the properties panel under the character category, and there's actually more options here in case you want to see them. But you can also open these up in a separate panel. Just go to the window menu and from type, choose character. So once you have that open, you will see these options. Again, it's pretty much the same thing here. And for instance, we can change the leading. So leading controls the space between the lines, and we can make this text frame bigger, so make sure it fits inside it when I do this. And by the way, we can select all the text and use Alt or option up and down arrows as well to change the leading or space between the lines. We can also use Alt or option right and left arrows to increase or decrease the tracking, and that's the value that you see under the leading. So that's tracking. Increase and decrease by 20 points at a time. You can also reset it easily to zero here if you want to. And we already seen the font size. That's something that you can find here and easily adjust, which you can also use, by the way, command or control shift. Full stop to increase the size and comma to decrease the size. And you can also use kerning in Illustrator. If I just zoom a little bit closer here, notice how my cursor is flushing between the O and B. If I use Alter option left right arrow, you can see I can also individually adjust the spacing between characters, and that's what kerning is for. So if I want to reset this, I can just go back to zero and notice how kerning actually disappears if I have the whole text frame selected. I can still adjust the tracking, which would change the spacing between the characters in the entire text frame. By the kerning would only apply between specific character pairs. Character panel actually has more options. So if you go into the panel menu and turn on show more options, you will see these additional ones. So let's just walk through these also quickly. If I select, let's say, these two words here, I can increase the baseline shift. That's, by the way, alter option shift up arrow or down arrow to move it back down again. So this is a feature that we can find here. We can scale the selected text both vertically and horizontally, but this is going to result in distortion. So this is something that I would recommend not to use most of the time. And we also have an option to rotate the characters. So they would still be inside the text frame, but they can be rotated around Again, not something that I would recommend to use often, but it's interesting that we can do this if you ever require something like that. Now, we also have a couple of icons to change the case of the text. So from sentence case, we can change it to all capitals or all caps. We can also use small caps. We have the index or superscript option or subscript option. We also have the underline and strike through options here. So these could be on, turned off, and they are completely non destructive. Font selector is up here and you can scroll through and see an immediate preview of the selected fonts. And in case a font family has multiple styles, you will be able to choose those from this second drop down. So Myriad Pro, for instance, has a lot of stylistic options or variants. 46. 4.2.c Paragraph Panel: Now let's move on to the paragraph panel, which is going to give us paragraph formatting options. And this one again, has additional options from the panel menu. Just make sure the show options is turned on. And firstly, one important feature you will find here is whether you want to hyphenate the text or not. So you can turn this off, and then the selected paragraph won't be hyphenated. And I'm actually going to split this text into two paragraphs. So I will press Enter here, and I am going to reveal the hidden characters just so we can see where the line break is. Now having this text selected, or we can have the text frame selected. That means all the text inside will be affected by the changes that we do here. We can do bullets. For instance, there's two bullets or we can use numbered list as well, and there's additional options for numbering that we can choose from we can use Roman numerals as well. We can also pick any of these bullets from here and of course, add additional ones as well if we wanted to. And besides lists, we also have ways to control indentation. So we can have the whole text indented from the left or the right. We can also have only the first lines indented, which looks like this. And we can also have space before each of the paragraphs. So there's space before or space after. Now, in this case, because we only have two paragraphs, it looks like it's doing the same thing, but it would actually mean different things depending on how many paragraphs you have. We, of course, can control the alignment of the text. So by default, it's aligned left, but we can have justification turned on, which will look better if we have hyphenation enabled, as well. So let's just drag the text a little bit more out. Or in, and that's how it looks when it's justified and using hyphenation, maybe we can just keep it somewhere there, and also we have aligned to center or aligned right if we need that. And that's pretty much all you need to know about paragraph formatting controls. 47. 4.2.d Convert text to graphics: It's important to know how you can convert text to graphics. So for instance, if I decided that I'm going to use this text the way it is and I don't want this to be editable anymore, I can just go to the type menu and choose create outlines. Once you click on that, it will now turn into a group. So we can see it here. It's a group, and it will have each of these characters created as compound parts. If I go back one step, we can see it's still an editable text object. The easy way to tell that it's editable is that you will see these baselines drawn under the text. So the same thing here with this area type, if I go to type menu and choose create outlines, the whole thing can be turned into a graphic where each of these letters are now separate compound parts. Going to undo this because I want to still be able to edit this text. But this one I can turn into outlines. The shortcut for this is Command or Control Shift O. So that's the same command that we've been using from here, is just simply accessing it with a shortcut. 48. 4.2.e Manage text flow: Let's talk a bit about handling overflow in a text frame. You may have seen this before when we saw the little red plus sign showing up. So in this case, I have some additional text in this frame that doesn't fit inside it. If I click on the plus sign, I can load that text into my cursor and I can click and drag to define a new box or text frame. And then these two frames will be connected. And this is called threading text. So there is a text flow set up between these two text objects. And if I change one, the other one will either load more text into it or move it back into this first frame. If you have a wish to break the thread between the two text frames, you can just select this object and click on it twice. Now this shape is disconnected. It stays as a text frame. It will just have no text inside it because everything is loaded back into this first frame. So there is no text flow left. There's also a way to wrap text around an image. So for instance, if I have this leaf here and I wanted the text to wrap around what we need to do is to have the object selected. So in this case, that's the leaf. And then we have to go to the object menu and find text wrap and choose make. Once you turn that on, you will see immediately that the text is getting affected. And wherever I move this text, it will automatically update and find the outline, and you won't be able to paste the text over these type of objects anymore because it's always going to push the text away. Now you can control the offset or this boundary created around that leaf or the object where you use text wrap. Just go back to the object menu, choose text wrap and choose options. So this is where you can find the offset. If I increase that, we will have more space between the illustration and the text. 49. 4.3 Selections: We already covered selecting objects in previous topics, but now we will be spending more time on discussing all the various ways that you can work with selections. And first of all, I wanted to mention something that we haven't covered before. The little circle next to the object in the layers panel is the targeting feature. And there is a useful technique that you might want to utilize sometimes if you have an object like this one here, which uses a unique appearance. So it has a blend mode, in this case, called overlay applied on it. If I want that to be used somewhere else, maybe on this astronaut, I can select that little circle and drag it over this other object. When I let go, notice how it's moved from the currently selected shape onto the other one. So it's a way to remove that special appearance from one object and move it on another one. So that is just a technique that many people know, and it's not often that you need this, but it's worth mentioning. So you can drag the appearance of an object from one to another within the layer panel by doing this little technique. Also important to mention that we refer to targeting object if you select them like this, while if you click on the circle, that's actually going to select the object. And why would you ever want to use the targeting? Well, targeting can be useful to quickly change the stacking order of multiple items. So in this case, I used the shift key and selected all the planets, and I can quickly drag them down all the way to the bottom. And in this case, that will make them disappear in a way because I place them behind this main rectangle that's in the background. So once again, if I select all of them, I can very quickly move them up above the rectangle. The reason why it's important to know the difference between targeting and selecting is because they might ask you about these specific terms, and you should be familiar with them. But in general, if you are working in a single layer, for instance, and you quickly want to move multiple objects, by using the selection. So let's just say I selected these. That's one, two, three, four, five of them, selected, but only one of them targeted. When I drag it down below, notice only the targeted object. Has moved. The other four selected groups that were not targeted, they stayed in place. So when you are changing the stacking order, you don't have to select objects, and you can actually press Command or Control Shift A to quickly remove all your selections. Instead of using the circles, get used to working with targeting. So you target them, and then you move them around either within the same layer or into a new layer. Now you can also save selections in Illustrator. So for instance, I can select all of these smaller planets in this illustration. And instead of grouping them together, which would make them a little bit hardier to access because it just adds an additional level of organization. So I could instead just go to the select menu and choose Save Selection. And I could call this planets or I can maybe write smaller planets. Once I save that, notice how it's not going to affect anything here in the layer s panel. So it's not going to change their order, not going to indicate a connection between them at all. However, if I go to the select menu, now I will find this option here at the bottom, smaller planets. I can just simply click on it and it will remember the exact selection that I had. Of course, you can have as many safe selections as you want, and also it's great that even when you move objects around into separate layers, like here, I'm going to move some of these planets on layer two. If I go back to the select menu and choose smaller planets, it will still find the ingredients of that selection, even though I move them to a new layer. Now, you can also quickly select objects with similar appearance on them. For instance, I might want to select all of these small stars, and all I need to do is to have one of them selected and then go to the select menu and choose same appearance. And if I zoom out, notice how it found all the similar looking stars. So when I click away, can see them one by one, and that was the one that we got with this feature. Once again. Let me just select this one here, let's just go back again to select same appearance. And we will zoom out once again, and we can see all of these. And just to be able to see them better, I can also choose to cut them out so I can go to d cut and then create a new layer for them and then paste in place there. That's Commando Control F. So it remembers the location where they were. But now we can just quickly turn off the visibility of these two other layers. So, yeah, we can see all the same stars very quickly collected and placed on their independent layer. Another quick way to select similar looking object is by using the magic wand. The keyboard shortcut for it is Y. So once you use that tool, you can click on an object. In this case, let's try clicking on that star again. But as you see here, it actually picked up on more stars than before because it's going to also find the stars with different colors. So if you double click on the Magic One tool, we see that it is using a tolerance for the field color. So it's finding similar objects based on their field color, and that 32 tolerance is quite high. The highest one is 255. But if I reduce this down maybe to five and then try clicking again on one of these stars, we will probably get a little bit less or we can go all the way down to zero. And that way, it's just going to find exactly the same colored stars. We can also click on one of these circles, and then it finds all the blue circles in the background, or we can click on one of these shapes here, and again, it will find the other shapes that have the same field color on them. And of course, the magic one can also find similar objects based on their stroke color, the stroke weight, even opacity, and blending mode. And you can even combine these search criteria, so you can have multiple of them turned on at the same time. 50. 