Adobe Graphic Design masterclass

1. Adobe Graphic Design Masterclass: I'm Peter Bone. I've been a freelance graphic web and motion designer since the late 1990s. Alongside my work as a designer, I've taught thousands of people from organizations like these, both in physical and online classrooms, how to design with Adobe tools like InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. With the advent of AI, having good taste is becoming one of the most valued attributes amongst employees and clients. But how do you go about acquiring that taste? That's what this course is about. You can tell from the name of the course that you will learn how to design things with Adobe software. You'll learn the essentials of using in design, Illustrator, Photoshop, and After Effects. But the specific aim here is for you to develop your unique eye for design, your taste. You'll do that by solving real world design problems using these tools, by trying things, making mistakes, and learning from them. It's suitable for anyone taking on design work who's never been trained to do it, people like marketers and content creators. As part of the course, you'll get brand assets and guidelines for five organizations that I'll also be designing for in this course. At the end of every section, you'll get homework assignments so you can put into practice what you've learned. So by the end of the course, you'll have built your own portfolio, grown your design confidence, and at the same time, learned the essentials of Adobe's key design tools. I can't wait to see what you'll create. Let's get started. Here's how to get the most out of this course. This course is unique and that it provides you with brand guidelines to work from and homework assignments to do. You'll get way, way more out of this course if you follow those guidelines and do as many homeworks as you can. You'll also get the most out of this course if you complete it in the order it was created. You'll find everything you need in the download resources in the projects and resources section below. And if you want to post any homework, please use the submit project button in that area, too. Okay, so to participate fully in this course, you will need to have access to the Adobe Creative Cloud software. So in design, Illustrator Photoshop After Effects. So I recommend you sign up if you're not signed up already. If you do want to, you can take a free trial of their software only lasts for seven days though for each program. So that would be quite a stretch, but that is an option if you need it. I wanted to put this course together in a way that it's as accessible as possible to that end, I've used things like images from sites like Unsplash, for example, where you can download any of their images and use them pretty much without restriction for free and also humans and feather. I'll say more about these as we go. But just to acknowledge the generosity of Unsplash and Pablo Stanley, and the person whose name I forgotten that put the feather site together without which it would have been much harder to create a course that's got engaging graphics inside it. And the other key ingredient to design is fonts, and I've made use of a wide array of fonts that are available on the Adobe Fonts website. So you get access to that if you've got a creative cloud plan. So it's another reason for getting at least temporarily a Creative Cloud account. Now having said that, one of the things you might have encountered already is the challenge of opening up a document that uses fonts or images that you don't have. So it's not the ideal thing to start this course with, but I want you to get an understanding of this so that when you open the documents I've created for you, you won't have any issues. So that's what we'll look at in the final video in this module. 2. Troubleshooting font issues: In this video, we're going to look at the process of downloading and using the files that I've made for you. You go to your Downloads folder or wherever you've set to be download. And when you double click on the zip, it opens up the folder. Now, this is something called InDesign package. You learn more about what a package is for later and you'll create them. But a package, you may have seen this before that, by the way, a package gives you a PDF of what the finished document would look like, and that's great because there may be missing fonts and images as we'll see in a second. You've got an InDesign version of the document and an IDML. That's useful if you've got an older version of InDesign than the one I recorded this course with. So try opening the design file. So when you open what might happen is this. So you can see the fonts don't look quite the same as the PDF. Let me show the PDF again. That information is not there. Now, it's not there basically because I've switched the fonts off so you can see what happens. So when the fonts are missing, you get this pink highlight. And if you change your type tool, you'll learn more about the type tool soon enough and you click up here, it shows you the name of the font, but it's in brackets. So the brackets say that this font is missing. Now, all the fonts I've used in the Adobe Cloud creative cloud system. Let's take a look at that. This is a program that runs in the background, and I've switched the fonts off, which is why it doesn't look how it normally looks. Normally, you'll see this you can manage fonts. If you click on that, it shows you the fonts you've got active. I've not got any because I switched them all off. The way that you'll turn this on, if it's not on, you go to your account and then you go to preferences, and then under services, Adobe fonts should be switched on. So my top tip for you, whether you're on a Mac or a PC, if you open up one of my documents and fonts are missing, then essentially the best thing to do is go to Creative Cloud. I'll just finish this off, go back to the beginning again. So go to Creative Cloud and then to your own account to preferences, to services, switch Adobe font off, switch it back on again. And then when you go back into the program you're using, in this case, in design, let's hope it's worked. There you go. That's exactly what should happen. I notice I say should. Sometimes there's a delay, sometimes for whatever reason, it doesn't work, but it normally works, and that's the best fix I can offer you if the fonts don't work. So what's happening now is your computer is connecting with Adobe's servers, and they're providing you with the fonts. So that's how you fix missing fonts. 3. Troubleshooting missing images: In the previous video, we looked at missing fonts. The other thing that might happen is that you have missing images. So if you look at in design on my screen here, these little blue link symbols, this one and this one, tell me that the images are properly linked. Essentially, when you bring an image into Indesign, it records where it is on your hard disk. Now, the problem can come when you start sharing files around. So obviously, I created this and I've sent you the files. Now, what hopefully won't happen, but what might happen is the links are not in the right place. So let me show you what would happen if I accidentally on purpose, move the links. So this is from the package. So the links are all in here. Now, if I just move the Links folder somewhere else, I E onto the desktop, and I go back into InDesign, instead of that blue ink symbol, you have a red question mark. So this doesn't stop you working, but you might wonder why the images don't look quite so good quality, and that's one of the reasons why. So if that's the case and the links are missing, if you know where they are, what you can do is click on the appropriate frame. And you will learn how to do this properly later. You go to the Links panel and in the drop down menu on the right hand side, top right hand side, you do relink, then you locate wherever those images are and you link them back up. That's that one relinked. And then click on this one. Again, relink and then that all works perfectly. So in one sense, we're kind of jumping the gun by me showing you this. But I hope that should you have missing fonts or missing images that won't throw you for too long. 4. Introduction to print design: We're starting, I look at the world of design by looking at print. Now, print can be something really simple, like a simple token, one sided like this, and they gradually get more complicated. So two sided postcard, and a flyer, in this case, two sided. This is more of a leaflet, but only four pages. So one, two, three, four. This is a so called concertina fold. And then brochures, magazines, books, and a art book. Various examples of print. I want to talk about design because InDesign is the program used to create these. So I'm going to go back to this document here. So the way InDesign works, we can talk about it at its most simple with three elements. So the outermost element, if you like, is the documents. So this is clearly a document. It's got lots of pages. So that's the second thing is the pages. So document pages. And then on the pages, we have so called frames. So here's a nice simple example. You have frames, and a frame contains either an image or text. So frame, frame, frame, frame, frame, frame. So if you weren't aware of that before, you can start to look at different pages, different documents, and you'll notice, okay, frames that contain images, frames that contain text. It's almost as simple as that. Key where there is almost. Let's take it a stage further. So there are two kinds of images images like this that are photographic. We'll get into this in more detail later. But what's interesting about all these images, these are made of pixels. If you've ever zoomed in on an image, you might notice they're made of squares of lots of colors. They're called pixels. So these are photographic images, made of pixels. But there's another kind of image as well. That's an image like this. So this is more illustrative. Another example of these logos here. So these are not made of pixels. These are kind of more handmade, if you like. And the two programs used to produce these Illustrator produces these kind of graphics, logos, illustrations, infographics, that kind of thing, whereas Photoshop is the program used to work on images like this, photographic ones. So what I hope you can start to see is that InDesign is the program where everything gets pulled together, but nonetheless images inside are either bitmap like that or vector Sorry, I'm just using the jargon. Sorry, I've gone into the jargon. Bitmap is another word for photographic image. Vector is another word for illustrations, et cetera. So much more of that jargon later. But that's how the programs fit together, and that in a nutshell, is the world of print. 5. Introduction to the Adobe tools: Let's take a quick look at InDesign and Photoshop and Illustrator to see how what we've just been talking about kind of makes sense on the screen. So very quickly, this is InDesign, and this is a leaflet that you'll be working with later on. And what I hope you can see is when I click on these different elements, these are frames. So a frame that contains text, a frame that contains an image, that's a photo and a frame that contains a logo. So let's look at the actually not this image, but a similar image that's in Photoshop. And what I want you to notice here is that as I zoom in, eventually, you're going to see that even though this is a photograph of a leaf, if you go far enough, you can see it's literally just a bunch of squares that contain different colors. So what a digital camera does the moment you take a photo, whether this is an iPhone camera or a much more expensive DSLR camera, it captures what it can see in front of it and breaks it down into thousands or millions of individual squares of color called pixels. And an image like this is generically known as a bitmap image, BIT, MAP, bitmap, because there's lots of bits of data all mapped together in the right order. So what Photoshop does is enables you to work with those pixels, and a good example of that is this what you're about to see is nothing too creative, but this is the photograph having had a bit of work done on it in Photoshop. Before it looked like this. And you can see it does look a lot better. So if you're trying to advertise some flowers, much better if they look a bit more like that than like that. So you'll be doing this in due course, learning how to do that in Photoshop. But Photoshop can do that because it enables you to edit pickles, which the other programs don't allow you to do. So that's Photoshop. Illustrator, you'll notice the image insight here looks very, very different. Notice that if I was to click on an element like this, if I was to zoom in, you're going to see no loss in quality because there's no pixels. So the pixels don't get larger because there aren't any. So that means that something like this logo, you can make it whatever size you like, and the quality doesn't go down. Whereas in Photoshop, what I didn't mention earlier, but you might have gathered that as I zoom in, you can increasingly more easily see the pixels. That means if you were to blow something up too large, then you might actually see the pixels if you made it too large. Much more about that later when we look at print. But there's a key difference then between an image in Photoshop, which is made of those pixels and an image in Illustrator, which is not. So the one in Illustrator you're looking at now, much, much simpler, so not appropriate for everything, but really appropriate for branding, for example, or infographic, that kind of thing. So this is known as a vector graphic, and a vectorgraphic is defined by the so called anchor points. Which we'll get into when we look at Illustrator. So that's how those three programs come together. So in design, you bring all those elements together. Illustrator is for the vector graphics, so called Photoshop is for the bitmap graphics or photographs. 6. Introduction to digital design: We've already looked at the context of print and how InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop can work together to produce printed documents, and we're going to take a quick look here at how you can do the same but for digital documents. Now, all these documents you will be creating through the course. Let's take a look at some of these. The first one is really a print document, but we'll just save it as a PDF. That's like a two page download effectively, you download from a website or send somebody in an email. Whereas these next few, these are all images to go on social media sites. Now, if these four. Now, these could have been created in Illustrator or in design, or technically Photoshop. But InDesign is generally speaking, where you'll start because as you probably know already, InDesign is really good it's like a kind of repository where you just put stuff. So in this case, a frame for text, a frame for the orange image, a frame for this kind of icon, and a frame for the logo. So InDesign is great at that. And then once you've created your document, you'll save it in a PN format. So you might notice that as a Ping file. So one of the files that's commonly used for social media. And the same applies here. The whole thing is put together in in design in different frames. Save as a pin. But these next two, now, I could have put them together in in design, but because they feature very Illustrator specific elements, it kind of made sense to put them together in Illustrator. So in this case, the pattern and the blend at the bottom, they're both very much Illustrator features, so I thought, Well, I might as well just put the whole thing together in Illustrator. So having got the size right in Illustrator, I just made it an Illustrator and then again, save that as a pin. Same with this. Illustrator is great for producing infographics. So that's what I did here. And again, you'll be producing this during the course. But then the last couple of things, these are more Photoshop specific. I maybe should have warned you about that. It's a little bit vibrant. So this is a frame by frame animation. Nothing too sophisticated. But nevertheless, that's the kind of thing you can do in Photoshop. So only Photoshop can enable you to do that. And then a mockup. So this is done in Photoshop. The original graphic, I created for the front, one for the side. I created those in Illustrator, and you'll learn how you can take that, but make it look like it's actually on a package of coffee, and most of the work is done by the person that makes the mockup. Once you found one, you can use that. So that's something we'll be looking at later. And then finally, a more sophisticated animation. Let's look at this one down here. It's a bit easier to see. So if I play this, so this is created originally Illustrator, then brought into After Effects to animate. And then that can be put on a website via Vmeo or YouTube. So that's technically a video, but you can also get them to play in the background. So it's like a looping video. So that, again, is kind of at the other end of the spectrum in terms of digital work. So you'll be creating all of these throughout the span of the course. It gives you a sense of what you'll be doing and also hopefully a bit more of a sense of how the programs will work together. But obviously, we've got a long way to go yet. So let's keep going. 7. First steps with InDesign (MODULE 3): If you've used any of the Adobe programs, the chances are you've used InDesign and you've used it to amend an existing document. That's probably the easiest place to start, and that's why we're going to start there. So here's in design, and in a minute, we're going to change this social media advert here for one of our brands, Limone to look like this. So we'll do it in a second. But before we do that, I want to just talk you roughly through in design. So there are five areas of in design to be aware of the area where you're working, number one, the tools panel where you will use various tools to accomplish what you need to do. Thirdly, the control panel, fourthly, the different menus, file menu for opening, saving, closing, et cetera, edit for undo, copy paste, and numerous other menus, which we will get to. And then finally, the panels over here, panels to change things like pages, colors, and so on. Now, the only problem is, in design these days, it ships using something called the Essentials workspace. The idea with this is that it makes it easy for you to find anything but the thing you need just appears. In practice, I find it doesn't, it's actually fine to use once you know what you're doing in design. But my experience of teaching it to lots of people, they find it a lot easier to use, at least initially, a different view called Essentials Classic, or I should say, a different workspace. So a workspace, one of these, they control the panels. So the essentials view you see it like this, pretty useful, but I'm going to change to Essentials Classic, and I suggest you do, as well. Otherwise, you might find it quite hard to follow, at least in the initial stages. Okay, so that's our overview of InDesign, and next we're going to move on to creating a new social media ad from an old one. 8. Edit a social media image: So as you know, we're going to create this advert from this one, and we're going to do that so you can understand how to make basic changes to elements in in design. So firstly, what are these elements in in design, or I should call frames. You should know about frames already. So the InDesign works on documents, documents have got pages. These are things that we just got one page each, but they've got a bunch of frames. First frame we're going to look at is this one. So this one being the one that contains the image that goes across the whole page. Now, two ways I can tell that it contains an image. Firstly, I can see there's an image inside. I guess that's pretty obvious. But the other way is here in the top left corner. You see a little link symbol, and this link symbol tells you that the image is linked. Now, much more about that later. It's really important. But for now, all you need to know is it means that it's an image. We've got another one down here, that's the logo. It's come from Illustrator, and then we've got two text frames. So that's what's going on on the page. And the tool I'm using the tool you're going to use is the Selection tool. This is the tool you'll use most of the time in in design. Notice, we can see that tool has been chosen because it's got a dark background. So if I chose a different tool, you'd see that has a dark background. So Selection tool, that's the tool to use by default, and of course, use it to select things. And you can see they're selected because of the handles around the edge, the little white squares. So first off, I want to change the text inside here. So it's all very well to select the frame, but to change the text, you need to use the second of our key tools, which is the type tool. So if I click back inside the frame, then you should see I've got a flashing cursor and that tells you that you're about to edit text. To be honest, editing text, once you get to this point is very much like any other program. So like editing an email or editing something in Word, you can click and drag to select, you can delete, you can over type. So I'm going to just select all of this, press backspace. I'm going to type the replacement text, so cool beans. Feel free to come up with a better phrase if you want. But the issue we've got now is, we really want that to fill the whole width. That's not something you always want to do, but very often when you're trying to draw attention to something, bigger can be better. So to make that happen up here in the control panel, because we're working with text, it tells us information. It tells us this is the font we're using, and this is the size of the type. So this button we're going to press a few times. And as I press it, you'll see the text gets larger and larger. Now, eventually, we're going to get to the point where the text is too large to fit. And I want you to see what happens when that happens. So about now, there we go. So it kind of bursts its banks, if you like. And look here, we can see a little plus. That's called an overset mark, and it tells us that not all the text fits. So in this context, all we do is we just make that a bit smaller. In other contexts, as you'll see, it gets more complicated. But for now, we know that's as large as it can get, so that's good. That's the first bit done. Let's just check how we're doing. Okay, that's good. So next bit is the text here. So a good practice when you're starting off is just to manually select the frame. You don't have to do that later, but for now, it's probably good just to get used to changing between tools, and then back to the type tool again. So the easy bit is we just highlight that, change that 33%, I think it said, then we can put our cursor here, do an asterisk that's Shift eight on my keyboard. Now, as you can probably guess, if I want to type below that, there's not much room. So if I hit Return, we get one of those little overset marks straight away. Pretty good thing to do is to undo that. Let's go edit undo or you'll notice here, it says Command Z, that's a Mac shortcut. The shortcuts are the same on the PC except for you have a control key rather than a command key, that would be Control Z on the PC. So you can do that. Now I'm going to go back to my selection tool because obviously with a selection tool, we can select things, but we can also do with the handles, we can click and we can drag, so we can make that frame a little bit deeper so there's a bit more room, and then we can go back to our type tool, click inside here, do a shift eight for an asterisk, hit Return. And then I think it said something like, new customers only. Now, design wise, I'm not sure this bit needs to be quite so obvious. I'm not thinking that's really going to attract people particularly. So you can see in the finished one, I've got one that's much, much smaller. So I want that to be smaller. So as you can probably guess, we're just going to select it. And change, firstly, the font size like that. Now, the other thing I might do is move it up a little bit. The way I'm going to do that is with this setting here. It's called leading and the leading is the gap between lines. If I press that down arrow a few times, you can see that all comes up. I can continue playing with that. I can adjust the size a bit more, make it smaller, the leading a bit more, and so on. That's something you can try. Finally, all I've got to do is to change the image. If I go back to the Selection tool, select the frame with the image in and do file and place. Now this is probably the command you use most in in design. It's the card used to bring in images and also text sometimes. If I do file and place, I've got to just find image, it gets in here, there it is. One of the many unsplash images we're going to be using. So the image comes in, but you can see it doesn't quite fit. So the first thing to do pretty much always here is to go object fitting and fill frame proportionally. And that either enlarges or reduces the size of the image to make it fill the frame, but it does it in a proportional way so that it doesn't stretch it at all. And if I wanted to adjust it from there onwards, what I would do is make sure the frame is selected. Now this is a bit tricky, actually. I want to grab that little circle that keeps appearing. Trouble is this frame is kind of getting in the way. So I'm going to just make that a little bit smaller. And then I should be at to click on there. Now, this is a little bit subtle, but what I hope you can see now is this extra brown frame here. Now, the brown frame represents the image that's inside the blue frame here. So the blue frame is called the container, and this is the contents. So this extra bit at the top and this extra bit at the bottom tells me there is more to the image if I want to see it. So if I decided I wanted more of the sort of wood at the bottom, I'd click and keep my mouse down for a second, and then as I drag up, you can see it shows me the bit I'm going to bring in. If I wanted more of that, I could do that, or if I wanted less of that, again, I could click pause and drag downwards. I probably like somewhere between the two of those things. If you're trying this and it's not working, it's because you haven't paused long enough. You have to pause to tell in design that you want it to actually show you the image moving while you're dragging. Otherwise, all that will happen is you don't see it until you let go like happened to me just then, much better to have it. Displaying as you're moving it. So there we go. There's our first steps in the whole world of design. So we've taken an image. Sorry, we've taken in design document, we've changed the text in a couple of different ways, and we've also changed an image. 9. Amend a printed postcard : We're going to continue looking at editing documents in design, and in this case, we're going to change a pattern from Illustrator, or at least the way it looks in in design, and we're going to bring in new colors and a slightly trickier editing of text. So that's how I look. So another one of our brands, cafe Puro. I believe that's probably how you pronounce it, a lovely little postcard saying about their new Peruvian coffee. Well, that was their new one a while ago. They've got an even newer one now, which is Nicaraguan. And that's problematic because the word is, well, harder to type, possibly, but it's also longer, so we need to deal with that. So firstly, let's look at the different elements here because this is a little more confusing, nothing you've seen before. So I'm going to use my selection tool and just drag that out of the way so you can see this big X here resembles an empty frame. So when there's nothing in a frame, it's got an X in the background. That's useful because it tells us, okay, that must be the thing with the background color. So if I click on it, you'll see over here, the bottom of the tools panel, it tells me that's the color that's being used for the inside. That's called the fill color, that bit there. So that's got a fill color of their dark brown color there. Let's move that back again. Let's try that again. Let's move that back again. Then down here, we've got another empty frame. But this time, the middle is empty. It's got no color. That's what the white with a red line means. That's called a fill of none. But this thing here is the stroke color. That's the white around the edge. It's got a thick white stroke around the edge. That's that element there. This time, I'm going to do edit undo to move that back. Then we've got, as you can probably see, this is an image here. This is the logo. This is another image here. That's the pattern from Illustrator, and then we've got some text. I know that this looks like text, but it's in fact a logo, and again, we can tell that because the link symbol, that means it comes from somewhere else. Alright, so firstly, let's look at changing the text. So that needs to say Nicaraguan. And that word is longer. So that is challenging because if we go to our type tool and start to re type, before too long, we're going to just run out of room. We're not going to be able to see what we're doing. So one way we could fix that would be to make the frame a lot longer, but a nice trick is, if you go edit and edit in story editor, it brings up this little window and you can see what you're typing. So I'm going to type in here, and even if I can't see it in this window, at least I know I've typed it right. So NIC RAGAN, Nicaraguan Nu. Yeah, so I can see that it's all there as I want it. Now what I can do here too, is I can highlight it and I can come up here and make the font smaller. So this is a kind of editor's trick used when they're resizing articles on newspapers and magazines. There we go. So I've managed to do that without having to adjust the frame. So that's pretty handy. So now I can close that down, go back to my selection tool. I'm just wondering will I need to move that down a little bit? I want that to be a bit more centered. So the sort of gap at the top there from the white to the white stroke. I want that to be a bit more equal at the bottom. So click, pause, just drag a little bit like that. Something like that look good to me. Okay, that's good. What about the color of that? As you know, that needs to be that color. But let's first get the image in here. So this again, is a frame that contains an image. This is a pattern created in Illustrator, so we're going to replace that by going file and place. And I've got two different triangular patterns here. I've got that one and that one. I think I'm going to go with that one. Notice it's at AI file, that means Adobe Illustrator. When I open that, and it comes. Now, this is the challenging bit. How do I get that to look more like that? Really, it's a fine tuning of what we did last time. It's clicking in that middle circle and this tells us again that even though the whole thing is inside this blue container, we've got more contents here. I can click and pause and then start to drag this round. We're trying to lose those half displayed triangles like that. Get something like that. That's not too bad, but I kind of want to have a bit more of a gap that side. So the way I'm going to make that smaller. Now, probably the easy way to do it is up here with these numbers. If I reduce those a percentage or two, and then try that again. Click and drag. It's a little bit of a fiddly process. That's not too bad. I'm going to try that another percentage. Click pause, and drag. Now actually that hasn't helped, so let's try going back up. That might be as close as I'm going to get it in terms of close to the one I've done. That's quite useful. That's not too bad. Only problem is these ones at the bottom are cut off. If I deselect that by clicking off the edge of the frame, when I click back on it again, notice I'm in charge of my blue frame, which is the container. I can click and pause and then drag on there, I was hoping to get that so that overlap, but that doesn't work, so I'm going to have to go back that way. I think what I'm going to have to do without spending hours on this is just to click and drag that whole thing down a little bit, so it's a bit more centered. That's not quite like the one that I was going for, but I think without completely confusing you, I think I'm going to stop there. Now, what I'm not showing you yet is there is another way of changing images by clicking and dragging and I will show you that later, but for now, I think it's enough to see it this way. Final thing is, what about the color here? I need to get this color into here. Now, normally, when you bring logos and things like that into InDesign from Illustrator, it automatically creates a swatch for you. That's what's happened here. But in this case, it hasn't because it's a pattern. So to get that color in manually, I'm going to create a brand new swatch. And to do that, I'm going to look at the brand guidelines. So I've got them open here in Acrobat. So you've got access to these as well. You can see this is Cafe Puro's brand guidelines, and it's this blue color I want. So I can type in the CMYK values. That's the values for print or RGB on screen or the web colors. I'm going to go with the print one. So 660, 15, and zero, okay, 660, 15, zero. Let's see if I can remember those. So I'm going to do so in the swatches panel, if it's not open, you just click it once to open it. And then this little button on the top right that gives you access to a menu, and nine times out of ten, the most useful thing in the menu is right at the top, and that's the case here. So new color swatch. So if I remember rightly, that was 66 Cyan, light blue, no magenta. Was that 15, I think it was? Yeah, that looks right. 660, 15, zero. It's going to name it with that color value, so it's going to name it like that. If I wanted to override that and call it Cafe Pero light blue, I would undo that and call it that, but I won't. It's also going to add it to a CC library. Now, that's another way of using swatches, which we will talk about. For now, I'm not going to worry about that. So we're just adding it in to this document. And now I can use my type tool. I can highlight all my text, and I can apply that colour. Not quite the same as the one we were copying, but close enough, I hope you will agree. So we've looked a little bit more at elements in in design. So empty frames, frames with strokes on them, frames with patterns in them. We've looked a bit more at tweaking images. We've looked at resizing text using the using the story Editor, sorry, using the story Editor, it, edit and story Editor. And we've looked at using brand guidelines to create new swatches. Okay, give that a try. See how you go. 10. Edit a printed flyer: So we're working our way through some in design documents. And to be honest with you, I'm deliberately throwing some slightly tricky things at you because as you may have discovered already, sometimes it's pretty straightforward to figure out what you're doing. And if it was that straightforward, you probably wouldn't be taking this course. So I'm throwing at you some of the kind of things my students go. Alright, that's why couldn't I do this? And when I show them why it's kind of obvious. So a lot of these things are obvious in retrospect. And here's a couple now. So layers and preview mode, both of these things can cause real issues. So let's take a look at this. So in design, again, I've got a before and an after. So we've got this flyer for another brand. So some flowers, plant power, sort of, uh, what's the word I'm looking for house plants. Okay? So that's the start one. But actually, we want it to look like that. So in a minute, we'll look at changing colors and that kind of thing. The trouble is, if you were to try and work out what's going on, can you see that there's hardly any information there? There's no Xs to show you the background. It looks quite nice, but it's hard to see what's going on. And that is because we're in a mode called preview mode. Now, this throws a lot of people who may have thrown you already. The idea is that you get a preview of what the document looks like, which is wonderful. You don't see all the kind of extra stuff, the kind of stuff behind the scenes, but sometimes you do want to see that. In fact, probably mostly you want to see it. So in the view menu, under screen mode, by default, you should be working in normal mode. That's what we've been in so far. But this document has been left in preview mode. When I turn it into normal mode, you'll see you get all that extra information, the X to show you empty frames, the edges of the frames, and that kind of stuff. Okay. So let's do that here, too. Let's go view screen mode normal. Okay, that's helpful. Okay, next up. The other thing that you're going to find challenging, I suspect from time to time might have happened to you before is so we're going to change this background color. Now, this is let's look at the elements here. We've some text there. We know about that. That's fine. We've got a logo here. Now we've got an image here, but you might also see with your growing knowledge of wind design, we've got this X in the background and that's going to be that blue the frame of the blue color. Now, this is a new thing. This is a cutout image. So this plant has been cut out in Photoshop, maybe not that well, to be honest. You can see some slightly dodgy gaps there. But nevertheless, we're seeing through this to the color underneath. And as you know, we want to change that color underneath to a darker color. So the first problem you're going to have is, well, how do I select that frame, and you can click as many times as you like, but you're not going to be able to do it. Now, you might have been thinking when we were in the previous document, with all the different things overlaid one on top of the other, you might be thinking, that's really fiddly. Is there a way of kind of controlling what you can select or what you can see, and what you can't see? And if you were thinking that, then the feature that I'm about to show you is InDesign kind of answer to that. So let me just undo moving the frame there, right? Let's have a look at this. So this isn't something you will always come across, but this panel here called the Layers panel, when you need to know about it, if you don't know about it, it's challenging. So by default, in design documents only have one layer. It's called Layer one. So everything we've been working on so far and most of the things we'll work on in the future will only be on one layer. I suppose I should just show you that if I just pause for a second. There we go. So everything here is on one layer, and that's fine, but it can get a bit fiddly, whereas here, as you might see, so on this one here that we're trying to change, we've got the text layer, the logo layer, the photo layer, and the background color layer. Now, you wouldn't know that was functional because it's hidden, but when you open it, what you might be able to tell is that the text layer is unlocked, which is why I could select it, but these other ones aren't now, the reason for layers is specifically for that reason so that you can say, I'm working on the text. I don't want to accidentally select anything else, so you can lock them. But let's suppose I was done with editing the text and I wanted to change the background color, I would unlock the background color layer. But if I'm not sure which layers which, I can just click like that and show and hide. Okay, so that's what we're going to want to get into. We're going to need to unlock certain layers. But before we do that, we're going to need to have the colors to change the background too. The next thing we're going to look at once more is the brand guidelines. So here are the brand guidelines of plant Pow. You've got access to these. And I want these colors to be able to play with. Now, if I create these swatches in design, then they will live in this particular document, but not in any other document. And that can get annoying after a while. If you're working for one particular brand, you might wonder if there's a way of always accessing a particular color. There is, it's a thing called a CC library. Stands for Creative Cloud, the application that kind of runs behind in design, Illustrator and Photoshop. And if you create a CC library with things like colors, logos inside them, you can access them from any in design document and also Illustrator and also Photoshop. So that's what we're going to do now. We're going to create a CC library for this brand plant Power. So under Sushi libraries, go to the drop down menu and say create new library. So I'm going to call this. I've got loads of other libraries open, so I'm going to do a couple of underscores to put it at the beginning. Actually, let me do that. I'll just type. Oops what's happening there. Sometimes you need to click actually back in there. There we go. Plant Power. And then create Now, sometimes there's a delay here doesn't work 100% of the time because we are relying on being connected to Adobe server wherever that is in the world. So here it is. It's open, but it's empty. Firstly, how do I get colors into this document? Well, you already we can use the Swatches panel, and we can also use our brand guidelines. So I'm going to create this light pink color. Now, I could type these numbers in, but I'm going to slightly cheat. By clicking this button, this is in Acrobat, which also you can get as part of the creative cloud. You don't have to do this bit, but I'm just doing this to save a bit of time to save you watching me do this for a long time. So I'm going to edit PDF. I'm just going to copy the web code there. Command C. I'm going back into InDesign. I'm going to create a new I'm not going to create a new swatch. I'm going to click on this fill color, double click on there. I'm doing that because inside that area, I can paste Command V, Control V to paste. That gives me that color. And when I okay that, then I can add that to my CC library. Now, the only problem is, I want to be able to view my swatches panel and the CC library at the same time. As you saw, I just tore that off. And then if I click on that color and I make it a new swatch I didn't do this in the last exercise, but I'm going to do it now. I'm going to say, yes, add this to my plant Power library. When I press Okay, it appears in my document and it also appears there. Let me do that a couple more times and you'll get the sense of this. Back into here, copy the number. Double click on here, paste the code. Make a new swatch. It remembers to add it to the library. And I just keep going. Actually, I just saw there's a slightly quicker way of doing it, which is copy paste. Do you see that add RGB swatch? That seems to do it in one step. That's even better. Although when it did it, yeah, it didn't give me the option within that to add it to the library. So the other way of doing it is that little button down there that adds it to the currently selected CC library. And I say currently selected because, again, you might have several of these. In fact, you will have several of these for the different brands that you'll be working on. Okay, I'm going to do the next couple, but then I'm going to fast forward this, so you haven't got to watch me do this at full speed. Alright, so there we go. So there's my CC libraries. So I can now apply colors directly from there or from swatches. But what I do want to do is make sure that I've got swatches back where they were before. Now, a good way to do that actually is to go reset Essentials classics. Remember, this is the workspace. If I reset it, it goes back to how it was by default, which actually has removed the CC libraries, which wasn't what I wanted to do. So, okay, I didn't mean to do that, but seeing as that happen, let's go window and CC libraries just to pull those back out again. There we go. Then I drop that down there. There we go. There's our libraries. Okay, so next up, we're going to change the background color of this one to look like that one. So let's do that. So it's going to be the dark green. So in the layers panel, make sure the background layer is unlocked. And then with the Selection tool, we should be able to select the frame. A good clue that it's selected is the fact that we can see the light green color. But as you know, we're going to change it to the dark green color. Looking better. Okay. Next thing we're going to do. We're going to change the text to the light pink color. So now, earlier I said you should be selecting the frame first. That's generally a good idea. Let's just unlock all these layers, actually. But now you know what you're doing, I'll probably just go straight for the type tool and select. So let's select all that text. Let's use the light pink. Notice it doesn't look like it's worked, but that's because the text is still highlighted. When you stop highlighting it, you'll see that it has worked. Now, also on the text, can you notice the subtle difference between that one, which I would say looks much better. And this one. Now, let me show you what's going on there. A great feature in design, which isn't used by that many people, is this feature at the bottom of the type menu called Show Hidden Characters. This shows you what you've typed in. So it shows you things like a dot, which means you've hit the space bar or one of these things called a pill crow, which means you've hit Return. So this is a classic thing here. I've hit Return a couple of times to get spacing. The trouble is I've got a pretty pretty clunky bit of spacing there, and I really don't want as much spacing as that. So the way I can fix that, firstly, it's helpful to see that. But if I select that character, I can actually use the leading value that we talked about in the previous lesson. I can reduce that like that, so I can control much more finely the spacing. That kind of implies that these two sentences kind of belong together rather than being miles apart from each other. So more about that when we talk about design theory. So there we go. We've changed the background color, we've changed the color of the text. The only other thing we've got to change is the type here. Now, that's text on a path. So we can select it. Again, you do need to click first and then drag around believe I used the bright pink color there. That's probably what I did. Let's just double check. No, I use the green color. And also, that's rotated round to start reading there where it's maybe slightly more natural place for someone to look. So let's do both those things. So let's drag around in a circle like that, go for the green color. And then back to the selection tool. So if you want to rotate something and you want to rotate it at a standard 45 or 90 degrees, you've got a button here. That one there will go to the left, rotate counterclockwise. There we go. And now, finally, so we can see what that actually looks like. As you know, we can go back into preview mode, and we can see that it looks pretty close to the other one. But one final thing, we also have presentation mode. That gives you, well, as you can imagine, the idea of the possibility of doing a presentation, which is useful, but also it shows you in full quality. So we haven't seen too much of an issue with that yet, but if you were working you were seeing things in low quality, when you go to presentation mode, it shows you in full quality. So quite a lot to take on there, layers, CC libraries, hidden characters, preview mode, presentation mode, but really, really useful things in design. So have a go at that one, see how you get on. 11. Edit an A4 information sheet: In the final video of this module, we're going to look at another couple of things which can be a little bit challenging in design when you're editing documents. The first concerns something called a master page and the second concerns getting text to fit when it doesn't quite fit. Plenty to look at. This is the document as it will be. It's a double sided information sheet for yet another company, and this is what people will get when they book on one of their tours. It tells them what's going on. If we look at that in presentation mode, you can see there's page one. I'm pressing the down arrow on my keyboard to go to page two, so it fits nicely on two pages. Notice, too, the quality of the map there that's created in Illustrator. That's a vector graphic. The logo is created in Illustrator, as well. Now, I realized when I was recording the last video that I changed my setting in InDesign, which might be different from yours. So I've changed it to normal now. Can you notice the quality doesn't look great there. It looked fine a minute ago. That was in presentation mode, which, as I said, previously, gives you full quality. What you might have found when you were working on this postcard is that the quality of the logo looked like that. You might have wondered why mine looked fine. I'll tell you why it was because I was in I was using what's called high quality display mode, which looks much better, doesn't it? So that's the default mode that I work in, but I realized that's not the default, so it's most likely you haven't been working like that, so you might have been wondering what's going on. So that's what has been happening. So under display performance, you may well have been using typical display. I've been using high quality. So high quality is useful in that obviously you can see things that are high quality. The downside is it takes more energy from your computer, particularly when you're working on longer documents with lots of images, it can really slow it down. So that's why it's not on there by default. So that explains that bit. Okay, next up. So we want this document here to look like that one. Now, this time, the only change we want to make is to change the date and then to get the text to fit. So notice this needs to say 2022. Like many things, it's been put back a couple of years. So how do I do that? Well, let me see if I can select that frame. And as you can see, I can't select it. You might be thinking, Okay, that must be a layer then. Let's look at layers. But no, it's got nothing to do with layers. This is the default, everything's on layer one. This is another thing that again, makes sense in retrospect once it's been explained. What this is is a thing called a master page item. Now, we haven't even looked at the pages panel yet, but when you have whether it's one page or 64 pages or anything in between or even more than that, every page is listed here in the pages panel. Now, every page B default is based on what's called the Amster page, and that's the page that keeps all the pages again by default looking the same. So what is possible to do, if I double click on this page, it's possible to put elements on that page. The beauty of doing that is that they appear on every single page in the document. So that means that if I was to add a third page, then they would appear automatically. So it's perfect if you were designing, let's say, a newspaper or a book where you want to the page number to be on every page or something like that. That's exactly how you would do it. So what we need to do then is change the date 2020-2020. I'll just change it to 2023, just so we can see it's different from the other one. And when I click, double click back on page one, it says 2023, page two will say the same thing as well. Okay, so that is editing on the master page. So be aware when you do that, it will change all the pages that are based on it. So by default, that's just the A master page. It is possible. I don't think we're going to be looking at in this document. Maybe in this course, maybe briefly, we'll look at multiple master pages, but that's getting a little bit more advanced. But if that is the case, you'll see the letters B or C here, and you'd need to look at those master pages instead. Anyway, I'm getting away from myself. Right. That's that bit done. The next bit is, how do we get the text to fit earlier when we were editing bits of text like this, we saw that when we make them a little bit too big, we see that little overset mark. I said, in that context, all you got to do is make the text a bit smaller. That's fine in that context. But in this context, where this is a piece of design that's been used over and over again, they wouldn't thank you for just making all the text smaller here. So the context here is something that the design is already established and it's agreed, and there's brand guidelines. What needs to change is that either the text needs to be shorter or maybe we need to lose an image or two. It's one of those things, really. So let's look at page one. So double click to get to page one. I think the problem here is that we've got two images, and there just isn't room for those. So if you can see here we go to day 13. The text really should go up to day 16. So let's get rid of this image so we can select it with a selection tool. If I just pull that out of the way for a second, you can see that the text kind of pings back again. There's a feature here called Text Wrap. Which you can apply to an image, and it pushes text out of the way. Later on in the course, you'll learn how to create this document and you'll learn how to create text wrap. But for now, you can see that it's working because it pushes the text when you make the image occupy where the text lives. I'll get rid of that and delete it. Let's see what we got now. Much better. We're going up to days 14 and 15. We know it goes up to 16, but one way you can view how much extra text there is, bit like we did before, you can put your cursor near the end and you can go edit in story Editor. If we scroll down a bit, we can see that's the overset text, day 16, one, two, three, four, five, six lines. We just got a little bit to get back. Just to keep in mind, the final word there is for your flight home. That's what we're after. How to get that back? One way would be to make this image a little bit less tall. That would certainly get us a few lines. One way would be to rewrite the copy. But the truth is sometimes you'd be allowed to do that. You'd be thanked for doing that. Other times, they really don't want you making an image smaller or they don't want you changing the copy. Sometimes it's really not appropriate or maybe not even legal to change the copy of certain types of documents. So there's another approach that you can sometimes use, which is less obvious, which is what I want to talk to you about now. It's something called tracking. Now, tracking used in a design context, the idea of tracking is to make text more kind of obvious to stand out at a distance. What I might just do quickly is go to the master page. And I'll just show you tracking here if I was to get rid of bit of text, select that text. And to do tracking, I just increase this number here and you can see what it does. It puts space in between the letters, and it really draws attention. There's also a little blue highlight going on. I'll explain that in due course. I'll just switch that off for a second. So you might have seen this certain types of brands use this. Think of the brand Chanel, uses a different typeface, but nevertheless, uppercase characters with loads of space in between them. That's tracking. That's used in a design context. I'm going to just do a few undos to get that back to where it was before. Lots of commands Ed. Okay. Now, tracking can also be used in an editorial context. Because if you look at this paragraph here and I'm going to do one, two, three, four clicks to select the whole paragraph. If I was to do a tiny bit of tracking now, can you see that it's a little bit shorter if I do a little bit more I was hoping that would fit. Actually, that hasn't quite fitted, so I'm going to undo that. You might wonder I'm not going any further. You don't want to go more than about 15 or 20 at the most, so I was hoping that would get that back. So I'm going to undo that. Sorry, undo it by going the other way. What I'm looking for is a paragraph. I was hoping that would work, but this one should hopefully work where I'll just zoom in on this for you. I'm doing Command plus, by the way, to zoom in, Control plus on the PC. Let's try that. Minus ten. There we go. So with -20, we've gained one line back. And can you see that we've now got, if I just undo that for a second, all that space, because that has come back, which has pulled this other line back as well. There we go. So that has fixed a certain amount of that. Let's have a look on the second page and see if that's worked. More or less nearly there. But can you see the next candidate here, one, two, three, four clicks? That to me looks like, it looks pretty horrible. That should all be together, I think. If I use tracking again, minus ten -20, 20 has worked, but really, to be honest with you, I don't want to use any more tracking than I have to. I don't want it to be in any way obvious for the reader that the text is closer together. I'm going to try doing, let's say, -15. Yeah, that's okay. Let's see if I can get away with anything less. So -12, for example. Oh, that's fine. -11, maybe. Great. Okay, that's good. We know that minus ten didn't do it, so that's good. And maybe on the previous one as well. We did -20 there. Let's see if I could get away with anything less than that. So I'm trying to be as subtle as possible. Yep, -15, did it? Okay. Just command zero, by the way, command zero or Control zero. It shows you the whole page on the screen. Right, so now on this first page, all these paragraphs fit in perfectly. On the second page, in fact, there we go. We've managed to get that all fitting in perfectly. I can see we've got there right down to the end. In fact, we got this special character, this hash tag tells us that all the text fits. So that is how we can use a couple of tricks to get text to fit where it doesn't otherwise. Getting rid of images can work, making images smaller can work, although we haven't really looked at that, rewriting the copy can sometimes work. But this thing called tracking, when used in an editorial context can really, really be useful. There's just one thing I need to say about that. We'll discuss this a lot more later in the course. But there's a panel here called Paragraph Styles. Now, this is the way that all kind of serious text in design is put together. Excuse me. They use paragraph styles so you can be sure that the text is consistent. But there's a little button that comes with it here. This was switched on before and I'm going to switch it back on again. This shows us if any text has moved away from how it was originally set up, and you can see that these two paragraphs where I did the tracking, that one, and that one, they're now highlighted in that blue color to tell us that it kind of looks like it did before, but we've moved away from it. So you get that little plus there as well, and it tells us there if you hover over it that we've done -11 tracking. So it doesn't stop you doing it, but it's just warning you that you've moved away from the default. Much more about that later on in the course. But there we go. There's some useful ways you can change text to get it to fit and also the thing that can trip people up an awful lot, which is things on master pages. So well done, we've got to the end of the first module of the course. 