4.4.a Modify artboards: There's a couple of important things to remember when it comes to scaling an entire artboard. For instance, in this case, we have this illustration as a single artboard within this document. And if I use the Commando Control A shortcut, that's going to select everything that's in this document. And we can see there's a couple of layers here. In this case, we have three layers. If I start changing the size of this and hold down the Shift key, it's not going to scale the artboard, only the illustration components within that artboard. And of course, we can even move this outside of the artboard if we wanted to. However, if I want both the artboard, and the illustration to be scaled up or down. We can do that by selecting the artboard instead of the illustration. So that's Shift O, that's the artboard tool. And from the properties panel, you want to make sure that both the move and scale artwork with artboard are enabled. So these features should be turned on. And then you also want to make sure that you are holding down the Shift key while doing this. So if I make this smaller, I might just get a warning that there may have been something locked in the layers panel. So if I click Okay, I can still see the result worked fine. However, if I come back to my layers panel, I can just quickly search with the filter option for anything that's currently locked. That's a very, very useful filter there, and I can just see, Okay, there is a rectangle that was locked. So now I can remove my filter, and I can use shift, drag down, or shift drag up, and both the artboard and the artwork is going to change in size. Now, of course, I can also just move the artboard around, and thanks to that feature that we earlier checked here in the properties panel, it's also going to carry the illustration along when I'm using the artboard tool thanks to that feature there. You are ready using the artboard tool, you can just press Escape and then you will go back to the normal selection tool. Now, I wanted to use this example to practice working with artboards because there is one interesting feature where Illustrator can overlap existing artboards, or you can create artboards already on existing artboards. So in this case, we have a single artboard here on the top, which includes everything in this composition. But it would make sense to have separate artboards created for these three illustrations. If I use the artboard tool, I can just click on this rectangle and then this one or squares, and then I can create new artboards for them. So now if I use Shift Do to select the artboard tool, we can see that there are additional artboards created for these illustrations. The advantage of doing this would be that it is still possible to export all of them with the same layout and perhaps have some information written underneath them, something that I wanted to share with the client. So it could be a slide in a presentation. While if I needed to export these individually, I could just target the artboards number two, three, and four. And of course, you can change the name of the artboards either by using the properties panel or the Artboards panel, but we can just type in green dragon, the first one on the left. The one in the middle can be the orange dragon. And this one here could be the Black Dragon. 51. 4.4.b Transformations: Now let's go through quickly a couple of transformation techniques in Illustrator. First up, scaling your objects should be fairly straightforward. You hold down the shift key and drag up and down from one of the corner points. So the shift key is there to make sure you keep the proportions the same and you're not distorting the object. Now, in case you can't see a bounding box around your object, you might want to press Command or Control Shift B that's going to reveal it. But you can also find this from the view menu. So there is the bounding box option. Just make sure that's turned on to be able to see the corner points. If you want to rotate something around, so let's just say this girl is flying around and we want her to be slightly on an angle, we can go close to a corner point and start dragging in the direction we want or hold down Shift key, we can also drag in 45 degrees increments. If you hold down the alter option key together with the shift key when you are scaling something, you can also keep the center point of the object in place. So you are scaling towards its center point or from its center point outwards instead of scaling to one of its corner points. And of course, you can also use the property panel under the transform section to change the size of an object. You just probably want to make sure the proportions are locked, and then you can specify exactly the size, let's say, 150 for the width, and that's going to update both the height and the width accordingly because we looked the proportions. Now, for rotating, you can also use the rotate tool. This one might be a little bit more intuitive to work with. You can just click and drag to rotate around, and you can even rotate around another object. So if I put the point, the center point on this other character, I can move the beagle around the crocodile boy. So that is a useful way to work with the rotate tool. Similarly to this, we have the reflect tool, shortcut for that is O, which again, can reflect the object that you click on. So in this case, we turned her upside down. But if we have the center point set somewhere else, we can reflect her exactly to the opposite side. So it will retain the same distance from that center point, and it will be flipped on the other side. Now, to test this out with this other boy here, I use the reflect tool, notice how he has his left hand up. If I then click and drag it over, now he has his right hand up. So it behaves similarly to the rotate tool, but it also actually reflects or flips the object around from left to right. So from this to this. Worth mentioning that whenever you are working with transformations and complex illustrations, you might want to temporarily turn off the edges option. So to preview the edges, I actually use a shortcut for this, a custom shortcut, but I'm just going to turn it off from the view menu here. So notice, I can select the boy without seeing all the anchor points, and I can use things like the reflect again, reflect back if I want to once again without seeing all those anchor points, if I turn them back on again, now this is how it looks, and especially when I use things like the rotate tool or the reflect tool, it gets even worse because now we see all individual anchor points as well. So high edges could be extremely useful. The only issue could be that you are not 100% sure what you are working with. So it's always good to double check that you have the right selection first before you are making a transformation. We also have a tool called shear with which you can distort your selection in all kinds of different directions. And in some cases, it's easier to use this tool by double clicking on it and specify exactly what you want. So here, I could say, I want the shear angle to be something like this, and then I want an additional angle to be edited on top of that. So that way, I can see exactly what I am creating. Be able to distort an object, you probably want to use the free transform tool. So this is something you can find here in the modified tools. So there's free transform. We can just drag and drop this in here for now. And whenever you use this tool, you will have a couple of options to choose from here on this floating palette. And the first one is the default behavior for free transform. So this can allow us to scale. We can also rotate a bit similar to what we could do normally just using the selection tool however, the perspective distort is something that we can only do with this tool. So that's perspective distortion. That's working quite well. Again, I'm just going to turn off the edges so you can see better what is happening here. A little bit tricky to handle it, but, yeah, it works quite well. And then we have the free distort or normal distort option. With this, we can drag individual corner points to add the distortion. Of my favorite transformation features is called Puppet Warp. This is something you can find again from the additional tools. I'm just going to drop it in here. So it looks like a little pin. And once you select it, it will automatically add a couple of pins on your object, which you can then start moving around. And especially for characters like these, could be extremely useful. I can even details behind each other, can move the head around, the leg around, and we can add additional points as well. So we can start posing the character differently than how he was originally, make him a little bit more animated like that. You can also remove any of these pins by clicking on it and then pressing delete on the keyboard. And you can even rotate them around by going closer to this dashed line, and there you can rotate the selected anchor point or pinpoint. Here, once again, we can do that rotation or on this one, perhaps it would make more sense like that, and maybe this one can be straight. There's also a lot of additional transformation tools for distorting your objects. One of the most useful one out of them is probably the Warp tool, but you can see there's a lot of various tools here. I'm going to show you the Warp tool now. This is a brush, so you can change the brush size by holding down the older option key. Make it smaller. And then whatever you paint over with this tool is going to get distorted. So for instance, here, we can just drag the outside silhouette of this costume to add a couple of little shape details on it. So instead of having just a single line, we could make it a little bit more spiky and we could also distort these lines, for instance, if we wanted to and so on and so forth. 52. 4.5 Reconstructing and editing: There are a couple of important editing and reconstructing features in Illustrator that might come up in the exam. So let me walk you through these. First of all, you need to know where you can find the option to remove stray points. Stray points, we mean by any anchor points that are just simply edited on their own and they're not connected to anything else. These usually don't have any visibility. So to remove these, you would want to go to the select menu. And then object and then choose stray points. So once you click on this, in this document, I have four of these points. So there's one there, one there, one up there, and one here. They are invisible, but it would be important to delete this, so I'm just going to press Delete on the keyboard. This is a good practice to get used to. Whenever you finalize your artwork, you should run this feature and make sure that there are no stray points included. If you have two parts that you wish to join together, like in this case, this one and this, all you have to do is to select both of them, and then just press Command or Control J. An Illustrator will automatically figure out where it is best to connect them. So for instance, if I go back one step and I move this up here and maybe rotate it around a bit, I now can select both again and press Commando Control J. Notice how it now connected them on the left side, and it became a single object. But you can also find this option from the properties panel. But in that case, you will have to use the direct selection tool and specify exactly which two anchor points you wish to connect. Once they are selected, you can click on this join anchor points option. So once I click on that, it will join exactly those two points together. But the result is going to be the same. We have now a single path. You have an object like this, which has lots of anchor points and it's unnecessary to have that amount, you can either simplify or smooth the object out. So these options you can find both from the object path drop down. So here you will be able to find smooth and simplify. First, let me show you what smooth can do. So it's a very intuitive control. You can just drag to the right or to the left, and you can see how it's going to affect the final result. I notice how it's not actually reducing the amount of anchor points, it's just making the shape more smooth, so more rounded. Compared to this, if we go back to object path and then choose simplify, it looks like a similar control here at the bottom. But here, automatically, you already reduced the amount of anchor points without changing the shape too much. So we can see it can go even further down if we want it to, or we can go back to the original amount of anchor points. So from the original 28 points, automatically Illustrator recommends to use 17 points instead, but we can override this and make it even less if we wanted to. If we click on this setting icon here, we can fine tune the settings. There's lots of options here, and you can have a much better control over what you achieve. You can also see before and after with the preview option, and when you're happy, you can just click Okay. It's worth mentioning that if you use the simplify and smooth options often, you can either assign keyboard shortcuts to them, or I would recommend to use the contextual task bar, which will automatically show these options whenever you select an object. So as you can see, I select something straightaway underneath it, it will show these. And in case of a path, even a single path, we would still have these options like smooth. We can smooth that shape out very quickly, and when we are ready, we can just say done. Now let's take a couple of techniques that we can use to reconstruct or repair illustrations. First of all, the eraser tool is probably the easiest one to learn. That is like a brush, so it has a brush size. You can use the square brackets on the keyboard to increase or decrease the size. And once you're ready, you can just start painting over the details you wish to delete. So it will automatically erase everything that is not currently locked. And in case you want to restrict the erase tool to a selection, you can just use your selection tool first and then use the eraser. And notice how now it's only affecting the selected object. Or in case you have multiple objects, it would select, again, only the selected ones. The other way of using the eraser tool is to hold down the old or option key, and that way you can make a marquee selection and delete everything that falls under that marquee. If you need to ever cut a shape into two, you can use either the knife or the scissors tool. So I just have this shape selected here, and I am going to get the scissors first, which is close to the eraser tool. So I can just click maybe here and there. And now we can move these two shapes apart. And similarly, if I have another shape selected, we can also use the knife tool. So there's the knife tool. I'm just going to drop it into this category. And with the knife, we can cut along a path. So