12. Edit an SVG with Illustrator (MODULE 4): In this next module of the course, we're going to be looking at Illustrator. Now, we haven't looked at Illustrator before. You know roughly what it does. It creates so called vector graphics that generally speaking, you'll be bringing into InDesign. That's what we're going to be working with here. We've got our logo here on the screen, the plant Power logo. Now you've seen that before. You've seen it used in InDesign. We're going to change it so it looks like this. We're going to do this so that you get a sense of how you can work with these elements, but also where you can find them because you can get certain types of these things for free without having to create them yourself. Now later, you will learn how to create vector graphics from scratch. But for now, we're going to be using on ones that you can get online. And there's a fabulous resource online. Created by Pablo Stanley, who made humans. And there have been other people who have done similar things, but this is a really good example of a place to get a mix and match of illustrations, as you can see, you can download them, and they're free for commercial use. So that's what I've done. I've downloaded them. And from Illustrator, I'm going to open. So this is what you'll see. You'll see if you download everything, you'll get the single pieces and the humans. So inside there, you've got different people in different positions and you've also got scenes. And it's one of these that I'm going to be working with. Now, you might notice that you've got PNG files, and you've also got SVG files. So PNG files are bitmaps, so they're made of pixels, so they will work fine online, but you can't scale them that much without a loss in quality. SVG stands for scalable vector graphic. So it's a vector graphic and it is scalable. So this is used particularly in app development, but it also can be used online. But what we're going to use it for, we're going to open up the SVG of the one we want because we can edit that in Illustrator. So let me find the one that I'm after. That's the one there. So I'm going to open up not the pin version, but the SVG version. And here it is. So in Illustrator, much like in design, the tool you're going to use most often is the Selection tool. Like in design, you got those same areas. So you've got the area you're working, the tools panel, the control panel, menus, and these panels. And again, the panels are controlled by the workspace. The default workspace that you'll use will be essentials. That will be absolutely fine. So when I click on this element that I want, this is often people's first experience with Illustrator. Something a bit scary like that happens. You're thinking, Well, what's happening? I just want this bit. I don't want this. So one of the first things we're going to learn how to do is to ungroup. That's happening because these are all part of a big group, as you can see in the top left corner. So if we go object ungroup, and we can deselect. So like in design, click off the edge of the page like that to deselect. When I click again, now, you might notice that that's quite lucky you might think, I've got all of that. Now, actually, there's things called subgroups. So inside a bigger group, you can have other groups kind of nested inside. And that's a great way to design something, which is how Pablo Stanley has done it. And when we look at creating stuff on our own, I'll teach you to do that in the same way. So that means that with a single click with this regular selection tool, I can select that object, that group, rather. I'm going to do edit copy, and then I'm going to go into my logo here and do edit paste. Now, I quite like that, actually. That could work quite well, but it's much, much bigger than we need. So much like in design, I can zoom out. I can do Command minus or Control minus on the PC, just to zoom out a little bit. I'm making sure that my group is selected. I can scale it down in various ways. Actually, there's a feature I should have switched on, so it looks the same as yours, which is the bounding box. There we go. That's what you would have seen actually when you were selecting these other things, this bounding box. By default, I don't have that switched on. More about that later. With the bounding box showing, as you might imagine, I can click and drag. What you don't want to do though, is do this. Hold down the shift key whilst you're dragging and you can make it the size and shape you want. Having done that, I'm going to go and pick up any one of these objects. And I can make it bigger. I'm going to zoom back in now, so Command or Control plus. And then I can scale that again, holding down the Shift key to make it look however I want. Now you might notice there's a bit of transparency going on here. This is semi transparent. Now you might like that, in which case you can keep it. But to show you how to switch that off up here in this section where it says opacity, 70%, I'm going to just change that all the way up to 100. Now we've got all these elements here, but I want to change them to the colors in the brand guidelines. You might remember yesterday, we went through the brand guidelines and we created within in design CC library for plant Power. Now, fortunately, the CC library is also available here. And as you'll see, it's right there ready for me to use. So this is the beauty of these CC libraries. They can be used across the programs. So I got my colors there. The thing is, I want to give these elements different colors. So again, this is where the fact that it's grouped kind of gets in the way. So again, I could ungroup it, but a trick that not many people know, at least when they're starting out in the Illustrator is that you don't have to do that. You can use a tool that's hidden under this tool called the group Selection tool. So if you choose that one instead, deselect, if you need to. But then you can click on one element at a time. Now, you're not seeing that element actually when I select it. I think I've turned off another feature, which is hide edges. Okay, I should have done that. There we go. So basically, I had previously hidden the edges when I was last in this document, which is why that was happening. So there we go. Now I can select these objects one at a time, much like in design, you have the so called fill of an object, and then the stroke that's the line around the edge, so I can see the fill changing. And then I can just choose different colors that line up with my brown guidelines. Something like that. Maybe that's better. I'm not sure. I'll leave it up to you how you want it to. So within a few minutes, you've managed to source a vectorgraphic from somewhere online. You've downloaded it. You've opened up the SVG version, the scalable vectorgraphic version. You've copied it into Illustrator, having ungrouped it, and then by using the group selection the main selection tool, you've scaled it. And then with the group selection tool, you've managed to change the colors to match the brand guidelines. So that's our first steps in Illustrator. 13. Edit an SVG icon: Going to continue our look at editing vectorgraphics that we can download online. As you can see here, I've got another brand you haven't seen yet, and we're creating a social media image for them. It starts like this, but it's going to end up looking like that. So the idea is, rather than creating this ourselves, we're going to download it and change it so that it matches the brand colors, in this case, white. So this has come from feather icons, which I really like the style of these. So lots of icons available online. I've created icons myself in the past. And what I find challenging is to get ones that look like they all belong together. And I think this is a really good example of a set that work really, really well together. So I recommend this to you. Since I decided on using these, they've actually allowed you to choose the color you want as you download, which lightly defeats the purpose of what I'm about to show you. But anyway, we'll ignore that. And so as you saw, I found an image down here somewhere that looked a bit like a paper plane, which I thought might be quite useful. And it's there somewhere. There we go, that one. So I just clicked that and I downloaded it, which you can do too, and now I'm going to open it in Illustrator. Now, very often, these files are really, really tiny. You might not even see that I've downloaded it or opened it because it's so small there. So with my Zoom tool, I'm going to just click a few times. And if we take a look and see what the file consists of, for clonic, you can see that's one object there, and there's another one. So I'm going to just click and drag around all those bits, all two of them. And as you might see here, we've got the fill color is none. That's white with a red line through it, so there's nothing there. And the stroke color, that's the line around the edge is black. So I want to change that to white. So if I go over here to color, you always get the nun black and white colors there. So I'm going to go to white like that. And then I suppose I could just save it as it is, but I'm going to save it. Find it's best to save it with a name that's useful. I'm going to put it in the right place here. I'm going to call it Limon. We deliver. I could save it as an SVG, but I generally tend to work I generally tend to send things into Illustrator if I'm going to be working with Illustrator in design, which is what I'm doing here. So I'll save that obviously because it's white, it's hard to see what's going on, but let's just see if it works. So I go back into in design. Now, actually, I'm in preview mode, as you might see, we're going to go into this one. So view screen mode and normal so we can see all the elements. That's helpful. Now, when you place something into in design, what we've done before is we've selected a frame and brought images in that way. But if you don't select a frame, when you do file and place, then as you will see, it creates a frame for you and it creates it the size of the image. You notice we've got this tiny little frame. But if I click and drag, I can make it the size I want as I'm dragging it. That's a nice little trick for logos and icons. That's pretty much the size I want, actually, but if I wanted to resize it, a good trick is up here, these numbers. If I press up like that, they get bigger, if I press down, it gets smaller. So there you go. That's another example of the kind of thing we can do. We can get an image online. If it's an SVG, it's in vector format, so we can open it and Illustrator it and we can change colors. 14. Using your brand colours: For our final look at editing SVGs, we've got just another quick example of working again with the humans, Pablo Stanley as humans, but this time for another brand. So for this brand here, rather than going with a paper play idea, we're going to go with some people. Personally, I'm not convinced that it works, but I like the way the colors work. So let's look at how we would do that. So as you know, inside here, we've got all kinds of interesting characters we can work with. So I've opened up a couple of SVGs in Illustrator. Here's one, and here's the other. You might notice also, I got from the Brown guidelines, I've created a CC library. So there we go. There's all those colors there. So you can create yourself a CC library. You can open up one or two or more of these characters if you want to and then change the colors to match. So, for example, they're pretty close to the colors anyway. I could just leave those, but I might, for example, say, Okay, I want her to have a red top, for example. I notice I'm using, by the way, the group selection tool as opposed to the main selection tool, as I call it, which would select the whole group. So let's suppose I do something like that, and then in fact, it's the same colors there. Let's say we had a orange skirt maybe something like that. Okay, the other thing you might notice for the finished one is that I turned around. So the way I did that was to select everything and then hidden under this rotate tool is a reflect tool, more about the rotate tool later. Now if I double click, I can flip around like that. And then really, it's just a case of copying and pasting into in design. Now, often you place into from Illustrator to in design. It kind of depends if you want to edit something later. So something like a logo, which you wouldn't generally want to change. It's a good idea to place it in. But if there's any chance that you want to paste, sorry, if you want to work with this and manipulate it one way or another, like I might do, I can bring it in. So control C to copy, Control V to paste or command if you're on a Mac, and I can move her in like that, for example. I can do the same with the other. So you get the sense, I hope of how you can grab assets online. Later in the course, you learn how to create these kind of things on your own. But for now, grab them online to have a look at the different options, bring them in, change them to the brand colors so that they work, and see what you come up with. So best of luck. 15. Improving image contrast with Photoshop (MODULE 5): In this section of the course, we're going to take our first look at Adobe Photoshop. So as has already been explained a little bit, Photoshop is largely the program you're going to use to edit photographic images or to use the technical term bitmap images. So those images which get sent to you as a JPEG or a pin, if you want to edit those, so you want to make them lighter or darker or cut somebody out from a background, that kind of stuff, Photoshop is the default program used to do that. You can also use it to create images for social media or that kind of stuff in a similar way that you can do within design. But primarily, it's used to edit photographs. So that's what we're going to start with. We're going to look at a few techniques you can use to improve photographs. Now the context of this is important because I've already suggested you use images from somewhere like splash or it might be you've got your own sources of images. Now very often images are absolutely fine. I've had to look quite hard on on splash for images that fit these brands that also could do with a bit of improving. Most of them are going to be fine. But if you know what to look for and also what photoshop can do for you, you'll be in a much better position when it comes to bringing in images and making the most of them. These are normally pretty subtle changes, but nonetheless really useful ones. And one more bit of context. The changes we're going to make here will affect the whole image. So every single pixel, that's quite different from painting in or selecting, which are different techniques which we'll look at in further modules. But for now, we're looking at improving images, and the changes we make will affect every single pixel. So here we are in Photoshop, like with in design, like with Illustrator, the setup is the same, the area working in, the tools panel, the control panel, the menus, and the other panels over here. So looking at this image, as you know already, this is made of lots and lots of pixels. Let me give you a bit more technical info on that. If I change to the Zoom tool and keep zooming in, eventually you're going to see it's made up of individual squares of color. What I also want you to see up here, it says RGB. And what that means is each pixel contains three units of information or three channels of information. Firstly, how much red, secondly, how much green, thirdly, how much blue. And it's an eight bit image, which is technical jargon for meaning each of these channels contains 256 shades. So each pixel can contain up to two, five, six of red or green or blue, multiply those together, and you've got an awful lot of potential colors. So let's just zoom out. Actually I'm going to do it up here by doing Fit screen. I might just zoom out a tiny bit more by holding down the key clicking once on my Zoom tool. I'm going to go back to the move tool now. The first thing we're going to do is go image adjustments and levels. So we've just talked about RGB and you might notice we go 0-255. That gives us a total of these 256 shades of red and green and blue. This thing called a histogram is showing us how many pixels are using each level of light. You can see there's loads of them in this really dark part of the image, but hardly any in the light half. This is a way of telling that the image is overly dark. You might hear a noisy plane going over my head. Hopefully you can still hear what I was saying. So the image is overly dark. Now, being Photoshop, we can do something about that. I'm seeing that all this area here, we're not really using any of this. So at the moment, white is at this point. So if I drag that all the way back to where we start having pixels that are being used, then it's going to mean that all the pixels from here onwards become white, and it brings back a bit more use down here. Let's look at what that does to the image on the screen. If I turn the preview off and back on again, you can see this image is now much more contrast to. The light pixels are lighter and the dark pixels a little bit darker. So that alone, if you just know one thing in Photoshop, that will really help you when you've got an overly dark image. So if I press Okay there, if I saved that, if I just did file and save, in fact, I'm going to do that, if I do file and save, saves it as a JPEG. Now, if I was to close this, this is typically what you might do. And then I go and open it again, which I think I'll be able to do. Here we go. So this is I just show you this in a different viewing mode here if I go into list view. You can see, you can't see that because you don't know when I'm recording it, but I can tell you, I've just literally changed it now. What's happening that might say today, but trust me, I've just saved it. But when I reopen it, if I think, actually, I want to go back to how that was at the beginning, I can't go back. There's no kind of reset because I've already saved over it. So there's a problem with using the command I've just shown you. In Photoshop terminology, what I've just done is what's called a destructive change. So I've permanently changed the so called background layer over here. Now, I'm throwing a lot of jargon at you here. You might be thinking, What on earth are you talking about? Destructive change on the background layer. Well, this is useful jargon because I'm going to go back. I've got another version of this before. At least I think I've got another version of this. And I'm going to show you a different way of working on this, which is non-destructive, which means I can do the work on it. I can close it, I can save it, and then I can come back later and I can make additional changes or go back. So in the next video, I'll show you how that would work. 16. Non-destructive image editing : In the previous video, we took our first look at Photoshop, and we discovered how we can use the levels command to improve the contrast in an image. But what we also saw is that if you do it that way, it's to use the jargon destructive. So I want to show you a way that's completely non-destructive, which isn't always appropriate, but if you've got both options, you can decide which to use. So here we go. It's the same image. I've resurrected it back from my downloads flber. And I'm going to use levels like last time, but I'm going to do it a different way. I'm going to come to the layers panel where you'll spend a lot of time in Photoshop, and right down the bottom here is a little button. I'm going to try and zoom in on it for you. It's this one here. It says, if you hover over it, create a new fill or adjustment layer. We're going to create a so called adjustment layer. Click on it, and there's a variety of them here. We'll look at some of them. We're going to use levels. So it creates effect over the top of our background layer. When I click on this side, it gives me some settings I can use. If I zoom out a little bit, you'll recognize there's the same histogram as before. If I was to drag this back, remember, as I drag this back, all the pixels to the right of here become fully white. But by restricting that, it just gives more tonal range to use the jargon over the rest of the image. I can do that. In one sense, I get exactly the same result as before. But if I just save this now, if I go if I just try and do file and save at the moment, it's a JPEG. But when I save, it's going to offer to do it in a different way. So you might notice it's going to save it in Photoshop format. So it's not offering me JPEG, and there's a reason for that. It's saving it in Photoshop format because Photoshop format supports layers, which is what I've now got. So I've now got an image with the background layer plus this other special layer. So, in other words, it needs to save it as Photoshop. So if I just scoop that along a bit, you'll see that a Photoshop document has the PSD suffix. If someone offers you a PSD document, then you know it's a Photoshop document, so it's probably got layers in there. If I save that, that's fine. Now, just so you can see the difference, if I was to close this down and then reopen it. Let me just do that here. Looks the same. But notice with my levels layer, I can hide the layer by clicking on the eye. So the original information is still there. So if I needed to say to my boss or my colleague, Look, this is what I've done to the image. What do you think? Then you've got before or after, so they can say, Yeah, that's great. They might say, Yeah, could you take that a bit further? In which case, you could click on here, and you could pull that even further to get yet more contrast, or they might say, Can you take it back a bit, so you could take it back this way. So it remains infinitely flexible, which isn't always what you want, but if you do want it, this is the way to do. Okay, so so far so good, we've got the image, we've improved it, I would say, considerably with a bit more contrast, and it's lightened it at the same time. But there's something else we're going to do here. Again, with an adjustment layer, we might as well use these no in about them. Vibrance. Vibrance is about color. You won't have noticed any difference yet, but if I increase the vibrance, can you see the greens just look a bit kind of greener? They look a bit more vibrant. Now, you don't want to overcook this. You don't want to go so vibrant that they look unrealistic. But if you compare the before and after, I think you'll start to see that looks just a little bit better. And if you want to compare the before and after, in other words, hide both of those things at once, the easiest way to do that is if you hold down the alt or option key, so t on the PC option on the Mac and click on the background layer I, it hides all the other layers except for the background, so you can see the before and after. So if you're trying to sell green beans or runner beans or whatever kind of beans these are, I would be more tempted to buy them if they looked more like that. If you're looking at them and thinking, Yeah, they look a bit too much, the vibrance is too much, then you can just dial it down a notch. 17. Apply colour correction: So far in Photoshop, we found ourselves using levels and vibrant, and they can very often be useful in your images. But there's a much more subtle problem that can occur in images that's really quite hard to fix unless you know what you're doing. So I'm going to show you in one sense, it's quite a high end technique, but it's one of those things that will just make the odd image look so much better, and this is a good candidate for that. This is a great image, but there's something a little bit not quite right about this. So levels will help a bit, vibrance will help a bit. But to be absolutely honest with you, the problem with this image is that the white balance is a little bit wrong. So this is easier to see kind of after we fixed it. So I'll explain briefly the theory now, but it will make more sense at the end, I suspect. So what I'm going to do here is show you some areas in the image, which I'm guessing should be white or gray or black. So, in other words, they shouldn't have any color associated with them, so green or pink or blue. Now, that's a guess. But I reckon this area here that I'm focusing on should be sort of grayish. So I'm going to use this tool here called the color sampler tool and I'm going to click on there. And this brings out the info panel, and it shows me the RGB values. 62, 69 and 71. Now, what they're telling me is that these values are not equal. But if that pixel that I clicked on was completely neutral, so in other words, grayish or sorry, not greenish or pinkish or blue, but purely gray, then those values would be equal. So the fact they're a little bit off tells me there's likely to be an issue with the color. And what it looks like to me is that the green could be a bit stronger. So the blue and the red are relatively close, but the green could be stronger. So this is part kind of data science and part complete guesswork. So ordinarily, you don't know whether this will make a difference or not. Obviously, I do know because I've found an image that this technique will work on and hopefully will help you to understand. So let's look at how we do it. We create an adjustment layer like before. We're going to do a levels adjustment layer. And the way we're going to do it is, I'm not going to look at the image too much. I'm going to try and zoom my screening so you can see this and you can also see this. We've now got two sets of numbers. The set on the left are the original. They won't change, but the set on the right will change as we make adjustments. So I want to increase the green. The way I do that is I go to the green channel. If I click and drag this middle slider, if I drag it to the right, the value goes down. If I drag it to the left, the value goes up. So I'm trying to get it up to the middle value, which in this case is the red. So when I say middle value, you can see green was the lowest, red was the middle value, blue was the highest. So those are now the same. Honestly, you can't always get them exactly the same, but that's closer. And then the blue I want to reduce down a couple of notches, so I drag this to the right. Yeah, I did say you can't always get it exact. That's about as close as I'm going to get it. Okay, so I haven't looked at what it actually looks like on screen, but now if I zoom back out, let's take a look at the before and after. That's the before, that's the after. So what's happened here is that I've measured a pixel down there, which I thought should have looked sort of that looks more sort of grayish now, whereas before, it looks a bit pinkish, and pink is one of the causes of pink is an absence of green. So there we go. I think that looks much better. It took me a long time to learn this stuff. When I was into this, it was pre Internet, and I couldn't find any books written about it. Fortunately, I was freelancing on someone's desk one day, and they had this all written out, and I thought, it's like, This is a gold mine. So having discovered it, I've used it ever since and taught it ever since. There are other ways of doing it in Photoshop, which sometimes work, sometimes don't this pretty much always works. So long as where you click with this color sampler tool is on something that should be gray. If it isn't, then you'll see pretty quickly that even though the numbers line up, the color looks worse. If that happens for goodness sake, just abandon it. There we go. That's how you do colour correction. We'll do one more in a subsequent lesson. Now, let's use the other techniques we know. We'll use levels again but this time to increase the contrast. This is in the RGB. Let's just drag that slider back like that, something like that. Then let's also do a bit of vibrance as well. I'm not going to do this so much because it's pretty bright, but I'll do it, let's say, about halfway, and then I find it easiest to turn it off and turn it back on again. Yeah, it looks a tiny bit better. Try it a bit further. Yeah, the greens are just looking a bit punchier, maybe a bit too much. But let's compare with the original. So Alt click on the background layer. Yeah, look at that. That looks much more like it. I think maybe I've overcooked the vibrant a little bit, so I can just come back. But again, like with the last one, if I save it as a PSD, I can open it up next week, and I can look at it and go, No, actually, I'm going to dial those down or dial them further up. So there you go. That's how you perform colour correction, as well as doing levels and vibrant. Oh 18. Sharpening an image: For the final lesson in this module, I'm going to show you before and after so you can see where we're going. It's pretty similar to the previous lessons, but here's the before of the image and here's the after. So most of this we've done already, but we'll do one extra thing, which will work quite well on this image. Just before I say anymore, some of these techniques work well on some images, some work well on others, and really, it's just a mix and match. You try all the ones you think will work and you go with the best results. Don't feel you always have to do levels or vibrant or whatever. Okay, so here we go. I'm going to go through this relatively quickly because you know the theory already. So I'm going to start with the colour correction because we did that last time. So the color looks wrong here. So the thing is, though, I don't know quite where to click because you can see that sort of a looks kind of more bluish and some looks more yellowish. So I've obviously done this before. And actually, if we look at the other one, the finished one, you'll see I sample down there. But I did try some other areas. And if I tried other ones, basically, what I would have done is I would have gone through and got the pixel measuring the same values, and then the color wouldn't have looked right. So if that happens, as I said, last time, just back out of it and try it again. So this kind of area seemed to work. So this is saying that this time, the blue is really strong, so that needs to come down and the red needs to come up. So again, we do a levels adjustment layer. I'll zoom in over here for you. So let's start this time with the blue channel. Bring that down to 127 or closest we can get. You might wonder why I'm doing this without looking at the screen. I do find it works better that way. I only look at it once I've got it as close as I can in terms of the numbers. Yeah, it's going to go one way or other. That looks fine. And then the red needs to come up. It is counterintuitive. You drag the middle slider of levels down to make it go up and vice versa. That's probably as close as we'll get. Okay, let's see what that looks like. Yep, I'm pretty happy with that. The color, it's still lacking in contrast, but that to me, looks more natural. Yeah, I'm happy enough with that, I think. If I wasn't, I would bin that layer and then do another one. Okay. Let's do another levels layer. It's time for the contrast, but you'll see the contrast. Actually, it's already using the full tonal range. So here, the other thing we can do here on the RGB, the so called composite channel, I can make the overall image darker or brighter. So I might just tweak that a little bit and make it a little bit brighter. Let's try a bit of vibrance. Again, let's try that before and after. Yeah, I think I like that. Let's compare all those three. Yep, I like that. That's got a bit more life in it. Okay, but one more technique for you. Now, this again is subtle. These are all subtle, but hopefully they add up to something that looks better. What I want to do is make sure I'm viewing this image at 100%. This is important when you do this next thing we're going to do, which is called sharpening. So to view at 100%, easiest way to do that is do the command or Control plus do that a few times. There we go, 100%. And then I might use my hand tool just to pull that down a little bit. Now, this image is a tiny bit out of focus, I would suggest. And whilst there's nothing you can do in Photoshop to make something more in focus, that might come in the future, but currently, that's still not possible. We can make it look a bit more in focus. Now, again, take this with a pinch of salt. This is not a magic bullet, again, this is relatively complicated. So I will try my best to make it simple. But if it doesn't make sense till after the end of this process, that's absolutely normal. So I'm going to drag the background layer onto this little new layer button. What that does is it duplicates the background layer. So we've now got the original layer and a copy. And on this one, I'm going to change the blending mode. We haven't seen blending mode yet, but I'm going to change it to hard light. Where are we going? There we go hard light. And we're going to go filter, O and high pass. Now, what I'm trying to do here I'm going to click up here somewhere. I want to lower this value down. So we just kind of get a little sense of the edges here. So something like that, and it's going to accentuate those edges and just make it look a little bit more in focus. So it's a cheat, but it often works. So ip can see that. So if I take that too far to the left, literally nothing's going to change. If I go too far to the right, that's too much. So I just want the sort of tiniest sense of the edges being accentuated. Now, when you're dealing with really tiny values like this, a good trick is you put your cursor in the area where the numbers are, and then you press the up or down arrows, and it just goes down or up in one notch. And then you can keep looking. You can see it's getting more and more subtle. So that's a pretty subtle one. I'm going to leave it about there. Press okay. If I hide and show that layer. Yeah, that's really subtle, actually. I've gone a bit too subtle for you. I got to do that one more time, Bin the layer, duplicate another one, change it to hard light. Again, filter other high pass. I'm going to go maybe a bit too strong, just so you can see the difference. Let's try that. So let's compare that so if you look at the edge of the leaves, look at the before and the after, it just looks a tiny bit crisper, tiny bit less out of focus. It's a kind of cheat. But if you get that radius value right, it can really, really help. So if you're thinking that didn't make any difference, then fair enough. It's very, very subtle. But again, I would say that adds up to an image that's kind of just about usable to one that really looks a whole lot. Better. So there we go. So the same changes we made before, levels for the tonal range, levels for the colour correction, bit of vibrance, but also this last one, it does sharpening, but it's a filter called high pass, and we made use of a blending mode, more about those later and a filter. I know we haven't used either of those before, but that's something you can try, and I hope it will make a difference. One final word of advice with all these things. Better to undercook them than overcook them. Don't ruin your images by going too far with this stuff. Okay, so well done, that's the end of this module. 19. Basic graphic design theory (MODULE 6): So you might remember from the introduction to this course, I was saying that alongside doing design work, I've been teaching adults how to use creative software mainly by Adobe for many years now. And that kind of goes into two halves. The first half was pre 2008, so before the crash when essentially I was teaching professional designers, people who had already gone through art school, that kind of thing. Whereas now it's hardly ever the case that I'm teaching people who've got any design background. So having some design background clearly is important when you are going to be doing design work. So just to put that into context, the thing is whether or not you've ever done any formal training, you will have a sense of design, I would say. I think everybody does. You know what you think looks good and what you think looks bad. You might not know why you like things or why you don't like things. So part of my job here is to educate you in terms of some of the language of design, some of the concepts of design so that you can start to name the things that you like, why you like them, why you don't like them because that's the start of you establishing your own style, which is half the battle. So this is not rocket science. But it does get easier with the experience, and it does get easier as you can name things. So we're just going to talk about four concepts here, which are not tricky. I'm sure you'll get them pretty much straight away. My aim here is to teach you this stuff as quickly as possible so that you can spend the time actually looking at this for yourself because that's really what it's about. It's about developing your eye for design. So let's look at the screen here and you can see the first design term is repetition. So repeating elements. So you can see all those squares. They are exactly the same size, and they're all the same color. So it kind of feels like they belong together. You might think, well, that's obvious. And yeah, it is it is obvious. They belong together. We can see that. Even when they're maybe seeming a bit more random, they're still the same color, they're still the same shape, even though they're triangles now rather than squares, they feel like they belong together. Furthermore, possibly what I could have said on the last slide as well, because the font, the text uses the same color, that feels like that all belongs together on the same page. You might have felt that already when you're putting things together in design. Some things feel like they work together and some things don't and repetition really is a key part of that. Now, repetition on its own will only get you so far. To make things look a bit more interesting, often a client or your boss might say, can you make it pop when someone says that or something like that? That kind of annoys me. I think really what people mean when they say that is, could it have a bit of contrast? Could there be something in there that you notice? So I suspect that when this slide came in, you noticed the circle, not because it's any bigger than the other element, not because it has a different color, but in this case, because it has a different shape. So because it looks different, everything else is repetition, but contrast as well. Draws your eye and makes it more interesting. These two things seem to be completely opposite from each other, but they work together, so repetition and contrast. I know you noticed that. You're noticing it now not because the shape is different, but of course, the color is different. So you might be thinking, Goodness, really, this is not rocket science, and you would be right. It really is not rocket science. I did know a rocket scientist once, actually, but that's maybe for another day. So there we go. That's contrast this time to do with color. And now to do with size, your eye is drawn to the thing that is contrasting. So we have repetition, we have contrast. Here's repetition and contrast. Of course, because the type is orange, it's the same color. It's the square that's contrasty, it kind of feels like they belong together. So your eye connects those two things. So all this happens in a split second. You may or may not realize what's happening, but these are the kind of things we respond to. So repetition and contrast. Now, alignment. You might think there's nothing to say about alignment. It's obvious when things are aligned, but they're aligned for a reason and they're aligned to make them feel like they belong together. Now, in this case, those blocks, they feel like they belong together because they're all together, they line up with the text. So, that's all aligned. That's straightforward, isn't it? However, it's more important when elements are a long way apart from each other. These two squares would look completely random. There is repetition, I realize, so that makes them feel like they belong together. They still look quite apart from each other, but the fact that they're aligned together does make them more feel like they belong together. Might be pushing it slightly, but that's how alignment can be useful. We'll see some actual examples of this in due course. Now, when you're aligning something to text, the important thing is you align your object to the baseline of the text, the so called baseline, BSE LINE, not baseline, as in heavy, heavy bass drum and bass, whatever, base as in the base of a ladder or something. Okay? So that orange line represents the baseline of the text, and because the bottom of the square lines up with that, it feels aligned. So rather than the so called descender of that lowercase Go lining up with the baseline of the text. And then the last thing we're looking at is what we call proximity. So you would imagine that there are two separate elements there at the bottom. So we just feel like the ones on the right are separate from the ones on the left. We feel that because there's more space in between the two units. So automatically, we group them. So I would suggest you'd see three groups there, the type at the top and the blocks bottom left and the blocks bottom right. Proximity, that can be really useful as you're putting things together, having an awareness of that. Now here, it's a bit more confusing. You can see that these two elements, I say two elements, the blocks at the bottom are separate from the blocks at the top, but you might be thinking, well, hang on, the block, what are we talking about here? The blocks at the top, they go with the type at the top. I would say you probably see two different elements there. The word proximity and the topmost blocks and the bottom blocks. So that's kind of how proximity works. We just when we quickly process something, we see things in groups. So depending on how close they are together. So the previous one is a bit clearer. The objects, three groups, whereas there we've got two. So repetition, contrast, alignment, and proximity, I'm hoping that makes really good sense as you see it in theory. Next, we're going to look at a few examples of these things in practice. 20. Applying graphic design theory: Okay, so let's take a look at a few examples and see how this works in real life. So you've already worked with these few things. So this first one here, as you can see, well, let's talk about repetition. What can you see there that's repeated? And obviously, I'm guessing that what you're thinking is white. And, of course, there's lots of white there. So even though we've got different type there, there's lots of white. So that's repeated. So it all feels like it belongs together. That's the theory. I hope it works. So that's repetition. And then contrast, of course, the cool beans and lemone type, but that's repeated, but it's very contrasty from the rest of the text. And of course, that's all designed that way. So it's designed within the branding. So more about type in a future lesson. But in a nutshell, you're trying to get type that feels like it belongs together, even though it's different. So that's where the repetition and contrast thing comes in. So repetition of the fonts, repetition of the color, but the contrast between those two different typefaces is massive. I would also say there's a deliberate contrast between the size of, let's say, the logo at the bottom and the headline at the top. Okay, what about this one? So repetition, I think is fairly easy to see here. We've got the same shade of green bottom left and top right on the logo and the circular text, which is almost the same green as the color of the background. So not quite the same. Otherwise, obviously, you wouldn't be able to read it, but close enough. The jargon there is it's an analogous color. So more about that when we look at color theory. Don't want to delve too deeply into that right now. But again, you can see this kind of repetition. It feels like it belongs together. But of course, briefly in terms of color, we want the headline to be noticed, so that's quite different. That's quite contrasty to the green. So repetition, we've got the greens. And in terms of contrast, well, clearly the font, the big headline font, staying indoors font, that's very, very different from the font in the logo and a little bit different from the circular text. And also what's a bit weird there is that the alignment is deliberately not consistent. Again, that's part of the decision that I made when I put it together to make it look a bit quirky. The text is aligned to the middle of the page. Those two bits of text in the middle are aligned to each other, but not to anything else in particular. Let's look this final one that you've already worked on. So there's quite a lot going on here. Not too much in the way of contrast. It's mainly repetition. So you can see there's two typefaces here. There's the bold version and the non bold version. That is essentially the contrast that exists. And the repetition, of course, it's simply black and white, tiny bit of gray in the map. So there's lots and lots of repetition. I think the interesting thing here is partly the alignment and partly the proximity. Look carefully at the logo at the top left, and you can see where it says, Discover cultural tours. The baseline of the text of the lower line there deliberately lines up with the Nicaragua highlights line. So that lines up with that as opposed to the bottom of the black block, if I can say that. So that's how that works. And you might notice the top of the capital T and I for tour information, I felt that look better aligning to the very top of the black block in the logo. So yeah, spent a bit of time trying to get that aligned in a way that again, it looks like it belongs together, talking of which proximity. So you would probably perceive that block, the logo, and that text as one element, and that's absolutely what I wanted you to do. And then in terms of alignment, you can see that the top left the logo lines with the whole like a straight line going straight down the page. Notice the map aligns with the top section of the text. So there's lots of very solid alignment going on there. But the main thing I want to talk about here is proximity. The deliberate space that we've got above day one, day two, day three, day five, et cetera, makes it very obvious to you if you're reading this, of course, you don't need me to tell you what happens on day one, and you can read it and you can read it easily because the extra space around it. In other words, we perceive the stuff to do with Day one as separate from day two. Again, it's not rocket science, but when you're designing, try and think about where you're trying to direct people's attention. For me, having that extra space around it, that's the proximity thing. So here we've got a good balance of repetition of the fonts contrasts with the weight of the fonts. Alignment speaks for itself, I think, but the proximity is what makes this really easy to digest. And that's often what you're trying to do. You're trying to convey a message. So the proximity there works pretty well. Let's look at alignment in proximity and the other examples here. So there's a very strong central alignment here. Everything lines up to the center of the page. And, of course, in terms of proximity, the logo is deliberately away from the rest. But within the logo, we've got those two very different elements, so they're very different fonts again. But again, because they're really close together, you perceive it as one unit. Okay. And then finally here, again, in terms of proximity, you'll perceive those two bits of the two slightly separate blocks of type in the middle as one, I would imagine at a distance, again, because they're relatively close together, but they're further apart from the other elements there. And, yeah, I think that's probably all I've got to say about that. So hopefully, looking at these things, it just gives you a sense of, Oh, right, this is how we do it. You can design things differently to me. You certainly will. But if you are aware of those different elements, the more experience you get, the easier this becomes, you start to do it more and more intuitively, but you're using those elements we've looked at, repetition, contrast, alignment, and proximity. And of course, there are more that we're not talking about yet, but we will in future videos. So I'm going to give you some homework to do that will put all of that into practice for you. 21. Create a flyer from a template (MODULE 7): Your experience of in design so far in this course, has been opening up existing documents, making changes and saving them. And don't get me wrong, that's absolutely fine sometimes. Sometimes that's the most efficient way of working. But there's a different approach which we're going to look at on this module, which involves working from templates, in this case, that someone else has made. So we'll look at that. We'll also look at how to make a template if you feel that's going to be useful for you. And then we're also going to look at two things that are a bit more technical to do with sharing work and to do with printing, both might be really useful for you at some stage. So that's what we're going to cover in this module to start with templates. So this is where we're going. This is a company you haven't seen yet, the final one, I think, probably in the course. You can see it's quite vibrant color scheme. They use red and yellow, and they're looking really for mainly bluey images to go with that. Anyway, more of that in a second. So that's the finished document. When I say finished document, what I want to stress here is you're normally working with these dot INDD files in InDesign. That stands for InDesign. Final D stands for document. Whereas what you're about to see is an ensign template. And when I open one by doing file open, you're going to see it's an IND, T for template. So you'll notice it looks pretty similar to the finished one. There's lots of Xs in here, and there's also you might remember the hidden character there. That means the end of the story. So that's that bit. But these Xs, when I crect templates for people, I try to make it very, very obvious where you've got generic copy. By putting something like an X in there or something in Latin, as we have down here, just doing Command plus to zoom in, it hopefully should make it really easy for the user to spot. Oh, yeah, I need to change that. That's why we're seeing lots of Xs. Okay, so to make this one look like this, look like this. You know most of this already. We would select the frame, change the type tool, click inside there. And then obviously we start typing. So as we saw before, so Cuba is going to fit in here perfectly, as you might guess, to make it nice and easy. But if it was Mexico or Venezuela or Nicaragua or a longer word, then obviously we'd need to make the text the font size smaller, and then we might close this up at the bottom. So we might do that later. We'll see how we go. Okay, so that's the text. Let's select the frame, bring the image in, so file and place now, let me bring a conventionally shaped one in first. So this one. This is portrait shape, and it's a portrait frame, so that's probably going to work. Object fitting fill frame proportionally. You know, I quite like that. I think that works pretty well. I'm tempted to stick with that. I'm going to just bring the other one in just to give you another example of how you might resize an image. So again, object fitting, fill frame proportionally. So you can see this guy's pretty central and the yellow kind of goes with that. So it's a bit of repetition going on kind of. But I really probably want him up a little bit, so he's more we can see a bit more of him. So to do that, I'm going to click on the center there. And now, as you might recall, I've got access to the brown frame. So I can press this up arrow here to make that a bit bigger, and then I can click and pause and drag, see if I can do something like that, I think that looks much better. I can bring him in. I might even bring him in like that so we get a bit of yellow off of his foot, which I hadn't quite realized was there. Again, that kind of links that pointing towards this. So I'm hoping that feels like it belongs together. Yeah, I quite like that, I think, maybe moving back a tiny bit. Okay. Let's try that. Alright, moving on. So now, in terms of the text down here, I'm going to click This is kind of hinting that we've got three lines of text. So going copying the finish one, the one I did earlier said cigar, return, central, return, Adventure. I don't like the way that's really quite far apart, so I'm going to use I'm going to reduce the leading like that. Then rather than you watch me type this text in here, I'm going to just copy from here. A good trick, actually. If you do edit copy and then you're going to paste into something whether there's already some formatting. If you do edit paste without formatting, generally speaking, nine times out of ten, it acquires the formatting of what's in now you might be wondering, given that you know a little bit about paragraph styles, why I wasn't using those, I'm deliberately not using styles here because very often, you're going to encounter pieces of work where styles weren't created. So this is quite common. And for me, I always try and create styles if I can. But if you don't see them, it's not the end of the world for something quite small like this because you can just figure out the text that's being used and stick with the same style. But it's more problematic with something where the text needs to be more consistent and we'll look at that in a couple of videos time. There we go. That is a way you can use a template. Most of the content we've done, you've seen before, but it's another example of how you might work in InDesign. So finally, we'd save that as an insign document, and off we go. 22. Alternative flyer from a template: I'm just going to give you another view on how you might use that with a different image and with a different country name to type in. So I'm going to open the same template. Let's do the text first. So up here, type Mexico exclamation mark. Clearly, that doesn't fit. Good trick here is with your cursor in there, if you do Edit, select all or command or Control A, that selects all the text in that so called story. And that means even the stuff that you can't see. Now, I don't know what font size that needs to be. That's currently 213. Certainly needs to be a bit smaller than that. I'm going to guess, let's say, 150 hit Return. Actually, that was a very good guess. I really was a guess. That's about perfect, actually. But let me see if I can get it any bigger. That's about as good as I'm going to get it. Okay, so that fits okay. But you can see it doesn't really fit the shape of the frame. Of course, it's not tall enough now. So with my selection tool, firstly, I'm going to move the frame that contains the text. And then the way I've done this, I've done a separate frame. That's the red one in the background. So I'm going to pull that up as well. So I'm just doing this visually, just trying to get the same gap top, bottom, left and right. I think that's close enough. If I wanted to be much finer than that, I could zoom in. But one benefit of having them as two separate frames is that you can mess around with that you've got total control over the size of the relative bits. Okay, that's that bit. In terms of the image, I've got another image here. It's not going to work perfectly. This is an image from Mexico. And if I was to do, again, object fitting, fill frame proportionally, and by the way, while we're here, you're noticing we're using this command a lot. This keyboard shortcut is well worth learning if you're into keyboard shortcuts. So command shift and C or control Alt Shift and C on a PC. And if I just do that command here, you can see it just fits it straightaway. So worth learning. I thought that would possibly work. I'm not convinced it does work, but if I now select that, I can make that a bit wider. I reckon if that green sort of fill the space like that, that might work quite well. Yeah, that's not too bad. So it needs a pretty vibrant color to go with that. Probably pull that up a little bit. But I think you get the idea. Those are the two things I wanted to show you. So bringing in a different image and how we work with longer text. I won't bother fitting in the rest, but you can always try that yourself later on. 23. Using Layers and editing path text: So we're getting accustomed to working with templates for brands, and there's another template we're going to work on for plant power. So you've seen a little bit of their stuff already. We're going to create this same flyer, but from a template. And again, just to remind you, a template is there just so you can create loads of different things for the same brand nice and easily. So the things that were tricky to set up maybe at the beginning, they're all there ready to use. So let's take a look. If we open up a template, You can see it looks pretty familiar. One of the reasons I want you to look at the skin is to remind you about layers. So remember the layers panel. If things are separated onto layers as they are for this brand, a good trick is to click, keep your mouse down and just drag through all the layers like that, and then just one at a time, turn on these different elements so you can figure out what goes where. So let's turn them all back on again. I'm working on the photo layer. I can tell that because it's highlighted in blue. I can also see that it's not locked. It's highlighted in blue and it's not locked. That's fine. I can select the frame and then do file and place. And I've got an image I want to try. This is one that we've worked on ourselves. I don't know if it's going to work or not. Let's bring it in. Object fitting fill frame proportionally. Yeah, you know, that might work. Now, because this image isn't cut out, it doesn't make any difference what the background layer is. But when you do use a cutout image, and the brand guidelines do ask for one. But when you do use one, then of course, the background color will be important. In this case, I'm going to not worry about that just so we can use this image that we've been working with. So that's that bit I might as well lock that layer for now, Logo we don't need to worry about. So the text layer, if we unlock that, then we can just what does that say, staying indoors, go on and treat yourself. So you've seen we worked with text before, so I'm going to just copy that Select this and paste it edit paste or Command V or Control V. That didn't work, didn't it? Let's try that again. I'm going to just select or delete that. Let's try that again. Okay, that really didn't work. So let's try that one more time. You'd imagine I should know how to copy and paste. There we go. Few. That could have been embarrassing, couldn't it? Okay, I might try different color there. I'm going to use the plant power. I'm kind of thinking, I wonder if that color would work better. Maybe. Let's just pretend that it does for a minute. So now up here, this text is tricky to select. I suggest what you do is you use the Selection tool first, and then with your type tool, try and line it up, maybe try and click at the top there just so that InDesign knows that's what you want to do. Then again, you can go edit, select all, and then you can type that said something like 50% discount for new subscribers, something like that. I'd carry on typing if I knew what that was supposed to say. But again, you want to stop typing before the end. I'm going to just type apply now. And again, you don't have to talk whilst you're typing. Now let's suppose that's what that had to say. I really don't like the fact that it's kind of an awkward angle there. I'd really like that to be to finish at the bottom. So I could retype that. I could try some slightly different text, or as you might recall from a previous lesson, I could do a bit more tracking. So -20 I've got there. -30. You wouldn't ordinarily do -30 tracking, but because it's on a circle, it works slightly differently. So I quite like that, but I am thinking I probably need to be using one of these different brand colors. I'm going to just, yeah, great mistake there. I've tried to select the text, and inadvertently, I've just created a text frame. That might happen to you if it does, just to undo or Command ed or Control ed. What I should have done, might just need to do another one as well, another undo. What I should have done there to select that is click once in there and then again do Command or Control A or Edit Select and just try a different color. So I might try that dark or purple color. Yeah, it doesn't work at all. So I'm going to stop messing about. But there you go. That's again, a reminder about layers and how to edit text on a path, again, from a template. 24. Using Paragraph Styles: For our final look at working from templates, we're going to look again at something else you've worked with previously, which is the tour sheet for Discover. So I'm just going to open up a template for that. But you can see where we're going here. So you know that we can import the text. I want to just remind you about that bit and about the paragraph styles. So this is the template. And what's really nice about this is that everything we need is built in. So with the type tool, if we click inside this paragraph, we'll need the paragraph style panel, so that's window Styles, Paragraph Styles. So that's kind of you might notice subtly here, often on a template, there'll be some clue as to which style you're going to use. So in this case, it says, introduction for the introduction style, day for the day style, places for the places style, and body for the body style. But then after that, it's all random Latin, which is a feature, by the way, you can do by choosing type, fill with placeholder text. Watch this. There you go, fills it with random Latin. Now, clearly, I don't want to do that. I'm going to just do Command or Control A, which I showed you previously means select all in the edit menu that I can delete. And then that should have taken me back there we go to the right the beginning there. That hash tag again tells me that that's the end of the story. In other words, there's no text in there, so I can do file and place then inside this folder, here's the text. No, I wasn't expecting that. That's telling me that there's an override. So I'm going to select all that text. So one, two, three, four, five clicks is another way of doing Edit Select or Command A. And then most of this text is going to be body text, actually. So as you might recall, you can do Alt and click on the name of the style. So that does two things at once. It makes all the texts using the body style, which means we don't have to do so much later, but it also takes out all the overrides. If there were overrides, because this button is pressed, we'd see them highlighted. So now all I've got to do is go through introduction days places. And then the body ones are taken care of. Let me just do a couple more for you. Days places. And so the idea is with Paragraph Styles, really, really worth its weight and goal once you set these things up later on in the course, you'll learn how to make these things yourself, which will help you greatly. But just remember, one of the other ones we did from a template for go Adventures we didn't have paragraph styles, and then we didn't really need it. So it's known when you need to use them and when you don't, briefly, with this frame selected, Oh, actually, I'm trying to select this frame. Now, if it was selected, I'd see the handles around the edge here. This is telling me that what it's doing, actually, it's selecting this frame in front. Now, I wasn't anticipating this to happen, but seeing as it's happened, if you want to select something that's underneath something else, if you right click on it, so that's easy with a two button mouse, pretty easy on a PC normally. On a MAC, sometimes you might need to do Control Click. That's the CON TRL key that you get on a Mac keyboard. Control left click does a right click. But once you've done a right click, you can say Select last object below. And that didn't work either. Why didn't that work? Let's try next object below. That didn't work either. Goodness. Oh, there we are. I can select it now. Okay, well, that's sometimes a really useful trick, in this case, didn't help. Okay, there we go. Let's do file and place. Bring in the Illustrator file. That's looking good. Okay, so the only other thing I need to do is edit the text that's on the Master page. You might remember this from before. So in the pages panel, double click on the Master Page, and then this is going to be something like that. Let's just do a little bit of tracking to get that to fill the space. Yeah, that should do. And then go back to page one. So that's pretty much there. If I had more time to fill in all the paragraph styles, that would be done. So again, master pages, importing text into that frame and using paragraph styles. So all of these documents show us particular in design features, but they all come from templates. So if you anticipate doing lots and lots of work that's quite similar, one way of doing it is to create a template. 25. How to create a template: You like the idea of templates, then you might be thinking, Okay, great. I like them, but how do I create them? So let me show you how you'd create them. So typically, you create a finished document first, and then once you know, yes, that's good, I'm going to keep reusing that. So I'm going to take this document and turn it into a template. So really, what I want to do is get rid of any specific content that's about this specific tour and keep all the generic stuff. So let me do it pretty speedily. I'll go to the master page and then get rid of that particular bit of content. And I'm going to replace it with generic text. So type fill with placeholder text. Actually, sorry, if I delete that first and then do type, fill with placeh the text. Perfect. Back to page one. Now, I could just strip out all of this text. In fact, I think I will. I'll just do Edit, select all and delete. I think what I'm going to do is just go introduction and type introduction, hit return, and do days. Now, you really don't have to do this, but I feel it's kinder for someone that doesn't really know how the thing is supposed to look. Just to do that. Maybe even then do fill with placeholder text, then maybe actually delete most of that. Just dragging back if I can. No, that's not going to work. I'll drag it back as far as I can and delete. Just get rid of a chunk of it like that. So I would hope that if someone had that template, they'd kind of figure out which bits they needed to change. And if they know about paragraph styles, they'll get a sense of how that works. I don't always do that. Sometimes I strip out all the texts. The main thing is the paragraph styles are there. The final thing would be to get rid of the map from this frame. Again, there's an issue with that. Let's just try selecting the last object below. There we go. So when I click in the middle there, again, I'm seeing the brown frame, which means I've got access to the contents of the frame. I'm just going to press delete or backspace to get rid of that. So there we go. There's our empty frame. So now to say that as a template, I'd simply go file, say that, and I would choose rather than in design document, I'd choose InDesign template, call it something useful. So discover tour sheet. Template. But the key thing is that I've chosen it to be in template format, which gives it that NDT. That's what you need to know about creating templates. 26. Commercial printing: bleed: Early in the course, I try to set the context of whether your work will end up on screen, I digital or printed. So it's the printed stuff we're going to talk about now. So when we talk about print, we're not really talking about the kind of thing that would come out of your desktop print or ink jet printer, although it could, but really the process of getting something to a commercial printer, where they'll print thousands of copies of your leaflet or your brochure or whatever. So there's quite a bit of jargon to learn and a few bits of terminology that will really help kind of smooth that transition. So if you look at my screen here, I've just Googled offset Litho printing press, which is a particular kind of printing press. And if you look here on the right, that gives you a sense of the scale of what we're talking about. So this could be something that would be the size of a garage or the size of a room or the size of a van. So we're talking about lots of sheets of paper going through at high speed. Hence the commercial nature of it. These things cost a lot of money to buy and maintain. So I've attempted to simplify this by means of a little document here. So at a very simplified level, what we've got here on the left, this is a whole bunch of big sheets of paper. So they come in the printing press and go through these rollers where cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink. Those four colors, often called the four color process, the four process colors get applied one at a time onto the sheet of paper, and at the end, you got your printed document. Not quite document yet, but still sheets of paper. Moving on from there, so these sheets of paper will have several examples, let's say, have a flyer on them. So let's suppose it was an A five flyer. You might have 16 of those up on one sheet of paper. That would be called 16 up in the jargon. You might have seen a proof featuring these kind of things, these kind of spidery lines. Now, the idea here is that once this is printed, it goes through some kind of glotine and the glatin will chop, and it will line up with those lines and just cut like that and like this, and then down and down and down and down. And you'll end up with, in this case, six flyers, and this paper around the edge will be recycled. So that's the kind of process. One of the bits of jargon you're going to come across is that bleed, BLEED. So a printer might ask you if you want them to print something, they might ask, does it bleed? So that's the first thing I want to kind of get into relates to this. So this tour sheet, I'm going to just look at this in presentation mode for screen mode presentation. If we look around the edge of the document, you can see there's nothing that goes anywhere near the edge. Not on page one, not on page two. Bleeding is something that prints where you've got a color or an image that goes right up to the edge. So that's not the case here. But if I was to look at this one, again, in presentation mode, you'll see that we have got an element, I, a photograph here that goes all the way. This would have to bleed off on all sides, so top, bottom, left and right, because we've got an image that goes all the way to the edge. So when this gets finished, when the blade comes and cuts that off, we need to make sure there won't be an issue if the blade is slightly wrong where if it just misses it or if the paper moves or the blade bends or something like that. You might be thinking, what on earth are you talking about? I'll try and tell you what I mean. So this is what it might look like. If when the blade comes along, it's slightly misaligned. It might end up printing like this. Subtle, but can you see there's a white gap at the top. So this means the knife should have come here, but it came down here instead. So we end up with a bit of extra, it's kind of obvious that we've got extra paper there. So that's what we're trying to avoid. So you might wonder what we do about that and I will show you. So if you've got our flyer like this, the edge of the document, which you'll see if I move this out of the way, that really thin line. That's where it's going to so called trim. That's where the blade is going to trim after it's cut it. Remember that you have several of these on one big sheet. So, to make sure that problem doesn't happen with the bleed, what you do is you go file document setup. At the bottom here, we've got a bleed value. The value of 3 millimeters is normally absolutely adequate unless you're working with very, very large posters or material that's thicker or more complex than paper. If I do that, you might notice we get this red guide around the edge. The blade is going to come here, but what we're going to do is extend our frame out all the way to here. Let's try and control that. That just gives a bit of extra leeway or at least it will in the minute once I've resized the image. I'm going to pull that out that side as well and pull that down. It's in two steps. I've made the frame a bit large so it goes out to meet the bleed, and now I need to go object fitting fill frame proportionally one more time. What I hope you can see when I zoom in. The blade should come down here and cut there, but we've now got a bit of extra leeway. If it comes here, you won't notice much of a difference when it prints as opposed to seeing a white strip, as we saw before. So if a printer asks you, does this thing that you want me to print? Does it bleed? And you have any element like a background color or a photo going all the way to the edge of the document, then you'll say, Yes, it does. In this case, it bleeds on all four sides. If the photo just went to the very top of the page, but not to the sides, you might say, yes, that bleed at the top. Either way, you'll need to set up a bleed before you send it to the printer. So that's one of three things we're going to look at before I show you how to send things to a printer. O 27. Commercial printing: missing images: So if you're preparing to have your document printed, there's a couple of bits of jargon you might come across. We just talked about bleeds. The next one is missing images. Now, when you've imported an image, let's say like this one. You get this little link symbol. This is really, really important. It tells you that the image is properly linked. Now, what does that mean? It means that InDesign knows where it is. You might wonder why that's important. But it's important because when you bring an image in, end design doesn't bring in the full quality of the image, I just brings in enough so you can see what you're doing. I know that sounds odd because this looks fine on the screen now, I realize. I'll explain that in a second. But it only brings in the full collar to the image under certain circumstances, either when you ask for it or when you do something like create a PDF, which is where we're going next. So this image here looks fine on the screen, but it's only looking fine on the screen because I'm using high quality display. That means that InDesign is pulling all of that information in. It's kind of displaying it rather than by using its default approach, which is to use this typical quality. So normally, it only brings in that amount of information, and it only uses the full information when you use high quality display or when you create a PDF or something like that. So that's how it's designed to work now. Watch what happens if I accidentally on purpose move this image. InDesign knows that this is where this image lives. But if I move it, let's say to a different folder, which I'm going to do here. When I go back into InDesign, can you see that link symbol has gone replaced with a red question mark, and you might notice that the quality of the image now looks terrible. That's because it can't source the original so it can't pull that information in. If this was to go to print like this, the map could look as bad as that. Okay. So that's what happens when you've got a missing image or a missing link. So if that happens, you either just move the file back to where you moved it from. But typically what happens is, well, you don't know where the original is, but let's suppose you found it and it was in a different folder, what you would do is go to the Links panel. And again, this is telling us that this is missing. It says, double click to relink, so I'll do that. And if I can find the folder that it was in, which I think is this one. I think I put it in the, I move it in that. That will now relink, and now that blue symbol is there again, so I know the image is no longer missing. So that's really important because the quality that is built into the image is not brought in in design by default, but it's only linked to it. So if that link is maintained, you'll be fine when you come to print. But if the link is not maintained, then the quality will be far lower than it should be. So you can tell if an image is missing because of the red question mark. You can also look in the Links panel and you can see the question mark there if that is the case. So that's missing image. Um, 28. Commercial printing: resolution: Okay, so the third thing you really need to be looking out for before you send something to a printer, as well as missing images, what a printer might call a low res image. They mean a low resolution image. Now, resolution refers to the number of pixels per inch in an image. As you recall in Photoshop, a digital photograph is made up of thousands and thousands or millions of tiny little squares known as pixels. Trouble is, if there aren't enough pixels per inch, then the quality won't look as good as it should. It's kind of hard to know sometimes by looking on a screen, whether or not the quality will be alright. Now, if you're doing something for digital use and the quality isn't good enough, it's not the end of the world because if you realize it, you can change it. But if you sent it to a printer and paid them thousands of pounds of dollars to print a poster, for example, and then you realize later that the quality wasn't as good as it should have been, then there's a problem. So we want to know how we want to know if that's going to happen before we get there. So this image, for example, if I select it, I want to know what the resolution is, and it's really easy when you know how, you select it in the Links panel, and then in the Link info area, which you might need to press this little button to open up, you might need to scroll down as well. What we're looking for here is the effective PPI. So this tells us the effective resolution at the size that you've made the image in design. So in this case, it's 633. Now, the magic number you're looking for is about 300. So so long as it's 300 or more, you shouldn't have any problem at all in terms of the resolution of the image. There might be other problems with the image, like we talked about in the Photoshop section. But in terms of the resolution, in terms of how many pixels there are, you'll be fine. So so long as it's over 300, you're okay. Let me show you what would happen if I brought in a lower resolution image. So this is a much older image, which I'm just going to bring in for you. Let's just fill the frame proportionally. Now, you can probably see on the screen already the quality you can almost see the pixels, but we can tell for sure that the quality isn't good enough because the effective resolution is way, way below 300. So you would really notice the quality would be poor if you sent that to a printer. So we're looking for a resolution of 300 or more personally, I don't get too worried if it's a bit lower than 300, but if it's way lower like that, then you will notice the quality when it prints. If that happens, by the way, I'm not saying you can't use that image. I'm saying you can't use it at that size because what happens if I just made that. Let's just suppose I put the image in here for a second. It won't look any good. But I'll bring exactly the same image in and it'll be much, much smaller. Now you'll notice the quality looks much better here. And that's because the effective resolution, it's 224. That's because the frame is much smaller. If it was even smaller still, the quality would be even higher. So an image with a low resolution, it's not that you can't use it, it's that you can't use it at a very large size. InDesign will tell you whether at the size you're using it, whether the resolution is adequate or not. The larger the stuff you're producing, posters for example, the more problems you're likely to have. My advice is check that early as soon as you bring an image honestly, if you're using images like we've been using from Unsplash, et cetera, or from a modern digital camera, you're not likely to have a problem, but that's how you check in the Links panel. 29. Create a pdf for commercial print: So you've designed your leaflet, assuming it's got no spelling mistakes or anything like that, you check that all the links are intact. That's great. You check the photographic images, the resolutions okay. You put the bleed on if it's required. Now it's time to send it to the printer. So I'm going to show you how I tend to do it. But my advice generally is that you talk to the printer, you ask them, and if they tell you anything that contradicts what I'm saying, great. Go with what they're going to say because they're the people you're paying the money to. But this is generally what I do. I haven't gone through those checks and any others that the printers advised me to look at, I would say file and export, and then I would choose this Adobe PDF brackets print and then save, and then we get some options. And there's different presets, high quality print, smallest file size, and so on. The one I generally go with is this one. Most of these would be fine. But the reason I go with this one is that if we look at output, it converts colors to CMYK. And what that means is very briefly, you might remember in Photoshop, when we looked at the pixels of the images when we were doing the colour correction, they were all in RGB. So images generally come in as RGB, but they need to be output for print in CMYK. If you remember my illustration here, Oh. Those are the four inks that are used. So somehow that needs to be converted. So if you use this kind of PDF setting, it translates it whilst it makes a PDF. So that's the reason I use that one. There are other more technical reasons that I won't go into. So that's what I would choose. And then I would also choose marks and bleeds. Because this has a bleed on it, I need to include that, so I need to press that button. That's important. This other one, all printers marks. So printers would like that, some won't I'll show you what that does. So when I press Export, it makes a PDF, which I'm just going to open. I'm going to open from Acrobat. There it is. So we zoom right in. So this is the bleed bit. So this is the actual trim mark. So the printer once it's printed, will cut on there, cut from there to there and there to there. So that's the extra bleed, so that's good. You can see these are color bars. So this is useful for the printer to check white and black and yellow and cyan and magenta and so on. And then at the bottom, we've got the name of the file and the time and date it was made. And we know that the quality is up to it because we checked the resolution before, and there we go. That's fine for the printer to use. So that's the process. So you design your work. You check those things for quality in terms of missing images, resolution and put bleeds on if you need to. Ask the printer if there's anything else that you need to check or change, and then you send them a PDF. And that's about as much as we can say about that for now. 30. Packaging your work: The last thing I want us to think about before we move on from this technical stuff is what would happen if I sent you this in design document, the in design document, nothing else. I think for a second, what would happen when you opened it. Feel free to pause the video because I'm not going to make you wait. What would happen? If I literally just sent you the InDesign document, you would open it up. One thing that would definitely happen is you'd get a missing link because InDesign is looking for this file on my computer, which is not your computer. So it wouldn't know where that was. Similarly, this image here, this logo, again, it's looking for it on my machine and not yours. The third option or the third problem that might happen is that this is using a font that you don't have or possibly don't have. In which case, there would be an issue with a missing font. So this can cause all kinds of problems. When you're sharing files between colleagues or maybe you start the job at work and you need to finish it at home, you need a way of more reliably transporting files. So the way that most people tend to do it these days is this way. Rather than just emailing or we transferring someone the in design file, which would give you those kind of problems we've just been talked about, you do this instead. You'd go file and package insists on saving it. There's a few dialog boxes to go through here. But then it would create a folder for you. It would copy fonts, copy the links, update the links in the package so that when you open the file from the package it knows to connect those links properly, it also includes a PDF, the last kind that you made, and it also includes something called an IDML, which is a version of InDesign that works on any previous version of design going back about ten years or so. So that's really useful. So when I click the package button, it just gives me a font warning. You want to just read about how legal or otherwise it is to send fonts after you've done this, so I'll let you read that at your leisure. It might take a second or two, depending on how complex the image is and how large the sorry, how complex the document is and how many and the size of the images in there. So let me just look at this in my finder. So here it is. Here's my folder. So it's just made this for me. So there's the IDML. That's the one that works in an older version of InDesign. That's the InDesign file. That's the PDF, which is really useful because it means I know what I'm supposed to be looking at. Inside here, there are links. Those two files. Now the reason it hasn't copied the fonts is that because these fonts come from the creative cloud, the Adobe font library, it doesn't need to do that because that will automatically link, at least in theory, it will. So if I was using fonts that were on my machine and not from the Cloud, then it would have included those as well. So if you want to share your work with a colleague or possibly with the printer, but more likely with yourself, if you're working from home 1 minute and working in the office the next, think about using a package. So file and package. Okay. 31. Edit Illustrator's workspace (MODULE 8): In this module of the course, we're going to take a closer look at Illustrator, and we're going to edit some stuff. We're not going to create anything new just yet, but we're going to edit a map, and we're going to edit some infographics to get us further into our understanding of Illustrator. So you can see on my screen here, this is a map produced for Discover, and we're going to create a slightly different version of that. As you might recall, in their brand guidelines, they use a solid blue color. So we're going to recolor the map using that. But along the way, look at type, look at layers, look at strokes, and various other things that will be pretty helpful for you to understand. So let's go. So in Illustrator, we have got the original map, and then the new ones going to end up looking something like that. That's more or less where we're going, but I can't guarantee it'll look exactly the same. Before that, though, another word about the kind of defaults in Illustrator. I possibly made the mistake of bringing a new version or updating all my Adobe programs since I recorded the last module, and it's changed the way it looks a little bit. So it might have been when you're watching the earlier videos, you thought, hang on, this doesn't look quite like mine. Now, seeing as that's happened, it gives me the opportunity to talk about these defaults and what we can do about them. So this is now the default setup on my screen, the way that Illustrator looks. And to say more about that, in the Window menu, we've got a workspace. Now, workspaces, as you know, they control the look of the panels, and the panels mainly on the right, sometimes at the top, and occasionally on the left, as well. So workspace. So this is now the essentials. This is what it looks like. You can see it's pretty minimal on the right there. It's using the properties panel. Now, the idea with the properties panel is that much like it's supposed to do in design, it works out what you want and gives you those properties. And again, it can be really useful, but sometimes things that you'll look for won't be there. So for that reason, I would encourage you to do this change to the essentials classic workspace. And that still gives you the properties panel, but it also gives you dedicated panels for things like swatches, strokes, and layers. So you can use whichever you like, but my suggestion is you use this one. The other suggestion I'm going to make is if you follow my mouse over here, this is the area for colors for the fill and the stroke. Now, that's really tiny, especially on a large monitor. So what I suggest you do is look up here. This is true in all the Adobe programs, by the way. You can click on that little Chevron. And it gives you a double width panel. Now that makes that area larger. I suggest that's quite useful in all the programs if it helps you see what colors you're applying, and we're going to be doing a lot with color this time. So I suggest that's something you think about doing. So there's a couple of setup things. So in a second, we will go and make changes to this map. 32. Edit a map: So as promised, here is the map that we're going to edit. You can probably see that I've saved it as I copy, so I haven't saved over the original, and let's get into how it might work in the Illustrator. So firstly, I'm using the Selection tool and I'm going to look at the Layers panel, which is this one here. If you're trying in future to find a panel and you can't find it, one way is to hover over the little icon, and it should say layers. The other one is if you really can't find it, you could come down here in the Window menu and say layers, for example, and it will open it out for you. Sometimes you'll need to expand the panels. This is true for all the programs, so you can see, in this case, all the layers. And as explained previously, I think friend design, you can see different layers. We can turn them on. We can turn them off. We can lock them, we can unlock them. So that's exactly the same, in that sense. Right. So let's first bring in the color that we need. And that's going to come from our library. I've got a library I've made. Again, you know how to do that. We've looked to that previously, and you can refer to the brand guidelines to get that color. That color is in there. So first thing I'm going to do, I think, is to select one of the bits of type and then I'm going to show you loads of shortcuts here. The first one is select Object or text objects. So this is perfect in this example because I know I want to change all the text. It's not always useful, but perfectly useful now. So it's selected all of them. Now, again, talking about defaults. You might have seen earlier I had this bounding box switched off. Personally, I do that. So I'm going to show you again how to do that. So view hide bounding box. I use that shortcut an awful lot, so command Shift B or Control Shift B on the PC. That for me is easier. I can see what's going on. I can see that these text objects are selected. You just get one anchor point for those more about anchor points in a minute. I can also see looking over here that they are black. You probably don't need me to tell you that. But the black fill color is at the front. I could simply click on this button here and that would give me the blue color and I might as well do that. Only problem is, when I go to swatches, it's not there. It is up here, but it's not actually a permanent swatch, and I'm going to want to make that a permanent swatch. You'll see that in a minute. For now I'll leave it as it is. There we go. We've got the blue color in there, so that's good. In fact, you know what I'm going to have to just cut straight to the chase now, so. In the previous one, you can see this is all shades of black. So this is shades of gray, basically. The problem we're going to have as we make our map is that we need lighter shades of blue. Now, how do you do that you might think? Now, what we need is to use the color panel. So we've got swatches and we've got color, and you might wonder why you've got two. This is true in other programs too. Swatches are predetermined color colors that you have predetermined, whereas the color panel, you can kind of mix up colors really useful if you're painting, not quite so useful in a graphics program like Illustrator. So you might wonder why we're even looking at it. We're looking at it because if I turn this into an actual swatch, which I'll do as you've seen before by going to the dropdown menu, new swatch, it names the swatch with the CMYK values. That's fine, but I think I'm going to call it Discover blue just so I know that's my color. The thing I really want to show is this global. Now, let me make it not a global color, if I press okay, then it comes. If I want to change the color, maybe to have a lighter version of that, and I go to the color panel. Well, I can't do it. First reason I can't do it is because I need to expand this panel upwards by clicking on that tiny, tiny, tiny little pair of Chevrons there. I know they don't make this easy. So we go. Let's expand that out. So because it's not a global color, the sliders it gives me allow me to change the cimagena yellow and black or RGB sliders, which can be just what you want, but that's really the last thing I want now. I want to stick with my color, but maybe just have it slightly lighter or slightly darker. So the way I can do that is if my swatch is a global color. So if I had chosen Global, it would have given me that option. So you might think, great. So we've gone down the wrong path. What can we do? What we can do is double click on the swatch and tick it, then press Okay. And now, when we come back to the color panel, we have T rather than CMYK, T stands for tint. So we have 100% strength, which is going to work perfectly for the type. But things like the lakes, I imagine these are going to need to be a little bit weaker. Now, next shortcut. You can see, I've got this lake selected, but there's also another lake here. So I can do Shift click. That would work, but another trick is select same fill and stroke. That will select any object with exactly the same fill and stroke. In other words, they need to match exactly. You can see as they match, they're both selected. The fill color is at the front over here on the left where my mouse is. So I'm going to apply my discover blue color, which of course is way too strong. But now I can go to my color panel and reduce that a little bit. I'm thinking about 60%, something like that. And that's really way too strong still. I can't read the text over the top of that. Yes, something like 30%, I reckon should do. Okay. Now, another problem is when something is selected, because you can see so clearly the selection. If you're interested in changing something quite subtle like the stroke around the edge, you can't really see what you're doing. So another default I tend to use is this one view, hide edges. So if I turn that off, it's a slightly dangerous one in these two things are both selected. Obviously can't see they're selected anymore because the edges are hidden. But you will see that when I bring the stroke to the front, now, we haven't done this before, click on here. The stroke is now at the front. So now I can apply my blue color there we go. I don't see any reason for that not to be 100%, so I'll stick that there. But you can see that I might want to maybe adjust the stroke weight and that's here, that's the stroke panel. Now again, we've got more options here if we press that little button. I reckon maybe half a point, maybe three quarters of a point. No, maybe half a point is good. So what we're trying to get here is clarity. So real clarity for someone who's trying to read this map. So I'm going to keep changing my mind about this probably, but that'll do for now. So that's much easier to do with some of these shortcuts. Again, we've done view hide or show edges. We've done hide or show bounding box, and we've done Select, Same fill and stroke, and we've also done Select Object or text objects. So I'm going to continue using those as we continue editing the map, but we've made a good start with our global color and with those shortcuts. 33. More complex editing: We're going to keep working through this map and more shortcuts and more integral features of Illustrator. So with our Selection tool, I'm going to click on one of these roads. Now I can't see whether it's selected or not. So as you know, in the view menu, you can do hide or show edges, but the shortcut for that is Command or Control H, you'll be using that a lot. That road is selected. I'm going to do Select Same fill and stroke. Now, you might notice I've set a shortcut up for this that you won't have that shortcut. The way I did that was in the edit menu and keyboard shortcut. And I searched through the menu commands and I found a shortcut I could use and I experimented with different ones. Basically, it allows you to use shortcuts if they're not already in use. I found a combination with the F for fill and stroke. I had to hold down the command option and shift, maybe not for right now, but if you want to do that in the future, edit keyboard shortcuts. I won't use that shortcut. Select, Same fill and stroke. Look at that. There's all the roads that are used there, so that's wonderful. I'm going to change the color to our blue color. Let's see what that looks like by doing Command H or Control Yeah, that's good. I think I might make it a little bit thicker. Notice where it says the word lay on there, it runs over that. I'm going to make it. Did I say thicker? I meant thinner. Yeah, that's much clearer, I reckon. If I want to do it 1-2, I could always do 1.5, for example, hit return. Yeah, now that was better, maybe let's throw 1.25. Yeah, let's stick with that. That's good. That's changed the colors of all those. But you might be seeing that some of those bits of text are quite tricky to read, so I might be tempted to move one or two now. So when I click on a text object, again, I can't see it because I've just done hide edges. You've got to get used to doing Command or Control H. If that's confusing, you just leave them on, but occasionally switch them off. I'm going to click on that object there. I could just try moving that up, for example. I think that might work. It's all about making this clear. That seems to be good. Whilst we're there, San Juan. I'm not really liking that. I think I might move that a little bit further away. Oma tepi. Well, let's see what that looks like once we've changed the color of that. Let's just see if there's anything else we need to change the color of. Those black circles will do in a second. Okay, so I can see we've got that lake. So that's the land, actually. So that wants to be white. To match this. So let's bring the fill color to the front, which I'm doing over there. We're going to change the fill color to white. And the stroke color, which I'm clicking on there to bring to the front, I'm going to make that blue. That's fine. Wants to be a little bit narrower. What I forgot to do there, I could have done Select, see if there was a shortcut there to select all the other ones. I'm going to try that up here. I'm going to click on this object here, Select Same fill and stroke. There we go. We get all these ones over here. So this is some kind of water. So again, same color, but with a really weak tint, so 30 ish. That's good. Okay, so this one. That didn't get picked up because it has different stroke on it. So I know this is a little tedious, but this is the kind of thing that you might need to do if someone says, Can you edit this? Can you edit that? So hopefully by going into all these little areas now, it'll help you later. Now, talking of things that you might need to do, before I talk about that, let me just see, that's good. But this fella here that you might see is a kind of gray color. So let's just do that one. I. It's looking better. What I was about to say was layers. You might notice that as I select different things, they've got different colors. That's because they're on different layers. Layers can be quite useful. It can be quite useful in all kinds of ways. For now, you'll notice that because the layers aren't locked and because we're using the select same fill color, we're not needing to use them, but sometimes it would be really integral to go in and out of layers. The thing that hasn't changed color are these black circles. If I select one, I want you to notice that you've got this weird kind of cross hair in the middle. This tells us that this is a symbol. Now, symbols are quite an obscure feature in Illustrator, but you'll come across them occasionally. The beauty of a symbol is that it's kind of like an external thing, and if you change that, all the things that are connected to it change. So this symbol, if I edit this one, all of these will change. So I'm going to do that by pressing this button here, Edit symbol. And it's just warning us that that's what it's going to do. Notice that having pressed Okay, the rest of the screen kind of dims. This is called symbol editing mode. So now when I click on this object, I could do anything I like to that, and whatever I do will be applied to all those other ones. In this case, all I'm going to do is change the color. But if I did anything else, that would be what would happen. So I'm going to change that to that color. And then to get out of that, you can either press this little button here or the escape key top left of your keyboard. So either way, that would work. And as you can see, they're all changed. So there we go. They're symbols. And we're nearly there now. Let me make a change quickly to the C. Again, I quite like that solid blue, actually. I might keep that. Then we need a bit of coastline. So again, I'm trying to stick with the same color. And the reason I'm trying to stick with it is simply that that's the brown guidelines. That's probably going to work, something like that. I tend to try and use round numbers just to make it easier if I need to come back and change it later or match something. Okay, so I could spend a bit longer moving the text around. Quickly, you can see that I can drag an object like that. I'm just trying to get it so that these lines don't kind of mess around with that too much. Okay, so the final thing I want to do is over here, it says corn Island, the corn islands. So I figure we might want to see that on the map, maybe with an arrow going towards them. So what I'm going to do is select this long object, so the corn islands are over there. But I'm going to use an obscure tool here. It's the scissors tool, usually hidden under the eraser tool, so you're probably seeing that. Press and hold down. I'm going to click there, and that cuts this path in too. Why am I doing that? You might wonder, I'm doing that because in the stroke panel, now normally, when you click on the stroke panel, it looks like this. I don't see many options, but when I open that up, in fact, I did that earlier. If I press one of these arrowheads options, you can see it gives us an arrowhead. It's absolutely gigantic. Depending on which of these you do, it does one at the beginning or one at the end, and you normally or I normally need to try try both options before I get the one that I want. I'm just lowing that down a little bit. Maybe try a couple of different ones to see which fits the brand best. Maybe that one. So that just kind of says that the core lines are over there. I think I might make that arrow head a little bit bigger now. I won't spend too long on this. Yeah, that's not too bad. No, I kind of having put the arrowhead there, I think I want my text to kind of line up with it. So what I'm actually going to do is change the type tool, click just before the word islands, hit return. And now these are in two separate paragraphs, so I'm going to select them. I'm going to align them to the right. And then with my selection tool, bring that back. That's more like it. It's just it's using that principle of proximity, saying this is all connected together. Now again, talking about proximity. I'd like the word islands up a little bit, so it's really obvious that this is one object. So when we're looking at type, we have the character panel here. If you see it underlined. If you click on it, you've got that option there, much like we can do in design, we can adjust the leading for something like that. Okay, so there's quite a lot we've covered there, more about layers, more about strokes, more about colors, about selecting about some of the preferences that you can use to make it easier as you edit. So I'm hoping that you can have a go at this and you find this relatively straightforward and where it doesn't make sense, you can kind of look and see what's going on. I know we haven't created much in Illustrator yet, but we will do, but this will really help you as you continue your discovery about Illustrator. So on to the next one. 34. Edit a graph's values: So in this section of the course, we've learned how we can edit a map in Illustrator, and now we're going to edit this little graph down here. So, here it is. Now in the last thing you were changing the map, you didn't need to worry about groups. We were using pretty much exclusively this selection tool. You could just click, select the thing you wanted. Sometimes layers separate things, sometimes groups separate things. Watch what happens here. If I click on one of these objects, the whole thing gets selected. This is because it's grouped. Generally speaking, in the top left corner, it says that it's grouped. In this case, it says graph, but a graph is made of things called subgroups, much more about those in a second. So if somebody says to you, look, we need to change this, we need to, you know, make these lines thinner or change the font here or change the color. It looks pretty challenging to start with because you could select that and then try and change the color and you've got a load of question marks. The question marks are there because well, there's different things, so that line has got a black fill and no stroke. That sort of square there has got a black fill and no stroke. Sorry, I said the wrong way around, Black stroke and no fill, and that's got a black fill and no stroke. So that's why it's confused. So if we were to try and change these things, we would need to use the group selection tool. Now the group selection tool we've seen already gets you into things called subgroups, but they really really do well in a graph because it kind of intelligently puts these things together. So, for example, you do need to pause a little bit in between clicks here. But if I was to click on this thin little line here, and then pause and then click again, yeah, there you go. Took a while, but this is a subgroup. So I didn't need to do shift, click, shift, click, shift, click, as you might have guessed. Certainly, my first little while of using Illustrator. I didn't know about this tool, and there was lots of that going on. Now I can see that's all selected. So let's suppose I wanted to make it a different color. There's my Discuba color, I think. And actually, it's a tiny little that tells me it's a fill rather than the stroke. It's a tiny little fill. That's okay. I can work with that. And then when I deselect, I think it's changed it. Let's try this object. Again, click and then pause. Again, there we go. So this has got a black fill and a black stroke. So I'm going to change the fill. I don't see why I want a stroke on there, so I'm going to bring the stroke to the front. Now, shortcut time. Hit the X key, on its own. Can you see that? X brings the fill or the stroke to the front. Then another shortcut for this button here, that does none, but you might notice in the little brackets, it gives you the forward slash key. That's your shortcut. So if I hit the forward slash key on my keyboard, that's the shortcut for none. There we go. So that's going well so far. Let's try clicking on this object here, pause, click again. I'm hoping that's grouped with the other objects. No, actually, it's not. I know maybe it is. Yep, took a while. Let's try that again then. So let's change that to blue. Great. The only thing left is the type of the bottom. So again, click once, pause, click again. No, I didn't like that. Oh, no, it's just being very slow today. I don't know why that's taken so long. We're not exactly asking that much from it, are we? Okay, so let's bring the fill to the front, so I'm going to use a shortcut again, X. Make that blue. And then click on one of these bits of type. Now one of the reasons I'm emphasizing the pause here is that if you double click, you're telling Illustrator that you want to edit the actual text, and that's really not what you want to do. You want to click, then pause, then click again. There we go. Now, if that doesn't work, then the option you could do is click and then drag around those objects like that. That would also work. But the double click thing works because they're so called subgroups. So that means groups inside a group. So if you're creating something from scratch, you create something that belongs together, you group it, and then you continue doing that. If you group them all together at the end, you end up with this gigantic group made up of subgroups. I'm tempted to show you that now, but as we haven't really made anything from scratch yet, that would be more confusing, but trust me, we'll get onto that later. So there we go. I can do file, save as, let's just call this. Blue. So that's more about subgroups. But the main important thing here is that the reason this is grouped is because it's a special kind of object, it's a graph. If I select it and go object, graph data. This is how the graph was originally made. So this information is put in here, as you can see, it turns it into a graph. So just to show you how this would work, let's suppose we've got the dates at the dates the temperatures wrong. And let's suppose that in oh, I don't know, let's look at the smallest one. What's that? 74? So in October, that's the lowest. Let's imagine October should actually be 82. So if I change that number and then press this little tick, you can see there's a little spike there. So if I was to close that little window and save it, then that would be my graph changed. So for its own technical reasons, this only works if the graph remains a group. The moment you try and change that, that really won't work. So I'm actually going to take that back to 74. Close that. Whilst it remains a group, you can do that. Let me show the other thing you can do. You can go object, graph with two other things. One is you can change the type of graph. I quite like the way this graph looks. But if I wanted it to look like, let's say, that, there are a few options here that you can experiment with sadly no preview. Then there you go. That is another way of looking at the data. Let's try one more. Object graph, type. I'm not sure how that. Yeah, might work. Okay. So once the data is in there, you can edit the data. You can change the type of graph, and that can look pretty good. And then the final thing you can do. Let's suppose you had this and you wanted to change a setting, you've got these, but you also got the value axis, which is up here. Sorry, it's this one here. For example, I could add a suffix, so I could say, this is degrees, isn't it? If I did a degree symbol, that's t or option zero, and then the tick marks, I've switched off, actually, let me turn the tick marks on. This isn't going to be anything terribly exciting. But you can see that sort of helps a little bit. And then down the other side, we've got the category axis. The other thing you can do is control things like whether these things are drawn. But I think you've probably seen enough about that. So there we go. We can select the whole graph with the main selection tool, but we can get inside the subgroups using the group selection tool. Remember, click and pause and then click again, we can change things like, let's say, the stroke weight. The font, the color, and so on. Again, I might do one more down here. But you are limited in terms of what you can do. It's a particular feature. It's a particular quirk of Illustrator, this feature. It doesn't do everything you want. But as you can see, if you just need to change your bit of data, it can work pretty well. So there we go. That's how we would edit a graph. Some people call it infographic. Technically, it's called a graph. 35. Edit an infographic: The final example in this module of something we're going to be editing in the Illustrator is this infographic. So you'll be creating this later on from scratch. So there's nothing too detailed. I need to show you now, but what I do want to show you is how we work with the grid. So you might notice looking in the background here, there's these things that look a bit like graph paper squares, which is kind of exactly what they are. It's a grid that you can snap to. So the command here is in the view menu. The grid we can show or hide, and we can also turn the snapping on or off. So generally speaking, I don't use the grid, but I use it very specifically for certain types of work. So, for example, the graph, the map we've edited. The grid would not help us at all here. But when you're doing something very linear, very geometric, it can be great. Now here, for this infographic, as you'll see later when you make it, it's much easier sometimes to just make infographics up using different percentages, for example. I researched different percentages of different coffees, and each percentage, I used a grid square. So for example, espresso. That's my little measure down the side. So that's ten but that's 20, and that's 30, and that's 50. So that makes up the hundred percent of the cup. Okay, so an espresso is just well, it's entirely espresso. But then a cappuccino that's that one. Americano is 20%. And then whatever that was 35 or whatever, and so on. So I'm using the brand colors, which is why we've got some pretty weird colors going on here. So we're going to just change this. So the cortado should have a little bit of milk foam there rather than being exactly the same as the flat white. So when we select things, you can see that we've got these different elements. Now, I've drawn these on using this tool here. So the rectangle. If I was to line up more or less with that, when I click and drag and you'll see this when you start doing it for yourself, it has to snap to the grid, which is why it will be actually relatively straightforward to do it like that. So we just snap like that, and that was the last color I use, and that's absolutely what I want. But if it wasn't, if I wanted that to be more than that, rather than do another one, I would go to my selection tool. And because the bounding box is on, I can just grab that and make that bigger or smaller. If the bounding box wasn't on, if I just turn that off, then it's a little bit more challenging. The tool I would use would be this one, the free transform tool, which is kind of the same you might be thinking, Okay, what happens, though, if you want, 5% rather than 10%, then what you'd have to do is you'd have to turn off snap the grid and then do that half the distance. Not forgetting to turn the grid back on afterwards so you can do the other changes you want to make. So there you go. That's a few other bits in Illustrator that should help you navigate when you need to make changes. 36. Retouch an image with Photoshop (MODULE 9): This module, we're going to continue looking at Photoshop. But unlike what we did last time when the changes that we made affected every pixel in the image. This time we're going to do things that specifically target individual pixels. So the first thing we're going to do is look at how you would remove something from a photo that you don't want to be there. So this is a lovely image of this lemon, and I want to kind of bring out what I can from that. But if we're going to make this kind of main image, we want to make sure there's nothing in there that we don't want to be there. So let's have a look at what we might do. So firstly, I'm going to use Command plus to zoom in. And then if you hold down the space bar, you can click and drag and drag the screen around. And you can see there's something there that's kind of caught by the light. And it's not the end of the world, but I'd like that to not be there. So the default tool you're going to use to get rid of that is this tool over here called the clone stamp, which does, as you might imagine, it clones things. Now, if I was to just do that now, as you know, that would change everything on the background layer, and we call that destructive. So we could do that, and it would work fine. But just to get us into a good habit, I'm going to duplicate the background layer by dragging it down to the little plus button down there. Now I've got my copy. So they've got the original one, and this is the one I'm going to work on just in case I need to get back. So I'm going to try and find some that it looks similar to that. If it wasn't there. So something with similar sort of lightness and darkness, I'm thinking over here somewhere. What I do is I hold down the alter option key, click once. There's a little target, which tells me where I'm going to be sampling from. And then when I move my cursor back over here, that's going to paint in over the top. Now, the only trouble is, firstly, the size of the brush, that circle. If I want it to be bigger, I can go up here and make it larger. If I want it to be harder, I E the edge to be completely solid, I go that way. If I want the edge to be softer, I go that way. So I think something reasonably soft, and the preview there shows you that it's slightly soft around the edge. An easy way to make it larger is to use the square bracket to the right of the peki. You've got two. You've got the left one makes it smaller, the right one makes it larger. Something like that will work, I think. So I've sampled from here, I'm going to paint over the top. So my mouse is down now. And when I let go, yeah, I don't think you'd notice that's been faked. Let's look at the before and after, how it was before, after Clearly, you can see that it's sampled some of the lighter errors there, but it fits with the rest of the image, so I'm absolutely fine with that. So this tool you can use in lots of different circumstances. It works best when you have what I call an organic background. So something that looks naturalistic. So where there's a bit of variance in it, then it works absolutely fine. I've got two more examples for you. Here's the next. So again, these are all from unsplash. They're all great images. But let's just imagine that we were using these raspberries for our limone brand. You might not want that one there with that sort of blemish there. So again, if I zoom in, so Command plus and Space Bar click and drag. So the question is, can I find something that's similar after that so that when I paint over the top, it just works. I'm looking for something the same angle, probably directly above it. Trouble is that's really close and what you can end up doing inadvertently, if I click, you end up just painting literally over the top. Better if possible to move away a little bit more. I'm going to try sample, let's say from here. Actually from the line, I'll go from the line, sample on the line, then line it up with that line and then I should just be able to paint like that. Yeah, not too bad. Not too bad. Same over here. Trouble is once you start looking at this stuff, you get carried away and it's knowing when to stop. Again, I'm looking for something with a line going like that and I might just about get away with sampling this side. At click. Try and line it up, click and drag like that. Doesn't quite match up. But if I was to zoom out, I didn't do my background copy there. If we look in history, you can see the before and after. So if we're going to be really picky, that doesn't quite work. So if I was going to do that again, I would look a bit harder for something that works in terms of where the line is, I could probably do it with a bit more time, but I'm not going to waste any more of yours at this point. The final limage we're going to look at here is one that's much more difficult. You can see this image. It's a lovely one, but that white area, I'm finding distracting. Certainly if I'm trying to sell this lime, I'm not sure I really want that there. So if I zoom in and I duplicate the background layer, the problem we're going to see is when I use my clone stamp, it's just really, really hard to match up the so called tones of the image. So whatever color that is, I could try sampling from over here, but you're going to see I'm afraid, it's just not going to blend together. It looks really, really obvious. This is a problem that retouches have had for years. I'm not going to pretend it's easy. I'm going to just do command set to undo. But Photoshop have made it a little bit easier by giving us this tool called the healing brush. The idea with a healing brush is that I can sample. Really what it's trying to do is it tries to keep the texture, but it tries to unify the colors. So if I sample, let's say, from here, and as I paint over this, it's trying to blend it together. It's not doing a perfect job. I'm just going to sample again up here just so I don't accidentally run into what I'm trying to copy. It's doing its best. I'm going to try and sample one more time maybe by choosing a different area over here. Now, if I zoom out a little bit. It's not perfect, but I think you can see that I'm on the way to doing that. So this is the healing brush. So it works more subtly than the clone stamp. And if I had a lot more time, I'd spend more time in the detail of that. But to be honest with you, when we look at selections, there's another approach that we'll use that will introduce you to a third tool which is going to work better than that. So we've seen the very easy stuff you can use the clone stamp for, which is that one. And for stuff that's a bit more subtle, you can try using the healing brush. But there are other approaches that we will see in a forthcoming module. 