we can cut in any direction. And then once again, we will end up having two separate shapes now. Similarly to dividing shapes, you can also combine them together. So if I have these two, for instance, selected, I can use the Shape Builder tool that's Shift M on the keyboard, or you can find it here in the toolbar and paint over the shapes that you want to join together. Or you can also use Alter option key to cut shapes out of each other. Additionally, you can also use the pathfinder settings from the properties panel. And with this, you can either combine the selected shapes together, subtract the top shape from the one below it, or you can also have an intersection of the two shapes like that. Or you can also use this last one, the exclude option, which is going to punch a hole in the middle. Keep the non overlapping details. It's also important to know how to use the live paint bucket tool, which can be used to fill in gaps or empty places between existing objects. So, for instance, if I select everything in this illustration, I can then click on the Live Paint Bucket tool and I can choose a color with the right and left arrows on the keyboard, which is going to go through all the swatches currently available in this document. And for instance, I can add color here in the middle. And just click Okay to accept that, and then we can just click again and click again. And as you can see, we would be able to continue adding these colors onto those empty parts of the illustration. Now, if there is a big gap like here, it ended up overflowing and filling out this area. This is actually something that you can control by going into the object menu and choosing live paint gap options. You can specify what type of gaps you wish Illustrator to recognize. So if I switch to medium gaps, for instance, we will find 148, and it indicates these gaps here at the bottom, and we can even change the gap preview maybe to blue. So there it's easier to see where it recognizes gaps. Change to small gaps, we will have even more separation. And if I change to large gaps, then obviously it's going to have less separation in the artwork. The same tool, of course, can be used to also fill in existing colors of shapes, so not just empty areas, but we can also fill in these colors quicker. And also, it's worth mentioning that whenever you use live paint, it's going to create a special group called live paint. So that's going to enclose all the details that were selected originally when you started using this tool. Now we also have to talk about the image trace feature for which this example could be useful because this is currently a roster image that is placed into this document. So when we look at the layers panel, you can tell that it's just a single object. And in the properties panel, I can see it's currently embedded. If we go into the Links panel as well, we can see the image file there, which was embedded in here. And once this image is selected and I zoom closer, we can see it is obviously pixelated. So if we want to turn this into a vector artwork, the best option for it would be image trace. So if I choose image trace, I can choose maybe 16 colors for now. By the way, you probably want to use the enhanced presets option. So turn that on first, and then you choose 16 colors. And this is going to turn the roster illustration into a vector illustration. And if you click on this icon here in the properties panel, going to open up the image trace panel, which can help you to quickly see the before and after results by using this icon. So when you click on that and hold, you can see the original artwork. When you let go, you can see the vector artwork. So you can very quickly switch between the two. We can check any other details maybe further up here. And before and after. And I intentionally chose an illustration with a lot of textures in it, which obviously tracing is going to struggle with. But to create this, we can see the statistics here. Illustrator needed to create 46 almost 47,000 anchor points, use 16 colors, and it needed around 4,800 parts. It is important to mention that whenever you are happy with the tracing result, you can choose to expand it, and that's going to allow you to make changes to each of those individual parts because at this point, it is only a temporary preview of how this tracing result will look like. So the object is still in this transitional state where it still remembers the original raster image. And it can show you the vector details that it's going to create. But once you expand this, that's when it's actually going to turn it into pots and anchor points. So when we zoom out, we can see how that looks like. We can click away as well, and that's our traced image. 53. 4.6 Appearance: Already use the appearance panel in previous topics, but I'm going to talk a little bit more about it because it's actually a very important one to use in general in Illustrator, but also they like to ask questions about it in the exam. So you find it in the window menu, and that's the appearance panel. And I'm going to just put it here on the right, maybe dock it into the panels that we have. And I'm going to focus on one of these illustrations. And once I have my selection, I'm going to go into the effect menu and choose the stylized outer glow effect. I will maybe increase the blur amount a bit on here, and that looks quite nice. So I'm just going to click Okay. So this is how it looks without the effect and with the effect, I have the appearance panel showing the outer glue that we assigned, and we can also click here on the name to make changes to it. So these are called live effects. Anything that shows up in the Appearance panel, you will be able to make changes too. You can remove it as well, delete it if you want to. And you can also, of course, add multiple effects. And then just for fun, something that will be very obvious, I would add an additional effect. Also from stylize, I will use scribble. And of course, again, we can adjust this if we wanted to. The variation can be a little bit less, perhaps, something like that. The curvineess we can play around with, but I'm just going to click Okay. I think that looks quite good. So once again, that is without outer glow, and that's together with outerglow. And now, if I wanted both the scribble and outerglow effects to be saved, I could save this as a graphic style. So we can go to the window menu and find Graphic Styles panel. And here, if I click on the plus sign, I will be able to save this style, and we can try this out on one of these other dragons and just click on that style, and immediately, it applies everything. The same thing here, applies it exactly the same way. And of course, if we switch back to the appearance panel, we will be able to make changes to each of these live effects, even on these new illustrations. So the fact that we saved it as a graphic style is simply just a fast way to reapply the same settings on another selection. Just would like to remind you that if you look at your layers panel, wherever you apply effects on objects or selections, you will see a field circle. Similarly when you use blend modes as well, it's the same thing. It's a complex appearance. That's how it's represented here. And if I go back a few steps before this graphic style was applied, we can compare the two groups that are up here. Which has the effect. So if I zoom out a little bit and see all of them together, so these are the two that has the appearance with the two effects that we applied, and the one on the left doesn't have it. But remember, if I drag this circle onto the other object, we can transition the effects from the illustration in the middle to the one on the left. And if I hold down the older option key, I can also duplicate the effect. So it's like copy pasting the same combination of effects or appearance from one selection to another. 54. 5.1.1 Setting the Color Mode (Color Space): There's a couple of things that you have to keep in mind and check whenever you finish a project in Illustrator, and you want to get them ready for either print or web. So in this topic, we will be covering all of these things and especially focusing on things that I know they like to ask in the exam. So first, you have to make sure that the file that you have opened is in the right color mode. And you can see that here on the document tab. So this says it's in RGB. And in the file menu, under document color mode, we can easily change this. So from RGB, we can switch to CMYK. And this is something that we talked about before, but RGB is generally for any work that is going to be displayed on screens. So whether that's web, mobile or video, while CMYK is for print, so that stands for the sign magenta, yellow and black inks. And when you click on this, you will see a change in the colors because there is a conversion that the illustration has to go through. So this was RGB, and this is CMYK. So this is just something that you have to be aware of. So in case you stop working in RGB and then you convert the document into CMYK, usually you will lose a bit of the intensity of the colors. So once again, RGB, more saturated and vibrant. CMVK tends to feel a little bit more flat, desaturated, and generally just not as vibrant as we've seen it with RGB. Good way you can see also the difference between the two color modes or the restrictions of CMYK compared to RGB, is to go to the color picker. So double click on the swatch here in the toolbar. And for instance, we can jump to a very bright violet or purple color like this one. And notice that there is going to be a little exclamation mark here, meaning that this is going to be out of gamet in case we want to use this in CMYK. So if I click on that, will move the selection within the same hue, but it would reduce the saturation and the brightness to make sure that it's going to work for print. So notice how much different that looks to this vibrant color up here. So once again, if I click on that, it jumps down there, and the same thing would happen pretty much everywhere where we go all the way to the top right corner, which is the most saturated and brightest colors. In print, this is what's the closest color that can be reproduced, again, using the standard C and K colors. So once again, I click it changes quite a lot. Besides changing the color mode, you can also go to the edit menu and choose color settings. Now, this is a general setting that you can change, and you have a couple of options to use here. You can also create your custom settings that you can save, and it's rare that they ask you to do anything here, but it is possible that they might ask you to choose a specific RGB color space or CMYK color space. And set that up as your main setting. This is something that you can do from here. There's also more options if you click here and you can find additional options there. And it's also possible that they might ask you to assign a profile only to your current document that's actually also accessible from the same area, edit, assign profile. And here, you can pick a profile. You can see I have a couple of Banque profiles, for instance, because I'm using Banc monitors. I can pick one of these. Let's just say this one, and then I can assign it once I click Okay. It will again slightly change the colors. So that's how it looks after I assigned it. And the color profile is an ICC file that is embedded into this illustration. And anytime we export it, we will have the option to include it or not. So for instance, if I go to File, Export and then choose Export as and then we choose maybe JPAG and maybe just say, we want to use the artboards and then Export. Here you can see in the JPEG options, we will have the embed ICC profile, and that's the one that I use, the BankUO. I can choose to include it or I can also choose not to include it. So again, this is something that you might be asked about 55. 5.1.2 Rasterizing Vector Graphics and Applying Raster Effects: Another important thing to know is how to rasterize something within illustrator because everything here right now is vector based. I just press Commando Control Y to see the outlines. That's also by the way, from the view menu. That's the feature there. So I can quickly test whether everything is set up as vectors or not this way, and I can see that this is definitely all vector based. However, if I want to, for instance, change this astronaut into roster image within this composition, there is a way to do that. So I just selected this and I can go to the object menu and choose rasterize. So this is a feature that I rarely use because if I export something, I normally export the entire artwork in the JPEG, and there I can specify the resolution and the size. However, in certain cases, you might need to rasterize only a specific detail. And so this is how you can do it. So going to Object rasterize, you will be able to specify both the color model, which is going to be RGB grayscale orbit map, in this case. Because we are in RGV color mode. But more importantly, we can specify the resolution. So I'm going to set this to screen that will be more pixelated because it's lower resolution. And I'm going to keep the background transparent because I don't want to have it generating white backdrop for this. And there's a couple of addition options that we can change here if we want to, like, to create a clipping mask for this selection, even add some boundaries around it, if we wanted to. Also, we can choose the type of anti aliasing. So to keep it more pixelated, we can even have no anti aliasing for this particular example. If I click Okay, that's how it's going to look like. So in case you want to create a pixel art version of your vector illustration, this is the best way to do it. But if you kept a close eye on what happened in the layer panel, you will probably notice that all of our objects are gone and turned into a flat image. So this was before, and this is after. So what that means is not only the astronaut is turned into rosters but everything else in the illustration. So if I move around here, we can see that was before. And this is after. The reason why that happened is because we had a single layer and it also had a clipping mask inside it. So it kept everything together. So in these cases, if you want to make sure that only your selected object is rasterized, you actually have to place it on a separate layer. That's the safest way to preserve everything else. So I create a new layer and I just drag and drop the astronaut in there. And now having the same selection, I just go to object rasterize, and I'm going to do the same thing again, same settings. Now notice how all the other details in the original layer are still vector based, and this is the only roster based object in this illustration. Another quick test is if I press Commando Control Y to switch to outline view, we don't actually see any detail for the rasterized element. So the astronaut is not visible here because it doesn't have any outlines. Once again, that's just a quick way of testing how your illustration is built, whether it's built from parts or pixels. Besides rasterizing a selection or an entire artwork, you also have roster effects in Illustrator, and this is also something important to check before you finalize your work. So this is actually something we already talked about in this course, but I just want to remind you, you can find it here in the effect menu, and it's a general setting for your current document. So when you go to document roster effect settings, it's going to give you the resolution that you are working with right now. So the resolution of roster effects is currently 72 PPI. Is not that high, so it's not print ready. If I change this to even lower amount, once I choose other, I can do maybe ten PPI. That's Pix up ringe. I can now click Okay, and we can zoom closer and see if there's anything that's changing, but it's not changing right now because these details that we have here that could be a roster effect is actually set up not as a roster effect, so that glow outside of this planet is actually a gradient. And we can take a look at that. So if I use the direct selection tool and select this object, it's somewhere inside this subgroup right there. Now, if I switch to properties, we can see that that is a gradient. So it has transparency built into it. That's why it looks like it's fading out. This is actually a very smart way of doing glow or shadows. So instead of relying on raster effects, you are using a gradient, and the gradient is more accurate and can be represented better most of the time. But I just wanted to show you that we could create something similar to this, if I just turn this off temporarily, and I select the planet, and then I go to the effect menu and I'm going to choose stylize outer glow. So we can set this to the similar color that we had before. I could also use a little bit more red in here, I think, something like that. Let's click Okay, and I'm going to increase the blur, maybe up to ten pixels, and you can already see in the background how pixelated this looks like. So if I click on Okay, that's because of the extremely low roster effect resolution that we are currently using. And this is important also to point out that from the effect menu, you shouldn't be fooled by the fact that there is a section called Illustrator effects and another section called Photoshop effects, it doesn't mean that all these illustrator effects will be vector based, and these will be roster based. It's not true because, remember, we chose the outer glow from within the Illustrator effects section, and still, it is a roster based effect. So to improve the quality of this effect, we would have to go back to the effect menu and choose document roster effects settings. And then if I increase this up to 72 PPI and click Okay, immediately, it looks better. However, if I zoom close enough, there will still be a subtle pixelation noticeable here. And if I go even higher with the setting, maybe up to 300 PPI, which I would recommend to use for print, then this is going to be perfectly smooth again. So there are ways of achieving the same visual aesthetics in various ways in most Adobe applications. So here with this example, you could see we could use a gradient or an effect. But in case we are using a raster effect, we just have to keep in mind that we need to also make sure that the document raster effect settings is set to a high enough resolution when this goes for print. You might be wondering why would we ever want to change that to a lower resolution? Well, the main reason for that is because the higher the resolution, the slower it is to render everything. So if you feel like your document is getting sluggish, you should reduce that effect maybe down to 72 PPI or even lower. But of course, that will only make a difference in case you are using raster effects in your illustration. 56. 5.1.3 Managing Metadata: Another important thing you have to know where to find is the metadata that is saved into your artwork. So this is actually something you can find in the file menu by going to File Info. You can find all the necessary information. So you can add keywords here. You can add the description. You can also change the copyright status from unknown to be copyrighted, and you can even add copyright notice or URL. And these are actually things that you might be asked about in the exam. So it's important to remember where to find. Now, you don't have to remember all the options that you can find here because usually it's fairly quick and easy to find them. So you might be asked to add the city or the country where this artwork was created. And then, obviously, you can find the origin for that. And yes, there's a lot of additional options here, like IPTC and IPTCEtension. I'm not going to walk you through this. Just remember this is something you can find from the file menu and file info. And once you make a change, just make sure to click Okay for those to be updating. So far, we discussed all the important things that you have to keep in mind and check before you export your work. So it was the color settings first, then resolution, which could be rosterization of certain elements or checking the roster effect settings for the document. And we also looked at how we can change the metadata. Now it's time to look at all the different file formats that we can use from Illustrator to export our illustrations. 57. 5.2.a.1 Saving to Adobe Cloud: The first and most important thing when it comes to saving your work from Illustrator is that you have to retain the working file, which should be the native AI or Illustrator document format. And this is something you simply do by going to File Save or Save as if you already save your file before, and the format is right here, Adobe Illustrator. So it's that simple. Now, one option that you can find here next to this is to save this as a Cloud document. The main advantage of doing that compared to just saving the file on your desktop computer and storing it locally is that a Cloud document will be stored in your creative cloud account on an Adobe server, which allows you to access it from anywhere where you have Internet connection. So I'm just going to demonstrate this to you. If I choose Save to Creative Cloud, I can just choose the name I want, and I can also choose to put this into a new folder if I want to. But I'm just going to keep it like this and click Save. Now, when you do this, notice that the file format is actually changing from AI to AIC. That's Illustrator Cloud document format. And there's also a little Cloud icon just reminding me that it is stored in the Cloud. But also it's a way to see whether the changes that I've made are already saved to the Cloud or not. So for whatever reason, if you lose Internet connection, that icon is going to warn you that you are not connected to the Internet and it won't be able to save the changes that you make. Now, another big advantage of creating a cloud document from your illustration is that you can easily share it with other people. There's a big share button here on the top right. If you click on that, you will be able to share for review by clicking on creating a link. And then here, you can decide whether you want anyone with the link to be able to comment or only specific invited people. In that case, you will have to invite them, so you'll have to click on Invite and type in the email addresses or names of the people you want to share it with. Now, this is going to be the link that you can use. Just send that out to whoever you want to review this work for you. This could be a client, a colleague, or a stakeholder. And then whenever you make changes to the illustration, just make sure you update your content here as well. So it's not enough to save the file. You have to also come to the share area and choose update content. Besides inviting people to review your work, you can also actually bring in people to work on the file with you so you can collaborate with other illustrators. That's the Invite to edit option down here. So if I click on that, again, I can put their emails in here and I can send them the link that's right here. You can also find these options from the file menu. So share for review and invite to edit. Don't think they will ask about this in the exam, but it's worth remembering where to find them. And I just generally recommend to know the main advantages of saving a Cloud document because that might come up in the multiple choice questions. I just wanted to briefly show that to you if you switch over to the Creative Cloud desktop application. Within the files section, you can actually find the file that we just saved and we can easily open it. So if you are on another computer, that's a quick way to access it. But if I close this document from the home area, we can also choose your files, and these will be all the Illustrator Cloud documents. So we can easily find it here. And by coming back to this file, there's one last thing I wanted to make sure you know, and that's also an advantage of using a Cloud document that you actually have a version history for it, too. By going to the Window menu, you can find the Version History panel down here, and don't confuse this with the History panel, which is just simply recording the steps that you make during edit, while Version history is going to show you when the file was last changed and even the changes that it goes through. So each time I make changes and save this file, I will get a version automatically created here with the time and date. And it's important to mention that these are only stored for 30 days. After that, only marked versions will be retained. So if you want to mark a version, just click on that little bookmark, and that is going to be retained as long as you don't delete this Cloud document. By the way, instead of just simply having the date and the time here, we can change the version information. So by clicking on Edit version Info, we could give this a title. So maybe we can call this ready for print, and we can even add description and save it, and then we can see the note on this version. I'm just going to go back to the file menu and open the desktop version or offline version of the same file. So that's the AI extension. And you can see that we can have these two files open at the same time. But the main difference is that we won't have a version history for this because it's not a Cloud document. Also, in case I wanted to use maybe the Invite to edit feature, it will warn me that currently this is not stored in the cloud. So first, I would have to save it would turn it into a Cloud document if I wanted to use that feature. 58. 5.2.a.2 Saving Locally: Now, in some cases, you might want to save your file in multiple different versions or variations. And for that, you can just use the save as or save a copy feature. So save a copy automatically adds the copy in the filename. You can change that, of course, and you can also control the file format. Compared to this, if I choose Save as, that's going to remember that last time I saved it as a Cloud document, I can switch back to saving it on my computer local here, there's not going to be any additional text on the fin name, so it's easier to accidentally overwrite the file in case I don't change the finame and it already exists there. I might just overwrite it. That is why they have the file save a copy. So these two are very similar. Save a copy is just a little bit safer because it automatically changes the finame a little bit for you. By the way, the version history can also be found here a little bit lower and then there is an option called save as template. Now this is also important to know for the exam because they might ask you about this. And the main difference here is that it's an AIT file extension. And if you save something into this format, it's going to open as a blank new document. So it allows you to always start from the same illustration. But once you make your changes, it will automatically ask you to save it into a new file. So again, it's a way to prevent overwriting the original template. So I'm just going to save it in the same folder. And once I saved it, we can see the file format up here. And now, if I go to File, Open and open that template file, notice how it's going to be created as an untitled document. And the main benefit of that is that when I save it, so even if I just choose File Save, it's not going to overwrite my original space Illustrator file or the template. So I can just give this whatever name I want and I can decide where I want to save. 59. 