37. Use Layer Masks: We're working through a series of techniques we can use in Photoshop, which use brushes basically to paint in some kind of effect. So far, we've used the clone stamp and the healing brush to paint out pixels or paint over pixels. What we're going to do now is something much more flexible and much more creative, too. You've seen this image already. This is the one we worked on last time. We've just taken out a ti dust moat or whatever that was there. But if you look at the before and the after, you're going to see quite a dramatic difference. So again, the context here is that this is a product shot. Maybe it's going to be a closely cropped image for Limone. So lots of contrasts we want. I'm not saying this is going to work on every image, but for this, I think it looks quite good. So that's where we're headed. So first thing I want to do to get that contrast is I want to do something quite subtle. I want to let people really see the sharpening that I'm going to apply onto the lemon there. So I've got I've already done a background copy there. Oh, yeah, that's the one we worked on before. Right. Let me just hide that one. I'm going to do another background copy. I'm going to double click on the text there. I'm going to just call this sharpen so I don't get confused. And we did this before in a previous module, we're going to go filter, other and high pass. As you saw before, we're going to use the radius. What I'm trying to do here? I'm not worried about the rest of the image because I'm going to paint that out in a minute. All I'm worried about here is the detail on the lemon. I don't want to take that too far. I don't want to make it too soft, something like that will bring out the detail. So as you might recall from the previous lesson, you can change the blending mode of that to hard light. So there we go. That's much sharper. Now, I might want that over the whole image, possibly on that leaf as well, but I don't want it on the rest of the image. So what I can do is I can add a thing called a layer mask, which is this button down here. When I click on that, it shows me an extra white thumbnail. Now, white means it's visible and black means it's not visible. So if I use a regular brush, I can paint in white, black or shades of gray. Now, the last time we used the brush, it's quite large, and it's got a fairly soft edge. So that's actually that's pretty much what I want. So I'm going to click. And as I drag around here, it's subtle, but what I hope you're seeing is that sort of extra sharpness I've just brought on there is disappearing. And if you look here, so the sharpness is showing in the white area and not in the dark area. And where it's gray, it's kind of in between. So I'm going to paint into these corners to make sure that's properly applied. Sort can happen with a soft brush, you end up missing bits. Now, because this is a reasonably subtle effect, it doesn't matter greatly if I miss the old bit. But the main thing I want to keep is the lime the lime, the lemon. There we go. Okay. So next up, as you saw in the preview, we want contrast here. I want to darken this area down here. I'm going to do that by means of an adjustment layer. So I could do levels. You've seen that before. I'm going to do it with exposure this time, and I'm going to bring the exposure down. And I'm not worried about the lemon. I'm worried about the background. I'm just trying to bring that down, something like that. So now I could paint that out all over again. But what I could also do is copy this layer mask. So to do that, I hold down the altar option key, drag that onto here, and it's asking if I want to replace the layer mask, which I do. So you can see now I'm darkening just the lemon and not the background, which is actually the opposite of what I want to do. So when I click on the mask there, I can see it selected because of the little white area around there, and I'm going to go image adjustments invert or command or control I and that just flips that round. Now, remember the exposure has gone down, so it's darkening what is white, and it's not darkening the area which is dark, as you can see. And then one more to do the opposite, I'm going to do another exposure layer. This time, I'm going to brighten and now I want to make sure, again, it's only applying to this area here. So I want that in the middle and not at the back. So I'm going to copy this one again or drag, replace the layer mask. I kind of feel I might have gone a bit too far there. Looks to me like so I've brightened the leaven. Really like that. Sort of feel like I might have gone a bit too far with the the darker exposure. So what I can do here, and this is what's so great about the adjustment layers is I can click on that and I can just bring that back a notch or two. But let's compare that to the original. So if we Alt click, you can see that's the original Now, the image was great to start with, but what I hope you can see is that I've accentuated the bit that I want us to focus on, I E the lemon. What I realized actually, is that the bit where I've lightened it, I actually wanted that to appear up here as well. I can click on that thumbnail and I that the darkened one? Yeah, that's the darker one. The one where I lightened it, I want to increase that. I want to paint in white now. If I click on this little button here, the smaller brush. I can paint to bring that in. There we go. Layer Masks, very, very flexible and adjustment layers very, very flexible. Once you start to combine them, you can really make great creative decisions for your photos even after you've taken them. 38. Use Smart Filters: One final example of what we might call retouching in Photoshop, again, using layer masks. Now, this is quite an advanced example. It's kind of way beyond basics, but it gives you an idea of the kind of thing you might do. Most of this, you know already. So here's the before. It's a fine photograph of some very nice limes. But here's the after. Remember Alt click. I would say that is a much better kind of product shot. It makes it far more obvious what you're supposed to be looking at as opposed to the background. So these are more sharp and lighter. And as we go round to the edge, they're a bit darker, they're a bit less in focus. This is technically known as a vignette. So it's a really old photographic technique which we're doing digitally. So most of this, you know, but there's a few bits you don't. So if I just I'm going to just click on the topmost layer, press the mouse down, press the button down, and then just drag all the way down to hide everything, then just show you one at a time. So there's the original background layer. And I've done a sharpened layer using high pass, so you know that already. Duplicate the background layer and use the high pass filter. So as you can see, that just gives a bit more texture on the limes, the vibrant adjustment layer. You've seen that before. So I didn't hold back any subtlety there, so lots of vibrant and extra saturation. That's possibly too far. If you go too far with that, you end up kind of making the colors a bit too gaudy, but I didn't feel like I needed to be subtle here. So I did that. Okay, but now for the bit that you haven't seen before, look around the edge as I turn this on. Can you see it gets blurry toward the edge. Now, if I show you that layer on its own, you'll see that we've got a background copy. We're only seeing the blurry bit around the edge. So essentially what I did was I duplicated the background layer, and then I did a Gaussian blur filter. But what I did first is that I converted the filter for what they call smart layers, which means that if I want to, I can go back and I can double click on Gaussian blur and I can change my mind. So briefly, this is how I did it. I duplicated the background layer. I put it above the vibrant stuff, and it would help if you saw it, wouldn't it? So I then right clicked on the layer and said, Convert to Smart Object. And then in the filter menu, I did Gaussian blur. Now, when it mentions the filter at the top, it remembers the exact settings as last time. I'll do that because I know I want the exact settings of last time. Normally, though, you would go down and go through the regular dialog box. But I know what I want, so I'll click on that. So that's the bit that is obviously the whole thing has gone blurry. And then when I add a layer mask, which you know about, that hides everything in the middle. So that's how I got to that point. Okay, so now if we add all those together, we've got the blur around the edge. And then once I've got the layer mask, I've duplicated that firstly on a hue saturation layer. So hue saturation enables us to reduce the saturation, so reduce the intensity of the color. Now, what happens often when you take a photograph is that you look through the viewfinder. This is an old fashioned camera with your eye, and you kind of see what you see, and you see the background, a bit you're not interested in you see it as darker and less in focus. But unfortunately, the camera doesn't see that. So very often, what happens is that the photo should look a bit more like we're seeing now, but the camera doesn't do that. It's something our brains do. So we can put that back in. So by using hue saturation, we can make the background less saturated. We could also do lightness there as well, but I did that separately as an exposure layer. Which again, possibly I've overcooked out a little bit, but you can see by reducing the exposure, then this background. So in other words, in the front, it's lighter, it's sharper, it's more vibrant, in the background, it's blurry, it's less saturated, and it's darker. So do you need to do that on every photo? Absolutely not. But for the occasional photo, it will look far better. So there you go. There's some quite advanced techniques in Photoshop using, again, layer masks and adjustment layers, but also this time, smart filters as well. 39. Further graphic design theory (MODULE 10): In this module, we're going to take a second look at some design theory. These are things I certainly didn't know when I started out and really would have wished to have known. So I really hope that by knowing some of these aspects of design, it will really strengthen the work that you do. So firstly, we've talked about contrast and repetition and proximity and alignment. Those are great. Let's stack a few more things on there. And the first one is balance. So I hope you can see these are reasonably balanced, right? So the left and the right kind of balance out. Whereas now, they'd kind of tip over if they were on a kind of seesaw. Again, that's balanced. It's aligned in the center. But nevertheless, it's all balanced. Whereas that isn't, it kind of feels clunky. So even though we've got that repetition, lots of repetition, the balance is kind of off. Now this is a weird one. Compare that one with this one. Now, I know we don't have the repetition, but in terms of the balance, I would suggest that this one here appears to be better balanced than this one, even though the blocks are the same size. The reason is and this is a really bad analogy, but it's the best one I've got. If you imagine a seesaw with an adult on one end and a child on the other, then clearly that's not balanced. So what you need to do is balance it up with more children on one end or the adult would need to move nearer the middle of the seesaw. And that's because the adult weighs more than the child. So here, what constitutes weight is contrast. So in this example, the white block here, the smaller one is more contrasted with the background than these, so it kind of weighs more. Okay? That's a weird thing to talk about, I know, but that's the concept of balance. Now, it's not unconnected with what we're going to talk about next. Which is focal points. Now you've seen this before and you've seen that your eye is drawn, in this case, to the orange square because it's different from the other one. So it's contrasting. So it's similar to contrast, but it's deliberately making people or encouraging people to look in a particular place. So that speaks for itself. As does that one as well, I hope. So by surrounding something with a circle or a square, whether it's dotted lines or solid lines, that again can provide a focal point. Arrows can do the same thing, that can be physical arrows or it can be somebody looking towards something. All of these things can make people look in a particular way. And what that does, if you like, is it provides more weight, if you like. So if you are going to create what we call an asymmetrical design, so one where it's kind of unbalanced, you'll need to use the weight of the weight of people's focus, if you like. So by pointing an arrow at something by something being very contrasty with the background, that gives it more weight. Obviously, size works as well. So I'm hoping you can see the connection there, and we'll look at some examples. Hopefully, that will make that a bit more concrete for you. Okay. Now here's a weird one. Rhythm. If you were to compare, let's say, punk to country, punk will be a bit more like this, a bit more jangly, a bit more all over the place, whereas country would be at like this, a bit more staid, a bit more consistent. In the same way that music has a rhythm, design has a rhythm as well, and that conveys something very different to this. The rhythm is the feel of the piece. Let's look at a couple more examples. That's very vertical as opposed to very horizontal theory the pincher salt, but the theory is jangly stuff like this constitutes edginess. This Cote, that's a new word, probably not one to remember because I just accidentally said it. This conveys or evokes, calm, that's the idea. The theory is this conveys power, vertical conveys power. Again, back to my favorite, which is the slightly jangly one. Again, a bit edgy, a bit exciting. That's rhythm. Again, we'll look at some examples of that. But it's subtle, but it's worth paying attention to because that can really evoke the mood of a piece. Now, this is something you know, I suspect, possibly like the other things, but you might not know that you know it. Ratios, ratios when I started to really get this, I would say it improved my design work probably more than anything else. So this is a one to one ratio. You can see there are the same number of white blocks as there are to orange blocks. So that's a one to one ratio. It's kind of like cutting the page in half. So that's a two to three ratio, and that's reasonably pleasing. We see that quite a lot. That's another example of that. But I suspect you'll prefer this three to five. Now, you may have heard the term the golden section or the golden ratio, which a lot of people have expended a lot of words about this. But essentially, it describes a ratio of objects that we as humans, we kind of feel is pleasing. Lots of tests have been done on people and they've been asked to, you know, test, you know, ratios like this, for example. And this is more or less what they've come out with. So three to five once you start using this, you'll just start to naturally kind of break the page up into ways that are more harmoniously pleasing. That's the kind of thing I did anyway before I knew about it, but once I knew about it, I could use it more consciously. And that's what this is all about. The more conscious you are about things in general, but in our case, design, the more choices you can make and the better off you're going to be. So that's a nice three to five ratio. As is that. As we continue in the course, we'll look at how we can use grids to help us create that. That's ratios. Let's take a look at a few examples of these things to make these concepts a little bit more concrete. 40. Apply further graphic design theory: So in terms of this slightly more obscure design theory stuff we're looking at now, let's look at some examples of what we've already done and see how they relate to what we've been talking about. So firstly, this one here in terms of balance, nice and easy, just couldn't be more symmetrical, couldn't be more balanced. Next one along. Again, pretty much balanced, nice, aligned in the center, symmetrical balance. The image itself isn't hugely balanced. There's more going on this side than that side. But then again, this kind of bit of word appears here, which isn't there, so it kind of balances. And this is a bit less balanced on the right hand side of that orange, you got the leaf and also that little kind of paper plain symbol is pointing up to the right. So these things do affect how we see things. So that's possibly unbalanced. I guess I could have pointed it the other way, but, you know, and that would have counterbalance. Let me just do that quickly. I just pressed that button a couple of times. Oops, not like that. I line it around the center. Yeah, more balanced, but yeah, it's no longer pointing at we now deliver, so not so strong. Okay. So this I like because this is in one sense, well, it's not symmetrical, but it is balanced. You've got center align text, this up here on the top right, balances out this at the bottom, if that wasn't there. I would say that does really look unbalanced. Okay. Next up. I think this is balanced. So the image here, obviously the text is balanced. So generally speaking, we're sort of center aligned. But the kind of church tower there or whatever you call it, there's more kind of information on the left there. But then again, we've got this nice contrasty logo bottom right. I would say this balances out that. So that's I think quite a good example of what I was trying to say earlier that contrast constitutes weight. So as that's really contrasty, even though it's small, it balances out that. If the image was more kind of over this side, then I think it would look yeah, already. That looks unbalanced. Okay. And continuing on. Okay, in terms of balance, yeah, you know, reasonably balanced. We've got a bit more information going on this side, maybe some more things you might kind of focus on like this b but then he is looking that side, so balanced dish. Okay, I got two versions of this one. This is the one I did originally. And I would say, Well, there's a few issues with this, but it's not hugely balanced in that you can see this arrow is pointing that way, which kind of directs our attention off rather than into the image. And again, the car is pointing out this way. So all our focus is kind of going this way. So arguably, that's not quite as balanced as it could be. So I've done another version. I think it's a bit more balanced. This is pointing in this direction, that's pointing in that direction, but very much more from the left. The overall balance, I think is better if we compare the two again. This is subtle and you may disagree, but I do think trying to work out where things are balanced and also in terms of where the focal point of the images that really helps. In terms of focal point, I would say these people are the focal point of this image, partly because the car is pointing towards them, but, you know, they are kind of on their own, that kind of proximity thing we were talking about. So that's kind of what's going on there. Anyway, I want to move back and talk about rhythm now. So let's go back to the beginning. So the triangles here, there's a bit of a contradiction here because you've got the kind of width there, which kind of is calm. And here you got all the jangly stuff. So that's kind of a mixed message, but there's a better example of that in Illustrator. So this is I think a really nice example of a bit more of an exciting rhythm because you've got the trigles here and you've also got this kind of angular blend. Now, you're going to be creating this in a few modules time, so you'll get to put this together. So you can see that there's a bit of an interesting energy going on there. Okay, whereas nothing too exciting really sort of wide. Yeah, nothing too exciting. I suppose here because of the nature of the plant, it's a little bit more interesting, a little bit more vibrant, not quite horizontal, not quite vertical. It's a bit angular. And again, that gives it a slightly more interesting rhythm. So, you know, something a bit more going on there. But here, this is calm calm calm. So we've got all that nice wide images there. So this is deliberately evoking calm. Obviously, the image itself, the choice of color is, as well. More about that later. But that is very much I'm going for the calm thing, whereas what I'm going for here is something a bit more edgy. The colors again, we'll talk more about later. But the logo is deliberately at an angle, and I'm deliberately using images with lots going on, lots of texture, lots of detail, not calming. But I prefer this other image that you've seen before. If we look at the one that I prefer. You can see again, it's on an angle and there's lots of stuff going on, so it evokes excitement, which of course is what this is trying to do. There's a few more examples in terms of, um the balance and in terms of the rhythm, and I hope you've seen a few examples of the ratio as well, very deliberate use of the ratios that we've been talking about. For example, that is pretty much three to five. You'll see kind of how to do that in due course. What else have we got? That's not quite that, but you can see that this is kind of two to three roughly. That's kind of what I was going to there. So as we go further into the course, you'll get some more ideas about how to use those ratios. But I hope seeing these examples just given you a bit more of a sense of the theory behind some of the things I've been creating and hopefully give you a sense of how you might use them as you create things yourself. 41. Understand social media image sizes (MODULE 11): Section of the course, we're going to create our first in design documents from scratch, and the kind of documents we're going to create are for social media. So the challenging bit here is twofold. One is that you haven't created insign docs before, but the second one is, how big do you make these things? So in the first video, we're going to look at how we work out the size we want, and the second video, we'll make it, and then subsequently, we'll turn that into a PNG file that you can upload to a browser. So let's have a look. So the first thing I want you to look at is this really useful resource from Sprout Social. So there are other guides available, but this is the one I tend to use. So as you can see, it's called the Always up to date guide to social media image sizes. So if you want to get that, you can either copy the URL or if you just start to Google Quick Sprout always, then that's going to come up because it's a pretty popular post. So in here, there's a couple of reasons you using it. One is that it tells you which particular types of things to use. But as well as that, if you click on the link here, it takes you to this document here, which is fabulous because as you can see, it's got most of the social media platforms you might use, and then it gives you a list of all of the different things you might create for those and their recommended dimensions. Again, the keyword there is recommended, is what they recommend, and I trust their judgment. So we're going to look at creating a Facebook event image. You can see their recommended dimensions are 1920 by 1080, so we'll be coming back to that, but it could be as small as that. But just back to this guide for a second. If you were to scroll down and say, well, I do want to create something for Facebook, you can read their guide. Again, other guides are available. But if you come down far enough, you'll see that this is the one they recommend and they say why they recommend it. So that's where we're going. We know the platform, we know the kind image we're going to create and we know the size. Let's do that bit in design. 42. Create a Facebook image with InDesign: So here we are in design, and we're going to create our first document. We're going to go file new document. And here, I've got recent documents because I've obviously created some before. You might not have that, but because we're creating for social media, we're going to choose web. There's some preset sizes, some of which may be useful, but more useful than that is the information that we got from Sprout Social, which told us that the width of our document was going to be 1920 pixels and the height was going to be 1080 pixels. So that's where we're going. Now, we don't need to worry too much about the other settings. The only one that I want to look at is the margins. Now, you might see that preview is on here. If that isn't showing for you, feel free to turn it off and then back on again. Occasionally, in the current version of InDesign, the preview doesn't update. So if that isn't happening for you, I would just try another document. So what I'm trying to imagine here is what my document is going to look like in the end and how I can use my margins. So the margins of margins are the margins are? The margins are this combination of pinky purply lines around the edge. Now, obviously, I've done this before, so I know where I'm heading. But really, what I'm trying to think when I create a document is how can I use the margins best because they really are very useful, as I hope you'll see from this exercise. So I'm going to type in 72 pixels because that's the value I thought would be useful. I notice having selected that value, I just clicking one of these other so called fields. And the moment you do that, they all change to match. And that's because of this padlock here. So long as you don't click on the padlock, they will all remain the same. If you did want them to be different, you could click on a Padlock and make them whatever you want. So the preview should have updated. It has, so that's great. So that's the gap I want around the edge. So simply press Create. And there's our first document. Okay, so that's good. So in terms of in design, the tools we've used are two of the three key ones so far. We've used the Selection tool for selecting stuff, moving stuff around, et cetera, and we've used the type tool for editing text. But we haven't used this tool, which is the other key one called the rectangle Frame tool, and it's used for creating frames. So all the frames that you've used, that's where they've come from, from the frame tool. So let me just close the links palette down here. Right. Choose the frame tool, line up in the top left corner. You might notice a little white arrow saying, you're lined up. If I click and drag, my intention here is to click and drag all the way to the bottom right and let go. But I'm going to make a deliberate mistake here because it's one that you might make. If I stop halfway because I hadn't quite anticipated how far I had to drag or something, if I then think, Okay, I'll just continue, if I click and drag, you'll notice that it doesn't resize my frame, it just creates another frame. What I'm trying to show you here is that the frame tool is about one thing only and that is creating frames. So whether you click and drag or you simply click, it just gives you another way of creating frames. So if you're thinking, why does this keep creating frames, it's because you're continuing to use the frame tool. So my top tip is, use the frame tool for that, not for anything else. So I'm going to go to my selection tool. That frame selected, press delete or backspace. Same with that one. And then with this one, when I click on it, I can grab that corner handle and line that up in the corner, and it should go white when it's lined up. Notice also, you might just about be able to see it says width 1920 height 1080, which is exactly what we're after. So there we go. There's our new document, and the frame is the right size. I'm going to just zoom out a little bit using Command or Control minus so we can see that. Okay, next up, we're going to put an image in there. So we now have to do that, file and place. We're going to bring in the Photoshop image that we worked when we looked at retouching. So in it comes possibly a little bit large. So object fitting fill frame proportionally. We could move that around if you wanted, but that seems fine for now. So there's our first document, our first frame, and then image in the frame. Now, I'm going to bring the logo in now. So you might have the impression that you always create an empty frame, then bring an image in that's usually true for photographs. But for logos, the problem is, if you create the wrong size frame, it can be quite awkward to then adjust it with logos, you obviously want the whole logo to always appear. So just to kind of show you the problem here, if I accidentally on purpose, create the wrong shaped frame and then do file and place to bring in my mone logo, so it comes in like that. We can't see all of it. So, I guess I could manipulate that. I could adjust it. But much easier, and I'm just going to press delete or backspace to get rid of the frame and the contents. If you make sure nothing's selected, so click off the edge of the page and then do file in place. When you bring an image in, but again, this is particularly useful for logos, it attaches the logo to your cursor, and then you simply click and drag with it. I hope you can see that it's constraining the shape of the frame so that it's exactly the same as the image. So then I know I've got the whole logo in and it's much easier to work with. So then I'm just simply going to drag that to the middle of the page and line up the baseline of the text to the bottom margin. To make another mistake quickly, what you don't do is click on that central circle because that moves the image around inside the frame. If you realize, hang on, where's my logo gone? That's what's happened, you can simply do Edit undo or command Ed or Control Zed. Try and I can see that brown is still selected, so I'm going to deselect Come back. Click Not on the middle. And what I hope you can see there is that pink so called margin guide shows us, there we go, that's lined up in the middle of the page. I'm going to then line up the baseline of my text on the bottom. You might wonder what I'm talking about there. That's the line that the text sits on. The P is called a descender. It goes underneath the baseline. That's where I think I want my text to line up, my logo to line up. I'm going to do Command zero to see the whole thing looking good so far. We just need some text now. With the frame tool, I'm going to create an empty frame at the top, nice and big. You can see it's empty because of the X, and then with the type tool, I'm going to click inside it. And the X disappears, and it's replaced by a tiny, tiny flashing cursor. So I'm going to just type. You know what I'm going to just cheat and say, What was it I was going to create? Oh, yeah, how fresh. Okay. Feel free to think of a better headline for our social media post featuring raspberry. How fresh, you can barely see that. I know. Same with me. I'm going to select it and then change to our font. You can refer to the brand guidelines here. If you cheer a bold. Now, that should be upper case. I should have typed it with the Caps lock on, but as I didn't can press that button there or Caps. Then in terms of the size, obviously, I don't know exactly what size is going to be, but let me try 72, and I can see that's roughly a quarter of the way across 47, 28, so roughly 250, something like that. I'm guessing. Okay, so that's too large to fit on one line. I'm going to just press the down arrow a few times. There you go. That's pretty close. Right, that's as wide as I can get it. Okay, so now that's in. I'm going to just go back to the Selection tool. In the back up. I realized I should have changed the color to white rather than black. So let me select the text again. Go to swatches and use the paper swatch. There we go. There's a nice bit of repetition. We've got the white. We've got the font. We've got nice contrast against the red. So now we just need the strap line underneath. You don't have to do this in two separate frames, but it's really obviously just much easier in the long run because you can move them around separately. So again, nice big frame. Click inside there. I think I type direct from the plant in 72 hours. Now, the quality of these strap lines probably tell you enough about why you're in marketing and I'm not. Well, I'm kind of in marketing, but, you know, perhaps I'll just stop talking about that. Right. There we go. So the font here is miss Eves Oops, misses Eaves italic. It's another font from the Adobe font library. So again, I don't know exactly what size that is. I'm gonna try 72 and maybe roughly twice that size. So let's try 140. Now, I want to see what that looks like in the center. Obviously, everything lines up in the center so far. So to do that properly, I do that up here in the control panel. And then, oops, again, let me select it, change the color. And what I probably do now is view that in presentation mode. And I quite like that, but direct from the plant in 72 hours needs to be closer to the headline because it kind of belongs with that. So it's an answer to that question. And I think possibly it could be a bit smaller as well. So I'm going to press escape to get out of presentation mode. I'm going to go to my Selection tool, drag that up a little bit. Again, these frames can overlap, but I tend to find it's clearer if you leave a bit of space between them, just so you can see or your colleague can see or whatever else might use it later what's going on. That looks a bit better. And I think with the font size, I might just reduce that a little bit. I'm looking at the letters up here and just seeing if there's a way that I can kind of get some kind of alignment between them. I suppose I could have it the length of the whole word. Anyway, I'm kind of faffing around now, so it's time for me to stop doing that and time to stop this video. But inevitably, I could continue to rewrite, move, et cetera, which is one of the reasons why we create templates to stop that kind of thing happening. You get something, you get it working, and then you go, that will generally do, and we work with that. There we go. There's our first in design document. We know the size is right because we referred to the social media image guidelines, and we've learned how to use the Frame tool and yeah, that's great. Next up, how on earth we change that into something we can upload to social media. 43. Adjust margins & scaling: Before we look at saving this for social media, it just struck me actually, it might be quite useful for you to know what you might do should you change your mind about the margins or indeed about the size of the logo. So let's suppose I looked at that and thought, actually, I do want that to be, let's say, to have a larger margin. What you do is go to the layout menu, choose margins and columns, and you would just increase the value here and notice they're all locked. So I could, for example, increase them like that. Let's make them 100, say, for example. And you can see it comes out. It increases all the way around, and you can press Okay, and then you just have to manually adjust. Now you might have noticed there was an adjust layout button, and that does work sometimes, but it doesn't always work, so best to be able to do it manually. So let me just show you just undo what it just. So if I wanted to make that smaller, the easiest way to do it is actually to grab that, move it in, and then to hold down the command and shift key or control and shift on the PC. Click and pause on a corner handle, and the pause is important so that when you drag it knows, okay, to show you what's happening. So there we go. That's then smaller. I can do the same again here. Drag that in there to line it up and then command or control and shift, click on a caller handle, move it in like that, and I can do the same with the logo. Firstly, I'll just move it up a little bit so that the baseline of the text moves in. If I'm happy with the size, that's fine. But if I wanted that to be smaller or larger, again, I can do Command Shift. Click pause and drag. I know there's a lot of steps there. I know that's kind of painful at the beginning, but notice how lovely that is that you can kind of see the scale as you're dragging it. So exactly the same command. Again, the pause is important. If after all that you're thinking, No, that's too much. I don't like that, or it just doesn't work for you. Then the other option is up here in the top left corner, we've got these nine different points. And if you scale something using this button here, it scales it from whichever points. So because I clicked on that's the word the reference point, it will scale it up from the bottom center. So watch that. Does the same thing. So this scales up the frame and the contents, and that's because the blue frame is selected. Whereas if the brown frame was selected, then again, it scales it from the same point, but just the image inside the frame. Okay. So there's a few options for you in terms of making that a slightly different size. Right. So let's pause there, and then I will show you how to turn it into social media in the next video. 44. Export an image for upload: Okay, so we created our first in design document, and let's suppose we're happy with it and we want to put up on social media. This is how we do it. Referring again to the Sprout Social guide, you know that we're intending and creating something which is 1920 by 1080. And it's saying up here that the image formats are JPEG or JPEG or Ping. Either would be fine, to be honest, they're both formats that you'll be familiar with, I'm sure, they're both formats that work. They're both bitmap images. They both are made of pixels. I usually use ping because what ping does better than JPEG is it works with images that contain solid areas of color. So, for example, the logo and the text in the image you just created, there's lots of plain white. So that works better in a ping than a JPEG. So most people, most of the time use pin. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to make a ping. So, into end design, we simply do file. Export and I've chosen the format of Ping. That's the one we want. I'm going to just call that version four. Obviously, I've done this before to make sure this works. Then when I do save, then we get some options. Now, it's the technical bit, the quality. I don't see any reason why that shouldn't be maximum, that's what I normally go with. But the resolution, you might imagine I might be going, yeah, you want to turn that up. But actually, that wouldn't help. We're actually going to save it at 72 pixels princh. You'll recall from when we looked at print, Pixels princh is the quality. It's the number of pixels every inch, the number of pixels in every inch of the image. Goodness, that's a tongue twister. I'm going to just save that or export that, sorry. That might take a second or two. And now I'm going to show you the image. Let's first open it in the browser. So let's just file open. There it is Version four. Deya looks great. Now, I want to show you this in the finder. If you're a PC person, fine there is the equivalent on the map of Windows Explorer. There's the image I just made. If I go to the file menu or right click and choose Get Info, I want you to see over here that the dimensions are exactly as specified, 1920 by 1080. What I'm saying to you is if you have been told by whether it's Sprout Social or your web designer or the kind of help pages on whatever site you want to upload your image to, and it says, That's the size we want. What I'm saying to you is, if you create a document of exactly that size in end design, then when you export it, you export it at 72 pixels per inch, you'll get it exactly the same size. Whereas, if you exported it more than that, yes, you'll get more pixels, yes you'll get more quality, but the image will be too big. So that's my point of view. And other people see it differently. Other people would say, you want as many pixels as possible. And yep, you would get more pixels. The trouble is, I would say that it would take too long to upload, download, whatever. So I would say, you want to trust your source of information and create an image of exactly that size. Of course, if you do that and you think, actually, I'm not happy with the quality, then you could go back and you could export. I'm going to do this at a higher resolution. So if I exported it, let's say version five, If I export it at, let's say, 300 pixels per inch, that might take a little bit longer to do. Let's open that in the browser. Notice the file size is much bigger because it's got more pixels in it. I can't see much of a difference in the quality there, to be honest. But if we look at the file size, obviously that's bigger, whereas the version four was the exact dimensions we were advised on. And if I do get info on that one, you can see that the dimensions are 8,000 by 4,500. Yes, there are more pixels, so it's going to take a lot longer to download. But does the quality look that much better? Well, in my view, no. There you go. That's my opinion for what it's worth, and that's what I suggest you do. Refer to a guide like one of these, create a document of exactly those dimensions, save it at 72 pixels per inch and you'll get exactly what you need. 45. Use basic shapes in Illustrator (MODULE 12): In this module, we're going to start getting creative with Illustrator. We're going to look at how we can create basic shapes, how we can create patterns, and how we can use a great Illustrator feature called blends. So if you look at the screen here, you can see the triangles at the top. They're basic shapes, and they get turned into a pattern. And then underneath the clever thing that's happening with the text at the bottom, that's called a blend. And there's two more examples here, basic shapes or slightly more complex shapes and a blend, and again, another very basic shape that turns into a pattern and then a blend at the bottom. So that's where we're going. And you're going to learn a lot here in terms of the basic building blocks of Illustrator, not the only ones, but some key ones to get you started. So let's go. I'm going to just create a brand new document in Illustrator. I'll just stick with web arge bit like what we did in InDesign. So let's look at some basic shapes. So so far, we've really just used the selection tools and the type tool. So this is the standard tool really for shape, the rectangle tool. If I click and drag, then as you might imagine, I would get a rectangle of some sort. But if I click and drag with the shift key held down, I will get a perfect square. Similarly, the ellipse tool. Now, it can be used for creating ovals, but more likely you'll hold down the Shift key and create a circle. Going slightly more crazy than that, the polygon tool. If you were to click and drag, you will create a polygon like that. Problem with that is, how do I get the base flat? Because if I just let go and I want that to line up, how would I do that? The trick is hold down the shift key and then when you let go the mouse, you get something with a flat base. But you might be thinking, that's cool, but what if I want more sides or fewer sides? One way to do that is when you click and drag, put your finger on the arrow keys on your keyboard, the up or down arrows towards the right hand side of your keyboard, and you'll get triangle, square, et cetera. So I'm going to go for a triangle. And again, hold down the Shift key and then I'll a flat base. There's some really, really basic shapes, and you can see they're made up of these anchor points. I'm not going to go too deeply into anchor points at this point, but we will do a bit more as we go through the course. But there we go. There's some very basic shapes, but basic shapes will only take you so far. At some point, you're going to want to know how you can modify them or combine them. That's where we're going to go next. 46. Combine shapes: In this video, we're going to take basic shapes we've made and combine them together in a couple of different ways. So let's have a look at that. So here are the shapes that I made earlier. I'm going to select this square shape. I can see it selected because of the anchor points around the edge. And I'm going to change the fill color so it's a little bit more clashy is that a word? No, maybe not. It clashes more with the anchor points so that orange color. You might notice there's a little extra line there, that's the black stroke, so we can bring the stroke to the front like that, click on the nun button, and then bring the fill back to the front again. That's one way of changing the color. Another way would be you would change your color. Let's go for let's say pink this time. So a quick way of doing that. Press the X key to bring the strokes to the front, press the forward slash key to do none, and press the X key again to bring that back. I'm going to do the same thing on circle. Let's go with cyan blue this time or bluish. X, forward slash. X. Okay, so we got some shapes. Let's look at combining them. So firstly, if I was to Alt or option drag that shape, like it would do in design or Photoshop, you can make a copy. Now I'm going to make that bit smaller. Now the way I'm going to do that is by turning the bounding box on, clicking and dragging, holding down the shift key as I go, making sure the shift key is let go of when I let go of the mouse, then I can be sure that's still a perfect square. I'm going to zoom in a bit on that. And then turn the bounding box off. Shortcut is Command Shift B or Control Shift B worth learning. And with the Alt or option key, I'm going to create one, two, three, four copies to line them up, so they appear square kind of a square as a plus symbol. I can just do that. Now, what I'm trying to show you here are these pink guidelines. I should have picked a color that clashed with the pink. But I hope you can see, I'm just going to make them all green actually, so that's a bit more obvious to you. Try that midton green. Can you see the pink line? I know it's thin, but the line between the two shapes connected to two Xs and the word intersect means that the middles of them intersect. So there you go. There are more accurate methods that work, but I don't need to get into that right now. We might get into that later on. That's how we can make a plus symbol just by simply adding basic shapes together. They remain separate. I'm going to undo that. But nevertheless, they line up. I'm going to zoom back out again. Okay, so now I want to make a semicircle. So to make a semicircle, I'm going to grab this shape. In fact, let's make copies of these, make a copy of this one. Make a copy of this one. And what I want to do zoom in here. Zooming in actually helps line the shapes up because Illustrator, much like in design looks only at other elements that it can see on the page. So if you zoom right in, it won't look to align shapes with other things. I might zoom a tiny bit just so I can see what I'm doing there. There. Right. So what I hope you can see there, when I drag that kind of halfway up, it's now saying the middle of that shape is lined up with the top of the rectangle, which is great. That's exactly what I want. I'm going to use the rectangle to cut this shape in half. Now, there's a command I'm going to use called minus front. Now, that's only going to work if this is in the front. So I'm going to bring that to the front and go object arrange, bring to front. But it's reminded you that what I meant to do actually is to combine these together. Let me select all five of those shapes and using a panel called Pathfinder, so called because these things are technically called paths, that top left button will unite them. Can you see that? They are now one shape. It's not like grouping where you can ungroup. They are permanently now one shape. I'm going to do the same thing here. But rather than add them together, I'm going to do minus front, which is going to subtract the pink from the blue. So there you go. That's how you can create slightly more interesting shapes. So we're going to use certainly the plus one. We might see how that works too. In a pattern. That's where we're going next. But there's plenty to play with there. This is kind of these are the kind of building blocks, really, a lot of stuff in the Illustrator. Certainly if you're doing graphic work, like I imagined you might be doing. So plenty to play with there, and then when you're ready, we'll move on and learn how to make patterns. 47. Create a pattern: You've seen the patterns we've made for Cafe Piro or Piro or how you pronounce it, and we're going to look at how they were made from basic shapes. In this document, I've colored up some of these basic shapes and the combined shapes using the cafe Puro colors, which I've created from the brand guidelines, you've got the brand guidelines. Now, I'm going to need a bit more space here. There's a feature in Illustrator called an Artboard, there's a tool called the Artboard Tool. I'm going to zoom out we're doing command or control minus. And then I'm going to grab this handle and drag that up, and that will give me a lot more space to work with. In fact, while I'm there, I might as well grab it this way as well. It is possible to adjust the size of the Artboard very precisely using width and height, which can be really useful for social media in particular. For now, I'm just going to use it in a fairly random way so that when I now do Command zero, I've got a nice, large screen for you to look at and a lot of space to work with. So that's the Artboard back to the Selection tool. All right. So I'm going to take my circle, hold down the t or option key and drag. So I've got a spare one over here somewhere. I'm going to show you what happens if I literally drag that into swatches, it has made a pattern swatch. So let's look at what that does. If I create a rectangle, and I apply that pattern swatch. That's what we get. It literally repeats that circle over and over again. So that is the simplest kind of pattern that you might want to make. But I don't want that. What I want is something a bit more like actually, these are Artboards. Not that one. I want something more like that. We'll get there in a couple of stages. But the first step is I want more space between these things. So the way you generally create a pattern is you have a rectangle around the object. So I'm going to create a rectangle that's a little bit bigger. Obviously, it's got to be it doesn't have to be a square, but I'm going to hold down shift to make it a square. That looks like a terrible mess, doesn't it? So let's change the fill color to, let's say, red and do object arrange, send to back. So in a minute, this red will become the background color of the pattern. I should be able to use Smart Guides to line those two shapes up. Yep, that looks good. So if I was to select those two shapes now, drag that in If I select my kind of test area and apply this pattern, then you can see now we've got much more space between the circles, but the space between them is filled in red, and that might be what you want, but it might be that you want something a bit more flexible. Also, what I want actually is for the circles to be closer together. So I'm going to do both those things at once. Firstly, I'm going to make this smaller. And a lovely way of making something smaller is by double clicking on a transformation tool. We haven't seen any of those yet. We have seen the bounding box, which is fine. But it doesn't necessarily help you transform things from the center. I'm going to hide that. I'm going to double click on the scale tool, and if I press the down arrow, I'm going to reduce the scale gradually. I don't know roughly what I want, I think something like that maybe. Press okay. That would give me less space between the objects, but I also want a transparent background. Do that. I'm going to have none on the fill as well of the object. I use the keyboard shortcut, but I could have pressed that button too. Now when I select, drag that in there, apply that fill, that's much more like it. But you might be thinking, Okay, well, I can see that, but how do I get that? So there's two differences. One is the background color, and one is the rotation. So if I had a color underneath this, let's just create a fill color, a fill. Sorry, with a brown. That's their corporate brown. Object arranged center back to go underneath. Okay, so that's that bit. The way I get the pattern to be rotated is I double click, not on the scale tool, this one, I could actually do that to make the pattern larger, but I'm going to double click on the rotate tool. If I turn off transform objects, but leave on transform patterns, and I type in 45 degrees, turn the preview off and back on again. That's how we do it. This is how polka dresses, et cetera, are made. While we're there, if I was to double click on the scale tool, I can do a similar thing again, but this time only transforming the patterns. So this becomes a really lovely way to create some really interesting stuff, which is exactly why I wanted to include this because I think you'll find it really, really interesting. So there we go. That's how we can create patterns. So you could try the same thing with any of these shapes. So if you see, for example, so that's probably the most complex one. That's the plus symbol. You just got to gauge the right amount of space between each one. Then that's the triangle one. You might see if I zoom in here. These are the swatches I ended up with. So you can see that I've created a little bit of space around the edge. That takes a bit of time to figure out, but once you've done it, you can use it. But even once you've done it and you've used it, you can manipulate it further by double clicking on the rotate or the scale tool. So lots to play with there. In the next video, I'll show you how we can create these clever things called blends as well. 48. Create a simple blend: Blends are a fabulous feature of Illustrator, and I'm sure once you've seen what they are, you'll recognize them in all kinds of places. Like everything in design, blends go in and out of fashion, but they're never that far away. So let's take a look at a simple example first before we do the more complex blend we're going to end up creating. So here we go. Back in the same file as I was in before, I'm going to alt or option drag a copy of that circle, and I'm going to at or option drag with the shift key as well to keep it lined up. So I've got two identical circles aligned. I'm going to select both shapes. That's important. And then I'm going to choose object, blend, and make. As you might see, it's created, as well as these two real objects, they're the ones with the anchor points, it's created a whole bunch of these things in between. Now, a good trick here is because once you've deselected, you can think, which ones are real and which ones aren't in the view menu, you've got outline mode or command or control Y. That tells me the kind of real objects, and you can select them by their anchor points. So not by the anchor points by their outlines, like that. You can't select from the middle but from the edges. That can be really useful when things get confusing. So that tells me those are the two real objects, if you like. So you might wonder what I mean by real objects. Let's go back. If I try and select just that one shape, when I drag, I drag the whole lot. This is a little bit like a graph, even though it doesn't say in the top left corner there, it doesn't say group. This is an example of a group. And like a graph, it's grouped for technical reasons. But again, like a graph with our group selection tool, which is hidden under the direct select tool, we can drag one of these elements somewhere else. And as you can see, whoops, didn't mean to do that, as you can see, the blend updates. So it updates if I change the position of one of them, it updates if I change the scale. I also updates if I change the color. As you can see, so really, really flexible. So blends can be kind of quite kind of gaudy like that, or they can be much more subtle. Let me show you more subtle version of this. If I select the whole blend again with the Selection tool, notice both ends are selected. If I go object blend blend options, it's doing a smooth color blend, but I could say I want a specified number of steps. So I could say I want, let's say, five steps, for example, or I could say I want ten steps or whatever it is. But what I could also say is I want a specified distance. And if you have a really, really tiny distance, you might notice there's a tiny bit of what we call stair stepping there where you can see the gaps. But if I have a smaller distance, let's say one pixel, what we should end up with is something relatively smooth. Yeah, I can make it even more smooth if I want to by having a smaller valley. But there we go. We end up with something really quite interesting, but it's still flexible. I can move the elements around. I can change the scale. I can change the colors. So what we're going to end up with is something that goes from a dark color like that to a light color like that. Sorry, that's the wrong way around. I meant the other way around. But nevertheless, that is a blend. That's how they work. In the next little video, you'll see how we can use those with text. 49. Create a complex blend: So let's take a look at the Illustrator file. This is the finished version. If we look at what's happening on the different layers, we've got a background layer. That's just the brown. We've got the pattern. We've got the blend itself, we've got the text, and then a frame. That's the finished one. I've created all these bits for you so you don't need to worry about anything else. So we've got the background we've got the pattern. Now, we don't need to change either of those, so we might as well lock those. The blend we haven't done anything with yet, so that won't make any difference in terms of what we can see, but we'll leave that there. And then we've got the text. So what we're going to do is we're going to take a copy of this bit of text, and we're going to blend two versions of that together, going from light to dark, and then that's going to sit underneath the white text. So a lovely way of copying something from one layer to another. Let me zoom my screen in here. You might just see little the light blue, the cine colored underline. That shows that selected. That's also present there. That little dot means that's selected. Now, if I drag that onto the blend layer, it would literally move it onto the blend layer. But if I alt drag, you might notice a little plus there next to the little finger icon I'm dragging that copies it. Notice now if I hide the text layer, it's actually on the blend layer. So it's on both layers, which is great. Now that's done, I'm going to lock the text layer so I don't accidentally change that one. This is where layers are really handy doing this kind of work. So I'm just working with the one on the blend layer and I'm going to Alt drag somewhere over here, whatever angle I think I might want to blend. And I'm going to go from light to dark and I want it to go light to dark so dark up in this corner because the white text is going to be over the top of it. So let's just hide that text layer as well just so we get this right. So if I select that text there, so that's going to go the dark color. And this one is going to go the light color. Now I need to blend them together. So that's selected. If I shift, click on the other one, as you know, we can do Object Blend, make. And that's an interesting blend, but not what we're after. So we need a much more detailed blend. So Objectlenblend options. And then we're changing it to specified distance. Now, what's that This is measured in millimeters rather than pixels. But I want something pretty small. I'm going to go 00.5. Let's try that. Turn the preview off, turn it back on again. Yeah. That's pretty good, actually. Let me just see if I can make it even smaller. 0.1. Your computer might struggle with this. We're asking it to do quite a lot. That looks pretty good to me. So now let's see what it looks like with the text on top. Fantastic. There you go. So that's how you create a blend. So the idea here is that obviously, I'm using the wrong colour there. I realize I should have gone for the purple. Let me just change that then. So let's go. This top one is going to be the dark purple. It's quite nice going from blue to purple, isn't it? But bottom one is going to be the bright. There we go. 50. Export for print or social media: Final word on this. You might be thinking, looking at that. What about all this extra stuff that goes off the bottom of the page? You can see why we needed to do that right so we could get the right angle there. But what happens to this? Does this print? Does this end up on screen? The answer is it doesn't. What happens is if you were to create a PNG file, for example, it will cut it off at the edge of the Artboard, or if you were to import that into InDesign, again, it cuts it off at the edge of the Artboard. I've done that for you. This is the blend finished file, and I've brought that into InDesign. You can see in the Links panel, this is the same file. And I'm just showing you the whole image there. So that's all of it, the total extent. And I did that by going, instead of object fitting fill frame proportionally, I did, which looks quite good. I did object fitting content proportionally. That's good if you want to see the whole of the content. So there you go. You can see that even though it exists, the only bit that you actually see is the stuff that's inside the Illustrator Artboard. So what that means is, you can kind of mix and match between the programs. So as you might be started to imagine, well, hang on a minute. If I was in Illustrator and I wanted to keep working, tweaking my patterns, tweaking the colors here, tweaking the type, and if this was for social media, you might be thinking, wouldn't it be easier just to do it in Illustrator rather than have to bring it into InDesign? And of course, that's exactly what you can do. Now, we haven't looked at it specifically, but I'm hoping that you can kind of transpose what you learned from InDesign to Illustrator. In that, if you created a new document from Illustrator, and you got those readings from Sprout Social or whatever. So you can see actually there's a presetting Illustrator, which happens to be the size we used earlier. You could type those numbers in, and then you create yourself a document, and then you work from there. It's not quite the same as in design. Obviously, it's a different program. But once you know about the sizing, you can create what you want to create Illustrator as you're learning to do, and then you would export it. You can do Export as and you can choose a PNG. So plenty of options there for you. Once you've created what you want to create, either in Illustrator or in InDesign, you can kind of use the similar idea. Honestly, that works pretty much the same in Photoshop as well. So if you're starting to think, actually, I really prefer working in one program or the other, then you can definitely do that. Okay, on to the next module. 