5.2.b.1 Save for Print and Web: When it comes to saving for print, I would usually recommend to save into the following formats. These you can find on the Save as. The best choice would be Adobe PDF. That's usually what the printers would recommend for you as well. And when we choose this, we can just say save, and there will be a lot of settings here that you don't really have to memorize or be that familiar with the most important thing here that you should know where to find is the marks and bleeds because this is something that they might ask you to use. So here you can find things like trim marks that you can add to your PDF. You can also use the document bleed settings in case it's been set up. If it wasn't set up, you can also specify it here. By the way, if you want to set the bleed settings up, you just have to go to the file menu and choose document setup. So that's where the bleed settings can be found. But going back to the PDF settings, I'm just going to choose Save As and PDF again. You might also want to use or check the output settings, where you can actually do a color conversion in case you want a specific color profile to be used, for instance, and you can also decide whether the PDF should include that profile or not. So there's a lot of additional options here. But of course, we can also just choose not to convert the color mode of the file. If I go to the PDF presets for print, usually we would recommend to use one of these PDF x standards like 2001, and notice how that automatically changes the color conversion and uses this destination color profile. So that is like a standard for print that you can rely on. And it's a very good option to work with. And one final important thing to mention is the resolution setting for transparency and overprinting options. So this is something that you can control here. You can even choose custom and then you can specify additional options for this. You don't need to know more about the technical aspects of this. It can get a little bit complicated, and it's mainly something that printers would be doing for you anyway. However, in the exam, if they ask you to change the transparency flattener options during your PDF export, you should just remember that you can find it here in the Advanced tab. Once you have all the settings ready, you can just click on Save PDF, and it's going to be saved on your computer. So I'm just going to do that. And at this point, it just warns me that with the current settings, I might not have all the editing features saved into this PDF. So if I want to preserve all editing capabilities, I might need to use a higher standard. Or a more recent standard like 2008, for instance. But I'm just going to click Okay, just to show you what happens. On side save this as a PDF, you can see it changes already up here inside Illustrator, and we still actually have access to everything here. So I can still move around the objects. I can make changes. I see the same layer structure as well. So that is something I wanted to make sure that you understand that an Acrobat PDF file is something very similar to the native Illustrator document, the AI file. And most of the time, PDFs can be opened back into Illustrator and you can make changes to most of the elements. Now, like we saw in that warning message, there could be certain editing capabilities that are lost depending on the compatibility that you're choosing for your PDF file. But again, we don't need to go into more detail on that. Just remember PDF is the best file format for print. However, in certain cases, they might also ask you to save the file as an EPS file, which again, you can find here in the format settings from the file Save as dropdown. So EPS is the encapsulated postscript file. And this is in a way, an older version of a Acrobat PDF format. But you can consider this to be a universal vector graphic format as well that can be opened in other vector editing applications. Let's talk about saving this illustration for the web. The best option would be the SVG file format, which is a vector graphic that can be used in website, and to get to this format, again, we just have to go to File Save As, and then we can find two options here, SVG compressed and SVG. I'm just going to go with the standard SVG and choose Save. And you will see a couple of additional options here, but you don't really have to worry about this. However, it's worth mentioning that you can also just get the SVG code. Because that's one major advantage of this file format is that it can be stored in a code format as well. So if I click on SVG code, it will open this file in text format, so I can see in my text editor all the information that is required to generate this image. And this could be copied into a browser, for instance, or edit in a website and it's going to work. So it's going to be a scalable vector graphic. That's what SVG stands for. And if I click on this little icon here, we can even see the illustration directly within web browser. 60. 5.2.b.2 Export options: Apart from SVG, most other five formats that are used on the web would be raster based, and that includes PNG, GIF and JPEG, and all of these can be found in a couple of different ways. So if you want to export to these Rosa formats, you would want to go to the file menu. And instead of using the Save as command, which is mainly for the vector based file formats, you would want to go to Export, and then here you can choose export for screens, exports or SAF Vb. And most of the file formats I mentioned can be found in all of these, but you will have slightly different options in how you save them. So let's start with SafforVb which is a legacy feature. But this is the one that includes the gift file format. But this is still a useful one where you have quite a lot of options available here on the right side, and you can even create slices if you want to save an illustration into multiple different files or sections of it to be saved separately. And we have lots of presets we can use, and once again, we can customize everything we want. We even have a color table where we can see the colors that will be created because GIF file format, for instance, is limited in colors. It only allows eight bit or 256 colors, maximum to be used. And similarly to the SVG file format, we can also preview how this would look in the browser if we click on the preview option here, and this is going to give us the illustration itself, but also some additional information. If I zoom a little bit closer, we will see that the colors are obviously not as soft or smooth as before, because it's now using a limited color range. So only 256 colors instead of millions of colors that you can save into the PNG format or JPEC format. Now let me show you the other two options that we spoke about. So exports is the next one. Here, we can already specify the file format straight away. Let's say we want to save it as a JPAG and then I click on Export. Now we have much less option to worry about. We can choose the color model at this point, so we can still convert the colors at this point if we want to. And with JPEGs, the most important thing to remember is that it's going to give you a larger file if you want to retain the quality of the original illustration, or if you need a smaller file size, you can reduce the quality. And usually I find medium, so around three to five to still be very good quality. But of course, it depends on the complexity of your illustration. But if you go any lower than three, you will start seeing pixelation in the final output. So I'm just going to show you the zero quality, and I'm just going to keep the resolution set to screen as well, which will keep the quality even lower. So if I just click Okay. We can see the file here and I can open it in POT Shop. And once we zoom closer, we will see that it has not only pixelation, but also this typical JPEG artifact of seeing these distinct blocks like here is one. It's usually an eight by eight chunk that is averaging the colors for that region. So that's how JPEG compression works. And, yeah, it's noticeable. It's like a grid within the illustration. You can spot it in a couple of places, especially when it's like curve details. It's quite easy to spot this. But, of course, you can save really high quality JPEx as well. So just to go back once again to export as, we can change the file name to be high res and then export, and we will use the maximum quality and also 300 PPI resolution. So this is going to be a much better version of the image. So you can see we have it here. The main difference is the file size, of course. So while the original one was only 55 kilobytes, this new one is 1.6 megabytes. So that's a huge difference in file size. But of course, even when I open it in Photoshop, it's going to give me a very nice representation of the original vector graphic. However, if I zoom closer, we will still see the pixelation. So that's it's turning it into roster image that we will have all of these Pixel blocks, which happens during the export as JPEG feature. Now, the other file format, PNG is something you can also find in the export as feature. So we have JPAG. We have PNG. We also have web P, another format that you can use on the web. And by the way, you also have the SVG format here that we've seen earlier, and you even have CSS. Again, that's a code format. For this file that can be used on the web. I just wanted to focus on PNG because this is usually what is asked about in the exam. So the main difference of a PNG file over JPEG is that it can include transparency as well, and that can be controlled here. So you can set it to have the transparency information saved, or you can change any transparent details to white or black. In case of this illustration, we won't see much difference because there is no transparent details. Everything is fully covered. But similarly to JPAG here we also have the option to choose the resolution, which generally means how much pixels will be created for this image. So the higher we set the resolution, the more pixels we will have. So it increases the dimensions of the PNG file. And in turn, of course, it also increases the file size. 61. 5.2.c Export for Screens - Artboards and Assets: Last but not least, I wanted to also show you the export for screens option. The main advantage of this feature is that you have a better way of seeing the artboards in the document, and you can actually export individually artboards or select multiple artboards and save them. And you also have the option to save multiple scaled versions of your artboard. So you can save the original size in PNG format, but at the same time, you can add an additional twice as large version in PNG or any of these other formats as well. So export for screens is great for batch exporting in multiple sizes and file formats. And you can specify suffixes and prefixes for the files as well. And you even have the option to export all the Rbards as a single image if you choose full document. Once again, we only have a single artboard here. But I'm going to show you how this would work if we have multiple Rbards. Let's just say we would want to have these planets also on a separate artboard. Maybe some of these planets. I'm just going to use the artboard tool that's Shift O, by the way. And then I'm going to click and drag to move these planets here. And I will also make sure that they are placed on this new layer. So these duplicate planets will be placed here. That's just move this also over here and then drop it on this new layer so that it doesn't have that clipping mask on it, and then let's just do maybe this one and then maybe do this one as well. Okay, so we have the four planets. Maybe let's make them a little bit bigger, that. And I'm just going to arrange them from the properties panel, align them to their center points horizontally, and maybe we can also distribute them equally like that. So now this is looking quite good. Now, if I go back to File export for screens, notice how the full document option will include those planets as well and also the original illustration. If I go to all, I will be able to take the artboards that I want to export. So I can include both of these or individual ones if I wanted to. And there's one more feature here important to mention called assets. So instead of just using artboards to export your files, you can even create assets that can be easily exported at any time. And this is something that you can access from the Asset Export panel. I'm going to show you where you can find that. You can obviously open it from here as well. But if you go to the Window menu, you will find it right here. So Asset export. And we can select any item and just drag and drop it in here either one by one or even multiple elements at the same time. And it will automatically generate new assets from each of those grouped objects that we had there. And of course, we can name these. So let's just say this is the moon, and this is a planet and so on and so forth. Now, already directly from this panel, we can select one or even multiple assets. We can choose the export settings and we can export it. So if I choose Export, I just need to choose the place where I want to export them, and that's going to create these four PNGs, in this case. But if I go back to the file menu and choose export for screens and go into assets, of course, we can also now export them from here. So we can choose all assets or we can just select the ones that we wanted to export. Just to be clear, you don't have to place elements like these on a separate artboard for them to work as assets. Anything within an illustration can also be turned into an asset. So if I just have the astronaut selected, for instance, I can just click on generate a single asset from it. It will be dded. We can also select this other planet and add that as well, and so on and so forth. So it's as simple as that to create assets and to export them individually. However, you can also just make a selection, like I have the astronaut and the planet on which he's standing on, and I can go to the file menu and choose export selection. So that is another option we can do. Even though it wasn't saved as an asset, now it automatically was turned into an asset for me. So whenever you use export selection, just remember it's going to be saved also as an asset to make it easier for later to be also exported if you need it. Since we have now two artboards in this document, I just wanted to come back to some of the settings we used before, like the save as command, which will allow you to use the artboards and decide whether you want to include all artboards or just specific artboards in the file that you are creating. So in case of a PDF, we could say, we only want to include artboard number two. Or artboard number one. Now, if I go to SVG, we have the same options here. We also have the same options for EPS files. However, if we want to save something into the native Illustrator file, AI that won't allow you to save only a single artboard. So it will have to include all the artboards. That's the main difference. 62. 5.2.d Package an Illustrator project: Last but not least, you should also know how to package an illustrator file. Now, this is mainly important when you start using fonts or images that you place into your document. So for this, I'm just going to add some text here, and I'm going to say space adventure, and we just have to make sure that it is not in the layer where there is a mosque, so we can see what we are doing. Yeah. Something like that, let's change the color to white, and I'm just going to change the font as well to something a bit more fun. This one, and let's place this here. Maybe I'm going to put it into two lines and align it to the right, something like that, make it a little bit bigger as well. And then I am also going to place in an image. So if I go to File menu and choose place, I'm going to place in this low resolution JPAG in here on the right side. So when we have this selected, we can see this is a linked file. So it relies on that external file. And in case that is renamed or deleted or moved, I'm going to end up having a missing link for this file. Of course, we can choose to embed it, which will increase the file size of the illustrator file, but it's going to make sure that it's not going to be lost even if the file is deleted. But if I want to make sure that this work can be moved to another computer or be sent to a collaborator who has to also have access to everything that I have here. The best and easiest way to do that is to package things up. So I can go to the file menu and choose package, just like in Photoshop and in design. But for this first, the file has to be saved. So I'm just going to save and once it's saved in its current form, now I will create the package. So I'm just going to use the same destination as before, and I'm just going to call this space package. And the default settings will be to include all linked files. So it will copy those and place them into a separate folder, and also it's going to include fonts and create a report for us. So let's do the package. I'm going to click on Okay. And then if I click on Show package, we will see the files that were created. So it created a PDF file. There is the report on all the settings that were used. There is the linked JPECFle and there is the font file that I was using. So if anyone is going to open this PDF, they won't have trouble with missing fonts or missing links. That's the big advantage of using packaged illustrator files. And that is all you need to know about saving or exporting your work for different purposes, including print and web. 63. About the Projects: Now that we covered all the topics for the Adobe Certified Professional exam, it's time to focus on the tasks because in the real exam, besides answering questions, you will also be able to perform these tasks that requires knowledge of all the features that we covered throughout the course. I set everything up in a way that hopefully is going to be easy to work with. So you will have two files. The first one is called projects. There will be ten projects here. And then there is another one called document, which has the 11th project in there. The reason why I needed to set up this separately is because there will be a couple of features here that you will have to use, which would only work if you have a set amount of artboards. And in general, it would have been just complicated to have these features tested in a more complex document like this. Now notice that for each of these illustrated documents, I also set up layers for you to work with. And I have two layers locked in this one, for instance, one that includes the references and also one that includes the instructions. You don't have to change anything on these, but you will be working with this layer called elements to work with. So you will have already a couple of things prepared there. And then within the document project file, you will have three layers that is set up for you to work with. Again, the instructions are locked on a separate layer. Now, before you continue this chapter, I would highly recommend to attempt at least once all of these projects on your own without watching the solutions or the way I am going to demonstrate solving them. And instead of watching me how I do this step by step, try to refer to the study guides and, of course, all the video lessons from the previous chapters. By now, you should have all the knowledge required to complete these tasks, although some of them might be a little bit more complex than others. And in case you stuck with one of these projects and you really don't know how to do it, don't worry about it. Just skip ahead, move on to the next one, and get through all of them, like I said, before watching the solution videos from this chapter. So good luck, and I hope you will enjoy practicing everything that we learned so far. 64. Project 1 - Heart: In the first project, we have to create this illustration that you can see here at the bottom. And first of all, you might not notice it, but there is actually an element here on this artboard, which is this hand, and it might not be that noticeable because it's currently set up as a guide. So for now, I just wanted to make sure that you know about this. If you click and drag over it with the selection tool with a Marquee selection, you will be able to highlight it a little bit more. Or if you press Command or Control Y, it probably will show it a little bit better as well in the outline view. I'm going to start with the first step, that's to change the color of the heart. So I'm going to select it, and then we have the swatches panel here, as you can see, but currently, I don't have the color panel open, so I'm going to do that and go to Window color. And then from the color panel, we need to switch to CMYK values, and then we can just type in zero hundred for Magenta, 40 for yellow, and zero for black. To quickly switch between these values, you can press tab on the keyboard. And once you have everything in there, you can save this as a swatch. So we can go to the drop down and choose Create new swatch. Just going to change the color mode to CMYK. Now notice that here it actually saves it as an RGB color, even though we specified the CMYK values. And this is happening because we are in an RGB document. So the color mode is RGB, but we can just click Okay. It shouldn't be a problem, so we already done what we needed to do here. Now, second step is we need to change the size or the width of the heart to 385 pixels. So here in the transform area within the property s panel, we can do this. We have to also make sure that the original proportions are maintained. So make sure the little chain icon is on and then type in 385 and press Enter. It's also important to check that your reference point was set to the center. So this way, you can increase the size from its center point out. So the center point stays in place essentially when you do it like this. Now, on the next step, we have to release this hand and turn it into a normal object. But notice that we can't actually select it. So what you need to do is to go up to the view menu and under the guides, choose Unlock Guides. Once you do this, you will be able to select it, and then you can either right click on it and choose release guides or go up to the view menu again and from guides, choose release guides. And once you've done that, you can check the stroke size, which is supposed to be set to 20 points. And now we have to reflect a copy of this onto the right side with the heart being the center of symmetry. So if you press O on the keyboard, you can click on the bottom anchor point or the top anchor point on the heart and then click and drag the hand and hold down Alt or Option and Shift keys. And when you let go, this is going to reflect the selection and also duplicate it at the same time. Now finally, we just have to select all of this together, and we need to save it as a symbol. So we go to the symbols panel and then drag and drop all of this in there and call it health and make sure that the export type is set to graphic. Once we click Okay, that's stored in there now, and we would be able to easily reuse it anywhere else in this document. 65. Project 2 - Pin: Project Number two is the pin, and currently, it doesn't really look like a pin, but that's the result that we need to achieve that we see here on the bottom left. So first, we have to subtract this blue shape from the red shape behind it. So let's select both of these together, and then we can either use the pathfinder minus front, which would create this result, or we can use the Shape Builder, which you can access with Shift M from the keyboard, or you can click on this icon here and then just make sure you hold down the Alter Option key and click on that circle in the middle. So this is what we get, and it doesn't really matter which way you get to this result. But now we can just double check in a layer panel that the selected object that we currently have selected is a compound path. Just make a bit more space here. We can see it says compound path, which means it's a single object, but it's obviously made up of two shapes, the one on the outside and the one on the inside. Now the next step is that we have to select this anchor point here at the bottom of the shape. And we have to convert it to a corner point, first of all, because currently it's a smooth point. So let's convert it to a corner point by using the property s panel. We can just click on this icon here, and then we have to move it 250 pixels downwards. Now, to make any changes vertically, we have to use the Y value, and we could type in 850 here or we can just say plus 250 px. That way, it's going to move down 250 pixels. You don't even have to do the math in case the Y value is in a strange location, you can just type it in like that. So that is looking much better already. Now we have to have the whole object selected. So I use the selection to click on it, and then we have to swap the stroke and feel colors around that you can do by pressing Shift X on the keyboard. And then we have to make sure that the stroke is set to 20 points. If you hold down the Shift key and click twice on the up arrow, you will get exactly that amount. And then we have to change the stroke color. You can just click on here in the properties panel on the swatch and then go into the color area. And this time, we have to switch to HSB values, and then that one is set to 300. That's the hue, and then the other two is set to 100 and 100. So it's actually already working well here. And that's all we needed to do for this project. 66. Project 3 - Sun: Project Number three is about creating this sun illustration we can see here on the bottom left. And first of all, for this one, we need to set up a vertical and the horizontal guide that is aligned to the center of this circle. So the reason why we have to do that is because with the reflect tool, we won't be able to select the center point of this shape. Unfortunately, that's not something that Illustrator allows us to do by default. So first of all, we have to reveal our rulers, that's Command or Control R and then from the rulers, we can start dragging one down from the top and align it to this point here, and then drag a vertical guide from the left ruler and then align it again to the center point like that. Now, first, we have to select the flame icon or object, and we have to flip it horizontally. The easiest way to do this is to come to the property s panel transform section and just click on this icon here. So that's looking good. Now, we have to rotate this and duplicate it seven times around this circle. So we will have to use the rotate tool and click here on the intersection point of the two guides that we created. So that's going to be the center of rotation. And if I start moving this shape around, I can already see the result. But to make sure that it's going to be equally distributed, I'm going to hold down the Shift key, which is doing 45 degree increments. As you can see, that's going to be exactly the amount that we need. So holding down Shift key is the first thing that we have to do, but we also have to hold down the or option key to make sure it's not only rotating it, but also duplicates it at the same time. So when I do that, I created a new instance of this while I rotated 45 degrees clockwise, and I could repeat the same steps that we needed to achieve this or we could just save time and use the command or control the shortcut to repeat the last transformation. And we just have to press it six times and we have the final result. And now we just have to group everything together and save it as a pattern brush. But before we do that, I'm actually going to delete these guides or we can lock them probably better to just lock them. If I select them both, I can press Command or Control two. That way, these specific guides will be locked, and now I can just select all the rest of the illustration, and I will press Command or Control G to group them together. And then from the brushes panel, I can just click on the plus sign to create a new pattern brush. Then click Okay. And then here we just have to rename this to sunny side, and we need to use a 50% spacing value. So we can click Okay, and we could test this out with the brush tool. If I just zoom out a bit and draw something up here, we can see how that looks. Now, of course, if you find this shape to be too big and you want to draw in a smaller size, you can always double click on the brush preset and you can change the size, so you can go down maybe 20%. So that way, we will be able to draw more suns with the same size path. I'm going to remove this for now and just focus back on the page. So that's all we needed to do for project number three. 