51. About Adobe Bridge (MODULE 13): Congratulations for making it almost halfway through the course, keep going. The end is in sight. Before we get back on with Photoshop, I wanted to quickly introduce Bridge to you. Now, Bridge used to be a free program. It came when we first bundled together in design, Illustrator and Photoshop. A lot of designers then never quite used it. They didn't see the value of it. Somebody showed me a few things a few years ago, which made me use it a lot and I feel it's indispensable. Now you've started to get used to working with the programs and you know that you're working together with them. Bridge is quite useful because as you can see in my screen here, I get little thumbnails of not only things like PDF, which I know you get thumbnails of on Mac or PCs and JPEGs, which, of course, you get the same on. But you don't get that always anyway, on Illustrator files or in design files, which actually, there aren't any here, but you might see some there's one there. Yeah. So you can get little thumbnails of all of those, which is obviously really helpful. Furthermore, if you click the Space bar, having selected an image, you get a full screen preview, and then you can use your arrows to go through. And whether they're Photoshop files or JPEGs, it used to be Illustrator and InDesign files as well. Used to get full screen previews. So that's not quite full screen preview from Illustrator. Pretty good. And but in the current version, anyway, in design, suddenly, they've gone back to tiny thumbnails. Now, I've been digging around the preferences. It might be something I'm missing, but I'm not sure that I am. I think they might have just downgraded it. Anyway, I hope if they have they bring it back up again because it was lovely to be able to see just browsing design files, Illustrator files, et cetera. Nevertheless, it's still useful because you can still kind of get more of a sense of what these files are, even if the thumbnail is really tiny, and then massive depending on what kind of file it is. So that's one useful thing about Bridge. A second useful thing, and I'm pressing Escape to get out. So these are some of the files I was working on when I was putting some of these brands together. Let's suppose I'm just trying to find some JPEGs to work on. So on the left here, I can filter. I could look at, let's say, all the Illustrator documents only or all the design documents only, or all the JPEGs. So let's suppose I'm trying to get a final collection of images that I might use, obviously, in my case on this course, I can click on the first thumbnail, hit the space bar for a full screen preview. And then what I tend to do is go through them and then give them a one star rating, and I think, yeah, that's worth kind of continuing with. So obviously normally in my case, I'd be thinking about something quite specific. So I'm thinking, I might use these, let's say, for a social media advert. So I'm thinking that one not sure about that, maybe not. That one, yeah, I like that. So I'm going to do Command one. That would be Control one on the PC. No, I don't like that one. Not sure about that one, maybe. Oh, yeah, I like that one. Like that one. And so on. Okay. So Okay, so I'm back to the beginning again. So if I press Escape to continue refining my selection, I can go over here now and say just show me the one star ratings. So now, same process again. If I think, I'm definitely going to use that, I'm going to give it a two star rating. So just much quicker this time, that one that one. O. I think we're back. Let's say we are. Now I've got to be careful here. Show me the two stars and not the one star. I could continue that depending on how many images I'm looking to go through. This is great if you're going through this with a client or with your boss or your colleague and going, this is what I think. Then ultimately, let's suppose I want to physically send them these images or put them in a specific place to work from. It says you can't do this in the finder on the Mac or the FleExplorer, as far as I know, If you select them all and you right click, and you could move them to a place, but you could also say copy too. I'm going to copy them straight to choose my folder and I'm going to go to a folder on my desktop. I've already pre made that folder, and then when I okay, there they all are in that folder, if I just show you. So the origins are still where they are. I've copied them, so I can then bring them into InDesign from there, for example, okay? And of course, if I wanted to look at them in bridge there, then I could say, okay, desktop, there's my folder, and there they are. So that can work really, really well. So because obviously, you're working as a designer as a creative marketer in the design world, anyway, visual stuff is important. So being able to see things really helps. So that's the first aspect of bridge that's really, really useful, and I'll just give you a couple more in the next video as well. 52. Search inside folders with Bridge: So here's another aspect of Bridge, which makes it for me, really indispensable occasionally. What you might have found already, but certainly I can guarantee you'll find before so long is there'll be an image, for example, that you know, I know it's on my computer somewhere. It might be a logo or it might be, you know, whatever it is. Um, I know it's somewhere in that folder, which is inside that folder, which is inside that folder. Of course, as your teacher, I should be saying to you don't put stuff in a way that you don't understand it, keep things properly organized. If I hadn't said that already on the course, I certainly should have done. But as you can see, this is an example of my actual computer where things maybe aren't as organized as they should be. So I know there's a particular file I'm looking at and I know it's somewhere in this flowers brand folder, but it could be in the kind of outermost folder, or it could be inside flowers PDF, or it could be inside here. So I could search through those independently, but what I can also do, this is a great little trick. You click on this little Chevron and you say, show items from subfolders. And this gives you an X ray vision. You can suddenly see everything at once. What I tend to do is sort by folder, and then it shows you a folder and everything inside it. So there's some PDFs, for example. And there's some unsplash images. They're all down there. So it really, really helps you kind of navigate stuff. If you know, you know, for example, so that might have been the one I was looking for, or is it the PSD version. So again, using the trick from before. That's the original one, that's the PSD. So for me, planning a course or, you know, creating something for a client, I can see, Oh, yeah, that's what I was thinking about. And I can just to open the file. And Photoshop, for example, I can see the difference between the Photoshop and the JPEG, it's much, much easier to find. So I know you've got your own filing systems and your own ways of working, and they're absolutely fine, but this is an extra little program, which is kind of like a superpower. It does make things much much easier. So I encourage you to try using Adobe Bridge. And yeah, I hope it helps you. 53. Photoshop's Quick Selection tool: So in this module, we're back looking at Photoshop, just to recap what we've done so far. The first look at it, we looked at how you might change every pixel in an image. That's one approach, one broad approach. Second time we looked at it, we looked at another broad approach, which was to use some kind of brush tool to paint something out or paint something in. We ended up using layer masks, which is the kind of most advanced thing you can do with brushes. So there's a third very broad approach, which is to make a selection. And to be honest with you, some of the things we ended up doing on the last lesson might have been easier with the selection. So it's high time we looked at those. So if you'd like to look at my screen, you can see there are two oranges on the floor of this shot from Unsplash. Which one do you think is real and which one do you think is being copied? Have a quick look. What do you reckon? I'll show you it's this one. So I can move this one around. Now, that's kind of cunning, isn't it? We haven't seen anything like that so far. Let me show you how that is achieved. If you look over here, I haven't really seen this before. You know about background layers, you know, you always get those for free, if you like. But we've also got this layer. And this is an orange. Obviously, you don't need me to tell you if it's an orange, but it's an orange, and it's surrounded by what are often called checkerboard pixels. Basically, they show transparent pixel. They're all transparent. So as I move the orange around, the only bit you see moving is the orange, even though there are other pixels there, there have to be pixels on a layer. So the key question is, Okay, how do we take something like that orange and put it on its own transparent layer so that then we can do something with it. So we can move it, we can resize it. We can do all kinds of things. That's the question. And that's where we're going first. So I'm going to bin that layer. And I'm going to show you the first of several selection tools. So earlier, we looked at a variety of brush tools. Basically, most of these tools around here are brushes, we looked at some of them. The tool we're going to look at first is called the Quick Selection tool. The Quick Selection tool, hidden under the relatively new Object Selection tool. This isn't always the best choice of tool, but it's pretty good. If I could probably have only two different selection tools, it would probably be one of them. So what you can do with this is click and drag. And if you're lucky and the contrast, there's plenty of contrast between the object you're selecting and it's fairly hard edged and the background, it will do it pretty well. So obviously, I've chosen this image because it works, and that's a good example of the Quick Selection tool working well. So, there it is. So now what do I do with it? Well, I want to put it on its own layer, as you know, and the shortcut for this is Command or Control J for jump, if you like. But the long way around is layer new layer via copy. So now we've got layer one, which is just an orange. We've got the background layer. You can't see any different at the moment because one on top of the other. But if I use my move tool, I can click and drag and move that somewhere else. Obviously, depending on where I move it, it might look more or less realistic. Now, with the move tool, you got two key options. One is auto select layer. If that's off, you're only going to select the layer that you physically select over here. So if I'm on the background layer and I try and move this orange, it won't do anything because it can't move the background layer. Whereas if I choose auto select layer and I click on this orange, it automatically chooses it. The other one is Show Transform controls, and this is a little bit like Illustrator or InDesign. Now, if I want to, I can click Shift and drag and make that smaller, for example. When I do that, it's a lot more complicated than changing something in design or Illustrator. We need to approve that transformation by clicking the tick up here or cancel it by pressing the kind of no entry site. So it won't let you do much else. Notice they're all grade out, most of those unless you do one or the other. So if you see this coming up, it means you've got to make a decision. So if I press Tick, there we go. That is now much smaller. The pixels permanently changed, by the way, on that layer. So there we go. There's our first look at selections and our first Selection tool and also the move tool inside Photoshop. 54. Adjust a selection: Okay, so we're working through Photoshop selection tools. We've seen the Quick Selection tool already, and that works fine in some cases. But if I was to try and select this orange here, it's going to do fine where there's really good contrast, but there's less good contrast, down here, for example, it starts to go a little bit wrong. I'm amazed we got away with that bit. We're going to look at some approaches that you can use that might work better. Sometimes, we could use this and then modify the selection. But let me show you another approach first. I'm going to go to the Select menu and choose deselect and then go back. I'm going to choose under the Lasso tool, I'm going to choose one called the Magnetic Lasso tool. I'm also going to zoom in, and I'm also going to use my space bar to just scroll up. So now very gently, I'm lining up where that tiny black arrow is, lining up on the edge of the orange, and I'm very slowly going to drag around. I can take my finger off my mouse. I can raise my mouse button if I want to. But I just got to be careful when I put it back down again. So this takes a little bit of patience. The idea here is that I'm not quite on the edge of the orange, but it's figuring out what I'm trying to do because it's magnetic, so it tries to stick to the edge. A good tip here is, you can see I've gone a bit wrong there, if you change direction suddenly, it's a good idea to tell it you're about to change direction. In fact, I'm not about to, so Sorry, I'm just trying to concentrate to get this right, but this seems to be working more or less right. It's kind of picking it up. When I get back to the beginning, I can just stop. So there's my selection, and it's not too bad. But hopefully we're looking for something that's a bit better than not too bad. I'm going to zoom in. Again, use the space bar. So this section down the bottom didn't really work. So what I could do is add to that selection. This is the bit that I missed. And what I generally do is even I could use one of these clever tools like Quick Selection or magnetic lasso, I tend to prefer straightforward, the old Lasso tool which relies on you to work freehand, but it does give you maximum control. The idea here now that I've got a selection, let me just make a mistake or two. If I just clicked and dragged, notice that it just moves the selection. So you might wonder what I'm going to do. What I'm going to do is hold down my shift key. And can you see that when I do that, I'm doing it again now, a little plus appears. What I can do is click and drag this is completely free hand. I'm going to draw like a little loop and let go like that. In other words, I can gradually add the pixels that are missing. So that's another few down there. Dag. So you can hold down Shift, and that adds pixels. If you've gone too far and you want to reduce pixels, you can do Alt drag. So for example. The magneticu did a really good job here. I was thinking it might kind of do something like this here. In which case, you'd hold down the Alt key, notice the little minus, and you come in and you just redraw that little bit like that. I didn't do that great. Let's try that one more time. W. Okay. Okay, so that's the magnetic lasso. But the other thing there is, if you want to add bits in, you just choose another selection tool or could be the same one, you hold down Shift to add or to subtract. I've just noted at the top there, it's a tiny little bit it didn't get. So again, I'm going to use the lasso, hold down the Shift key this time to add in and just very, very gently. Okay, so again, I can do actually, I was about to show you again, just copying it up onto a new layer. But a good trick sometimes if you do select Save Selection. If you spent some time getting a selection, you might want to store it inside the document. So I'll call this orange. Press Okay. And it stores it as something called a channel, an Alpha channel. Notice, though, if I try and save this document, if I just do Save As, it will prompt me to save it as a PSD, and that's because it's got an Alpha channel inside it. So an Alpha channel is just a posh word for a stored selection. It won't allow me to store it unless I save it as a PSD. So that's exactly what I'm going to do. And that means if I was to deselect, I could close it and save the file, and then I could re select it by doing load selection, and it's there ready for me again. As before, we're going to do layer new layer via copy. And now we have a spare orange. 55. Use the Magic Wand: I'd like to show you my favorite selection tool, which isn't the newest one. It's a relatively old one. It's called the Magic Wand tool. It was a source of endless frustration for me when I was first using Photoshop because I couldn't figure out why it didn't just do what I wanted to do. I mean, after all, it was called the Magic Wand tool. Why didn't it just work? And that was mainly because I didn't realize you should use it as part of a process. So use it to do what it can do, but you might still need to add to the selection or subtract from it like we've just learned how to do. But nevertheless, the Magic Wand now the way this normally works is this button is on contiguous. If I was selecting, let's say, the orange, I would click. And depending on what's called the tolerance, some people are more tolerant than others, the higher the number up to 255, the more pixels it's going to get. So 150 is somewhere in the middle, but you can see that would need to be a little bit lower to get the orange, but not the leaf, but then a bit higher to get that bit, which is why I got this is ridiculous. It doesn't quite work. But it needs a bit more patience than that. So what I'm going to do instead is deselect where this is really, really good is for selecting, let's say, it's blue background. If I click on, let's say the blue background, you can see it does a pretty good job. It stops whenever it hits something where the color values are really quite different. So for example, here, notice it doesn't come get the inside of the leaves. It's gone a little bit too far on the green there. That probably tells me that the value is a little bit too high. I'm going to deselect lower the value to about 100. This is pure guesswork. Click again. That's much better in terms of the end of the leaf there. That looks about right to me. But you might be thinking, yeah, that's great, but it's selected this bit, but what about all these other bits? So I'm going to deselect again. This is the bit that I really like. You can turn off this button called contiguous. It's a word you don't hear very often. It means neighboring or bordering. With that switched off, it's going to search for the same color blue all the way through the image and notice how it's got inside all these little bits that would take forever to get, or possibly we might even miss them. Having done that, I can use my Command J shortcut or Control J, which will put that onto a new layer. A, there's a classic mistake. Look what I've done. I've done the opposite. So if that happens, I was going to show you this history panel anyway, so we can go back to that point. So go back in time and then do inverse. This inverse is the selection. It gives you the opposite selection. Then again, I'm going to do Command J, or maybe show you one more time. New layer via copy. And there we have it. We have a really nice cut. Now, the only problem with this approach is that selections aren't always perfect and it's a good idea to test them against a background. Let's find a suitably horrible background. I drag that layer underneath, and you're going to see, I'm afraid, some little hair lines here. That little bit of blue, it didn't quite get and some of these it didn't get as well. So this is tricky, but this is where we need to go next. We need to look at what we can do if the selections, however good they are, don't go quite far enough. That's the subject of the next video. 56. Use Select and Mask: We saw in the last video how useful the Magic Wand can be, particularly in non contiguous mode, if that's not impossible to say. So that was good, but it didn't get us entirely where we wanted to go. Let's recap. So with the Magic Wand tool, I think we ended up with the tolerance of 100 with non contiguous selective. Click on the background, and it's gone, it's selected all the blue. And that was not bad. But we found that when we did a cutout with Command J, now as good as Command J is, it's not the only approach. What I should have done, actually, is just made a duplication of the background layer. Let me do that. Okay, so what I want to do now, instead of that, I'm going to press Select and Mask. Now, I didn't invert it again. Let me just escape or press cancel down there. Let me invert my selection. Select Inverse. Okay, let's try it again. Select and Mask. Now, this takes us to kind of a special bit of Photoshop. It's like a program inside a program, and it shows us the selection as it is at the moment. So if we say show original up here, that's what it looked like. Now, the blue bits you saw, that was the problematic bit. But last time I was in here, I made a few tweaks and you can see that we've got a slightly better selection there. What I'm going to show you is how I did that. Actually, um, when I came in here, I viewed this on black. So this shows the selection. It kind of gives you a preview of what that would look like. And basically, I made some adjustments. So I changed the shift edge from there and that catches up. There we go. So you got some bits of blue. So I took the shift edge back this way a little bit, and that just moved the selection outwards a little bit, or inwards sorry a little bit to get rid of some of those. Then the other thing I did was I smoothed the selection a little bit now, feather and contrast, if you use these together, then the feather softens, but the contrast stiffens it up, for some reason, by using them together, it just gradually makes the whole selection better. It's not absolutely perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better. So I'm going to press Okay this has given us a third layer. I didn't actually need to duplicate the background one. But notice what it's done. It's turned it into a layer mask. What we've got now are two of Photoshop's best features together. We've got a selection, which is great, but that turns into a layer mask, which is infinitely flexible. If you need me to remind you of what I mean by that, if I show you what it looks like on a solid color background, let's suppose we were going to put this on a yellowish background, something like that. It doesn't look too bad, actually. But in here, for example, there's a little bit of blue there. So if I want to get rid of that, there's a bit of blue there too, I can go on the layer mask itself. So yesterday, we did a bit with that. With the brush, I'm going to use a small brush. This is really, really tiny brush. You might remember black hides and white shows. If I was to paint out there, depending on how accurate I need to be and how patient I am, I can paint out some of these little bits of blue. So this is the kind of approach you can use when you're doing a cutout. So it takes a bit longer than just pressing a few buttons. But if you've got the patients and, you know, it matters to get it right, then you can absolutely do that. I'm not going to waste hours of your time by going through this from beginning to end. But what I hope you can see is that now it's on a mask. I can come in and I can make adjustments like I am here, for example. And if I go too far, like I've done there, I can just swap back and paint in white, again, with a larger brush. You've seen that before. This is infinitely flexible. If I save this and close it and then reopen it, again, all that information is there. That's a combination of the selection tool or a combination of different selection tools possibly, and then turning that into a layer mask in Photoshop. 57. Create a cut out image: For a final look at selection tools in Photoshop, I'm going to show you this image here. I got this from raw pixel, which is a competitor of Unsplash. Again, there's a certain amount of the stuff you can get for free, so you can try that. I think this would go really well with the plant power brand, maybe you zoom right in close to that. But if we cut this out, so if these white pixels were transparent, then if we exported that to InDesign, we can control the background color as we have done from within the InDesign template that you worked on. So let's look at that. So I previously used the Magic Wand tool, and it's remembered the settings. So if I try clicking you can see it selects really easily all this white here, but it also selects the really bright pixels on the top of the leaf. So that's entirely not what we want. All these tools are good for some things, but not good for other things. The best approach here is to deselect Command or Control D, to turn off or to turn back on contiguous. Then now the tolerance is possibly quite high. Let's find out if that's going to work or not. What I tend to do with something like this where there's lots of holes is try clicking on the bits that are a bit fiddly first. For example, here, and then I'm going to hold down the Shift key and click inside there, and then just get all the little gaps. It's looking good so far. No, look. Clicking on here, the tolerance is too high. I'm going to undo. In fact, what I could do is just go back in history and undo that last one, and then just lower the tolerance. Let's try 60. So I can shift click. Yeah, got away with that. Then it's just, I think, that one and that one left. Let me have a careful look around. Up here, the tolerance is too high. I'm going to deselect. With the 60 tolerance, let's try again. Let's start with the most problematic area there, and then suddenly fiddly bits. A problem I had there was I accidentally clicked on the green, so let me undo that. If I zoom in a little bit, that would help. The other thing is, this is a bit clunky, this icon. If I put my finger down on Caps Lock, this works for all the tools in Photoshop, it gives you a much more precise tool. Clearly not precise enough for me, though. There we go. I'm sorry this is taking a while, but this is honestly, this is realistic. This is kind of how it works. I know that you want specific instruction, and that's what I'm endeavoring to give you. But sometimes things just don't work and we just have to persevere. And this is kind of realistic. It's a bit of back and forth. I reckon that is about right. I've got all the white pixels. Now I'm going to inverse that selection. Select Inverse. I'm going to do Select and Mask, as you've seen before, and there we go. That's looking pretty good. The bits that look light are actually bits of the plant, it looks like to me. I can't see that I'm going to need to do much in the way of retouching there, but it is going to turn it into a layer mark so I can come back in later and fix that if I want to. I'll just press Okay. And there we have it. We've got that on a background copy layer. If I was to save this as a PSD, which it will want to do anyway. Then I can bring that into end design, and it will recognize those transparent pixels so long as that background layer is hidden, and we can use that as we would want to use it. So there we go. That's the end of this section. So it's using selection tools, but also how they interact with layer masks. 58. About colour theory (MODULE 14): Building on our knowledge of design theory, we're going to add on to that knowledge of color theory, which is, of course, part of what we've been talking about anyway. Firstly, a bit of terminology and then a bit of theory followed by a bit of practical stuff. Okay, so you can see on my screen here in the top right corner, this is the pure hue. This is red. And as you add white to it, increasingly, so that's white there, you get what we call tints. So these are tints of red. So the saturation is going from nothing all the way to full red. So tints are another way of saying that. Whereas if you add black rather than white, then you get what we call shades. So again, we go from pure hue down there. So we're going to talk about hue saturation and lightness. The hue is the color itself. The saturation is how full it is, so that being nothing and that being full, and then lightness in terms of again from here all the way down to black. So that's a key bit of terminology. There's lots of different color theorists over the years. My favorite one is that sounds really nerdy, doesn't it? My favorite one. But anyway, my favorite one is Johannes Ittens. He talks about different ways of achieving contrast. And in my view, this is what we're about when we're working in design. Generally, it's about creating contrast that's good. And what he's got here is his color star. And these colors are the pure hues. You can see this is before computers, it's painted on. And then going in towards the middle, these are tints because we're adding white, and these are shades, adding black. So they give you a nice overview of the kind of color spectrum. So as you can read here, we've got what are called warm or cool colors. All this stuff is subjective, but you can see why the ones on the left are called warm and the ones on the right are called. Did I say it right er The ones on the left are called warm. The ones on the right are called cool. Now, there's lots of jargon here. The first bit of jargon is complimentary colors. So I'm going to go through in order of how contrasty they are the different color harmonies. So complimentary is the most contrasty. So complimentary doesn't mean complimentary in that they go with each other, although they kind of do. It means that no part of one color is in the other. So those two are complete opposites. So they've got maximum contrast. Slightly down from Oh, no, we'll do that in a minute. Okay, so this here's an example of complimentary colors, the green and the red on both sides, two good examples of use of complimentary colors. So loads of contrast there. Now, next up, triadic colors. So as we'll see when we look at a color wheel, complementary colors go directly opposite each other. Triadic colors break the wheel into three. So these are really hard to use well. They provide great contrast, but hard to use well. Here's a couple of examples. This is one of my designs. I'm pretty happy with that. That looks pretty vibrant, but that yellow only works against the dark blue background. But if you're not careful, that can just look a little bit too much. That's an example where I think it works. Here's a much better example. This is Leonora Violetta. I believe it's how she pronounced her name. She's great with color, the way she does illustration. So that's another example of triadic colors. Lots of contrasting. Okay, so the next least contrasty going down from complimentary colors are split complimentary colors. And as you'll see on the color wheel, it goes across like complimentary, but then it goes to the right or to the left. So that kind of is a bit more usable than what we've just seen. And then tetradic colors are two pairs of complimentary colors. Again, that can be quite hard to use well, but here's a couple of very similar examples in terms of the colors, although the designs are quite different. There's two pairs of complimentary colors there. So the first and the third block there are complimentary and the second and the fourth are complimentary, as well. So that's tetradic colors. Okay, so much less contrasty are analogous colors. Now, analogous colors look really good together. They don't provide much contrast, but they can be very reassuring and very calm and so perfect for one or two of the brands that we're working with. But not for everything. If you want edgy, analogous is not what you want. And then finally, monochromatic. That's the least contrasty. So this is only contrasty in terms of tints or shades, not in terms of the hue. So there we go from the most contrasty at the top to the least contrasty at the bottom. That's all going from yellow. So we're going from complimentary to triadic to split complimentary, tetradic, analogous, and monochromatic. So there you go. If you wanted terminology, you got some. The question though is, how on earth you use all this stuff, and that's what we're going to be getting into shortly. Another bit of theory I found useful when I stumbled upon this. This came from Gee, the German polymath from a few hundred years ago. He wanted to know how bright certain colors were. And he gave a rating 1-9. So nine being white and one being black. And you can see that's the ratings he gave the different colors. That's worth knowing because if you've got, let's say, a white background, and you want a color to sort of pop away from that, then you don't want to be using yellow, for example. Whereas, if you've got a dark background, and you want the color to pop, then yellow might be perfect. So as with all this stuff, you can take it with a pinch of salt, but you might find that's worth referring to once in a while. Okay, so that's our starter to just get us into color. So we've got different bits of theory, different harmonies, and now we're going to take a look at how are we using them with our brands and also how you might use them yourselves. 59. Apply colour theory part 1: Previous video, we looked at a whole bunch of color theory, which is really useful, but you might be wondering how you can use that. So briefly, whether or not you can use that will depend kind of on your circumstances. So it might be that you're working for a brand where you've got a very, very limited set of colors that you can use and you can't veer away from them. If that's the case, this next bit won't be hugely relevant. Still interesting, I hope. But it might be that you're working for a brand where you can work with any colors you like, or it might be even if you're in the former category, that maybe you're doing an illustration or something where you can go a bit off piece and you're thinking, Right, I'm able to use more colors. How would I do? So what I'm going to show you is the process I went through on a couple of the brands that you're becoming familiar with and how I develop those colors. So this is strictly more about branding, which is really beyond the bounds of this course. But nevertheless, it gives you an insight into how you can use color, how you can discover colors and use some of Illustrator's best tricks, really. So let's take a look at that. So you can see here we've got several greens and a color that clashes with that. We've got the purple, but it doesn't clash hugely. They still kind of go together. So I want to take a look at Illustrator and show you how I kind of made those colors attempt to make them work together. Now when I was pulling together the colors that would become plant power, so I started off, I was thinking, Okay, so what's going to go with the green color? What should clash quite nicely with it. I thought a sort of really pale pink. So I started with that. And what I did in Illustrator, there's a thing called color guide. So it's next to color, and you know about swatches, but color guide, if you click on it, it gives you a whole range of options now. Actually, let me just show this with Discover. That's what I was intending to do. Notice it's showing me different shades there. And that's because I'm on monochromatic. It's showing me using the monochromatic harmony rule, so that's the least contrasty. It's giving me options. So if I wanted to, and this might apply to you if you've got very limited choices in terms of color, you can literally use this. You can go, Oh, what about a darker version? You can just click straight on there. There we go. What I'm just doing What about a lighter version? If you like the idea of a monochromatic harmony, that's one way you can do it. You can literally go to Color Guide. Now that hasn't made swatches of these things. If you wanted to make swatches, you can either add them into swatches by pressing buttons like that. You can add them into a library by pressing the little plus button down here. Or you can just use it as you wish. So it kind of depends if you're more in branding mode or in illustration mode. Okay, so that's that. So with this one, I was hunting around for the right kind of color scheme. And I wanted to have one that was complimentary. But you can see it hasn't quite picked up that this is the color I want to use. It's still going on the blue, so click back on that little button there. There we go. So complimentary, you can see, does give me that really nice light green. So I was thinking, Yeah, that's going to work. So then I wanted to explore. Okay, so what else we got? Oh, here's some interesting options, complimentary, too. So I clicked on that. And then I pressed this little button here. This edits these colors. And this takes us into a really interesting area of Illustrator. This is more to do with branding, honestly, right now, but this could be really useful for you if you've been given something to work with and you want to develop some colors that go with it. So I won't go too deeply into this, but I think enough to make it useful for you. So if you're going to edit here, by default, you see this little button on the left, and it shows you like a color wheel. So this is what I was referring to earlier. So complimentary colors go across the wheel. We'll see about the other ones later. This is the color I started with. All these green ones are complimentary to that. Then we've got slightly darker one that goes with it. What you can do here is if you were to move these around, for example, down here, normally, it has the values in RGB. But what you can also do is go to HSB, hue, saturation, and brightness. So what I'm going to do and what I like to do is press that button there, and it shows me all these different colors because what I want is contrast, even something like this, which doesn't want to be too or strong. So what I think I did was, I liked some of these light ones, but then I wanted a color that was quite different. So I clicked on this one. I unlocked the padlock, and then I tried messing around with the hue, thinking, would that color work, that, I think I kind of landed on a purple that I thought might look quite nice. And then I wanted a more neutral color. So that was quite neutral. But I thought, Well, yeah, what else can we do with that? So I kind of kept messing around like that, and part of the time you're in this view, part of the time you're in this one, and you can drag these buttons around. And ultimately, when you press okay, you'll end up creating some swatches. So I did something like that. Press Okay. And did that work? No, it didn't. Let me What I should have done there is press that button there and it saves them in swatches. So this is something I do an awful lot, and I encourage you to try. So that's a complimentary color, but it just veers slightly. So it's not just the pink and the green. It just goes a little bit to give you a little bit more a few more options to work with. Whereas if I had just gone for, let's say this is another way of doing it. What I was tempted to do actually was to do monochromatic for this one. I thought that would look really good and that's really quite trendy at the moment. You can see lots of nice contrast there. So I would have just done that, press Okay. I should I made the same problem again and then add that in there. And then you can work from those. Okay, so we're starting to see a couple of things. We're seeing the color wheel and how just double click on this to get back into this. So the color wheel, in this case, we're just going inwards to go lighter or outwards to go darker. And we've also seen it in terms of complimentary colors. And next up, we'll look at it and see how it works with the slightly more contrasting ones. 60. Apply colour theory part 2: Okay, so continuing our look at color, we've gone from a nice subtle brand to something really not very subtle at all. So entirely deliberate as a nice contrast for you. So you might love this, you might hate it, but the idea is you'll notice it, and you'll notice it partly because of the colors. So let's look at how I went about doing that. So I wanted a bright red color, and I went to the color guide, and I went to Tri Addict. So we've looked at complimentary, which complimentary would go directly across the color wheel. So that's massively contrasting, the most contrast. But if we go to Triadic, then that's the next contrast. So now, I showed you an example where I just about managed to make the red, yellow, and blue work together. But generally speaking, you probably will need to if you are going to use a blue, you'll need to make it less saturated or more or less bright to make it work. But I decided not to. I thought I'd just use those two colors and then realized, of course, I've chosen exactly the same color as McDonald's, which was not my plan, necessarily. So that's how I got there. So going for big contrasts there, so the yellow and the red. Whereas with this one, this is one of the cafe Puro colors. Let's just look at that in the brand guidelines. I wanted here to have several colors that work together and look quite good against the dark brown background. They need to be contrasted with that. As you'll see, there's an interesting thing going on in terms of the colors here. What I did was went to high contrast. There's several different high contrast ones that gives you contrast in different ways. You'll notice, I think, how I did this. Can you see that it gives me two pairs of triadic colors, slightly darker versions of each, and they work great. That's how they work. Again, if I was going to tweak those and I probably did, I'd go in here and then go, well, let's suppose I wanted that one to be lighter still. I might click on it, make sure that's unlinked, and then I could make it even brighter or if I wanted to make it less saturated, I could do that. That's what I mean about tweaking these colors. So generally, you're looking for contrast either in terms of the hue or the saturation or the brightness. And what I might just do quickly is go back and show you what I meant about the triadic option. So if I was going to try and pick a blue for that, it'll probably go horribly wrong. So if I was going start with a triadic option here. I'm happy with yellow, but I thought, the blue is a little bit much. I could say, What about if I unlinked that and I desaturated it. So you with a paler blue, or what if I went for a much darker blue? Now, that to me is starting to get quite exciting. So that's the kind of thing I mean. So you can keep the kind of relationship in terms of how they are and the color wheel, but you can start to mess around with the saturation and lightness, and that's where it gets really interesting. Right. That's how we ended up with that one. This is an interesting one. This isn't a color scheme I use much at all, but I wanted to show you something quite different. I use this one, the pentagram, which as you might imagine from the name is five equally spaced, not three equally spaced, but five equally spaced going around. Again, if I just cancel out of that and show you the one we're looking at, we can just compare and contrast what we've got. So I think some of those I kept, but some of them I didn't like. So yeah, I didn't feel that I wanted the sort of pinky color. So I just tweaked the hue on that one to make it a bit more like that, for example, that started to work. And other than I think, as I was just saying, I think I wanted an extra color there. So you can do that in here. You can add another one. And I think I went for a blue but a little bit lighter, something like that. Often you find, again, this is more in branding or illustration. You find that once you start using these colors, you realize, actually we need more contrast here. We need a darker color, we need a lighter color. So I want you to be aware of all of that because it might be that you're working with a brand where you've got a bit of leeway and you can start to develop some other colors with it. So what I'm suggesting you do is you take your existing color, your base color, and then you look around in the color guide, try some different options, whichever ones you like. You can directly apply swatches like that. You can get into this and make a color group. And then you can press this button and have them as part of your swatches. So plenty for you to explore there. Remember, what we're trying to get is some kind of contrast that is good that kind of enhances the brand. So whether that's really contrasty, really muted, whatever works. So it has to tell the story of what you're trying to convey, whether that's really analogous and it's really nice and easy, it just goes smoothly or whether it's really jittery and contrasting. So plenty for you to discover there. 61. Create documents for print (MODULE 15): One of the reasons I like teaching design stuff is that I know how difficult it is to get started. So when I started with this, I kind of knew what I wanted to make, but I didn't quite know how to get there. And it's taken me a while to discover some of the theories and the tricks and the tips and a lot of that you really only learn from experience. And what I'm going to show you now is a kind of thing that I certainly have to learn from experience. But by watching someone who's been doing it for a while, watching kind of over their shoulder, it will really help you grow in confidence much more quickly. So what you're looking at here, this is an example of something which uses deliberately some of the theories we've been talking about. And I want to try and get it to the point where you can sort of understand it and hopefully use it for yourself. Again, you may or may not like the design. That's fine. But let me kind of show you the theory behind it. Now, before I get to this point, the trouble of them with this, if you're copying something, you don't quite know the process behind it and you're just seeing the finished one. Let me show you my start point would be something like this. I just show you, that's probably enough. So in a sketchbook, I would literally scribble out something like that. I'd say, right, I want the top half the page to be a picture, then I want the logo down here, and then I want headline here and a bit of text like that. Now, honestly, it took me several years of designing stuff before I realized that was the way you did it. You literally start on a piece of paper and get out four or five ideas, and then once you reckon, oh yeah, that will probably work, then go to InDesign or Illustrator or whatever. Because otherwise, what you'll do is you'll start off on a path that may or may not be a good one and you'll end up trying to perfect something which is never going to be any good. So if I can give you one piece of advice, that would be it. But in terms of this, what I try to do here, as you can see, in terms of ratios and breaking the page in half, there's lots of room for the picture, which is the main cell here. And then you might notice at the bottom, that's two thirds of the way across. That's all the way across, but that's two thirds of the way across. That. And what was the other thing? Yeah, in terms of the ratios again, that's roughly if I just show you that. I've broken the page up into ten here, so you got five there, and then two to three. Yes, roughly, very roughly two to three and very roughly one to two. So using some different ratios, is it all about ratios? Clearly, it's not. But if you got somewhere to start, that's really going to help. So in the next video, I'll show you how I would actually put that together. 62. Understand document structure: So I'm going to start this from scratch in design. So a lot of this you'll know already because you know about creating social stuff. The difference really with print stuff, some of the technical stuff you've learned about bleeds and so on, but more than that, it's really about creating something that's going to be red because typically for social images, you're looking at something that makes a big impact, but no one's going to spend time with, whereas print is different. People are going to pick it up, I'll take it home, they'll browse it, so it needs to be readable. So I've just made this, but if I was starting from scratch, I would start with print. And in the US, you might want to use letter size. I'm in the UK, so I'm going to use a four. That's our standard. That's the size there. Number of pages is one. That's all I need. Columns, I'm not going to worry about right now. But margins, this is really quite a big deal, really, when it comes to stuff in print. Now, the standard margin is 12.7 millimeters, which might strike you as a pretty weird size. The reason they're 12.7 millimeters is that this is three times the value of the most commonly used point size, which is 12 point. And that's a pretty good place to start. But really, I'm saying this because it all comes down to the size of the text you're going to use. So 12 point in Yeah, 12 point is measured in point sizes. In millimeters, it's equivalent to this value here, 4.233. So assuming you've got 12 point type, you'll have a column gutter of that, and the standard margins will be three times that. So that's how it's designed to work. You don't really need to know that stuff, but if you do, it helps because it's really all about the font size you're going to use. So I'm going to choose a font size of 14 point, a bit bigger than normal type because this is designed to be read at a distance. You'll notice it converts that into 4.939 millimeters, not the easiest number. So the margins, I'm going to start with their default value, which is three times the point size. The easiest way to do that is just to type in 14 PT Shift eight, which gives you an asterisk, which means multiplied by three. Then you hit in the next field like that, you get this very obscure number, nearly 15, but that's exact. Then I put bleed on now because you know about that, 3 millimeters. And then I do create. So that's the main area we're going to work with. But as you know, if we look at where we're going, we're going to end up with half of that that's going to be used by the image, and then we're going to use rough ratios at the bottom. So to do that, the way I normally do it is go in the layout menu and choose Create guides. It's not very widely used feature, but it's in my view, one of the best ones in Illustrator, Illustrator in design. And I want to have ten rows. I'm going to hit the tab key as a quicker way of just jumping to the next field like that. And the gutter is the gap between them. Now, because I'm just using it for kind of visual guide, I don't really need a gutter or a gap at all. Could do with a tiny one, maybe I leave it at zero. Okay, that breaks the area between the margins down into ten, and tens a good number. It could be ten, could be eight, could be 12, but it needs to be an even number because I need to be able to break that in half. I'd also like ten because that gives me two and three, and as we know, two to three is a ratio that we might use. The more you get into this, the more you can use these. And then columns, I'm going to use three columns. And I don't think I need a gutter. That's the grid I'm going to work with. It's just a guide, but having done that with my rectangle frame tool, I can create a frame that goes halfway down the page. Then I can create a frame a little bit of a gap for my text, roughly that size. Then another frame, this is where I should have had a little bit of a gap going downwards, that would have made it more consistent for the rest of my text, and then the logos going to go at the bottom. So I'm hoping that you kind of get how that works because it really gives you a structure to use and to build on. So rather than bring this all together from scratch, we'll just go to the finish one because you know how to do all of this stuff. But that's essentially how I ended up with it. And I followed the brand guidelines, and I tried different things, and I don't think there's anything that you need to know that you don't know. What we're going to look at in the next lesson is how we create paragraph style so that you can quickly create something and edit it. But right now, I just want to mainly focus on the structure because I think if you got that bit, the rest of it will fall nicely into place. There you go. That's the thought process that I use when I'm designing pretty much anything. I try and think of it in terms of these ratios. I try and use a grid. If you're thinking, there's no way I do that, that's absolutely fine, but this is how I do it, and I do recommend it. 63. Create Paragraph Styles: Going to continue looking at how to create a document like this from scratch. So everything on this page, you know how to do and, you know, to bring in logos, you know, to bring in images. This is one of my images, actually, as opposed to one from Unsplash, but I'm sure if you wanted to create this and you typed in antigua Guatemala, you'd find images like this. So in terms of this text here, this is very much like we've done with social media. You would create a frame and if you want to make it larger, you can do that little trick with command shift or control shift, click on the corner handle pause and make that bigger or smaller. You can do those two bits of text in separate frames. That's probably easier than the way I've done it. I've done it in one frame, which I think possibly isn't the best way of doing it. Now, with these things, because I'm going to be modifying them, you know, kind of tweaking them in this way. I'm probably not going to worry about creating a paragraph style. I'm not worried about that being consistent, but the rest of the text, I want to be consistent, and that's where paragraph styles come in, as you will remember from this document. So this is how you do it. You would create a frame Again, I'm using the grid. Click inside with your type tool. As you might recall from the finished one earlier, it said something like, where, why, when or something. Let's say where question mark. Then rather obviously, if I've got some real text to type in, I would type it in. But as you might have seen in the type menu, this wonderful command filled with placeholder text, just gives you some random Latin text. I'm going to just cut that at a certain point. Hit Return, then type. Why return. Then I could cut and paste that text. I might as well just do some slightly different ones. Fill with placeholder text. It does it randomly. So just zoom in so you can see what I'm doing. I'm just put in my cursor before the U there and doing a backspace to get that into one paragraph. Get rid of that one, delete and return. You might be thinking, all this returning and things. What's going on? This is a time to look again at the type show hidden characters. We can see every time I hit a return, I get one of these little reversed Ps as you might remember. That's one paragraph. That's the second paragraph. I can tell that because it ends with that third paragraph, fourth paragraph, two more. When, clearly, I'm making this up as I go along. And then one final bit of placeholder text. The placeholder text is useful because it is more realistic than just typing in this is random text or something. It reads more like real words. And it's also very obvious to you later when you come to edit it that you need to change it. Put some full stops at the end of that. Okay, so now I'm ready to try and make that text consistent. So just to be clear, you do not have to create paragraph styles, but my advice is that you do. The reason why I'm saying that will become increasingly obvious once we've made them. So the way we make them is firstly, we go to the Window menu, and we choose styles and paragraph styles. By default, you only get one star for free, if you like, which is called the basic paragraph. And then you select a paragraph at a time and you change the so called character formatting. That's formatting that you could apply to a single character or letter, soon the size, that kind of thing. Then you apply the paragraph formatting. That's the only formatting that affects the whole paragraph, like whether it has automatic hyphenation, whether it has space before it, that kind of thing. And then you capture it as a style. So I'm going to select this first paragraph, and four clicks is the best way to do that. And then I'm going to change the font up here to optima. So referring to the brand guidelines. Optima bold, I believe it was, possibly black. I'm not sure. Let's choose that one. I'm going to make it a bit bigger, let's say, 18 points. Now, in terms of paragraph formatting, I'll ignore that on this one. Then I come over here to Paragraph Styles and the drop down menu, I choose new Paragraph style. I give it a name. I'll just call this let's say subheading. You can apply keyboard shortcut if you've got an extended keyboard. I'm not going to worry about that right now. Apply the style to selection. And if you are using CC libraries and if you feel you're going to be using this a lot, you can add it to your current library, or if you've got other libraries you can choose from whichever ones you want. So I'm not going to do that right now. And then when I press Okay, there's my style. So if I check it works, if I put my cursor anywhere in this paragraph, there you go. So you've got that instant consistency. Okay, that's good. So next up, let's select this paragraph again with four clicks. Again, change the character formatting, so the font. So this is going to be optima standard. Roman. Roman is often the word for just a default. Roman or regular is another word they use. That font size looks okay, I think. And then what I haven't looked at yet is the paragraph formatting. So the paragraph formatting, as I say, formatting that affects the whole paragraph, so there could be the alignment, for example. But the thing I'm going to do is turn off hyphenate up here. So notice that that takes away those automatic hyphenations. Okay and then I'm going to turn that into a paragraph style, which I'm going to call body. That's the general term for the main bulk of text you would read. It remembers your previous setting so that it'll apply the style and it won't in this case, put it into a library. So then I can apply that to these two. Okay, so so far so good, I know that all that text is consistent and it's how I've asked it to be, so that's great. I'm going to zoom out. I'm going to do Command or Control Zero. That looks pretty good to me, actually. I'm pretty happy with that. I'm thinking though the headings, at least, need to be blue, and I'd also like a bit more space before the headings. So this is the real benefit of using styles. Because what I can do, I can right click on the subheading style. Choose Edit subheading, and then with the preview here turned on, I can make any changes and I'll see them applied directly on the screen. For example, character color. I can apply any swatches that I've got in the document, so that's that one. Notice they've all changed. And then the spacing under Idense and spacing, this is one of the most common ones you'd use. I'm going to say space before. Notice I can do a very subtle space before there. Again, we talked about proximity, so that just emphasizes that this text belongs with why, this text belongs with where and so on. That helps. Having done that, I want a bit more contrast between the two. I'd like this text to either be bigger or maybe a bit bolder. I'm going to go to basic character formats. Instead of bold, I'm going to try extra black. What do you think? I reckon that's probably a bit too much. I'd like one in between the two, really, but there isn't one, so I'm going to stick with bold, but maybe make it a bit bigger. And also maybe pull the tracking back a little bit. And we did tracking to get the text to fit. This is less about that and more about the style, really. So looking at the text up here, it looks like it's been negatively tracked negatively tracked to use the jargon, and that matches out a bit better. Yeah, I kind of like that. I think that works. Another text doesn't fit perfectly, but it's only kind of fake text anyway, so that's right. So I'm pretty happy with that. So I will press Okay. Let me zoom out again. I might look at it in presentation mode. You know, the only thing that I'm worried about now, I'd like the final line of the text to line up with the baseline of cultural tours. So if I was going to be really picky, which I probably would be to be fair, I'm going to show you how we would do that. I selected the frame before I zoomed in and put the focus on that frame. I'm going to just make this a bit deeper. What I want is the final line of the text to line up with the baseline of that. You might think, well, yeah, how are you going to do that? How you do it is in the view menu, you say show rulers. These rulers aren't useful for measuring anything in my view, but what they alloy to do with your selection tool, you click and drag and you can drag what's called a ruler guide. And what I'm going to do is position it on the baseline under the baseline of that. Oh, look at that. That just happens to work perfectly, anyway, which is surprising. There we go. That's what I want. Can you see the alignment works? I could bring that down a tiny bit, but honestly, that's more to do with where this frame starts. So I could drag it down a tiny bit. But actually it's already snapping to the grid there, so I don't really want to mess with that. If I really did want to get it absolutely exact, I would adjust the space before this paragraph a tiny bit, but that's close enough. So all I need to do now is get rid of the last three lines there. The lines, last three words, and then make sure I close this back up again. So again, a good example of alignment. So all kind of fits together. I'm pretty happy with that. So if I save this, then the styles are made, and next time I open it, they're still there. And if I turn this into a template or if I was to try and save a copy of this or something, the styles will be there, so that gets set as the style. This is quite quite common really, what I will do if someone gives me a piece of work to do once I've got the text, once I've got the images, I'll put together a very quick style a bit like I did, and then I might spend some time tweaking it to get it to work. Because once it works, you then use it all the way through your document, which I know in this case is just one page, but if it was 100 page document, then obviously has much more use. There you go. That's how you create a paragraph style. 