67. Project 4 - Starfish: For project number four, we have to create this starfish shape. So for this, we will have to use the star tool. There's no surprise there. So I'm going to click somewhere on the artboard, and I already have the values in here. So radius one set to 100, radius to 305 points. That's perfect. Let's click Okay. And then we need to change the corner radius. For these details. So for R one and R two as well. So the easiest way to get to these would be to click on the additional options for the properties and particularly the transform section. So that's where you will see the R one and R two values. So R one refers to the diameter of these inner points of the star. So for this, we need to use a corner radius of 100 pixels. And then the R two or outer radius. For these, we want to use 30 pixel corners. Make sure between R one and R two, you don't have the linking turned on, so they shouldn't be changing at the same time. I wanted to change them individually. And of course, if the corner type you want to amend, you can still do that. But I'm going to keep them on this because that's how it looks in the final result as well. We have to flip the shape around vertically. We can do that easily with this icon here. So that's done, or you could just type in 180 degrees in the rotate section as well. Now we have to add this gradient, the orange yellow gradient from us watches. We can find that right here, and we have to make sure it's set to a radial gradient that we can do from the properties panel. And we have to move the center point of the gradient closer to the top. If you press G on the keyboard, you can do just that by clicking somewhere around the center point and then drag it up there. And if I click Away, that looks really good. Now we can just save it as a new graphic symbol names starfish. So we go to symbols, click on the plus sign and type in starfish, and we want it to be also graphic. So let's click Okay, and we are done with project number four. 68. Project 5 - Circular Logo: For Project five, we need to add some text for this logo, and first of all, for that text to be able to be fitted on the circular shape, we also need to add a new circle. We can do this with the Ellipse tool, and I'm just going to click on the ardbard and type in the value that we need. Since it's a perfect circle, I want to constrain the width and height to be the exact same amount. And I'm going to type in 325 pixels. Then click Okay, and it doesn't matter what color you are using for this. I'm just going to press D, so it reverts back to the default colors. Maybe I can even take out the fill with the forward slash keyboard shortcut. So now we just have the outline of next, we have to make sure that the center point of this new shape is going to end up in the right position. Now, we could select the original illustration and this one and just align them to each other by using align horizontal and vertical centers. So that would also work. But we want to make sure that this shape stays exactly where it is and just this is aligned in the right place. So if you have this shape selected, Make sure you have the center reference point selected. So instead of any of these other ones here, you want to make sure the center one is selected, and then you want to type in 1,000 for the X value and 500 for the Y value. So that should set it up exactly aligned to the illustration in the background. And now we can use the Type tool, and holding down the old key, we can click on that shape that we just created, and we will have to type in the text Galactic Enterprise. But currently, the text is too big, so I won't be able to see why I'm typing. So I just reduce the size a little bit from the character section in the properties panel. So I will type in Galactic Price. And then based on the example here at the bottom, I can tell that the start point of this will have to be moved. So instead of being written on this place, we will have to align it better. So we could align it to the left like that, and that already looks quite good. But I prefer to use the align center option, and then I can drag the endpoint and the start point to be set to these particular points. So at 9:00 or on the left side, I prefer to set up my start point and the endpoint to be here on the right side or at 3:00. Now for the text, we need to use impact font, and we need to set the size to be 50. Then the tracking, we need to use 75. That's going to add more spacing between the characters. And we also need a ten point baseline shift, which we can access from the character more options section. So the baseline shift is right here. Let's just put in ten points. And as a final step, we have to make sure that the field color is set to the same color as the background. The easiest way to do that is to simply press I on the keyboard to get the eye dropper while the text is selected and just click on the background detail. And now it's also turned golden. One last thing worth mentioning that you might not have by default when you open up this document is to make sure that you have the all caps option turned on for the text. And this is something again, you can find from the character section additional options, and that's the icon there. So if you just type it in normally, that's how it looks. But when you turn on all caps, it makes sure that it's all capitalized. And it's actually a good habit or good practice to type everything in with sentence case or lowercase letters and only switch on the all caps whenever it's needed. But that's all we have to do for project number five. 69. Project 6 - 3D Text: For Project six, we will have to add the text Cosmos, the way that we can see it here in the reference. And for this, I am going to use the Tit tool and just click somewhere on the ardboard and type in Cosmos. Again, as you can see, it remembers my last year settings, which was from the previous project. But we will have to change things around here. So the character actually needs to be aerial black, or that's the font that we will have to use, and the size will have to be 150. And again, we have to use the all capitals option, which is already on. So that's how it looks. And now we have to make sure that it goes in the right place. So having the text selected and the center reference point, we can type in the following values, 975, and the Y is 475. And that looks great. Now comes the fun part to apply this cool graphic style. I already have this panel open here, but in case you don't see it, just go to the Window menu and choose graphic styles. And there should be a couple of default styles here. But the one that I created for this project is the one called space. So once you click on that, it's going to apply a lot of effects and feels and strokes which we can see from the appearance panel. I'm just going to make a little bit more space for it, maybe even close the properties panel temporarily by double clicking on it. So one additional thing we have to do here is to refine this style. So we have to find the feel on the top, which has the offset path effect applied on it, and we have to change the offset value from minus ten to minus five. We just type that in and click Okay, and we can see how this improves the alignment of that effect inside and that looks much, much better. And before I finish off, I just noticed that I've missed one step here that I need also the text to be rotated by five degrees. So for this, I go back to the properties panel and just simply type in five here. It is highly recommended to use the rotate option instead of the rotate tool. And the great thing in Illustrator is that whenever you use an angle or rotation, it can easily be reset back to zero at any point later on. But I'm just going to keep this on five as requested in the instructions. And that's all we had to do for project number six. 70. Project 7 - Astro Logo: Project seven is probably the trickiest one out of all of them. It might look fairly simple, but there's a couple of tricky things here we have to do. So just to make sure that we don't get confused by this guide here in the middle, something that we used in the previous project, I'm just going to go to the view menu and I'm going to hide the guides. And below, we can see the final result, but this is what we will have to work with here on the top. So the first step is that we have to turn this into a graphic. That's the type Create Outlines option, which you can find here or use Command or Control Shift or keyboard shortcut. And this is necessary because we will be making changes to this text like having the T crossing over that line and also having details cut through within these other characters. But the first thing we have to do is to place the anchor point at the center of the bottom edge of letter so when I select this, this is actually a group right now. So I can either double click on this to be able to select letter T, or you can also just use the direct selection tool to get to it. Or alternatively, you can also ungroup this object, which I'm actually going to do. So I will press Command or Control Shift G. Now that they are ungrouped, I can select easily the letter and I'm going to use the Pen tool to add a new anchor point here somewhere on the bottom edge. It doesn't have to be exactly in the center because we will be able to use the direct selection tool, highlight these three anchor points, and we can scroll down in the properties panel, and from the distribute options, we can use the horizontal distribute center option, which is going to make sure that that point goes in the middle. So that's perfect. Now we can select that point. And if I zoom out, we can see that the next step is to move this newly created ancho point downwards by 65 pixels. So we already done something similar in a previous project. We just have to come to the transform area, and within the Y value, which is the vertical position, we can just type in at the end plus 65 px and then press Enter. So that moved it down and it created exactly that shape that we needed. But now we have to add a stroke around this letter. Again, you don't have to add this on all of the characters. Just have the letter T selected and then go into the stroke attributes and add ten points white stroke. Or you can even keep it black. It doesn't really matter because we will be removing probably we'll actually keep it black just so we can see better what we are doing. And that is because the background is also white. It might be hard to see what you actually created. But what's important is we have to make sure that this stroke is set on the outside. So it's aligned on the outside, which would be this option here. So to get to this, just click on the stroke attribute, and then you will be able to change the alignment. Next, we have to make sure that the T shape is in front of that line below it. For this, we can use Command or Control Shift and close square bracket. Or, of course, you can also go to your layers panel and drag it all the way to the top or right click and then choose a range bring to front. Everything is on the same layer, this should give you this result that you can see here. And now we will be using that stroke that we added to cut through the shape underneath the text. And for this to work, we first have to expand the appearance, so that stroke that we added will become an independent shape. So we go to the object menu and choose expand appearance. And this is the trickiest part. For things to work properly, we first have to ungroup what we have here. So notice that these elements, the outline or stroke and the shape were placed into a group. That group we don't need, so we can select that and press Commando Control Shift. G. And then first, we can even turn off the stroke just so we can see how this text looks like. And whenever you use as the stroke to be aligned on the outside, the actual shape itself also is enlarged. So there's an offset on the original path. We can see that the T shape goes higher than the R and S, and it got bulkier at the bottom, as well. And that is something we will be able to fix once we subtract the outline that we created here. But for now, I want you to select this T shape and the line underneath it and join them together with the unite option from the Pathfinder. So it becomes a single object, and you can see it up here in the layers panel as well. Now you can reveal the stroke again and then hold down the Shift key to add that to the selection, or you can make a selection like this as well, click and drag in the center over these two shapes and then use minus front. And Willa, this worked perfectly. Just remember whenever you use the expand appearance feature, it's always important to double check all the elements that were created, and sometimes you would have nested groups inside the main group. So it's always good to refine things first before you start making amends and especially using features like Pathfinder. Because there can be easily unexpected results if you don't spend some time correcting things fast. But let's zoom back a bit and see if we need to do anything else. So the last step is to use the eraser tool with a 15 brush size and erase into these letters here. So first and foremost, I'm going to select the shapes or the letters in this case that we want to make changes to. So that's these four letters, but not the one in the middle. And then to set up the eraser tool, I'm going to double click on it, and then from here, I can set up the size to be 15 points. And then if I zoom a little bit closer, we can see we have to cut into the text here. Just make sure you hold down the Shift key before you start using the tool and you can align your brush size just above the crossbar of the A, and then you can go left and right notice that even though I went over the I'm not deleting anything from it because we created the selection to begin with. And then I want to continue the same way on the right. So I align my brush here, hold down the Shift key, and then I cross over these letters as well. So that is looking great. And I believe that's all we had to do for this project. Once again, this was probably one of the trickiest ones. So hopefully, you didn't feel frustrated if you got stuck on this. Like I said, I intentionally included one that was a little bit more challenging. It requires a bit more understanding of all these features and the limitations of Illustrator or the complexity of combining more advanced features in a single project. 71. Project 8 - Camera Pattern: Project eight is about creating a pattern out of this illustration. So first of all, we have to select the entire illustration and save it as a swatch group. So we go to Swatches and then click on this folder icon, which creates the new swatch group, and it should be set to selected artwork and you can name this camera. Then let's click Okay. So we have all the colors in there. Now, next, we have to use the Magic One tool. If you press Y on the keyboard, you can get to the magic one, even if it's not showing up in your toolbar. And you need to reduce the tolerance for this to work properly, which you can do by double clicking on it, and I recommend to set it to one. So fill color tolerance one, and then clicking on this background detail, we could select everything that was the same color in this artwork and we can just press delete on the keyboard. The reason why we are doing this is because we want the background color to be handled in a different way. So normally, I wouldn't recommend saving a background rectangle into a pattern. Simply just use the elements you want, and then I'll show you how we set up the background color instead. So this is what we had to do here, and then we have to resize this artwork. I'm just going to make sure it's grouped together first, just to make sure I can easily select it. So I press Command or Control G, and we need to resize it to have a width of 100 pixels. So I'm going to maintain the proportions. I don't want to distort it, but I'm going to set the width to be 100 pixels. So that's definitely much smaller than it used to be. But now we can select this and go to the object menu and save it as a pattern. So let's go to pattern make. And then from the pattern options, we have to make sure we use the brick by row feature. And we change the tile width 2150 pixels and the height to 100 pixels. I believe these were the values that we needed to use. And when we are ready, we just have to click on Done. And I can actually see that the height was supposed to be 125 pixels. So I can just go back and amend this by double clicking on this most recent swatch. First, make sure that nothing is selected, and let's double click on that new swatch. We can still come back and amend these values. I'm actually going to name these cameras. So that's going to be the name of the swatch, and let's click Done. Now we can even delete this group or we can just place it up here, and we are asked to create a new shape, a square. For this time we're using the rectangle tool. I just press M on the keyboard to get to it, and it needs to be 800 pixels. So we want to be 800 by 800. And because I had that swatch selected, it already applied this. However, we want to start with the field color to be the original yellow color, which I believe was this one. Remember, that's a color group that we created or swatch group. And from the appearance panel, we can then add a new field color on top of this. And for this, we can add the pattern swatch that we created. So this is the right way to apply the background color as a separate fill and not saved into the pattern swatch. Because this allows me to come to this film, and I can easily change to any of the original colors of the pattern. I can make amends on the fly. And that is all we needed for project number eight. 