64. Understand the Primary Text Frame: Before we get into creating this, I want to look back at this document for a second. There's a really, really key difference between these two documents, and it's this. In this case, the text, we're going to put in a frame that's made completely manually, right? So I decided for various design reasons, I wanted the body text, so called, in a completely manual frame like that. So I just decided where on the page? I wanted to put that and I put it in there. Whereas on the one that you're about to create, this is a frame that is called a primary text frame, and it comes in automatically, and the key difference is that it uses the margins. The area inside the margins in design is assuming that's where the text is going to go. So that's what will happen on both pages. But maybe something to think about here would be if you had to put a novel together, I imagine you've read novels in the past and pretty much every page is the same, and the text starts on page one or page ten or whatever and goes all the way through to the end. If you had a document like that, the last thing you'd want would be create all the pages manually and put all the text frames on manually. What you want is a more automated way of doing it and that's what you're about to learn here. But the key thing is, it's about whether you use that feature or not. It's perfect for this, but you really wouldn't want to have that here because it would assume that the margin area is where the text is going to go and that simply isn't the case on every document. In fact, on no documents we've worked on yet, here we go. So we create a new document and it's print, it's a four. It's two pages. They're not facing pages because there's no spine. It is going to use the primary text frame. You'll see what that is in a minute. It's going to be two columns. Again, notice the gutter is 4.233 millimeters. That means 12 point. The margins are three times 12 point, as you might remember. Now I'm happy with that bottom left and right, but on the top, as you might have clocked a minute ago, that's going to be a larger value and the value that works for this is 55 0 millimeters. There's nothing that goes near the edge, so we don't need to worry about bleed. The preview should be working. It's not. That's annoying. Hang on a minute, 50, click on there. There we go. I hadn't clicked somewhere else. I hadn't given it the chance to write it. There we go. This is what I'm trying to say that this is where the body text is going to go, in this area. That doesn't mean we can't use the rest of this, of course, we will, but this is where it's going to go and where it's going to go is in the primary text frame. What the hell does that mean? You might think? Well, let's press the create button. So with my selection tool, if I was to click here, you'll notice there is already a text frame there. Notice the input and the output. Notice the output is linked to the next page. So this means you haven't got to draw it. It's already there. It's assuming that's where the text is going to go. So that's the first key feature, not for every kind of document remember, but for some and certainly for this one. Okay, that's the first thing I want you to know. Second thing, the Master page. We've been there already. So if you double click there on the Master page, this is actually where the primary text frame lives. That's why it's on both pages. So when you create this from scratch, I want you to have a look at the finished version that you've got, see if you can put this together. Of course, if you really don't want to do that, you can just copy all those elements and do edit paste in place on the master page. But a challenge for you is to try using these guides. So we looked at these in the previous lesson. When I say guides, I mean the ruler guides, the ones that you drag down. I dragged down some guides. Can you see that I drag one down to the base of the arc there that rainbow. I wanted to get the baseline of the text, the big text lining up with that. Then a separate frame, I've got I'm calling the strap line again using a guide, I wanted to get that lined up. To the cultural tours. So you bring the logo in. And the other thing is, I wanted there to be a nice kind of square in the corner. So I wanted to make sure that when I brought the logo in, it appears in the right place. And as you might recall, the margins there are 12.7. So we'd want a ruler 12.7 from the top. Let me just show you how I do that bet. So I'm on the master page. If I drag a ruler down, can you see over here, it has the distance down from the top. If you're not seeing that's because you've deselected, you just click back on it and it goes darker blue. And if you change that to 12.7 hit return, then that's now in the right place. I can drag a ruler in from this side too. So that's how I get the first set of margins. And then if I was to bring the logo in, I could drag the other ones down. I hope you can figure that out. So that's how we're going to use the Master page. That's the primary text frame. So with that in there, you can bring the text, same text as before. And what I'd like you to do see if you can figure out how to create these paragraph styles. So you know how to make them. You've made a couple, and you know what these are supposed to look like. You can refer to the previous document if you want to. So there's the introduction style, and then it just goes days, places and body, those three styles. So then the other thing that you will need to know is how we create this object here that pushes the text away. So what you'll do is create an empty frame. Select it and then do in the window menu, Text Wrap, it's another one of these panels. Then it's that second button in from the left and that pushes the text away. Remember what you're trying to do. I was lucky that you want to get that day five paragraph on the first page. If that doesn't spill over, then the text is going to fit. Assuming you make your styles the same way I've made mine, feel free to make it completely different. So long as you can get the text to fit on two pages. The other thing then is the gap underneath there. I would use these buttons here to get that. Having done that, I can see that as that goes over, I can just make that tiny bit smaller. If I zoom out a little bit, I can see how far I need to pull that. There we go. The new things then in this particular document when you create a new document by using the primary text frame and deciding where to put the margin, where the text is going to go, then the text will automatically come in and flow. Then on the master page, deliberately using guides. And then also deliberately creating Text Wrap. So these are features that you'll need if you're putting documents together like this and also in the final in design module, when you look at longer documents, you're going to see some of these things coming back again. So it's good preparation for that. Okay, so you've got a lot to do here, but I'm really hoping that it feels doable. And, of course, you can get in touch if you need a hand. 65. Create a map with Illustrator (MODULE 16): Recently in Illustrator, you've learnt how to edit a map that's already been made. Now you're going to learn how to create it from scratch. So if you look on my screen here, you'll see the first context in which you saw this map. It's in the end design document. And even though we're going to be drawing maybe a little bit more than this, this is ultimately where it's going to end up, so it's going to be that sort of shape. So as you know, there is a vector graphic that comes from Illustrator. You've already edited a little bit of that existing map. So to create it from scratch, first thing we've got to do is get some kind of source to trace over. Now, let me just say something before we get into this. You might be thinking, I never ever I am going to need to create a map, and that may well be true. But what you'll learn here is applicable for maps, but it's also applicable for a lot of illustration styles as well. So what I hope you'll pick up from this are some useful skills, some of which relate to maps, but also relate much more widely. So firstly, where are we going to get the map from? Well, in Google, I've got the openstretmap.org site. Now, I'm recommending this partly because it's more useful for our purposes, but also because this is free to use, whereas you might be familiar with Google Maps. I'm sure you are. Google Maps are copyright. So whilst I'm sure nothing would happen if you were to trace over something and use it, technically, this is free to use, whereas Google Maps isn't. So we're going to use this, so I'm drawing a map of Nicaragua, and I would encourage you to do the same. The first thing you're going to need to do is create some kind of screenshot of this so that we can trace over it. So again, for something more illustrative, the same thing would apply. You'd take some kind of image, whether it's a scan or a photo or a screenshot and then trace over it. So the same thing would apply. So first up, I'm on a Mac, so to do that, it's control, sorry, control. It's Command Shift four. So if I hold down those keys, that enables me to just drag around an area. So I'm thinking, I need to get this bit in here. So I'm going to go up like that. And nothing happens until I let go of the mouse, but that looks like the area I need. So when I let go, that will appear by default on the desktop, I believe. On a PC, you press the print screen button. Again, that would give you a screenshot. You might need to Google more on that if you've never done that before on a PC. So if I go to my finder now, I'm going to just do Command option H to hide. That is my screenshot. Just press the space bar, you'll see that's what I've captured. So I've already made a copy of that in my folder I'm going to use. So that's where I'm going. So to illustrate it, here's the finish one I just got there there in case I need to refer to that one. But I'm going to just go file new to create a new document. Because this will be used primarily for print, I've chosen print and then I've chosen A four. That gives me a rough sense of scale. But honestly, that isn't crucial which of these you use. I'm going to press Create. Then like an end design, I'm going to do File and Place, and I'm going to find the one that I made, which is this one. When I bring it in, like an design, it can link, so it can remain linked. If you don't do that, it embeds it inside the file, which I tend to do in Illustrator. But it's not crucial which one you do. When you bring it in, bit like an end design. You can click and drag. So I'm going to go a bit like that. So there's my original that I'm copying from. So that should do fine. So I'm going to be making quite a lot of use of layers, but I'm realizing what we've seen so far in Illustrator. I'm just going to do option click on there just to make it a bit wider. I want kind of maximum screen width here. So we've been using the Essentials Classic workspace. One option you've got, if you look very carefully here, if I press the little Chevron there, it collapses that one to icons. As you can see, that gives me quite a bit of extra screen width. That can be quite useful. It means that I can do Command plus a few times to zoom in. And I might even be able to have the layers panel open. Now, you will need the layers panel open because we're going to be doing lots with opening, closing opening, closing, hiding, showing layers of various types. So I'm pretty much set up. So let me just finish setting this up, and then we'll continue in another video. So this is currently Layer one. Everything you do in Illustrator by default is on Layer one. I'm going to double click on that and change it to original. This really helps later on down the line when you realize, Oh, what's on with layer. So if I hit return, I could do that. And then I can hide that if I want to. I can also lock it by clicking there. Locking means if I try and click and drag, I can't. So that's a good start. And then the next thing I'm going to do to prevent me drawing more than I need, what I generally try and do is create some kind of guide so I know which bits I'm drawing and which bits I'm not. I usually put that on a separate layer. So I would go to the dropdown menu here, so the top right of your layers panel, do new layer and when you do it that way, the reason I do it that way rather than pressing the plus button at the bottom, is it gives me this option straightaway so I can name it as I do it. I'm going to call this boundary. And then the color is the color of the anchor points on that layer. And so it's a good idea to try and find something that clashes with what you're going to be working on. So that red is fine. Press okay. So my boundary layer is there has nothing on it. I'm going to use my rectangle tool. I'm going to click up here somewhere. So somewhere up here, click and drag. And I'm trying to define the area I'm going to work on. Obviously, the problem is, it's just given me a white area, which clearly I can't see. So I want that to be none. So you might remember a shortcut for that is the well, actually, let me do it that way. That's the kind of way of changing the fill color. But what I recommend you do instead is you press D, that gives you the default colors. So black stroke, white fill, and then you press the keyboard shortcut, which is forward slash. And so long as the fill is in the front, you've now got, like, a window to see through. So now this is the area that we're going to draw. If I wanted to edit that, I go back to my selection tool and my bounding box is switched off, so I could turn that back on again and maybe pull that up a little bit. If I just refer to the one that we're creating. You can see we don't need to go too far below the lake there, and we're going up to just above stale, yeah, that looks okay. Could pull that in a little bit. Something like that. Okay, so that's great. So that's the boundary layer. So if I click on that to lock that because now I won't want to move that, I'm going to save this, and then I will continue in the next video. 66. Use the Pencil Tool: Previous video, we set up the creation of this map from scratch. We've created a couple of layers. We've got the original map on one layer. We've got a boundary we've drawn, so we know where we're creating. That's all set up. So now let's get drawing. Now, I'm going to create a new layer and I'm going to call this land because this is going to be the land that we're going to include. Now, the green color isn't great because that bright green doesn't contrast hugely with the blue, some of which will be on. So I'm going to choose a colour that clashes with that. So let's say, Oh, I don't know. Let's say orange. Okay, so it's an empty layer. It's unlocked. So there are basically two ways that you can draw an Illustrator. One is using the pen tool, and briefly, the Pentl you draw by going click click and so on, for straight lines or click and drag for curved lines. This is wonderful for really detailed stuff. Where you need to be super precise. But for the rest of the time, you can use this tool called the pencil tool. That might be hidden under the shaper tool, depending on what you're using. But pencil tool that's where we're going. First thing to know about the pencil tool, when you start using it, you get a little snowflake next to it, and that means that nothing has been drawn already. So I'm going to click up here and drag and I'm doing this with my tablet thing, which may or may not work now. I'm not trying to be too accurate here. I'll stop there. Now, you might be quite surprised at how smooth that line is because you might have seen I really wasn't drawing it hugely with any kind of great confidence or anything. Now, let me show you how that works. If I double click it gives me options here. The further it is on the left, the more accurate it is. The further on the right, the smoother it is. And you can play around with this. So depending on how far you zoomed in, depending on the device you're drawing with, depending on how much coffee you've had and various other things, you may or may not get a smooth line. Now, for the purposes of this map, that's absolutely fine. I don't need it to be kind of more detailed than that. If you did want it to be much more detailed, then you would drag the slide to the left. But I'm okay with that, so Okay, so that's good. So I've done that bit. Now, to do the rest of bit round here, because as you might be able to four S, this is going to be kind of cut off. We're not going to see this. We could just do yeah, a very kind of rough line. What we can also do is swap to the pen tool, click once here, and then do a click one to three, four, and you hopefully can slip tiny little circle. That means that these are going to join up. So there we go, the pen tool for the straight lines and the pencil tool for the curly ones. So that is going to be using a fill of white and no stroke. So let's bring the fillers at the front, so let's make that white. And then the stroke, let's bring that to the front and make that none. So now the only problem with doing it white, it probably will end up white, but actually we can't really see what we've done. So what I'm going to do instead is just make sure that's selected. I might just use a very, very tiny tint here, this is a 5% tint of black. So now we can see that's what we draw. Now, obviously, it's going to be tricky tracing other stuff with this in the front, but we do need it to be there. So what we can do is lock it and hide it, and then continue. Okay, so next up, I'm going to do another new layer, which I'm going to call. Let's say, water. I will stick with dark blue. Hopefully clashes enough with this. I'm going to use the same technique, the pencil tool, I'm going to zoom in a little more. In my case, Command plus or Control plus on the PC, hold down the space bar so I can click and drag. So I'm going to just draw a little section and then stop and then notice it's drawing the anchor points for me, and so long as I come back and instead of seeing the asterisk, I see a little diagonal line, it knows that I want to continue. This is really nice. You can go pretty free hand. And some of this is going to be fine. Some of it I'm going to need to come back and tweak later. I'm very conscious of how much time you have to spend watching me, so I'm not going to get this super accurate. But clearly, if I needed to, I could change those settings to make it more accurate. I could zoom in further. The trick is, I need that circle which I hope you can see. So when I let go, that's now what's called a closed path because you can't see where it began or where it's finished. So I'm going to fill that with let's say that color there, and also give it a color around the edge, a stroke. So let's go with a black stroke. Let's say, something like that, maybe a bit thinner. Okay, so I'm going to just see what that looks like by deselecting. That's not too bad. But what I want to show you, if we look at an area like this, that kind of kink happens quite often when you're using this tool. And if you want to fix that, just turn the bounding box off, actually. If you want to fix that, what you do is you go back to your pencil tool again and you just redraw. So I'm going to kind of redraw from here to here, and it works great. There are other tools that are supposed to help with this. One's called the Smooth tool. In my view, it just doesn't work as well as doing what we're doing here, just redrawing it. So just trying to get rid of some of those telltale kinks. And again, let's say, for example, I didn't mean to include that or I don't need it, I could just go back and redraw. So long as you start and finish on the line again, then it does that for you. Okay, so that's apologies to anybody lving in Nicaragua watching this. I'm completely destroying the shape of your lovely lake. So sorry about that. Okay, let's see what we got. If we hide the original map, you can see we've got some land and we've got some water. I'm going to just select that, change it to make it a little bit less full on. So bring the stroke to the front. Something like that. Okay, so that's the process, really. We'll do a few more of those. Rather than you having to watch me do that, what I'm going to do is draw this and yeah, I'll speed it up so you don't have to watch me do it kind of in real time. So see you on the other side of that. Okay, now I've drawn this to give it the same fill and stroke color as the finished one. I'm going to use this tool here the eyedropper with my current lake selected. Click on this one, and it inherits the fill and stroke from something else. So let's just save that So we've got the land, and we've got the water. Now I want to do the sea. Now, the sea, really, I can just have a large area here. So long as it's on a layer underneath the land, it will be absolutely fine. So I think what I'm going to do is just create a new layer, which I'll call Sea drag that underneath the land layer. Make sure the sea layer is selected, and then I might as well just draw it with a rectangle tool to start from somewhere like that. Make sure I encompass the area of the sea. Choose a color. And then when I show the land layer again, there you go. There's you see. If we look at the boundary layer actually should be above the sea layer, I think now. So let's bring that above. Yeah, there we go. So that's how you move the layers. You just drag them up or down. So I notice also actually the boundary layer really would be better if it was above all these other layers. So I'm going to drag that right to the top. Try not to let it go like that. That would put it on the water layer. Drag it where you see a little thin line there, the thin line. So if I zoom out a little bit, you can hopefully start to see this is building up now. So if I just hide all the layers, by clicking and dragging over them, we've got the original. We've got the S. Actually, I noticed that the sea has got a black stroke. That doesn't really help. So select it, bring the stroke to the front, make that none. Okay, that's good. And then the land, and then the water, and then the boundary. Okay, so so far so good, we're learning a bit more about layers, and we're learning about the pencil tool. 67. Use type and Symbols: So we're continuing creating this map. And this video, we're going to look at adding type and also a bit more pencil stuff. So here we go. So firstly, look at the layers panel again. So we've got land and sea. We don't really need those for a bit, so I'm going to keep those hidden and also locked. So we'll do a lot of this with hiding and showing and unlocking and unlocking. Get used to those symbols. Okay, so firstly, the type. So I'm going to do a new layer, which I'm going to call places. And again, just change the color so it's a little bit more contrasty with the rest of it. So let's say teal, for example. And then with my type tool, I simply click once where I want to put some text. So I'm going to click here and it gives me a bit of sample text. I'm just going to type over that. So Mata GalpaGLA you can't read that, neither can I. But if I go back to my selection tool, you might see there's just one single anchor point there. There we go. So that's that. So that is too large. I'm also using the wrong font. So the font for this brand, as you might remember is optima, so that should already be loaded up. If you've done that previously. So let's try the optima bold. And font size a little lower that. Yeah, that looks about right. So I can put that in place there. So I'm going to make a copy. So all option drag nearby. And then click carefully to edit the text. So lay on back to the Selection tool. Hold down the alter option key, Managua, and so on. So you kind of see how this works, so I won't do it for all of them. But what the finished map looks like, if you look at the finished one again, you can see that I've got a little dot there. So again, this is an example of a symbol if you want to do it the most flexible way. So I would create a little circle with the ellipse and I'd sort of click and drag, hold down the Shift key. That's really hard to see whether that looks circular or not, but if you do command or Control H for hide, yeah, that looks pretty good to me. So now I'm going to turn that into a symbol by opening up the symbols panel, which is here, and then saying new symbol, and it should take what I've got selected. I'll call this place dot. Press Okay. There it is. It's a symbol, it's marked up there. If I want another one, I can just drag it out of there. So I can drag as many of those out as I want to. You might remember from the previous video, the reason for doing that is if I change my mind, I can double click on that and change it for all of them. That might come in useful later once I've drawn the roads. There we go. There's a little bit about type. Again, with type, we create a type object with a type tool. Which we can move around. And then we're using that type tool to edit the text. But the selection tool most of the time just to position the various bits. So what I realize here is that Managua probably needs to be there. So basically, I'll move that around. And then really it's a case of juggling which bits we're going to see and which bits we're not. So yeah, that kind of makes sense. So next video, we'll look at roads. 68. Stroke attributes & Artboards: So we're doing pretty well with our map now. We've learned the key skills about layers and pencil tool and type a bit about symbols. Now a bit more in terms of drawing again. So let me go back into where we are. So I'm going to hide the Sorry, I'm going to show the original layer. So we need a few roads. So technically, you know what's going on here. So let me just quickly go through that. So the road layer, roads, again, give it a color that contrasts, so red. So I know that our trip goes sort of down here somewhere. So, for example, I need to draw a road. So let me sort of start. Let's say because all we're trying to do here is the essence of often what you're doing in Illustrator, you're trying to simplify something. You're trying to say, this is the information you need. In this case, let me press D to give the default colors. Is saying that the trip goes down to Rivas and it goes from a NAGua but it also goes from a Naga up to Leon. So depending on the detail here, I'd also be going up to Mata Galper. So we just need people to understand, you know, where the trip goes and where the roads go. So in this case, it doesn't need to be super accurate. If it does, then of course, we're zooming in. We're doing a much, much finer idea. So what I would start to do now is maybe hide the original and, again, in for clarity purposes, I'm trying to figure out where that road goes where it stops and whether these little dots are in the right place. In this case, probably, I want to just make that road come around here a little bit, so we can kind see how it all connects in with Managua, and that looks good. Now to change this one, what you don't do, what you do not do is this. You don't just start drawing a new one like that because what you'll end up with is two different roads that don't join. So instead, you select the road that you want to extend, and then you use your pencil tool to do that. Let's suppose I just wanted that to go a little bit further, maybe up to lay on like that. And then I decided, actually I want to just move the text so I can grab the text. So depending on what you're doing, you can manipulate these different bits, so I could close those gaps if I wanted to. So if I wanted to do that, I might first make the symbol a bit bigger, so I would Double click on that, select it. Easiest way to scale it up is to double click on the scale tool. Let's say we make it 200% size, and then escape to get out of it. And now I would go in and go, let's just I'm zooming in here, Command plus with my pencil. Do this kind of stuff. Depending on the order of the layers, let me just put one. Shortcut here. If I want to select this one, rather than going back to the Selection tool, if I hold down the command key or Control key on the PC, I can click. I don't want to let go. It's selected, but I'm still using the same tool so I can then come up and just position that like that. The idea is that this starts to feel like it belongs together. I quite like that, but if I wanted Managua to be over here, which it doesn't really work. But if I did, I would then obviously do the same thing here, but I quite like the way I left the gap, so I'm going to undo. Okay, so one final thing is if we look at the finished map here, you can see we've got a very, very smooth line here. That's quite hard to draw with the pencil. So this is where the pen would come in. So this indicates an airplane flight to the corn islands, which I think we got on the finished map that we edited. So if I want a very smooth line, what I would do is with my pentil I click once at the beginning, I'm going to click once at the end and once in the middle. Start from here, once at the beginning. In the middle, rather than clicking, I click and drag and you get these pair of handles, which are a bit like magnets, and they attract the line towards them. Then when I do a fine one over here, you can see I get a really smooth arc. Unfortunately, what I also get is a black fill because that's what I used last. I don't want that. I want a black stroke, not a black fill and this button here swaps those over. Now I've got a very very smooth line, which there's just no way you could draw that with the pencil tool. I don't want to spend that much time on the pentil on this course. But if you do feel that's something you really want to learn about, then get in touch and I can give you some resources that might help you on that. What I do want to do here is make that dotted line. I'll do that in the stroke panel. Then if I change the cap to a round cap, and then we play with this before, let's remember the numbers here, but something like that. Then if I do select, you can see that's how you would get a dotted line. If I wanted to manipulate that, I could do that by clicking with the direct selection tool. I could click on that to make that a little bit less arced. So if we were to continue with that and put all the roads in and so on, then that would kind of be finished. I just want to show you how it actually would finish this. I would show all the layers that I want, so the sea, the land. I can see the land is problematic. Now, it's hiding some stuff. So, the roads. So the roads need to be above the land. So I should have dealt with that earlier. Let's try that again. The places need to be above probably the roads. There we go. That's coming together. The only thing I might want to do here, you might have seen there was something a bit weird going on there, that one. So with that one, if I just select it, that's got a white fill. So this is an open path, so you can see both ends. And if you have a fill color, it kind of weirdly joins them. So I don't want that. So like that. None, that's good. I'm thinking that's pretty good. The only thing I might want to do is have some coastline here. So what I think I'm going to do is my land, if I just select that. That hasn't got a stroke. So if I add now, what color do I want it to be? I'm thinking a fairly dark stroke. It's hard to see it, so I'm going to do Command H to hide the edges, make it a bit thicker. I think I want the sea to be a bit lighter, so I don't want to spend too long on this, but I hope you get the idea that we do need to tweak this a little bit. So kind of play around with those a little bit just so we can start to get hopefully that's a little bit clearer. It's still clearly not land, but we want to be able to see the coastline. So by making that a little bit light a little bit darker, Yeah, something like that. Okay, so the final bit, once you've drawn it all and you've got everything working, what I would then do is play around with this boundary because ideally, when I export it, I want to kind of choose which bits are showing and which bits aren't. So if I unlock the boundary layer now, I'm going to lock all the other layers. Okay, so this is the boundary. I can see it selected. I forgot to turn on show edges. That's very easily done. So what I'm going to do now is just manipulate that a little bit. Let's show the bounding box. Let's say that's the bit that we want to keep, maybe moving a little bit further. We don't need quite so much C there. Maybe that comes down a little bit. What I tend to do in new versions of Illustrator is actually edit the Artboard, so it snaps to this. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to zoom out a little bit. You can see the Artboard is A four size. If I use the Artboard tool, drag that down, set it snaps. This one in as well? It should snap to the object there. So the idea now, I can probably hide the boundary layer. I don't really need it anymore. I might lock it, as well. When I export that, it's only going to bring in the stuff inside the boundary. So I find that works pretty well. So I'm going to save this, and I'll show you what that looks like when I bring it into in design. If I get rid of that by selecting the contents, delete. So I'm going to bring in this map. And let's do object fitting, fill frame proportionally. I like to click on that, bring that in a little bit. So as you can see, not quite finished, but it works exactly as you wanted. So there we go. That's how we create a map or any kind of illustration that you can trace over in Illustrator. 69. Create social images with Illustrator & Photoshop (MODULE 17): In this module of the course, we're going to look again at web images. So so far, we've only really created them in InDesign. We haven't really looked at what Illustrator and Photoshop can offer us. So we're going to take a quick recap of what we know in InDesign and then look at how Illustrator and Photoshop do things similarly and differently and what they offer. So there's plenty here for you to learn, and you can take from it what you will. It might be that you prefer in the end to do it in InDesign or Illustrator or Photoshop, it's up to you, but you'll get a sense of that by the end of this section. So let's start. So in in design, I've gone back to a document that we've created previously. So I don't need to say much about that, except for we got the information you remember about the size to make the document from Quick Sprout and from there obviously from other places as well, but you can go through their recommendations. But the main thing is, you go to their link or whoever can give you the specifications, which you click in there, you get to this, and then you can choose whichever platform you want. So that's the main thing. So remember, in InDesign, we created a new document, and we specified the pixels involved, and in InDesign, if you want a reminder of the size of your document, you go file document setup, and it tells you. So this is 1920 by 1080. And then we saved it, you remember from InDesign by doing export, and we exported it as a PNG or pink, which is generally the way to go. Okay, so let's kind of take what we've learned from there. Oh, the other one, of course. I don't remember if we put this together in InDesign, but certainly we could have done very easily. So we import the photo here. This has had its background removed in Photoshop, which you know about, we've got the logo imported there. You can see the links. And then we copied and pasted these elements from Illustrator. So an upside of using InDesign is that it's very good at handling all the different file types. So you can copy and paste from Illustrator, you can place from Photoshop. And, of course, also we have layers. So it's a really good way of doing it, but not the only way of doing it, as we will see. So let's look at a similar image to this in Illustrator. Actually, we'll do that in a minute. So in a second, we'll go to here. But before we do that, just in this is something you'll be creating later. Towards the end of the course, this is a more advanced infographic, pretty tricky to create, but you'll learn how to do this later on. So here, I've sized this up. This is an Instagram sized document. So if we refer to Instagram, currently, the photo size, I'm recording it for the Instagram app is 1080 by 1080. So in Illustrator, I created a new document which is 1080 by 1080. Now you might wonder, well, how would you know what size that is? And the way you would tell is in the Artboard tool, we have the width and the height up here. And it's Artboards we're going to be spending more time with because Artboards give us the flexibility of creating multiple different size documents all in the same document. That's one of the benefits of working in Illustrator. Right. So I think that's what I wanted to mention there. So yeah, so you will create this document later. One more thing before we look at this other document in the next video is that in the same way as in design, if you want a quick way of exporting something, you've made an Illustrator as a PNG, you would simply go file export export as, then again, we could choose PNG, for example. Okay. Now this gets more complicated when we use Artboards and there are other ways of doing it, so I'm building on this, but keeping it similar to what so far in InDesign, essentially, you can put the same document together in mostly the same way. So copy and paste sometimes, file and place sometimes, you can use layers. So it's very similar, and then you'll export it in the same way. But as I'm hinting at, there are other options which we'll look at in the next video. 70. Create a social image with Illustrator: So as you'll have gathered in the last video, there are a couple of benefits for creating social media images inside Illustrator. And we'll take a look at a couple of them now. So this document here looks pretty similar to the one in InDesign. It's got layers, and it's sized up according to the guidelines. So this is a Twitter single image size, which is 1,200 by 675 at the time of recording. And in terms of Artboards, I've named it that to help me remember. But really, the information is up here. So the witch by height, which you see when you use the art portal. Okay, so so far, so not very useful. Okay, however, in this particular advert, as quite a lot of this stuff is vector, of course, we can select it and we can change it directly in Illustrator, rather than h to go via a link in design or possibly copying and pasting. We don't have to do any of those things. So, for example, one of the things I really wanted to show you earlier but had to abandon because it was just too complicated at the time is as you might have thought earlier, wouldn't it be nice if, let's say, her hand was underneath the lemon. So it's really almost like she's interacting with this, or maybe her head was behind the line. I'm not sure, but certainly I'm going to make a hand go underneath the lemon. So I can't really do that at the moment because the vector layer that she's on is above the photo, which is on a separate layer. But what if I created a new layer? Which I'll call vector behind photo. Again, at the risk of repeating myself, it's good idea to name these things so that you remember when you reopen it in a month's time or your colleague opens it and goes, What on earth have you done? So if I drag that layer behind the photo, notice the little blue line there to tell me it's going to drop behind it. Then I can select, in this case, just her hand, and I can drag that little blue square that represents what I've got selected, I can drag that onto the other layer, and then when I deselect it, you'll see her hand disappears behind there. Okay. I'll do the same on the other side. And Let me go. Let me zoom out. Yeah, to me, that looks I was going to say realistic. Obviously, it's not realistic, but it kind of blends together in a nice way. So that's not impossible to do inside in design, but it's a lot fiddlier. So that's one nice benefit in this case, of using Illustrator, but there are a few more. So let's look at the next one. So I'm not convinced about the colors there. I think that might look better with possibly a green background, but I want to be able to see them side by side. So what you can do easily in Illustrator, is in your Artboards, so far we've just been working on one Artboard at a time, but you can duplicate an Artboard by dragging it onto the new Artboards button. Oh, yes, it's reminding me that any hidden or locked objects won't be moved. I'll just show you what that means. I'm just going to zoom out. So I'm going to do Command minus. Okay, now, I locked the photo layer, and so that hasn't come across, so I'm going to just undo that. Unlock the photo layer and then drop it on there. There we go. Okay. Now, the shortcut I want to show you now, rather than doing Command minus minus minus, if you do command or control Alt or option and zero, that's the shortcut for showing you all the Artboards, no matter how many there are. So Command or Control Zero shows you the current Artboard, command or control and or option and zero shows you all the Artboards. Okay? So we've now got two identical Artboards. You can see why I locked the photo layer, aren't you? Because it's a massive photo. We only looking at that bit of it. It's cut out, so I'm going to just lock that to save that happening. Okay, so now on this one, I could say on the background layer, select it and change the background color to green. Having done that, I might think, let's maybe incorporate another color or two. So what about if her top was orange? And by the way, I've used the group selection tool rather than the main selection tool because this is grouped. So if I'm not careful here, I'll end up changing everything. I don't want to do that. So yeah, I don't completely buy the colors there, but you get the idea that I can very easily create just a second example there. So obviously for social media, when you're going to be pumping out quite a lot of images, potentially, it's really nice to be able to see them all in one place. So the next thing is, Okay, but how do I know which one I'm going to be exporting or what if I want to export them both at the same time? Well, that's what we'll look at in the next video. 71. Exporting multiple images: So in this video, we're going to look at exporting your Artboards either one or two at a time. So good practice to get into here is to name the Artboards in a useful way. So this is called Twitter a single image. I'm going to just double click on that text there, and I'm going to call it blue. I'm going to double click on this one, and call it green. Obviously, in your own work, you'd have your own different examples. Then I'm going to go File. Again, as you know already in the previous video, we talked about, we can just do Export As, and that would work fine. There's also one called Save for Web, which as you see, says legacy, which is an old fashioned way of doing it, which I'm not going to worry about, but I'm going to show you this one, which I think is really interesting. If I do Export for Screens, so let's have a close look at this. This is telling us that we've got these two different Artboards, and currently we're going to export them both at exactly the same time. If we just wanted the green one, we could uncheck that one. I would say range of two Okay. So we're going to have both of those. I'm going to put them on my desktop so I can find them nice and easily. And notice it's going to scale it at one times the size. So in other words, the exact size I made them, and it's going to make it a PNG. Fantastic. But you could also say, for example, well, I also want one for some reason that let's say it's a JPEG. So I can say add scale now this does something slightly different. Let's just go one times. But the format, I want a JPEG and there's different qualities of JPEG. That would just give me a pink and a JPEG. There's other things we can do, for example. What if we wanted one that was smaller, we could say, I want a 50% size PNG. So what we're going to end up with, and I'm afraid there's a bit of scaling involved here, we've got the Achal so we've got two of the normal sized pings. We've got two of the normal sized JPEGs, and we've got two half size pings. So in other words, you can do an awful lot very, very quickly, as you might have been hoping for. So when I do Export Artboard, as you can see down here, it says we're going to end up with six files. So let's do that. And here on my desktop, if I click and hit the space bar, you can see that's 100 quality JPEG. And if I press the down arrow, you can see there's the next one, the next one, and so on. So notice the smaller ones. In fact, this will be a lot easier if I showed you the more individually. So if we compare, let's say, the single Twitter single image blue at half size, notice the size of that one. Whereas the single image blue? Where are we? Yeah, not at half size. It is like. Okay, so we've got those two, for example. And because we've named them, it's easier to work out what's going on. So what I'm trying to say is that there's kind of three benefits at once here that you can have more than one image, if you like, in the same document. Technically, that's an Artboard. You can export them at the same time, but as well as exporting them at the same size, you can also export them at higher or lower quality and in different formats, all at the same time. So that's a fantastic attribute that Illustrator offers you. 72. Combine multiple Artboard sizes: We've been looking at some of the benefits of creating social media images in Illustrator, and there's one more I want to show you, which is how you might have different size documents inside the same document or really to use the proper term Artboards, different Artboard sizes in the same document. So back to the one that we've been working on. And what I'm going to do is in Artboards, I'm going to get rid of this blue one. I'm going to stick with the green one, so I just delete that. And what happens sometimes when you delete the Artboard, it doesn't actually delete the stuff that's on it. So notice there's only one Artboard left, but this stuff is still there. So I'm going to just with my selection tool, select it all and delete. You can see what happened there, can't you? I hadn't unlocked the photo layer. So let's do that. Okay, so a good way to check that's the only Artboard is if you do command option zero. It's only zooming in on one. So that's another way of telling that, Okay, there's only one Artboard left. Okay, so I've got my Twitter single image Artboard. Now I'm going to just get rid of the word green there because now the purpose of this is to show you a Twitter single image one, as opposed to a Facebook one. So going back to my guide here, there's a similar dimension that we might use in Facebook. So a shared image on either the ti or the news feed is 1,200 by 630, so that's what we're going to create, okay? So what I'm going to do is again in the Artboards duplicate. And I'm going to just double click on this and change it to Facebook. Shared image. I suppose I could write the size down there as well. That might be useful. So 1,200 by 630. That's just the name of it though it doesn't technically change anything. So let's look at the size of the Artboard. So with the Artboard tool, it's 1,200 by 675 at the moment, because that's the size of the previous one. So if I change that to 630, it's a little bit fiddly. You can probably see the dotted line. So that shows me that's the edge of the Artboard. So I'm obviously going to have to adjust some of my artwork. So let's just go to layers. I'm going to leave the photo alone for the time being. But now with my selection tool, click on that background there. Looking at the size here, so it's 1,200 by 675. What should happen is I snap that to the bottom and it should, there you go by 630. So that bits good. I'm now going to lock the background layer. I'm now going to unlock everything else. Now, because that photos taken up so much space, I need to just zoom out so that I can kind of go over here somewhere and click and drag around all this stuff. Yeah, try not to get that one as well. So that's my problem. So let's try and do that a bit more carefully. There we go. And then I'm going to just use my arrow a few times to get that a bit more central. Now, I might want to scale that so I can use the scale tool as you know, and so on and so on and so on. It's not hugely different, I realize. But nevertheless, it's the right size for Facebook. As from the previous lesson, what you might find yourself doing now is create a document and you have a Facebook version and a Twitter version. Then when you come to export, this time, let's suppose I'm just going to save the Facebook version. I can do it two ways. I can either do Export as like we did last time. Sorry, we can either export for screens like we did last time and just uncheck the Twitter one. Then if I don't want all these extra ones, I just get rid of them by pressing a little X there. That would be probably the easiest way of doing it. So I'll just do it that way. There's my Facebook shared image. Lovely. But the other way you could do would just be export as. And I want to show you this just so you can see the subtle difference. You'd say use Artboards, but instead of all, you'd say range two. This is the way it used to be before they invented the other way of doing it, which is a bit more visual gives you a bit more of an idea of what's going on. But technically, if I exported that, it would give me exactly the same result. Okay, so there we go. So there's some really good reasons to use Illustrator, specifically for social media. In my view, Illustrator is probably a bit more fiddly to use for everyday stuff. If you're not using vectors all the time, you might find that bit a bit more clunky than in design. But there are some pretty good reasons to use it. Having said that, Photoshop has some similar capabilities as well, and that's where we're going next. 73. Create a social image with Photoshop: Much like we've seen with Illustrator, Photoshop is also capable of creating social media images. So you're going to use very similar techniques to what you've used for both in design and Illustrator. But as you'll see, Photoshop has got its own twist. So what we're going to do is take this image here, cut out this slice of orange, and it's going to end up in a few lessons time being two different sized social media images. That's kind of where we're going, right? So to start with this is another unsplash image. You know about selections. One you haven't done yet is just with just to give it its proper name, the elliptical Markey tool, the elliptical marquee tool. When you click and drag, you create a selection from the top left corner, which isn't actually that helpful. Instead, for something circular, put the cursor right in the middle, hold down the option or Alt key, click and drag. Sorry, I should have, sorry, click and drag and then hold down the option key. Notice, as I drag out, it's creating not a circle but an oval. If I put down the shift key, I get a perfect circle, which I want, but actually, I'm happy for it to be oval because it better matches the shape. So you know about adjusting selections and getting good selections. I'm not worried about that at this point, but I think that'll do. So there we go. That's close enough. And then we're going to go new layer via copy. So we've now got a layer one. Looks fine. If I double click on that, I'm going to name it Orange. Slice. And that's ready to go. It's like I'm doing a cookery program. That orange slice is ready to go into the pot. No, it's ready to go into my document. So I got to create that from scratch. So this is going to be a Facebook event image. And as you know, that's 1920 by 1080. I've got that from the same place we've been going to previously, Sprout Social. So that's what I need to create. So new document. So it's got those settings because they're the last ones I used. But if you started from scratch, you'd say web and you type those numbers in there. But I'm going to go back to recent because obviously I've done this before. The important thing here is that I've checked Artboards. That means later on I can have multiple Artboards like in Illustrator. So if I press Create a blank document, and then as you've done before, go to right click on this layer, I'm going to duplicate it, but not inside I'm going to call it orange slice, but not inside this document, I'm going to put it in Untitled one, which is the document I've just created. So there it is, and it's way bigger than we need. So as you've already seen, if you right click on that layer, convert it to a smart object, then that means we can scale it down. And rescale it up later if we need to. Show Transform Controls is on using the move tool that I can click and drag, keep the shift key down, keep it in proportion. I'm going to need to do this a few times, scale it down, drag it back up again, scale it down, drag it back up again. I quite like it large there, but obviously there's no room for the logo and the text, so I've got to keep it a bit more manageable, something like that. Then I won't be able to do anything else in Photoshop until I've pressed the tick or the cancel. I'm going to press tick. There it is. There's my orange slice. I'm going to position it somewhere on the left there. If I wanted to get it exactly in the middle, by the way, vertically, I would press this button here. For what it's worth, I'll do that. I'm going to double click on that and I'm going to rename it orange slice left or L, I think. Then if I hold down the t key, like in the other programs, I can click and drag and make a copy. Now, if I wanted that absolutely in the center, horizontally, I could press this button up here. Then I'm going to double click on there. As you can probably guess, orange slice M for middle and then once more duplicate of course, what's happening here is we're duplicating the whole layer. But because the layer just consists of the pixels surrounded by those transparent ones, as you can see over here, we've got now three of these layers, but it obviously looks like three objects. So so far so good, I'm going to just save this. Okay, so next up, let's bring in the logo. So we can do file and place. Actually, let's not bring in the logo because we need the colored background. So as you've seen before, we can do one of these different adjustment layers, including a solid color layer. Now, because I had the Limone green selected already, it's brought that up. But if I didn't have that selected already, then in libraries, I would double click on one of those colors, and it should appear in there and then it picks up that color. If all else fails, if you double click, let's suppose I want to the orange colors, double click and you can copy you might need to copy it in your head Fa eight BA, you could double click and type those numbers in there. Actually, that is what I'm going to do. I'm going to get the green color. Let me double click on the green color. In fact, that's just. That's what it should, so we just swapped it. Okay, let's bring that to the bottom. We've got a blank layer one there, which we don't lead, so we can drag that into the bin. And then two more things. Firstly, bring the logo in, file. And we can do Placeinked so it's like in design and it'll update if the logo updates. I'm not right about that. I'm going to do Place Embedded, and it puts a permanent version in. And where's my logo. It's in here somewhere. There we go. So it comes in. Now, it comes in as a smart object, anyway, and it's a vector, so I can scale it, if need be. Again, I might as well press this button to make it centered. I quite like the size of that. But if I did want to change it, again, be shift click, but I'll leave it pretty much as before. Okay, so far so good. I'm pretty similar to both in design and Illustrator. So finally, let's put the type at the top. So with the type tool when we click, it creates a special kind of layer for type. Now, this will just say ompsum. We can't read that because it's picked up the same color. So if I click on there and I just drag that to the corner somewhere, it's in gray. To make it white, I drag that right away to the top and you'll end up with either 2552, four, five, 255 in RGB or 0000 in CMYK or FFF in the web colors. Either way, you get white, then of course, I'm going to just change this to we deliver. Now, we'll deliver with two Rs. Maybe not. So it's remember the fonta last years, which is their branding. So if you here bold, obviously, if that wasn't there, you'd just choose it. And the font size is roughly what I was using before. I'm happy with that. Again, I'm going to make that centered. So back to the move tool, make that centered, and then I'm going to just nudge it down a little bit. Feel free to write anything else that seems more appropriate. So there we go. That's our starter. And I'm going to save this. And then in the second video on this, we'll look at how we might turn this into something for Twitter as well. So I'm going to just save that and see you in the next video. 74. Use multiple Artboard sizes: All right, so picking up from where we were last time, we've created a Facebook sized image. But now if we want to Illustrator, we can create another version within the same document using Artboards. So first thing to do is to rename this Artboard, and if I right click on that, sorry, not right click. If I double click, I can rename it. So I'm going to call this FB Event. Image. And then I can just fold that up, right click and choose Duplicate Artboard. I'm going to call this. So that was 1920 by 1080. Now, I had in mind a Twitter one which was pretty similar. Yeah. Um 1,200 by 675. So that's web again. Okay, so Tweet, single image. So 1,200 by 675. Remember that, if you can. So this is going to be Twitter. Single sharing. So it's in the same document. That's great. So bit like Illustrator, we kind of got two at the same time. Now, the question is, how do we then adjust? So if we select this new Artboard and we click on properties, then you can see the current Artboard size, width and height is what we've inherited. So instead, we're going to change the width to 1,200 and the height to 675. So the width 1,200 height 675. Notice that it scales the artboard, but it doesn't scale the contents. So what we're going to do is with our selection tool. Sorry, our move tool. I'm going to go back to the layers panel. Make sure this is that looks like that's come outside there, so I'm going to just drop that back in again. Select everything. And click and drag with the shift key heel down, and that should scale up nicely. The only problem is that logo, which got a bit left out somewhere. So let's just see where that is. There we go. It looks like it got accidentally left below one of those oranges. So now I can drag that whoops, make sure I've turned off auto select layer. Make sure I'm on that logo, drag it back into position. And again, what I can do is make that centered. Let's just put that in the correct place. So just below the oranges like that. And so there we go. Now we have two completely different size and shaped. In fact, just looking at that, I want to just bring that all down a little bit, so I'm going to click and drag through Woops. I'm going to It's going great, isn't it? So let's click on this layer. Shift click on this one, shift, click on this one. I'm going to just press the down arrow a few times just to nudge those down a little bit. So the logic is really similar as you swap between the programs, but there are little ways that they work slightly differently as you are gathering. So let me just save that. And now let's look at how we would export. Not too different from what you see in Illustrator. We do File, Export. Okay, again, we can do Quick Export as PNG, but if you do export as this should look a little bit familiar. It's not quite the same, but it's almost the same. So you can see here that we can choose either one or both of the Artboards. We can choose the format, so ping, for example, and we're going to have single size or double the size. You can also add more. So if I say I want one that's actual side and also one that's half size. And if I export, I just put them on my desktop. Ooh. Interesting. D, I've got an unknown error. I'm going to just see what's happening. Is there anything actually on the desktop? That one's worked. That one's work. So notice the sizing is different. For some reason, the half sized ones didn't work. That's never happened before. I'm not going to waste any time getting into that. But I think you see the idea. So in summary, you're doing similar things, whether you're using InDesign or Illustrator or Photoshop. For me, Illustrator and Photoshop are more flexible if you're thinking that you might want to create several different versions of something in the same document. That's one reason to use them. The other reason to use them is if you're using lots of vector content and you want to be able to edit the vectors inside, you know, using Illustrator, then Illustrator will be a better bet. If you're doing lots with photos and you're thinking, actually, I want to be able to edit the photos as I go, then Photoshop is probably a better bet. But honestly, you can use whatever you like. You know, social media was invented way after all these other programs. These programs weren't designed to create stuff in social media or for social media, but they've adapted. So you can kind of adapt with them. You can use whatever works. But there's one final thing we're going to look at in Photoshop, which the other programs can't do, which is you can do basic animation inside Photoshop. So that's where we go finally in this module. 