72. Project 9 - Tracing: Project number nine is about tracing a roster illustration, turning it into a vector artwork. For this first, we have to make sure that we are using the right colors which are listed here on the left side. Now, there's five swatches here. The last one might not be visible because it's white on a white background, but I'm just going to select them like this, and I will turn these into a swatch group. So having the most selected, I can click on the new swatch group icon, and the default settings should be fine. I'm just going to call it vegetables and click Okay. So notice we have five swatches added. Now we can switch to having the image selected, and then let's open up the image trace panel. You can find this in the window menu. There's image trace. And once you have the panel open, you want to change the mode first to color. Then you want to change the palette from limited to document library. And that's going to allow you to search for color groups that you have in your library, and this is a vegetables one that we can select. And then before we hit trace, we can also change these advanced settings. By the way, if you don't see these, just open up the advanced section, and we need 60% parts, complexity, and ten pixel noise. And I believe that's all we needed to change, so we can just hit Trace and get a preview of how this is going to look like. So we can see here in the statistics that five colors were used, and there are 266 shapes and 2472 anchor points. This is looking really good. And if we want to see the before and after, we can maybe zoom a little bit closer and just use the I icon up here, press and hold it to see before, and let go to see after. Can see it did a really good job. Only a few little details are disappearing like those berries on that plant, and maybe a couple of additional things like the foot is disappearing in the background or the ankle, but that is something that we can easily fix later on. But as a last step, we have to make sure we expand this illustration, and we are done with project number nine. 73. Project 10 - Skateboard: For Project ten, we have to create a clipping mask. So we will be using this shape here and we have to just move it over the illustration, and we just have to make sure it is including the sun. Fi press Command Control Y, I can see it in the outline view and I can align it with the arrow keys on the keyboard, maybe have it somewhere around there, so it's not perfectly in the center. Think it's going to look a little bit more interesting. I will press Command or Control Y to go back to normal preview mode. And then having this shape and the illustration in the background both selected, we can press Command or Control seven to create the clipping mask. And now that we have our clipping group ready, we can add the drop shadow effect from the effect menu. We can go down to stylize, drop shadow, and it should be using these settings that I used before. I'm just going to add 15 pixels blur the color, you can use anything. You can even use black if you want. I like to always have a little bit of color on the shadow as well, and then we can click Okay. And that was a quick and easy project for us, but I just wanted to show you that if we go to the layers panel and we find the object that we were working I select the mask within this clip group, I can still use the arrow keys on the keyboard to reposition this. So we can go even outside of the original illustration if we wanted to, again, both on the top and the bottom, and we can really refine this and find the best placement for it. 74. Project 11 - Document Setup: Now last but not least, we have our final project, which is more about document setup features. They love to ask about these type of things in the hands on part of the exam. That's why I have a dedicated project for this. So the first step we have to do here in the tasks is to remove all the stray points. Now to do this, we can go to the Object menu. And from parts, we can find the cleanup option. And within that, there is the delete straight points feature. I'm just going to remove these other two and click Okay. You won't actually see anything happening, but if you're interested, you can undo this last step and go up to the select menu and you can go into Object and choose straight points. And that's going to actually reveal these objects. So now we can just simply press Delete. We don't have to go through the same option that I showed you earlier. So this is also another way to clean up the stray points. Now, next, we have to change the documents color mode to CNK. That's from the file menu. We can just simply switch to CNK. Then we need to change the document roster effects resolution to 300. That's from the effect menu, document roster effects settings, and we switch to 300 PPI. By the way, you could also do the color model switch here from the same setting. Then we need to change the document units to millimeters. This is something you can do from file document setup. So instead of pixels, we can have millimeters. And while we are here, we will also change the bleed to 3 millimeters on all edges, and then we can click Okay. And in case you don't see the bleed guides, just press Command or Control semiclum and you can also do this from the view menu, go to guides Show Guides. We also have to set up the document grid, which we can do from the settings or preferences. You can get to it by pressing Command or Control K, and then this is going to be on the guides and grid. So the settings that we will have to use are 20 pixel for the grid lines, and we want five subdivisions. Notice how the pixels automatically change to millimeters because that's our measurement unit for this document. I can click Okay, and we can go to the view menu and reveal the grid, show grid. To see how this looks. And if I zoom closer, we can see those subdivisions as well. But we don't actually need to reveal this or use this. It was just a task that we had to set just to make sure that you know where you can find this feature because almost all the time, they would ask something about the grid in the exam. Now, we have to arrange all the artboards into a single row with 20 pixels spacing between them. We can do this by going to the Artboards panel and then click on the icon here, rearrange all artboards, and then we want to use a single row and the spacing, we want to be 20 pixels between them. And move artboard with Rboard should be turned on as well to make sure everything moves and nothing is left behind. So this is looking much more organized already. Now, we need to rename all the three Rbards according to the text on them. Once again, the Artboards panel, which by the way, is from the window menu artboards is going to be the easiest place to do this. So the first one, I'm just going to make sure this is the right one. If I double click around the number, it shows which one it is. So this is going to be sun and mountains. Then number two is called balance, and number three is going to be still life. So now that we rename them, this step is done, and this is going to be important for the step when we are going to save them or export them because these artboard names can be used for naming the files that you export. Now, we have to merge the three layers layer one, two, and three into a single layer. Now, the best way to do this is to target the three layers, but not selecting the artwork. So I'm going to make sure nothing is selected. Remember, targeting is when you shift click on the layers. So three layers is targeted right now. And then from the layer drop down, we can choose Merge selected. You don't want to flatten the artwork because there is also that instructions layer. You just want to merge the selected three layers. So now it became a single layer, and we can rename this to artwork. And change the color of it to violet. You can double click on the layer area or next to the name of the layer, and then let's choose Violet. Let's click Okay. So this is going to show up on our selections as well, and then we can move on to step number ten. That is to place all three text objects onto a new layer. Called titles, and we will have to also set it to a non printing layer. So these text objects are just for preview purposes only, so we don't want these to end up in the final print. So what we can do is to select these one by one, shift click on these three, and then create a new layer and move these selected objects onto there. So just drag and drop it there, and then we can name these titles. And once we have the layer created, we can just double check that's the only three objects on it. We can double click on it and turn off the print option. Once we click Okay, nothing is going to happen here. But when it comes to exporting these artboards, that text is not going to show up anymore. Now we need to change the blend mode of the moon and the ways to multiply. So we can do this with the direct selection tool. Let's select these two shapes and then click on opacity and change that to multiply. So that's a cool interaction between these elements. That looks great. Now, let's move on to the next step, which is the batch export. So for this, the best one to use would be the export for screens. So file export, export for screens. And then here, you want to go to the artboards and make sure that all three of them are selected. And then we have to look at the instructions. So we need to use the SUG format first. And then we need to add an additional one, so add scale. So besides the SUG, we want to have a two times PNG. Which already came up here, so that looks good. We can decide where we want to export these. We can have subfolders, as well, and we want everything and also include the bleed, although it didn't mention that in the instructions, but I'm going to have that there. And I can already see that it's going to result in six files. So let's do the export, and then we can see them now here we have the SWG with the names thanks to the naming of the artboards and then also the PNGs in this separate folder. Just to avoid confusion, I'm just going to show you that the text is actually still in here because these are not print formats. So both SVG and PNG is for web or it's intended for web use, and the feature that we use for the layer, not to be used for print would only work when you are exporting it into PDF file format. Now we can just return back to the file and do the final step, which is to save the moon and the ways as two separate assets and export them as well. So once again, using the Direct Selection tool, I will select the moon and the ways and go to the Asset Export panel, which in case you don't see, just open up from the Window menu. And from here, if you click on the plus sign, it would add both of these together as a single asset. And that is due to the limitations of how the layers are set up in this document. So even though in certain cases, if you have things grouped correctly, you would be able to generate multiple assets all at the same time. Here, we actually need to select them individually. So I have to use the direct selection tool, select only one at a time. So that's going to be the moon. I will call it moon, and then I select this one, and I'm going to call that vase. So now that we have these two selected, we can actually highlight them together holding down the Shift key, and the setting that we have to use is the JPEG 50 format with the double scale or two X scale. So once again, we just have to click on Export, and I'm going to export it in the same place, and we can see both of the files showing up here, the moon and the ways. So that's all we needed to do for this project. And there's a lot that we managed to practice here. So hopefully it all made sense, and hopefully this and all the other projects will help you to feel more confident when it comes to doing these tasks in the exam. 75. Conclusion: Congratulations on completing this course. You put in the time, the effort, and the practice, and you are now one big step closer to earning your official Adobe certification. Remember, during the exam, you will have 50 minutes to answer ten questions and complete 20 tasks. So keep practicing with the exercise files and test exams included in this course. When you feel ready, book your exam, stay calm, trust your skills, and show what you can do. If you are looking to build even more creative superpowers, don't forget. We also have exam preparation courses for Adobe Photoshop and in design. These certifications can make your resume even stronger and open even more doors in the design industry. If you manage to pass the Photoshop and either the Illustrator or in design exam, you will automatically get an additional Adobe certified professional in visual design specialty credential and badge. Even more reasons to do more than one Adobe exam. Once you pass your exam, and I'm sure you will, we would love to celebrate your success with you. So tag us on your social media posts. We are always excited to see our students achieve amazing things. Thank you for joining me on this journey. Stay creative, stay curious. And I will see you in the next course.