75. Create a GIF animation part 1: As you can see, this is not subtle. This is an animation. This is a frame by frame animation, nothing too clever, but this is all done inside Photoshop using the same far you've just been working on. I'm going to show you how you can take a static bunch of layers and turn them into a fairly crude but nevertheless possibly effective image that could be uploaded onto a webpage or to social media. Let's take a look at how we do that. 76. Create a GIF animation part 2: Okay, so to create a gift animation in Photoshop, first thing we need to do is change the workspace. So under Window and workspace, we've been using the essential so far, but I'd recommend you change to motion, and that opens up a little timeline panel along the bottom, which is going to be useful. We also need quite a lot of room for layers, so we might want to just drag that up a little bit. As you can probably see from down here, I can click on the different frames. So these are literally it's a bit like a flick book you might have made as a kid. You're literally going like this. So it's nothing too smooth. But again, these things go in and out of fashion. So this is appropriate, you know, very appropriate for certain things, really not appropriate for others. So really, all I did here was add frames. So basically, create a new frame. So let me do that from scratch for you. But you'll see that essentially it's just a case of turning on different bits, turning them off. So the way I would do that for us to get rid of all these frames. So I had a third of a second there at the beginning, and then another frame. Which is also a third of a second. And you can change the timing here, put in what you like. So I thought a third of a second was about right. I changed, let's say, the background color, and I had my first orange, and then I added another frame, third of a second, and I showed my second one, but changed the color again and so on. Fourth frame one, not that one. I seem to have lost an orange there. That's nice. I'm going to just have to duplicate that frame and then move that along. There we go, and change the background color back to green just by hiding these. Then I think I had something left that showing, but also had the logo. Then finally, we deliver, that's somehow moved down. So this is pretty rough, but you can see if I play this, that's essentially what you get, and you can manipulate that, you can stop it, you can adjust the timings, and then right at the end, you do File export. But this time, Safer Web Legacy this is how you used to have to save for web back in the day. If you choose GIF, then essentially, you can preview it in here. There are different settings you can use, different qualities, different image sizes, and I don't want to go hugely into that, but if you see vast differences between these, you could choose one that looks better than the others, but beware of the file sizes. They might get quite large. I chose that one, press save. There we go. So that's how we do it. So that's a gift animation from Photoshop. Very crude, not always appropriate. But fortunately, we'll be looking at After Effects towards the end of the course, which gives us way, way more options. But this is another example of what you can do in terms of social media images or images for the web from Photoshop. 77. Introduction to typography (MODULE 18): When you started this course, it might be that you didn't know any design theory or any color theory. But now you've got a little bit of knowledge in both those areas. So it just helps when you're thinking about things, describing things, working things out. And the same is true for type. So the word typography is used to describe kind of the site of type, if you like. Type is everywhere, and the more you know about it, the better your work will be. So if you look on the screen here, you can see a variety of terminology, some of which you know already to do with type. So, for example, the baseline, that's the line that the text sits on. You have the descenders. These are the bits of the type that go underneath the baseline. The height is the height of the type. And you have a senders that go above the X height. You have the height of the capital, which again, goes above the X height. And what else have we got the counter? That's the size of the area inside type. Aperture, that's the width of the gap between certain elements in certain letters. Then we've got serifs. So we'll refer to some of these things later on. Some are more important than others, but they give us the language really that help us describe what we're talking about. So that's our first look at typography. Secondly, we need to look a little bit at type history. Now, this might seem a bit archaic, and you might think, why do we need to look at this? But really, like anything else fashionable, things go in and out of fashion, and they often refer back to previous sort of times and previous styles. So it's important that you know a little bit about this. So very briefly, and you can read through this at your leisure. This is a humanist serif, so very, very similar to how type would have been initially drawn by hand. So notice these elements like this, they kind of mimic handwriting a pen with a nib. And what we're talking about here are things like the serifs, they're organic, so they're a bit more human like than machine like machine like we'll see later. The stress is at an angle, so that's kind of the thin parts of the letter O, for example. Then the contrast, there's not a huge amount of contrast between the strokes, the thick and the thin, and I think that's enough for now. So next up the transitional serif. Now, I'm going to skip back to this one in a minute. But essentially, we're going from here in the 16th or 17th century to here in the 18th or 19th century. If I just flip back, that's really different. If you look at the O, for example, you're going from one with an angle to one, which is and also the contrast isn't huge. The contrast here is huge between the thick and the thin, and the angle is straight up. So this is almost like it was designed by a machine. So very, very different from something hand drawn. So this is where we get to in the kind of 18th to 19th century as opposed to that. So in between times in the 17th 18th, we're heading in that direction. So the stress, as you can see, gets a little bit more vertical, if you look at the O and things like the seraphs they get a little bit less humanistic, we might say, so a little bit more smooth, essentially. So then by the time we get to the 18th, 19th century, this could have been created by a machine. So it's very vertical, huge contrast. That's the main yeah, that's the main thing we need to talk about there. Okay? So that's where we get to there. And then another drastic change in the 19th to 20th century. Now, I know that you'll be very familiar with type like this, but in the late 19th, early 20th century, people found this almost shocking. They were used to more type like this and suddenly you had type like this, no serifs whatsoever. So no contrast at all, kind of come very, very different from this. And this was known as grotesque type because people found it grotesque. They found it almost offensive, which seems crazy now, but very, very contrasty to what people have known before. So that's Sans serif type. And then that became even more machine like, if you like. So the circles, for example, became much rounder. So this is geometric, so so shapes type based on geometric forms like circles. So you can see, we have quite a history we've gone through all the way from really hand drawn stuff to stuff that really starts to look a bit more made by a machine and we end up with that. So that's your sans serif. And then these days, everything has kind of got mixed up. So we've got different elements from different periods all mixed together. So this is quite common now to find typefaces like this. And one of the reasons that this is developed is because now, of course, we're primarily reading things on screen as opposed to in print. And so the little details you've got here make it easier to read more about that in a little while. So that's a little bit of type history for you. 78. Type legibility & readability: We talked earlier about X heights and counters and ascenders and descenders, more about why they're important now. So I've got two famous typefaces, two classic ones, Caslon on the left, and universe on the right. So notice that the X height of Kazlan is much smaller than that of universe. So we're going to look at the implications of that. So because the X height is much higher on universe, it means the counters are larger. That's one thing. The counters are larger. It's more of air in the middle there. I know this is theoretical at this point. Again, notice the E, the counter is much smaller on Kazlon, much larger on universe. You should see what that means now. If you compare Kazan on the left and universe on the right, it's much more likely that you'll find the text on the right easier to read, particularly at a distance. So this is for that reason, the counters are much larger. So if you read the text, it will say a bit more about that. But what it also says is that the danger of the counters being large is that the ascenders and descenders might be too short. So if we go back, notice the descender there in Kazlon much longer. Than this one. So that's the slight danger with over large counters or large counters, we have less room here. I should have said at the beginning, the type is the same size in both cases, okay? But when we go back here, it's the same size, but it's much more likely you would find the one on the right, easier to read. And this is particularly true at a distance. So if you think about motorway signs or bus numbers or that kind of thing, this is what we call legibility. It's the ability to recognize text from a distance. So that can be really important, obviously, to get your message understood. So the X height is important. And what you might do if you end up looking for fonts, some of the systems, a bit like Adobe system has an X height search built in. So you can say, I want type with a larger X height, for example. So we've just seen that legibility is influenced by the font that you choose and the X height and the size of the counters and the ascenders and descenders. But another thing that affects how easy type is to read. Well, there's a few factors. Some are very obvious and some less so. So I know that as an adult, assuming you read English, you will be you'll find it very easy to read all these words. But if you imagine learning English, in this case, as a child, your experience of it might have been a bit like this. You'd have been trying to figure out the shape of words of letters. And if you see the shape of dog is very different to cat here, whereas the shape of dog and cat here are very very similar because, of course, they're an uppercase. So the lower case text is generally easier to recognize because it's more distinctive. So again, the overall shape of the uppercase text, even though you can clearly read it, if you read English, you can see those words are different. If you imagine learning it as a child, it would really, really help that the text is in lowercase. So whether it's lowercase or uppercase, that can really influence how easy it is to read. And as you'll see, with these examples, and depending on the size of the screen you're reading this at, you might find it easier to read all three of these or maybe just the one on the left or just the two on the left. But what this is saying is gradually as we grow older, we are better at recognizing words instead of just shapes and we're able to cope with smaller and smaller type sizes. So that's, I guess, fairly obvious. The other thing I've spoken about before, and I want to mention again is, again, text is much easier to read if it's in what we call a narrow measure. So the text on the left here is exactly the same as the text on the right, but this is much, much easier to read. So the choice of typeface influences how easy it is to recognize text, whether it's upper or lowercase makes it greatly influences how easy it is to read. The size of the type obviously has a great impact and then what we call the measure. So the length of the text, the length the width of a column of text, all these things have a large impact in terms of how easy type is to read. 79. How to combine typefaces: After this, we've got one more video where I'll give you some more advice on choosing fonts. But what I want to talk about first is how you combine fonts. What you can see here are two fonts that are exactly the same. Over here, I'm listing the ways that they contrast, and of course, there's no contrast. They're exactly the same. You know in design already that you've got contrast and repetition, and we need both. Here we've got repetition but no contrast. Here we've got repetition and contrast, simply the bold and the regular version. The shapes are the same, but the counters are smaller and the strokes are thicker. That's contrast and repetition. That I would suggest is a good combination. It's an easy one, but it's a good. Here's another easy but good one. And if I could just give you one tip, it would probably be to stick to one of these so called super families. So Tisa Sans Pro matches with Tisa Pro. So they're designed to go together, but one is San Serif and the other one isn't, but they still look similar. So you got a contrast and repetition. So that's my one kind of big top tip. But what about combining different types of fonts? This is where it gets more tricky and it does take practice. But what I'm going to tell you now is kind of the summation of what I've learned over many years of trying and failing to do this. And essentially, it comes down to the kind of basic elements in the typeface. So you can see, and we'll talk more about the history in a second. But you can see both This is a classic combination. A lot of type boooks will talk about Futura and Bodoni. And the reason these are believed to work together is that they're both rational, so they're both machine constructed. So you can see the very round O in Futura, you know, that's clearly done by machine. As is the Oh, they look different, but they kind of go together. This is another example. They're different and they go together. Again, you can see that the structure of the fonts is similar, even though they look very different. Having said that, this one, well, you got the machine thing going on here, but this is much more humanist. So I would suggest that this is contrast that isn't good, that just doesn't really work. So let's talk more about that as we look back into the history of type and help that inform what we're going to do. So or coding in orange, firstly to different ones that go together. So humanist serif. So the very oldest types of type. As we can see, we've got these so called terminals that look very hand drawn. Now, a typeface like Optima is san serif, but it is still regarded as humanist. So it hasn't got serif, but it has a humanist feel, so it does go you got contrast, but some kind of repetition. And you also have slab serif versions. So slabs are these much more clunky serifs. But again, there are different types of them. There's a humanist version, which is different from other slab serifs that you'll see later. So these ones tend to go together, and I say tend to go together because you've got to play with these things. You've got to give it time. So here you can refer to these lists. I'm not saying every one of these goes with every other one of these, but humanist serifs and humanist sand serifs. Then the transitional ones, remember, coming away from humanists not yet fully machine constructed. The transitional serifs, the theory is they go with what we call grotesque, the earliest SandifsGrotesque, or Gothic ones. Again, in terms of San Serif, it's the grotesque slab serif. Again, we've got slabs, but they look a little less clunky. And again, some examples of transitional seraps and grotesque san serifs. So lots of terminology I know here. But as you start to be able to look and recognize type in these categories, you can start to go, Okay, that will probably go. So again, there's some lists here. And then three out of four, the rational ones we've already talked about. So this is Dido, again, machine constructed, but you can see that's going to go with the very geometric sans like Futura. And then in terms of slabs, we've got very geometric slabs, which again, are more likely to go with the very geometric shapes or the machine constructed. Okay, and then finally, so there's some examples you can browse the contemporary serif. So again, this is kind of a mixture of lots of different attributes that have come before. And there's a sans version, so very, very similar similar shape, similar structure. But without seraph and again, there's some examples. So I realize that will take you some time to digest and to look at those different categories, study them. But the more you start to get your head around this, the easier it gets to just start to combine typefaces. Now, this may be relevant for you. It may not be, but just having an awareness of this really help get your eye in as you start to play around and you start to try and create contrast that's good between typefaces. 80. Useful type resources: Finally, in this section, I'd like to talk about some resources to do a type that have helped me and that I think might help you, too. So a lot of the theory that I got from the previous videos about the type history and how different categories of type relate from this book, which is the geometry of type by Steven Coles, which I recommend very highly. He's written several books, I encourage you to have a look at those. Loads of really, really good stuff in there. I've talked about Adobe fonts, and if you've got an Adobe account and I imagine you have, you will have access to this, and you can see that we can search for type in terms of these different classifications. We can search for properties like the X height, higher or lower loads of things you can do there. But what they also have got, and this is a new thing, you've got these tags. So if you're looking for friendly type, for example, which of course, this is very subjective, you could start here. Okay, so that's Adobe fonts. A site that you've probably come across I recommend very highly is Type Wolf. Type Wolf is really, really good place to kind of get it's where I go to try and work out what's trending. That's exactly what it's about. So this is often really quite cutting edge use of type, but it gives you a sense of kind of where things are going. A couple of things I'd like to recommend here. Firstly, these are just the latest examples just to kind of get your eye in, and you'll start to notice fonts that people are using. And if you think, Oh, yeah, I might like to use those, you can click on one of these and it will take you give you more information. Also they've got some free, some paid resources. So this is a good one here, the most popular fonts. And futuro, you've seen recently in one of my examples, and are there any others there Avenir, I think we looked at. But this gives you a sense of what's being used currently. So you could say, Okay, GT America, what's that? So you can click on there, and it gives you some samples, gives you some more information, gives you some examples of font pairings that you could use if you're going to use that. And then Tapio I also use because what I like about this, it shows you fonts in context. So again, duty America, which it's mentioning. If I look at that it gives me some examples. You might be like me in the sense that you don't quite know what something's going to look like till you've seen some examples. So Ty PO is good for that. Back to Type Wolf again. This is one of his blog posts. Again, you might need to put an email to get some more PDF information here, but he's suggesting certain typefaces that are going to be useful. This is an interesting one. Leading industry designers share their top three favorite typefaces. And again, if you start to read these kind of things, some of these fonts you recognize, some you won't you can look around, you'll just start to see, like everything else, trends go in and out of fashion pretty quickly. But you'll get a sense of what people are using and whether it's appropriate to you or not. And that's probably where we should finish this. It's all about whether this is appropriate. So just because you like a typeface, it doesn't necessarily mean it's good to use. It has to go with your brand. It might need to be on your brand guidelines, and certainly needs to convey the right kind of feel for what you are trying to convey. So don't just go with fonts that you like. Try and work what they're saying. So fonts. For example, these kind of fonts have a very, very different feel to fonts like these, the rhythm is very different. So that is not conveying ese whereas something like these should be. Okay. There's lots more we could say about type, but I'm hoping that's giving you enough of a sense of the whole subject to be a bit more confident in choosing type and putting type together in a way that's easy to read and easy to recognize and that people want to read. 81. Create newsletters & leaflets with InDesign (MODULE 19): This final module where we'll look at in design. I'd like to show you some of the things that I wish I knew when I was starting out. Now in design is a vast program. There's so much you can do with it. And some of it really is about learning in design, but some of it is about learning how it's used, and you've picked up a great deal already about how it's used. But for slightly more complex documents, maybe leaflets or brochures, that kind of thing, you might there's a few things that you don't know yet that would be really helpful to know. So some of them have to do with in design and some are more how you use it. So in this section, we're going to look at some of those things to try and empower you so that when you create stuff from scratch or you're working with things that people give you, you've got more information that's going to make it much easier. Let's start off by talking about stories. I'll mentioned this briefly already and you will remember possibly that that little hash tag that you see there means the end of a story. We've got that here because these are separate text frames. They're on the master page. But in this case, the main body copy, as we call it, it doesn't finish down here, we can see that because there's no hashtag. But if we get to the end of the document, we can see there it is down there. I'll do a shortcut you haven't learned yet, which is Command or Control four for 400%. That zooms in nice and quick. Command two, 200%, Command one, 100%. Command zero. Whole page. Okay, so that is an example of one story, and five clicks with the type tool, one, two, three, four, five, selects the whole story. So this came together because we used, you may recall the primary text frame, and the primary text frame assumed. There's only one story of text coming in, and it just continues all the way through the document. So this is a perfect example of that. But as I think I mentioned earlier, it's not often that you'll be using that. Let me look at a couple of examples that are different. So the social media stuff you've done already is different. You know, there's maybe one tiny bit of text, nothing more. So in that case, the last thing you want is the whole story automatically going in there. But here's a more common example. So you might well have to create a newsletter or edit a newsletter. And as I'm trying to show you here, we've got a story here on big story. Again, notice the hash tag there at the bottom. But then we've got room for one, two, three, other stories. So that might be one way that you do that. Another way that's pretty similar but slightly different that you might do it. Again, one big story here, then another one here, another one there. They could be in separate frames. But nevertheless, in these examples, the last thing you'd want is to have a primary text frame where in design assumes everything is going to come in in one go. So in the case of these stories, it's likely that if you're doing a newsletter, you're chasing somebody up for how many words that you need for that to go in there and how many words you need there and for the words that are going to go in here. And in either case, you'd either just to file and place and bring in the document from word or whatever. Or you do copy and paste, it doesn't matter if it comes in with formatting because as you know, you can use a paragraph style from in design and wipe out the formatting. That's the way that would go. I think you know enough about that already. That's the first thing I want to just remind you of then, that the primary textrame as useful as it is, is not that useful when it comes to creating documents with multiple stories. We've seen a couple examples here and we'll see more throughout this module. That's multiple stories as opposed to a single story. 82. Understand page structure: One of the jobs you might have to do before too long is designing or redesigning or working with your staff newsletter. Whether that's going to be turned into a PDF or be printed, it's the kind of job that might well be coming your way. So I've got a couple of examples of how you might do this. This first one is probably how I would have done it when I was fairly new to the world of design. Maybe I would have worked out that, Okay, this is where the body copy is going to go. So I'll do this in two columns, and back at the beginning, I may not have known about the text wrap, which I did there, as you can see. But nevertheless, we've got the two columns that work there, and then when it comes to the bottom where I want that to be different, well, I kind of might have done that by eye, I suppose. Whereas, I've got a better example here that shows you how you can better use a structure. It looks a bit scary at first, but what you might see here is that we've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight columns. Now, why eight columns? Well, eight columns because you'll see this if I go into presentation mode, I hope. We've got three different stories here. So this is the main story, and then we've got these two in what's often called a side bar. So if we come back just press the scope to get our presentation mode, you can see that two of those eight columns are used by the side bar and the other six are used by this. So it's still in two columns because the frames one big frame, but it snaps into two. And the way I did that was object text frame options. And I made that two columns as opposed to if I change up to one, turn the preview on, you'll see, that's what it would have looked like like that. So what I hope you can see here is that this is really quite flexible. So that's an approach you can use. So if you use an even number of columns, it's really nice and easy to break things in half like that. If you use an odd number, it gives you other options, which we may well look at. If not, just bear that in mind. Mm. Okay, so I got more complex example coming up. But before we look at that, you know about grids already, and the one coming up use a very particular kind of grid, but just in terms of what you know already, one way that I could have used to line this up, and in fact, I did. I just switched the feature off would be to do this. So in layout and create guides, if you watch this. So this is the area inside the margins. If I increase I did that up to ten, and I used a gutter size of 4.233. And as you can see, that gives me this nice breaks the page down, so it makes it nice and easy for me to decide, Okay, that's going to go across three, for example. And that gives me an ability to line this up. So this and it helps me keep consistent gap. Now, the logo there would have gone all the way up to the top, except that would have meant it would have cut across here, so the gap wouldn't have been consistent there. So that's how you can use a standard grid. So let me just throw everything off the page there and you can see what it looks like. It's a bit scary when you first see it. You think, What's going on there? How would I use that? Why would I use that? Hopefully, you've seen why you might use it. So that's an example of using a grid as well as the margins and columns in a particular way. Do you have to do that? No. But knowing this right at the beginning of the use of Indesign will, I think, really help you do much better work, much, much quicker. And the next example, we'll take a look at a very specific kind of grid that's used in certain types of documents, and it's good that you know about that, too. 83. What is the Baseline Grid?: Continuing, I look at more advanced in design features and particular ones that you might well come across. We're going to be talking here about the baseline grid, a very particular kind of grid. But just before we do that, I hope you can start to see again, we've got a similar column structure here, something clever is going on so that we've got a slightly narrower column there than we've got there. Have a look at that. You might be able to guess what's going on, but I'm going to come out of presentation mode and you should see. Again, two columns there, and then one, two, three, four, five, six, an eight column structure, and we're using there, three there, and two there. This time, though, the frames are individual and they link together, linked together manually like you've done before. But what's different here, one of the things that's different is this grid in the background. This is called the Baseline Grid in the view menu under grids and guides. If I hide the Baseline Grid, that's gone, and then I can choose to show it. Now, again, this looks mildly confusing or terrifying when you first see it. But there's something very specific about this that you need to know about if you're going to use it. A lot of people's first experience of the Baseline Grid is this. They will select some text. And if they change the leading value, suddenly, everything goes completely weird. Okay. Let me do that again. They select some text. The moment they change the leading value, it goes completely weird. So let me explain what's going on there. The Baseline Grid is a particular sort of grid, and what it's designed to do is to keep the text lined up across columns and across pages as well. So I can guarantee you that this text here, this line of text will line up this line of text, which will also line up if we can rely on my eye with that line of text. And that's because if we zoom in, do that short you learned last time, so command or Control four and let's do a few more Command plus command plus plus plus. You can see the text sits on this line. And because there's a consistent line all the way across the document, it all snaps together. So that relies on a particular feature. It's a paragraph format up here, called a line to baseline grid. You apply that by paragraph or ideally by paragraph style. If I get my paragraph styles open, so window Paragraph Styles. So this paragraph style, body indent, if I was to right click on that and edit it, under indent and spacing, it says, A line to grid all lines, whereas the default would be none. This is not something that you would want to use accidentally. This does need to be set up. So it needs to be set up. There's two things you need to set up. One is in a paragraph styles as you're seeing, you need to say it snaps to the grid. But the other thing is then the grid needs to be the right spacing. So what spacing should it be? Well you can probably guess? It's the leading value. Primarily, it's the leading value of your body copy. So as the body copy here is set to be size ten on a leading of 12, then I need to make sure that my baseline grid is set up as 12 as well. And to show you how I've done that, it's in preferences. Now, this is preferences in a different location on a Mac than it is on a PC. So as I'm on a Mac, preferences is inside, under the in design menu under preferences, whereas on a PC, it would be under edit and then preferences. So whichever way you get there, once you get to preferences, you go to grids. And this is the key area here. It's the increment every value that needs to be the same as the leading of your body copy. I know that's complicated. I know there's a lot of terminology there, but that is how it's set up. The other thing that I did when I set this up was to say the grid starts at the top margin, so you don't see it from the top of the page, you just see it in the top margin, which is whoops. Hang on a minute. Let's just put that back. So that's why we're seeing the grid just inside the margin. So that is a wonderful feature if you really want to get things lined up. So for some kind of documents that you might have to work on, for example, if you worked on an annual report, for example, or a magazine, it might well be that the Baseline Grid is being used. I'm not encouraging you to use it necessarily, but I think you need to know it's there. One final thing here is that just because the Baseline Grid is there, it doesn't mean that all the text snaps to it. Notice this paragraph, it snaps on the first line, but it doesn't snap on the second one, if we edit that style. And go on the Idense and spacing, you can see that it aligns on the first line only. If I just turn that off actually, you'll notice that with it off, it doesn't snap at all. For first line only, it snapped like that, which looks great, I think. But if I did all lines, then both lines would have to snap. And it's with these paragraphs down here because we're snapping all the lines there. Show you again. Because they're all snapping. The moment I change the leading value, anything above 12 up to 24 basically makes it go over two lines. So even if I just did 12.1, for example, that has to jump to line because the text has to snap to the grid. Okay, so that's the baseline grid. That's how you might encounter it. In the next video, I'll show you how this is set up. 84. Setting up the Baseline Grid: So I'm going to show you how to create this document from scratch. There's two main things. One is the Baseline Grid. The other is that it's a facing pages document. Let's get into that. That's file new document. It's a print document, obviously. Now in the US, you might use letter size. I'm going to use I'm in the UK. I'm going to use A four. We haven't done facing pages documents yet, but that is what that will be. Number of pages. Well, this could be, let's say, 12. Now the start number, I'm going to leave that at one to start with, but normally, I might change that for a document like this. More about that later. Primary Text Frame, do we want exactly the same text on all the pages all linked together for something like a magazine or a more flexible brochure? Absolutely not. So we don't want that. But the number of columns, as you've seen, we did eight to keep it nice and flexible. And the column gutter. So the 4.233 measure here, that's the equivalent of 12 point, so 12 PT. So that's why that standard number comes up over and over again. So what we need to think about here is the font we're using. Are we going to be using 12 point leading. And if we are and we are, we'll just keep that. If it was going to be 15 point leading, inside here, you type 15 PT. I'm going to just do that for you, 15 PT. And then when you click in one of the other fields, it converts to millimeters. Now, that's obviously not what I want, so I'm going to do 12 PT, click in one of the other fields, and we're back to 12 point. 12 point, 12 point or 4.233 millimeters. Okay, now the margins I figured this out before what I want. But if you were doing this for yourself from scratch, then you would use preview. So I'm going to use 25 at the top. 20 Oh, unlock those, so they can be different. 20 at the bottom, 15 on the inside. No, you've not seen this yet, and 25 on the outside. Inside and outside, we haven't talked about yet, but you can see this is roughly what it's going to look like. So let's press Create. Now, first the problem we got in pages, you can see it looks a bit weird on the first page, but that's because if you imagine this is a brochure, then, in fact, let me grab a brochure. So this is a standard sort of magazine document. On the first page is to the right of the spine. The last page is to the left of the spine. So you only see single pages at beginning and the end. In the middle, you see facing pages to the left and to the right of the spine. So that's what's going on here. First page and the last page are single pages, but all the other pages in the middle are what we call double page spreads. Okay, so that's the setup to start with. And now the grid, as previously described, inside preferences. So in design preferences on the Mc, edit preferences on the PC, and then grids, and then we'll say from the top margin, 0 millimeters, the increment every is 12 point. The view threshold, you might need to adjust that if you've got a particularly small screen. So in my case, can you see up here it's showing me this at 83% size when I'm zoomed out. Whereas if it said 40 or something, then I reduce that number down here to make sure that you can see the grid at all times. So if you can't see the grid, go back into preferences and lower that number. Press Okay. Now having said that, I can't see the grid, but that's because I haven't switched the grid on. So now view grids and guides show Baseline Grid, and there it is. So there's the grid, and that's the tricky bit that you saw here. We've got the facing pages set up and we've got the grid set up. In the next video, I'll show you just briefly a couple of bits about the text here and also how to create automatic page numbers. So that's in the next video. 85. Auto page numbering & Drop Caps: Returning to this document that we're setting up from scratch, I want to show you how to put an automatic page number on the bottom of the page, which is the kind of thing that you might have seen here. Okay? So 57 down here, 56 over here. And if we were to go to the next page, again, you can see the same thing. So this is the kind of thing that you could definitely put on the master page. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to go to the master page by double clicking where it says Amster, and then we're going to create a frame I'm going to line it up with the bottom left of the page like that. Zoom in Command four, my type tool, click inside the empty frame. Now, whatever I type here is going to be on every single left hand side page, all these pages down here. Now, what I don't want is the same number. What I want is a flexible number that changes. And to do that, you go type, insert special character. There's a load of special characters in in design, including markers, and that's the one we want the current page number. When I do that, it just says A and it says A because we're on the A master page. Whereas on page two, it'll say two on four, I'll say four and so on. Just in terms of where that's going to look, I'm going to leave it just as the basic setup for now. When we've got paragraph styles in there, I'll show you how we can do that. That's good there. Now, quick way to zoom out to see both sides of the double page spread. I'll show you the long way around first in the view menu. You can choose, as well as Fit Page in window, which you know about, you now need to know about Fit spread in window. Shortcut being command or control and option or Alt, zero. Okay. Right, so with my selection tool, hover over my text frame, hold down the alt or option key, drag all the way to the other side, using the green smart guide and the pink smart guide to line it up. And so then zoom in on that. So it's exactly in the right place, but, of course, it's align to the left. So I want to align that to the right. So change to the type tool, click inside there, press this button up here to line to the right. Okay, now the shortcut to zoom out. So command or control Alter option zero. And then if we go and look at, let's say, page two and three, page four and five, and so on. So that is an automatic page number. It lives on the master page. Every single newspaper page you've read, most magazine pages you'll have read, this is what's going on in the background. All right. So now I want to look at a couple of features in terms of paragraph styles. Now, you know a lot already. First, I want to show you how we can bring some styles in from this document into our new document. So I'd like to bring in well, let's say I want to bring them all in. What I can do is in Paragraph Styles panel, say, load all text styles, and then you've just got to find the document that you're going to work on or copy from. That's the one I'm working on. And it lists all the styles that are there, and you can uncheck any you don't want. And then when you press Okay, there they all are. So for example, I could go onto my master page and I can say, you are going to use the strap line style and you're going to use the strap line style as well. Although, of course, that's left the line, so I just need to override that. And then in terms of putting this document together, let's just remind ourselves what it's going to look like. We've got a frame here that ignores that structure, as I was trying to say earlier. So let's just put a six column six going across the eight there. Let's put one of those in here. So this is where the grid starts to become really useful. So we just kind of go, right, let's go across six, something like that, don't exactly how deep that needs to be. I'm going to go with the headline style. Did I do that over two lines? Yeah. Then I can hit Return and I can do my strap line. Okay, great. That's working brilliantly. That doesn't need to be any bigger than that. You'll notice that both lines of this line up to the grid and the first line lines up. If I was creating this style from scratch, remember, do you remember back when we looked at creating Paragraph Styles? We did the four stages. We did the First stage was to select the whole paragraph. Second stage was to select the character formatting. The third step was the paragraph formatting, and that's where you would choose the align to Baseline Grid. Then finally, you turn that into a style by going up to there. Obviously, we don't need to do that now because that's already been premade. So you know most of this. It's just the odd extra bit that's coming in. So that's one thing. But the other thing I want to show you is sometimes you might need to learn a new thing. I want to show you here how we can create a drop cap. So I'm going to create a text frame here that goes across three. And I'm just going to use the body no indens style for a minute and fill that with placeholder text. Okay, so that's what that would look like. But you can see, obviously, to break this text up, I need some indens it just makes it easier for my readers to focus. They can jump to the next paragraph because they can see that. What I'm going to show you at the top is a thing called a Drop Cap. Now, honestly, these things go in and out of fashion like nobody's business. 1 minute they look amazing and cutting edge the next minute the next minute. The next cycle, they look really old fashioned. But this is what they are. And what they're designed to do is to attract your attention to the start of the document. And you can see that it takes the first letter and it spreads it over three or four or two lines. So that feature there again, is a paragraph feature. No, it's not. Sorry. It is a paragraph feature, but the way you would see it is wait for it, wait for it here. Drop cap number of lines, Drop cap how many characters. But once you've turned that into a paragraph style, the way you'll see that when you edit it is here, drop cap and nested styles. So you can see if I wanted a four line, drop cap or a five line, that's how I would do it. But generally, once you set one up, you leave it the same for the whole document. So that's a drop cap. What I hope you can start to see here, this is really what I'm trying to say. Once you've got all these bits in place, it's like having a gigantic lego set. You just go, Okay, well, I'm going to have an image here, for example, rather than put an image in, I'm just going to fill it with black so you can see that. Then I want another paragraph here. So I just do another three columns here. And, of course, I want the text to flow from here to here so I can do that. And that would have worked fine if I've got some actual text, but I'm going to just again fill with placeholder text. And it all fits in nicely. So it becomes this thing you can just really start to play with. So in my long experience of this, it's really all about, in my view, anyway, if you can prepare in advance for what you think you're going to need the number of columns, the grid, and all the rest of it, the styles. Once you've done that, it's really quick and easy to put even a complex document like this together. So we've covered quite a lot in this video. We've discovered multiple pages. Oh, I've done that on the master page. There's a great classic mistake for you. I've put all this stuff on the AmasterPage. So, look, it's on all of these left hand pages. Didn't want to do that. So very quickly, I'm going to select all of that, do edit cut. And then make sure I'm on page, let's say, two, then do edit paste in place. If you just about got away with that. Okay. I was in the middle of saying something, which was. So we've learned about facing pages. Really crucial. We've learned about these page numbers, we've learnt about the Baseline Grid. We've learned about borrowing paragraph styles from other documents, and then other things like Baseline Grid. So plenty to play with. I'm hoping that as you use more and more of these features in in design, this gets easier and easier, and you can start to see stuff and go, Oh, yeah, I can see how they do that. You can work out the number of columns. You can work out the features in paragraph styles, and your experience will just snowball. So best of luck. 86. Create an infographic with Illustrator (MODULE 20): Previously on this course, you've learned how to edit existing infographics in Illustrator, but now you'll learn how to create them from scratch. So this is the first of several we'll be doing. You know this already. This looks quite difficult to do, but actually it's pretty straightforward. All you do is you use the graph tool, which there are several. I'm going to choose the line graph because I know that's the one I want. You click and drag to create what will become a graph of the right sort of shape, so you need to think about where this is going to be positioned normally in in design. So think about the frame you'll put it in. And then when you let go of the mouse, you get this data window. And what you can do is delete and then click back on that first cell again. And if you know the data you want to type in, you can type it in, but more likely you'll have it in a spreadsheet like Excel, for example. What I've got is numbers on the Mc, which I've opened here, and this is the data I want to use. So if you had a really complex table with loads and loads of bits of data, you just select the relevant cells, as I've done here by clicking and dragging and then do copy Command or Control C, and then go into Illustrator and with your cursor in that first cell do Command or Control V to paste. Then press this little tick, and you will see it converts it to a graph. So that's the data. And if you wanted to edit the data, you could do that. If these are numbers down here, you need to put them in quote marks so that it knows that that's kind of the legend as opposed to the actual data. But with that done, we just press closes button, and then it's a case of modifying it. So we've done this kind of stuff already, but it's about selecting not the whole group, but deselecting choosing the group selection tool, click once, click again. That gives me all those lines, and then I could, let's say, reduce the stroke weight, for example. As you might remember from before, the main work you do is you select the whole graph and it's object graph, and type, and you can choose various things. It's not hugely flexible, but you can change, for example, the value axis. It could be suffix of let's say degrees. Actually, it's just in degrees C, for example. That's how you create a simple graph Illustrator. 87. Edit graphs & pie charts: Another way of displaying the same data, as we've seen already is like this. And really, all you've got to do to make that happen is make a copy. Well, in fact, you don't even need to make a copy of your graph, but if I make a copy of this one, and then you go Object graph, and type. If I change that let's say that one there, no preview, sadly, you can see it displays the data in a different way. So once you've got the data in there, you can do all kinds of things with it, and sometimes you'll leave it in the kind of standard graph format. But sometimes what you might end up doing is actually getting rid of bits just to keep the bars, for example. So if I wanted to do that, so if something a bit more graphic looking and less like a graph, I'll just move these out the way. What you could do is ungroup. Now, the moment you ungroup, you lose connection with the data. That's what that's warning you about, don't do that unless you've got a spare copy. But if you have, do you can ungroup. Then with the group selection tool, you can select different bits and delete them. So I could get rid of all those bars, except those. And then I can move them around. I can put numbers on them. I could do whatever. So sometimes these graphs are more useful than they might first appear. Now, very briefly, the way to get a pie chart, I was trying to think of a pie chart that would be relevant for one of our brands, honestly, I couldn't think of one. You might be able to think of one. But if you choose the Pie graph tool, hold down the shift key as you drag a square, and let's suppose you had 2030 and 50. When you hit the tick, this is what is like to happen. You're going to be a bit disappointed with that. That's not really what you wanted. If that happens, this is true for the other graphs as well, sometimes. You need to press this little button here and it flips the data around. And then when you press Tick, you get the pie chart that you might have been expecting. So sometimes the data is good to have that way, sometimes it's good to have that way. The reason why that is good is that if you had circles representing 20%, 30%, 50%, for example, that is a quick way of creating them. These features with the graph tool, they're not the most intuitive, but they can be quite useful. That's a little bit more about graphs. Next we're going to look at how we might create things more from scratch. 88. Use shapes & icons for infographics: Infographic is one of those terms that means different things to different people. Sometimes it's about pure data, sometimes it's pretty picture. In my view, it's something that tries to make something really clear by means of a graphic. What you can see here is I hope a good example of that. For plant power, we might want, for example, for a particular plant to say it needs a certain amount of sun, it needs a certain amount of water, and we don't need to specify millimeters or hours of the day. We just need to specify one to five, for example. Here's a couple of ways of doing that. One with circles and words and one with icons. So nothing too challenging here, but I want to show you a couple of different approaches. First thing is, I've used the grid here. So that's one way you can do it. So the way I did it was I simply did view grid and then snapped a grid. If that is on, when I create, it could be a rectangle, it could be a circle, made it a circle because I thought it looked a bit better. I would click and drag and it's going to snap to the grid. You'll notice it has to snap to the grid, so we get a nice circle. I've got that color because I've used it previously. Give us this one. But I could choose any of the other ones from the brand guidelines. Let me choose that. What I've also done is I've chosen a white border stroke, I should say. Now that's not going to be visible, I'm assuming, but I've done that just to give a bit more space around the edge, which is helpful if you're using the grid, if that's what you want. Without that, there would be no gap between them. So that's why I've got a white stroke. So then I could create another one using exactly the same technique. So I can have three or five or whatever. So that's nice and easy. If we look at that without the grid, if I hide the grid, you can see the gap is there because of the stroke. If I selected all three of those, and went up to stroke here and made it smaller, you'll see the gap get smaller. And then when there's no stroke, they touch. That's what I was trying to avoid. So that's one way of doing it, and as you can see, relatively straightforward. At least, it is with a shape which is perfectly circular or square. And here, of course, I just created some texts which I've lined up. The problem with lining up when you've got snap to grid on is that it wants to snap to one of these grid lines. So if I try and move that, it's going to go to one of these positions. As you'll see, that does not help. So if you are using the grid, you will need to keep going into turning snapping the grid on or off. And the keyboard shortcut here is worth learning if you're going to be doing a lot of this. So that's particularly fiddly if you use this approach down here. So you might recognize these before. I downloaded these from our old favorite further icons. Other places are available. So I tried various things, so the cloud and the drizzle and the sun and so on, which is down there somewhere. I almost use that one, but I think there is a sun right at the bottom, which I won't. There we go. There it is there. So I downloaded those. I opened them up in Illustrator, so that one, for example, and I copied, and then I pasted it if I do that again, I just select it, copy. And paste. So command C to copy, command V to paste. So the trouble I've got here, if I select it and try to scale it with snap to grid on, it's just going to be horrible, as you can probably see. So a better approach is to not actually do that. So if I turn off snap to grid, just using the shift key to get the sort of size that I want and get the position that I want, roughly like that. While I'm there, let me change the color. Let's say the stroke from black to that dark green. I quite like it with the white center. But if you wanted to change that, you can probably guess you use the group selection tool, click on it, and then you press this little button here to flip that round. So what I can then do is select the whole thing and group it object group. And then hold down the Alt key and the shift key. It gets a bit awkward. And I do one like that. I've just made a copy. And then if I do Command D, it repeats the last thing I've done, I E, move and a copy, so I can create as many of those as I like. That works downwards as well. So if I wanted to have, let's say, three downwards, hold down Alt and Shift. And again, I could do that. So that's a much easier way of kind of using the grid but not snapping to the grid. And again, using icons or using circles to create your own infographics from scratch. 89. Use the grid for infographics: In the previous video, we looked at the grid briefly, and you might have got the impression that it wasn't actually that useful. But I want to kind of contradict that with what you're about to see now. So this is an example of something which might end up on social media. Although, to be honest with you, I didn't side it up properly. I just kind of created it as I was thinking about something to create for the course. So this isn't exactly the right side. But what I have done here, which I think you'll find useful, I've used the grid, and I used some information I got online about the different ratios of different coffees, so cappuccino, latte, flat white, and so on. And I want to show you how you can turn that kind of data into an infographic that you're making completely from scratch. So I took the percentages. So, for example, an espresso is simply coffee. But latte, for example, is 80%. What's that? Steamed milk and 20% coffee. And I kind of took it from there and worked out these various things. I want to show you how I actually created these. So I'm going to just move that out the way and create this one. So first thing to show you the background layer. I'm just going to hide that so you can't see it because that's interrupting the view of the grid. So now the grid's there. The way I created this was click and drag to create my shape like that. And then with the direct selection tool, if I zoom in a little bit. So the direct selection tool, I haven't done too much with that, but essentially with that, you can click and you can drag to move individual points. And in my case, now, because the grid is being snapped to, I have to snap to a particular point on the grid. So that's what's happening there. What I want to do, though, is select this anchor point. Notice the dark blue means it's selected. And if I hold down the Shift key, click on this one as well, both of these anchor points are selected. Not only that, but you should be able to see there's a little kind of target that comes with and that is a relatively new feature in the Illustrator. It's a way of rounding the corner. So I can make this bit rounded whilst leaving that bit square, which is really nice. So that gives me what I'm after for the coffee. That's the kind of tricky bit if I zoom out now. Now it's simply a case of taking the percentages that I found. So as you can see, we've got two, three, and a five. So that gives us up to 100%. So the one down here, what was that one, two, three, that's 40%. Water. Americano, 40% water, 20% coffee. We just click one, two, three, four, and across, and then we change the color to be that one there, which is probably uses if I just use the eyedropper and sample. So it's kind of as simple as that. And of course, if you realize you want to change the number, easiest way to do that is to turn on the bounding box, which I previously switched off, and you'll just snap to whichever is the nearest. If it's let's say half of that, and obviously, you wouldn't want it to snap, then you would just have to turn the snap off and do that kind of by eye like that. So I'm hoping that you know enough about Illustrator and you're confident enough to be able to make this work. Essentially, it's about using the grid, and I'm just noticed that my case, the grid. I haven't used it properly. I didn't quite zoom in enough. So that should have been a bit wider. So I would probably need to create that from scratch. So the tricky bit is getting all these, getting the right number of these and the gaps and so on. That can take a bit of doing. When I say it can take a bit of doing, what I mean is, you might create four, then realize they need to be wider, so you'd end up for just a Select. Oh, you can see actually what I needed to do is have another white one there. So let me just do that ult drag. Make that go up, another notch, and then sample. I'm going to hit the eye key, shortcut for the eyedropper. Let me go, that kind of thing. But yeah, if I wanted to, let's say, just have four instead of five, so maybe I'll get rid of this one. This is the triggi I hope it works out. I'm going to hide the grid again. Just make sure, hold down the Shift key as I drag to get the spacing the same, get it all lined up. That looks right, I think. Now, I would select all of these and the text and then shift click to make them go across you can see I inadvertently selected the text at the top. So that, of course, would require a major redesign. I'd have to make this smaller. I'd have to move these down. But that's the kind of fiddly bit in order to make more things fit or make less things fit. So I'm not going to waste your time by going into completely finishing that, but I hope that's enough. I'm just going to undo that so you can see how the grid can be used in a much more creative way. In my view, often the best infographics are made from scratch, using a bit of thought, taking the data and thinking, how could we represent that? I should have said, these are supposed to coffee cups, if you didn't figure that out at the beginning. So there we go. That's another way of creating infographics, a bit maths, using numbers, using the grid. But if you can do this, your infographics will be far more interesting, I would venture than most off the shelf ones. 90. Create a complex infographic part 1: You look at my screen here, you'll see the final thing we're going to create in the Illustrator. Now, this honestly is quite advanced, and it might take you a few goes to start to get the hang of this. But I wanted to show you this partly because I think it's a really nice example of the kind of thing you can create in the Illustrator, but also because it uses a couple of techniques which, while advanced are really, really good ones because they open up so many possibilities that you can use. So I'll start to set this up in a second. But just to show you where we're going here, we're going to set up a document that's Instagram size, then you're going to learn how to create texts that goes around in a circle, but in a different way that opens up lots more options. It's a more advanced transformation technique, and then you're going to learn how to combine shapes in different ways, including how to create this. So we'll take a few videos, but hopefully at the end of this, you'll get a really good sense of some more advanced, really creative features in the Illustrator that you can use. 91. Create a complex infographic part 2: Okay, so as you know, this is what we're going to create. So firstly, the way I got the size for this was once again in my Quick sprout ways up to date guide to social media image sizes in their Google Doc, that I can do. I'm going to do one. It's 1080 by 1080. Obviously, it's square, and it's for the Instagram app. So in Illustrator, I want to do a new document. I've got various sizes I can choose, web amongst them. There are some presets here, but I know the size I want, so I'm going to just type that in here. Turn 80 by 1080. That's all I'm going to do, press Create. Then I'm going to use my layers. Got layer one there. I'm going to double click, change that to BG for background, and I'm going to create a rectangle, bit like we might in design, goes all the way across, and I'm going to use that color there, and then I'll use the shortcut. So I'm going to bring the stroke to the front with the X key, the forward slash key to do none, and then X again to bring the fill back to the front. I'm just reminding myself with the finish one. Have I got the right color, yep. Okay. Good start. Right. So there's some background. That's done, so I'm going to lock the layer now. Okay, so I think mostly we're going to be fiddling around with stuff in the middle. So I'm going to put the other text and the logo on a separate layer so I can lock, get that out of the way. So I'm going to do another layer. I'll call this text and logo, which might seem obvious, but it's a good idea, I think, to name these things so that when you come back and look at them in a few months time or whatever and go, what's on which layer, you kind of know what's going on. So if we look at the finished one, you can see, called the text here. We've got the logo here, and you know how to create this stuff, so I'm not going to waste your time going through that again. What I'm going to do instead is show you a thing that you might have guessed is in Illustrator. If I select my logo with the selection tool and do edit and copy, when I do edit, I can do paste in place, which I think I've shown you in InDesign, so that goes into the right position. Obviously, only if it's the same size document, but this is, so that's perfect. I'll do the same command C. Command Shift V for paste in place. There we go. That's all that set up. Now we're going to talk about a guide. Lock that layer, create a new layer called guide. Guides are great featuring Illustrator. They're not used that often, but when you when you need them, they're great. I don't imagine you'll see this at the beginning why we're using it, but hopefully it will become obvious as we get into what we're creating. So what I want is a circle. I want it to line up with the middle of the page. One way of doing that that you don't know already is to use command or control Y. That takes you into what's called outline mode. Notice outline up here. What that gives you is this tiny little thing here, which looks like a bit of dirt on my screen, but that represents the center of any regular size shapes, so circles, squares, et cetera. So I'm going to use my Ellips tool hidden under the rectangle tool. I'm going to line my cursor up with the center there notice it snaps with smart guides on. Hold down the optional ted key, and then click and drag, and I'm creating now an oval that's lined up and comes out of the center. If I hold down the Shift key as well, it makes it into a circle. Going to kind of position that where I want it roughly. And then when I let go of the mouse first and then the keys, I've got a perfectly sized circle the size I want it, and it's also absolutely lined up to the middle of the page, which is great. When I do Command Y again to go back to preview mode and just while we're there in the view menu, you can also go outline and preview. You'll see actually it's white. Now, that doesn't matter because I'm going to turn it into this thing called a guide. So the shortcut is command or Control five, but the long way around is view guides, make guides. This is a thing called a guide which we can use. Thing about guide is that you can line things up to it, but it won't appear when you print or when you create a graphic from it. So really useful as you will see. Now, thing about guides is they're either locks or they're not depending on the setting here. If I do unlock guides, I can now reposition that and move that wherever I like. But if you find you can't move it, it's because it's locked. What I prefer to do is if you put them on a separate layer as I've done, I don't need to use that command. I can just leave it unlocked there, but I can just lock it from the menu and I can see whether it's locked or not. So now it's locked. I can't select it, but I can still snap things to it, which you will see will be really useful in the next lesson. 92. Create a complex infographic part 3: Okay, so we're in the process of creating this infographic, and we've set up the right size document, and we set up a couple of layers, and most recently, we've created a guide layer, and now you're going to see one of the ways that's going to be useful. So, here it is. And we're going to learn another way of putting text in a circle, but sometimes you want things to be very, very accurate. So, for example, here, I want to know that these are exactly going to line up with these. These basically there's 12 months of the year and I need these spaced out in 12th, if that's a word I can pronounce. The way I'm going to do that is I'm going to use my type tool. Actually, before that, let's create a new layer. This is going to be I'm going to call it months. You call it whatever you like, but months. So we know because they are the months going around the edge. Now, medium blue isn't that great because it doesn't clash that well with the background. So let's go with red. Okay. It's important it's on a new layer so that we don't accidentally click on something else. So they're all locked. That's perfect. This is unlocked. Okay, so I want to just click once, and then I'm going to type the letter J for January. I'm going to select it and I'm going to choose the brand font, which is Futura PT bold. Not quite sure the size, but let's try something like 30 maybe. And then I'm going to keep that left aligned. The bounding box is on last time I used it, so let's turn it off. Now with the boundary box off, you can see much more clearly, especially if I zoom in the anchor point. Now the anchor point, I want that to line up with the middle. If I'm lucky, I can just click and drag and it will do that, as you can just about see. The Smart guide is linking up with the center of that guide. That's where the guide is useful. Now keeping that straight, I can line up with the outside of the circle. I've got my anchor point is lined up with the middle. My text is left align, so it kind of isn't quite lined up. But if I make that centered, that works perfectly. Although I think later on, it looks better centered, left align, but we'll see that later. So there we go. That's that. I wanted to be white, though. So let me just it's still selected, so let me change the color to white. Okay, so that's January. But as you know, I want to get all the months of the year, we don't need them all, but I need to create them all because I need to get them all in 12th. Now, previously in the course, you've seen me double click on the scale tool, and you've seen me double click on the Rotate tool, and you've done this yourself, I imagine when we were creating patterns. So when you double click on those tools, they allow you to rotate or scale things. But what they do is they rotate or scale things from the so called point of origin, which by default is, in this case, on the anchor point. Now, I don't want to do that. I want to create 12 of these around the circle. So what I'm going to do is with my rotate tool, I hold down the t or option key and then click once on that center guide. And I've done this before, so it's got the right number in, but you might remember from when you studied geometry at school that there are 360 degrees in a circle. If you didn't ever study that, let me tell you, there are 360 degrees in a circle. If you press the forward slash key, that does divide. Then we do 12 because we want 12 of these things. And then if you press the preview, it will show you what it's going to do. So it will rotate that 30 degrees, which is if you do 30 times 12, you get 360. So you might have known that already. But that's what we want. But rather than press Okay, if we do copy, we've now got an identical copy, but it's rotated around this midpoint, and then we need to do that 11 more times, which you might think, that's really tedious, you're right, it would be. But what you can do instead is do Command D repeatedly because Command D is the shortcut for object, transform, transform again. And the last thing that the last kind of transformation you made, in our case, rotating around this midpoint, a copy 30 degrees. Obviously, it's quite complex. It just does that for you. So that's all we need to do. Having said that, we now need to change these to the letters of the months. So that can be a bit fiddly, and this is one of the reasons why it's good to have this on a separate layer so you don't accidentally select something else. Because as you might have discovered already, when you use the type tool, you can use it for several things. You can click over here and it will create a brand new type object to use the jargon, which we don't want. What you want to try and do is click very carefully on the type. If you get close enough, it assumes, you want to edit it, which of course is what we want to do. That was January. I now select it and I'm going to do a capital F for February and again, click very carefully, drag for March. So it helps to take your time here. Don't rush it. Just click carefully, pause, wait till you see the cursor. Okay. So I'm going to speed this up unless you w. Yeah, I'm going to speed up. All right. So I've got all those ones. I didn't change this one because I don't want December anyway, so I'm going to click on that, delete it, and I'm going to delete these as well. Because what we're imagining here is for this particular graphic, it's What's in season, and we're starting, I think I was starting in April. Now, again, I just Googled, you know, what's in season at a particular time and found the information I'm turning it into an infographic, which of course is what infographics are for to present information in a easily digestible, hopefully interesting way. Alright, so that's perfectly lined up around the circle. If I hide the guide, you'll see that that's there, regardless of whether the guide is there or not. I'm thinking actually that texts a bit small, so that's easy to do because as they're all on the same layer and there's nothing else on the layer, I can just click and drag around all of these. And then just increase the size. The only thing I'm thinking now, though, is that logo is either two, needs to be a bit smaller or maybe that the guide and all this other stuff needs to be moved up. So what I'm going to do is move it all up because that's probably the slightly fiddlier thing that you might have to do. So if I make sure the month's layer is unlocked and the guide layer is unlocked, then I can click and drag through all of that stuff. I'm just going to use the up arrow key. A few times. Now, if you try and do this yourself and the guide doesn't move, it's because you remember in the view men, you can lock it independently. So if that was the case, it would say unlock guide, and you'd choose that first. Okay, so that's looking better. So now I'm going to lock both of those because I don't need those anymore. And then the next thing we're going to learn is how we create this. 93. Create a complex infographic part 4: Okay, before I show you how to create this, there's a big piece of theory that underlines all this. So I'm going to just hide all this stuff for a second and just work on this kind of empty page. I'll just unlock the background so I can work on it. So if I had, let's say, a circle and I wanted to cut that in half, one way to do that is you select another shape as well. So let's say a rectangle. You select both shapes. So first shape is selected. Hold down the shift key, click on the other one. And then you choose this amazing tool over here called the shape builder tool. Now, watch what happens when I go over the different areas here. It recognizes where the shapes overlap. So one way of using this tool is if you hold down the Alt key, just look at my cursor. It changes from a plus to a minus, and that means that I can click and drag through both of these shapes and they will be removed. So it's a really quick way of creating, let's say, a semicircle. So just to take that further, if I said, actually, I want a quarter of a circle, I could do the same thing again. I could create this other shape here, select both the shapes. Did that work? No, so click on the first one, shift, click on the second one. And again, using the Shape Builder, hold down the alter option key and just drag through and get rid of the ones you don't want. So this is a really key technique for all kinds of things that you might want to create. So you know about circles and triangles and polygons, how you can create those in Illustrator. What you can try and do now is combine them in different ways. So you can subtract shapes from each other. You can also add shapes together, maybe just another quick example. Let's say we had a polygon. Holding down the Shift key. What might I want to do with that? Let's suppose I Wow, I guess this is going to look terrible, but let's imagine I wanted a shape that was those two things. I could select Shift click to select them both, and I could use this tool. I could just drag through them. So that's now one shape. So really easy to do. So an extreme example of that is what you see me refer to as this kind of infographic here. So we're going to look at how we do that. So let me just lock these layers. Sorry, let me show these layers, make sure they're all locked, including the background, create a new layer. Which I'll call shapes, I think. Make sure the background color clashes. That's reasonably clashy, but I might go with gold. I think that might work better. Okay, make sure the layer is somewhere useful. I'm gonna put it in front. There we go. Selected. Okay, the tool we're going to use is this one. Whoops. The polar grid. Now, this is buried underneath the line segment tool. Now, last time I used this, I set it up to practice this, so it's remembered my settings. But I'll show you what happens when you normally click. So I'm going to click on the center, hold down the alter option key and drag outwards. And as you can see, we're going to end up with something that looks a little bit like, I'll just let go and you'll see. That's kind of what we're going to create. We're going to fill in different colors here. But that isn't normally where you start from. So I'm going to delete that. Okay, let me just show you off the edge of the page here. So when you click and drag, now, it remembers the settings I've used, but it's more likely when you use it, you get something a bit more like that. So let me show you what's going on here. Whilst the mouse is down, every time you click the right hand arrow, can you see you get one more slice of pie? Click the left hand arrow, you get one less. So that's like four sections, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12. 12, we want because we got 12 months. That's that bit. And then the circles, the concentric circles, the up and down arrows. I love it the way the ambulances choose to go past when I'm in the middle of my videos, anyway, you can probably hear them. Maybe you can't there's five. It doesn't really matter how many of these I have. So long as I've got enough to cover the different vegetables, I think there were five. Something like that should work. So if I hold down the Shift key now, then I've got the perfectly sized well, sorry, the size is wrong, but I've got the right number of lines and the right number of circles. That's what you'll have to do. So what I suggest you do is get that set up, then let go of the mouse, and then actually delete that. But using the same tool, it will remember those settings, and then you can come into the middle here, line up with your guide, hold down the k key drag out, hold down the Shift key. And get it so it's maybe just a little bit smaller than where the text is. And then you let go the mouse. You've got a perfectly sized polar grid, which will in the next video look at how we can apply colors too. So I know this is complicated, but hopefully you're starting to get that this is really worth it because of the accuracy and hopefully beauty of what you're going to create. You're nearly there. 94. Create a complex infographic part 5: Okay, so to finish with, we're going to build on everything we've learned, and we're going to use Shape Builder to make a colored version of this polar grid. Now, this polar grid currently, as you might notice, has no fill and no stroke, which means it's easy to lose. And what I'm going to do is just fill the whole thing with white just for now. I'm also going to hold down the all tour option key and drag a copy off the edge of the page. This is really useful because it's very easy for this to go wrong as well, I might be about to demonstrate. I'm going to select the one we're going to use. I'm going to fill it back again with none. So the idea is we're going to fill certain bits of it with certain colors. So I'm going to copy the one that I've made already. And again, as you know, I've got this information from somewhere, and so, for example, apples will be in season from July to November. Apples, we're going to use the green color in our brand guidelines. And you'll see I try to roughly match the fruits available to the colors we've got kind of Rhubarb orange. I'm not sure. Anyway, so we're going to have green apples from July to November. So let's open up the colors here. Okay, what I'm going to need to do is unfortunately, I'm afraid, this is the downside sometimes of using the libraries because the color isn't actually inside the swatches, it might not work. So what I'm just going to do here is create a quick rectangle and color it in green, and then add the swatch in to this document and then do the same with all the colors. I know that's annoying. You probably don't really want to have to do this. But it's a good thing to know. That'll do fine. Get rid of that. I'm going to select the grid. We've got green going from July to November. How do we do it? We use the shape build at all. Now, what you can see here, just above my cursor, you've got three little colors, and these are the colors that you can apply. This is another way you can use the shape builder. I didn't show you earlier. This isn't a default. If I double click on the tool, you get the preferences, and what we're using here is the cursor swatch preview. So if that isn't on, turn that on. Press Okay. What I suggest you do is if you look at my cursor here, when I go left, I hope you can see this as I zoom in. Can you see that I can go left or right, and I actually can access the colors that I've just brought in. So that's the green color that I want. Okay, so I'm going to click here and then drag through to the next one. You can hopefully see that it's highlighting in red around the outside, the areas it's going to fill. I think that's what I wanted there. July through November. Yeah, perfect. Okay, so next, we've got blackberries from August to December. I should have put December, shouldn't. So this time, I zoom in for you, before I click and drag, I'm using my right arrow. I didn't get the dark blue color. Oh. No need to panic. Let me stop there. And There you go. There's the blue color. I've got them all now, haven't I? Yep. Okay, so let's try that again. So Shape Builder. So there's the blue. So August. So what I need to do is keep a steady hand here. There we go. Working well so far. Okay, and we've got gooseberz July to September. So left arrow to get the yellow color. Okay, I'm going to just make a mistake here so you can see what happens. So if I go here, you can see that looks kind of interesting, but really not what we want. So if that happens, don't freak out, do Command Z or Control Z, undo, and do it again. But you can see now I hope why I've created a spare one. So that's very much worth doing. Right. Let's get with it. So July through September. And so on. I'm going to speed this up just so you can get to the end June. I think that's pretty much what I wanted except for now let me just hide the guide layer. So now, actually, I didn't mean to leave a space here, but I quite like that. But if I didn't like that, then all I would do is select this and scale it up. So remember, because these aren't filled with anything, if I did need to make this bigger, I could just double click on the scale tool and I could increase the size like that, for example. And then when I have nothing selected. You'll see it works. Fine. So to finish this off, all I needed to do was to get some texts that kind of lined up with it. And I just adjusted it to make sure it looked almost like it was a continuation of the circle. So I don't think I need to show you that, but you can see that's kind of how I did that here with the text. So I've got these different type objects. Or are they one? Yeah, they're one object. Okay, so the way I did that, was if I drag through all of those, like we can do in design, I controlled the vertical space between them by using the leading value here, so up or down. All right, so that is a fairly complex thing to be able to do in Illustrator. I realize that, but I'm hoping that really inspires you to create some really interesting infographics and other graphics that will really, really help you get your message across. 95. Create a product mockup in Photoshop: This next module is a short one, but it shows you a couple of ways that you can kind of showcase what you've been making. So firstly, how in Photoshop, you can create a mockup of some sort of product, and then we'll look at in very basic terms, you can create a Squarespace, website, and in particular, how you can host videos and animations on that site. So that's where we're heading next. So the first thing we're going to do is take this artwork here that I've made, as you can probably see in Illustrator and turn it into this. So it looks reasonably realistic that it's actually on a paper bag, but of course, that's all mocked up in Photoshop. So the good news is well, two fold, really. One is that you already know how to create all this stuff in Illustrator. I might take you a bit of doing in terms of lining up the patterns and creating the blends, but you know all that. So then it's really a case of bringing it into Photoshop. So the hard work will have been done by someone that's made this mockup. So that's where we're going next, have a look at how that would work. So on this website, you can see, actually, this is an example of a different one we'll look at in a minute. But you can see I've just searched for coffee packaging mockup, and then I ended up clicking on this link here, going to this particular website. As you'll see just from this site, it gives you 30,000 instant mockups. They're not in short supply of these things. You will download from whatever website, and then what I did, I downloaded it here, and then when I opened it up, let me open This one in Photoshop. This is not the coffee one, but the paper bag one. So that's what we'll look at first. So this is exactly what happened when I opened it up. And as we can see over here, there's actually three things. There's a business card, which I'm not particularly interested in, and there's the bag, and then there's the background. So we're going to take a look at the back. So if I zoom in on this a little bit and open this up, you're going to see there's quite a lot going on, and this is pretty technical. The good news is, you don't need to worry about most of this. All you need to know is which bit to edit, and this is the one that we're going to edit. So this is like a separate file inside this file. It's a bit like placing something. There's a couple of clues there. This is the main thing. This is a smart object. So what we're going to do is edit this. So when I click on this layer, if you've got the properties panel open, if not Window properties, you can click on Edit Content. So if I do that, so this is essentially what they've got on the bag. I'm not going to delete that. I'm going to just hide it for a second. Then I'm going to use a command you know from InDesign, file and place. But in Photoshop, you can deliberately choose to embed the image, I E, bring the full information inside the file, making the file bigger or linking it as you would in InDesign, keeping it linked to the original the original changes, this will change too. So you can choose either. I'm going to go for embedded. And then I've got this ready to go, and this is an Illustrator file. So when I do place, now what I didn't show you was I've got actually two things, one for the front and one for the side. Now, the side isn't going to be used on this bag, but it will be used on the coffee. So I'm going to use the number one of two Artboards. You may remember from the Illustrator lesson. This might take a second because it's got quite a lot to do here. Now, a feature I've got on here, the tool I'm using is the move tool, and a key selection here is Show Transform Controls. When I turn those on, I can click and drag to make this bigger or smaller. And in the current version of Photoshop, you don't need to hold down the Shift key to keep that in proportion. If you're using a different one to mine, it might be that you need to hold down the Shift key. I would try it without and if that doesn't work, cancel by pressing the escape key and then try it again, keeping the shift key the opposite of whatever you did before. So I'm not touching the shift key, and I think that's what I want. So I'll press this little tick button up here. And you might expect something dramatic to happen, but it hasn't tell you why. What we're actually editing is the file inside the file. So it's not a PSD, as in Photoshop document, but it's a PSB. So this is the file inside the file. So when we close this, we'll then be back when sorry, we should have saved it. And that little asterisk here tells me that it wasn't saved. I should have saved it. So it's saying save, which I will, and then we'll be back, and there it is on the on the back. And if I turn off the Show Transform Controls, there we are. Looks not too bad. And if I think, actually, I want to make that bit bigger, then I would again, click on here, edit the contents, show the transform controls. Let's make the height of the bag. And this is the bit that you'll spend most of the time, to be honest, just trying out different sizes. Tick, taking a bit longer to do that, and then I'm going to save again. I'm going to just do Command S or Control S on the PC. I might just move that along a little bit, save it again, and then close it, and there we go, much more like it. So that is your introduction to mockups, and in the next couple of videos, we'll look at a couple of other versions of this. 96. Explore Photoshop mockups: I want to show you a couple of other examples of mockups. One that I think is quite good and one that's not so good. I think this looks great. It's a slightly old fashioned iPad. But what's really good about this, if you've ever, as I have in the past, created something to be viewed on an iPad and try to take a photograph of it, it can look pretty terrible because the flash for using will bounce off and the lights harder work because of the reflective surface. When I've had to do product mockups of E books and things like that, I've used a mockup like this. I want you to see here it's really similar to the other one. What's helpful here is that you've got a layer called place your screen here. So in other words, it makes it a bit easier. And again, that little icon tells us it's the smart object. So again, I just edited the contents and put that in. But a nice one here is that you could say, Well, what does this look like on the other different iPads, so you can see that built into this, there's other options, and there's also other things, cross process effects. You just open these up and try turning the eyes on and off. So you can see that in this particular mockup, there's some lovely things that you can play around with. Again, you don't really have to do any work at all. It's all done for you. So mockup Cloud who made this one. Thank you very much for making that free. So that's an example of one that works very well with this product. This one doesn't work so well. As I reckon you can probably see. I've tried to make it look like something on his shirt. But in my view, that just doesn't really work. So some products will work well on some things and they just won't work well on others. So pretty much the same thing here works well there. Sorry, worked well there, but not well here. Okay, so now onto the slightly more complex one. This mockup here. Again, this is exactly what happened when I downloaded it. You can see you can hide these various ones. So again, thanks to Jefferson Spaniel, who made this. So I'm going to hide that. And then it's saying edit these. So I'm just going to just turn these on and off just to see what's going on here. It looks very much like edit. Yeah, so this is what we need to do. So all we do to edit the front you click on there, edit the contents. So I basically hit all of those letters. I think I hid that one as well and that one. Then as before, place it's going back to where we went before. I've got a front and a side, so you'll see the front now and the side in a minute. Now, the tricky one for this was that I didn't really know the size I was aiming for. So it took me a bit of messing around in Illustrator to get it I didn't get it quite right, to be honest, but I got it close enough to work. At least that's what I say now. We'll see what happens in a second. All right, so I'll tick that. Again, sometimes this might take a little while because it's got quite a lot of work to do. You probably can't hear but my computer is puffing away as it does this. So I'll save that Command Control S. Close that down. Yep, that looks pretty good, doesn't it? So let's do the side as well. So this is the left hand side. So what you haven't seen is me going through the process of resizing my artwork in Illustrator, which I can show you briefly if you want me to. I'll just hide that and again, file and place. So I'll bring the same one in. But this time, I'm going to use the side Artboard. What you're seeing here is how well these programs work together. This is the whole point. Now, you can see this doesn't quite work, so the sizing isn't perfect. I'm going to nudge this to the right hand side because I want this angle here to line up with the other one. Will it work? Honestly, I don't know. But when I click that to save it. And then, sorry, click to approve it, Command Control S to save it, close that down. You know, you might be able to see that it doesn't quite line up. So this is reason to be realistic here. What I'm going to have to do is go back and nudge that up. But look at the clever thing here. You can see how that kind of curls in and the light goes over it. So some real clever work going on here that is on behalf of the person that's done it. So thanks to them. Again, right. So I'm going to go back in here and nudge that up a little bit. So on the left hand side here, click on it, edit the contents. So, literally, I'm going to click on it and drag it up a bit like that. Save it and close it. Yeah, that's better. Maybe not perfect. So that's that process. And in terms of Illustrator, these are two different artboards, as I said, so the front and the side one. And I started working on this and kind of got it working, and then I realized that what I needed to do was change the size of my artwork. So basically what I did was I used the Artboard tool. And you can see up here, we've got the width and the height. So I started off, I think it was like 100 by 210 or something, and then I realized, Oh, no, I need to change that to make it taller. So I just went in and then made it taller like that. For example, makes the Artboard a bit bigger. I just zoom out a little bit, com control minus. And then I had to adjust my artwork. So then that's really all about the layers. And saying, for example, the background. I got the bounding box switched on, so I would just grab that like that. For example. Then I might think, I want to move the pattern up, so that's on a different layer. Move that up. I think you get the idea. This can be quite fiddly. But again, the good news is the really fiddly stuff someone else has done for you. So do your work in Illustrator and bring it into Photoshop. 97. Showcase your work on Squarespace: Final thing you're going to make on this course is an animation in After Effects. So it's one thing to be able to do an animation. Obviously, you will learn that later. But you might want to know how you can then put that on a website. So this is hosted on Vmeo. It could also be hosted on YouTube. But the trick is, how do you get that onto website? So I want to show you how to do that in Squarespace, which is not the only way of creating a website. And again, this course really isn't about web design, but if you know just a few things about Squarespace, it will enable you to take the work that you've done and put it online for anybody to see. So let's take a look at that. Let's just quickly look at the video first so you can see that the text basically comes out at you and then the strap line, and then the logo, and then the little swirly text at the end. So that's the video made. What you can do to put this onto a Squarespace site is that you click on Embed. And if you click on copy the responsive embed code, we'll use that in a while. So I'm here at squarespace.com, and I'm going to click Get Started. And there's a whole bunch of different templates you can use. That's the way it works. And because we're going with plant power, I'm clicking on nature and animals, I'm doing that because I know that there's a template down here that's going to work quite well called Crosby, so you can preview it. You can even look at the demo site if you want to. But I know this is what I want to use. So I'm going to say start with this design. So there's various advice that will give me to make this work, but I'm going to just skip that and go to pages. And so what we got here, these are the pages that are linked in the main navigation notice shop, our story journal contact. So they're all the kind of main pages. But we've also got the home page, which you might just be able to see, try and zoom in on that. That little home icon there, that little gray one, that means this is the home page. So this is demo content that basically you can replace. But I'm going to edit the home page, so make sure we clicked on there. Click on Edit. Okay. And you can see that there's a button appears here that I can edit the page with. And if I click on Background, and currently there is an image. So any image that you've made, of course, could upload, but we're here to talk about video. So if we click on video and add a video, it plays without sound, which is pretty good idea, I would say. And then add from a Link, so YouTube or Vimeo link. So if we click on that, notice it says YouTube or Vmeo Links only, and it says, Addink URL. So we go back here. I clicked on Embed before. That's useful if it's playing in a specific frame on the page. That's not what we want here. I'm going to go back to the share link, copy that, and then just paste that in here. Command or Control V. It's found the video, press Save. That's the one. So you can control whether it goes full bleed or whether it's inset slightly. I quite like the full bleed. You can choose playback speed, all kinds of options here. I like that, but what I don't like is the fact that over the top of it, we've got the text. So if you click near the edge of any of these blocks, you can delete those. So, there you go. That's not subtle. It's not something you necessarily want to do. But what this means is that once you can create video animations, then if you want to, they can be at the background of your website. So that's one option. The other option is if you wanted it to be something that you could choose to play or not. That's why I want to show you next. I'm going to create a new page, a blank one. And edit it. Add a section. I'm just going to go with a blank page. That's what I'm after. I'm going to click on video, and now this is where I'm going to use the embed link. Copy the embed code. Click on this diddle button here for Embed data, paste. And what we've now got is video. Now, it doesn't play automatically, but if you want someone to be able to play that whenever they want to see it, then that will work fine. So two ways of using videos on Squarespace. But this last approach is pretty similar for if you had a gift animation or indeed any photo, basically, you click on the Plus button. So if you want an image, you'd oe image, and you'd add your image. So PINs, gifts, they would all work absolutely fine like that. So videos similar, but again, remember we did the embed data from either Vimeo or YouTube. But what we also saw is that when you've got a home page, you can edit it and you can have the background to use a video URL. So several ways to get your content out there by product mockups and or on websites. 98. Get started with After Effects (MODULE 22): Right at the beginning of the course, I was trying to say how design and marketing used to be completely separate world, and they've kind of come together. And so now people, I'm assuming like you, who don't have a design background will want to learn design skills. Now, in the same way, there are other kind of specialities that used to just be done by professionals that are kind of creeping in as well. So one of those is the use of the program After Effects. Now, until relatively recently, this really only would have been used by professional video editors or animators, and it would have been a very sort of separate kind of dimension to what we're talking about. But of course, as you know, things change fast, especially in the realm of social media. So we've looked previously at how in Photoshop, you can create something that looks like sort of a framer animation, which is a bit kind of clunky. It's got a particular style. But also in there, there'll be stuff that looks far more polished. So what we're going to do in the next few modules is look at how we can use after effect, admittedly on a very limited basis, but enough to get you working with it and to give you a sense of whether you want to learn more about it. So just to show you where we're going to go first, what you can see on my screen here is a Squarespace website. I'm using one of their default templates, and I've barely changed it. So all this stuff this is all their stuff, which happens to fit quite nicely with one of our brands. So what I've done is I've renamed it plant Power. The only thing I've changed is, well, I've got rid of some of the default stuff, which I'll show you how to do later. But the main thing I've done is, if you go back to the home page, you'll see I've created this animation in After Effects. So you can see what I've done with the text, and then the logo will come in and then that little sort of bit of circular text comes in and sort of swirls around. So this is the kind of thing that we're going to be aiming for. You can't do something this subtle in Photoshop, but you can do it relatively easily in After Effects. I say relatively easily. It is a complex program. But this is relatively simple in terms of what you can do in After Effects. But if you can do this, you can do a fair amount of other stuff as well. So that's what we'll be working towards in the next few modules. 99. The After Effects Workspace: So we're going to take our first look at After Effects. And here it is. This is the latest version of After Effects. And the first thing I should say is that I'm using the so called default workspace. So workspace as you've seen in other programs, you've got a little list of them along here, and I would make sure you're using default. You can always click on the little Drop down menu there and reset to save layout, and that will take it back to the default. That's just what I've done a second ago. So if you do that, your version of After Effects should look like this. So like with Photoshop and Illustrator and InDesign, you've got the main area that you're going to be working on, and then it's surrounded by these other panels, and you've also got a control strip at the top. But there's a lot more going on in After Effects than there is in these other programs, which is why it looks a little bit different. So the main three areas you're going to look at is obviously the area that gives you a preview of what you're working on, the so called project panel about that in a second, and the whole timeline and layers panel down here. So those are the three areas you'll be working on most of the time. So the project panel is where you import assets into, and then you work on so called compositions. So a composition is a little bit like a chapter of a book, if you like, and I've got five different ones here. So this is like five different versions of what I've been working through. So the one that you've seen the animation of is version five. So if I double click on that, you'll notice it opens up down here. And if I was to play this, so this is the playhead, the current time, or the CTI, the current time indicator, if I bring that right back to the beginning, then press the space bar on my keyboard, you will see it goes through and plays the animation that you've seen already. So this is the Version 51. But as you can see, there are other compositions here. So I've got Version one open as well. This is what we're going to start with. So I can actually close Version five here just by pressing the little X down here. That's still there. I still lives inside the project panel, but we're not looking at it at the moment. It's one of the things that can throw people when they get asked to edit something in After Effects, which is what I'm going to ask you to do in a minute, you're going to be editing this version one, which we've got open here. So the first thing is to just make sure you're working on the right one. Okay, so let's look at what we've got here. This stuff should be relatively familiar and it's layers. So if I try and zoom in or zoom out so you can see a bit of what's going on here and also here, you can see, for example, if I hide the photo layer, the photo disappears. If I hide the layer, the logo disappears. Now, where it's going to get more complicated is if I hide, let's say, the succulents layer, you'll see that disappears. But if I hide the cacti or the strap line, you won't see any difference at all. Now let's talk about why that's happening. Why that's happening is because unlike the other programs, although I suppose when we made the gift in Photoshop, it's a bit like this. They haven't had timelines. So what we've got here this is the timeline, and we're going all the way from zero frames all the way through to 6 seconds. So this is a six second composition, and it's measured in frames. Let's just back up a little bit and talk about that because that's really quite new. In the composition menu, composition settings or command or control K is quite a key feature in After Effects. If we look inside there, this tells us the width and height of our composition. That's a very familiar HD size. And the frame rate, I've made 30 frames per second, and the duration is 30 frames per second, the duration is that's hours, minutes, seconds, and frames. This is a six second composition. And that will go up to 30, it goes 28 29 and then zero, and that counts up one. In base 30, if that's not terrifying, I don't know what it is. That's what's happening here. That translates down here all the way up to 6 seconds. But if I was to take the timeline back, sorry the CTI, the current time indicator, if you look here, watch what happens as I move this forward slowly, it moves it forward in terms of frames. So one frame two, three, four, five, and 20 frames, but not at 1 second yet, but the moment we get past 29, there you go. You're back at 1 second. So this is all about time. So to answer the question from earlier, the reason that at this point in time, where I was earlier, it makes no difference if I show the cacti layer or not is because the cacti layer isn't showing it, or the succulent layer. So this layer here, the succulent layer doesn't kick in until this point here. So one frame, sorry, 1 second and 15 frames. And then the next one doesn't kick in until there. One of the things I'm going to encourage you to do is put these layers together in the timeline in a way that makes it quite easy to see what's going on. I hope that even though you haven't used After Effects before, you can see how this stacks up. House plants go until that point in time. There, and then the succulent text kicks in there, and then it stops and then the cacti text kicks in there. Then finally, what I'm calling the strap line. I've just created a new strap line for them, all the green you need, which I quite like. Then after that, the circular text. In fact, I think in this version, the circular text is there all the way through. So that's how After Effects works at a very, very simple level. So we've got the layers panel, and we've got the timeline panel. We've got the CTI, going back and forward in time. We've also got the space bar to start and stop. So in the next video, we're going to look at how we might make a simple change to this particular composition. 100. Understand Keyframes: So we've taken our first look at After Effects, and now we're going to start using it. I'm going to show you how you make a relatively simple change to some of the layers in your After Effects project. So that's how we go. So you're currently looking at plant Power version one, which currently looks like this. I'm going to just drag this back to the beginning. So notice the way that the titles change. It's just literally one stops. The other one starts. So nothing too clever there. Not that we necessarily need to be clever, but if we compare that with the version two, which I've got open here, you can see that one fades out, and then the other fades in. And you can see how that's working with the layers. But firstly, let's look at a couple of essential shortcuts to make this easier. So we've already used the space bar to start and stop. We're looking at the house plants layer. So let's just grab this time indicator back so that it's over the top of that. And I'm going to press the Uk U on its own. And what the uki does is it reveals the sort of properties that are on that layer. And what you can see are three things that look a bit like egg timers. And they're next to a layer a property rather called opacity. Now, if I drag this back to the beginning, you can see the opacity is 10%. You might remember opacity from Photoshop, 100% is fully visible, 10% is only 10% visible. If you look on the screen here, you can see that starts, it's only starting to fade in. But when we get up to here where the next little egg timer is, it's called a keyframe, or at 100%. And then when we come back there to the next keyframe, we're back on 10%. So first shortcut I want to show you was the space bar, and then we've had the UK. If you double click it, actually it shows you other options. If that happens, just quickly click again, that kind of goes right back down again. So let's do U once more. Okay, that's the UK. Now, the J key can you see that when I click that, it takes the time indicator back to the previous keyframe that's visible. J goes backwards, K goes forwards. Now, that's really useful because it's important that you line the time indicator up with the keyframe when you start to change things. So for example, if I wanted to change the first setting to let's say zero instead of 10%, I want to line up there so that when I drag this value back to zero, it does it there. Whereas if I don't have it lined up and I drag the setting here, can you see it just adds another keyframe and you go maybe up and down and then up and down. That's really, really easy to do. I'd be surprised if I don't do it while I'm demonstrating it. If that happens, just do Command or Control Z to undo. If I wanted to change this setting here, the easiest way to do it is if the layer is selected and you click on either J or K in my case, K, and then I can go and grab that and change it. Let's say I wanted that to be 90%, I could drag slowly. Like that. Then if I wanted to change this one, let's say to 0%, I would hit the Kiki, and then drag that like that. Now we're going from that doesn't look quite right. I add it on zero. There we go. So we're going 0-90 back to zero again. Let's see what that looks like. Almost the sat actually. Okay. Having said that, I'm going to make it look like all the others. So that was ten. I'm going to double click this time and just type in ten, hit the K key. Double click, change it to 100, hit return, hit the K key again. Double click, make it ten. Hit return. Okay, now that looks like all the others. But what I want you to do is take this one and add that in because we don't have any at the moment. So if any Keyframes, I should say. So if I click in there and do U, it doesn't do anything. So we need to add a keyframe. So let's drag that back to the beginning. Notice that says zero. And the way to get an opacity keyframe is you hold down the t key or option key and press T for opacity, if you like. That's 100% to start with, but we're going to make that as you've already seen ten and then roughly in the middle. We're going to make that 100. Then at the end there, we're going to make that ten again. Now let's see what that looks like. Sometimes there's a delay in the preview. Can you notice here that green line means it knows exactly what it's going to look like. It's ready to preview it. But this bit, because we've only just changed it, it doesn't actually know what it's going to look like. So when I hit Spacebar, it doesn't necessarily kick in straight away. You might need to wait till the second time around. That's what it looks like. Okay, so it was right, but I would suggest it's not quite as subtle as the other one. And I'll tell you why that is. This is what's called a linear keyframe. It literally goes from one to the next one. It does it in a very straightforward way. It's like running in a straight line. Sometimes you want to make the emphasis a little bit more smooth and subtle. So the way we're going to do that is click on the first keyframe, Shift click on the last keyframe and the middle one as well. And then if we right click on any one of them and change to keyframe assistant, we're going to choose Easy Ease. Or if you've got a keyboard with a function key on it, then hit F nine, and it will do that. What that will do now is it eases it in a much more gentle way. Okay, so we've gone from zero 10%, sorry, up to 100 and then back down again. So the house plants layer will go to 10%, but then when we go there, as we move on, the houseplants layer doesn't exist anymore. It stops in time. So we'll look a bit more of that in a second. But before we do that, to position these Keyframes on these other frames. Now, we could create that over and over again, but it's much, much easier to select those three, and I'm going to do it in a better way now. I'm going to click and drag through those three. And do Command or Control C to copy. Click on the succulents layer, again, do optional lt T to put an opacity keyframe on there. Now, I've just done what I said I might do accidentally because the current time indicator is there, it's automatically put a keyframe on there. Okay, so very easily done. So I'm going to just delete that. I'm going to press the J key to get me back to that point. Make sure I'm on that layer, and then of course, I'm going to press Command or Control V. And it should have copied the same opacity Keyframes going up, coming down again. Great. Okay, so next up, that layer. We need to do optional OT T to add the opacity layer. This time the keyframe goes in the right place, I can delete it and paste. Let's do K a couple of times to get to the right place. Then again, optionaltT to add an opacity property on there, and then we can delete that and paste. So really, a lot of this is about setting this up to start with. You'll notice that I've got all these layers effectively appearing for exactly the same length of time, which is why that is much easier. And certainly, my experience in After Effects is the more time you spend setting things up, the easier it gets. Part of that is preparation you might do in Illustrator, as we'll see in a future video. So let's see what that looks like. Again, the green gaps there show me that it hasn't had a chance to preview this properly. So if I press space might take a second to get it working. But there we go. So now we've got much more subtle fade out and fade in using the opacity properties using Easy Ease Keyframes. 101. Editing an animation: So just to recap before we go any further, we're still in the fairly early stages of looking at After Effects, and that's where we're going in this module, particularly we're looking at how we can edit something that's already been made. So just to remind you, ultimately, where we're going to end up is here. Putting a video we've created in After Effects from Illustrator into a Squarespace webpage. That's the idea. And this looks a bit more advanced than what we've done so far. I know we haven't created this from scratch yet. You're watching me edit and hopefully editing the footage yourself. So that's where we're going. But let's remind ourselves of where we got so far. So you started with this just pressing Space bar. This very very simple animation, almost like the frame animation you saw in Photoshop, very very simple. If you've been following along, you've made these changes so far. So there's a more subtle fade. What I'm imagining is if you've been asked to make a change to this, the things that you might be asked to change, it might be that you've been asked to put a fade on like we've done, but it also might be given the strap line, at least the strap line I came up with yesterday for the plant power is all the green you need, then I think that needs to be on there a bit longer and I think it also needs to stay on there. Also, maybe the logo, well, possibly the logo could be there all the time, but I'm thinking that could appear at the end or at least with the strap line that would make sense. Then this thing at the end that says new customer, maybe that wants to appear at the end, as well. So we're not doing anything too clever yet, but we're just making the composition just to use the jargon, make the composition longer, so all the green you need can stay there appear with the logo. And then after you've seen the logo, this will appear at the end. This is all about timing, and so much about creating animations is simply about timing. So it's a literally another dimension. So that's where we're going. So let me show you what it will look like. At the end of this, you'll have edited it so it looks like this. So the first bit will be exactly the same. But then all the green you need stays on, and then plant power comes on, and then the circular logo. So here we go. So all the green you need stays, plant power fades in, and then the circular thing fades in. Okay. So that's where we go. Okay, so let's get started doing this. I need to make sure I'm on the right composition. So in my case, it's volume, it's version two because I've got the kind of before and the after settings. In your case, you'll just be in the regular one. So under composition settings, I can just check that I'm on the right one hereby. That's the name of the composition. So I'm going to change the six to a nine. So instead of 6 seconds, it's going to be 9 seconds. If I press the minus key, it zooms out, and we can see we've got all this extra time to use. So the stuff at the beginning is going to stay exactly the same. But I want the photo needs to go all the way to the end. There are shortcuts we can use, but I'm just going to get you to drag the end of the layer like that. And we'll do the same with the logo as well. You can't hold down the shift key, and that lines it up. Okay, so far so good. And then what I'm interested in now, particularly, is the strap line, it layer here. So I want that to continue all the way to the end. So again, I can do that. I can pull that. All the way to the end. I'll hold down the Shift key and the circular text. Now, what we're thinking then is the circular text is going to start around here somewhere. Let's just drag that back so we can drag it back in time. And then I don't know exactly when that's going to start, but let's say when the strap line kind of that's when the logo is going to kick in. This will be maybe somewhere around there. The logo, I forgotten, rather than being at the beginning, let's suppose we want it to come in exactly when the strap line shows. Just so you can see what I mean there, this is the strap line layer, the one that says all the green you need and this is it fading in. Let's grab the CTI, the current time indicator and remind ourselves of what's going to happen. All the green you need comes in, in comes the logo. But unfortunately, all the green you need fades out. So we don't want that to happen. So what do we do? As you might guess, we select this Keyframe because this keyframe, you remember controls the opacity and it takes it back down to 10%. So we can literally select it and press backspace or delete, and that goes. So if we just scrub this forward, that's another bit of jargon, scrubbing going backwards and forward like that. You can see all the green you need comes in, it stays there, then the logo comes in, and then the circular text comes in. Okay, let's play that. Let's take the right the beginning, it Spacebr see if the timing looks okay. Now, in my view, the logo comes in a tiny bit too late. Just think of the rhythm of this. Dumb needs to be a little earlier, a little later. By the time you can really see that, it's about there. I would say let's bring the logo back. Let's bring that in like that. Let's try that. O. I still on that a little bit earlier, I think. Now, if you were to just preview a little bit, what you can do is grab these tiny, tiny, tiny little blue things, the work area. I can drag that just before the bit I'm interested in, and that one at the end is fine. If I put the current time indicated just at the beginning of that and then press space, it's just going to preview the tittle bit. In fact, I could pull that back a little bit, too. Let's put that back somewhere in that range. Why don't you stud it play through. I'm pretty happy with that. But as you know, what I want is for the logo and the circular text to fade in. So we already know that we can do that with opacity, so we'll do that in pretty much the same way. Let's start with the logo. We haven't got if we just hit make sure we're on that layer, hit the UK just to check if there are any properties there and there aren't if you remember option or Alt T for opacity, it starts at 100%. That's okay. We do want it to be 100%. Let's kind of fade it in the same distance as the other ones roughly. So to get another one there, if you want a keyframe where one doesn't exist, if you watch where my cursor is going over here, so on the logo layer opacity, you can just press this little button here, it adds a keyframe. Okay, so that one is set to 100, so I can press the J key to go back, press it a couple of times to make sure I'm lined up with the previous one. You will get used to this. And now I can take that to, let's say, Well, I think I might take it to 10% because that matches the other ones. So that goes 10-100. Again, to get a slightly softer transition there, I'm going to select both those Keyframes, click and drag through, and I'm going to do right click Keyframes and Easy Ease or F nine if you've got that keyboard. Let's try previewing that. Just want to pull the work area back a little bit so we can see how that builds up and press space bar again. So really, it's kind of up to you what you feel about that, whether it's coming in too early, coming in too slowly, too fast. It's more subtle than I was thinking. So let's imagine I want that to come in a bit quicker. Then I just select that frame there and bring it back because that's the point where it becomes 100%. Let's try that again. Yeah, that looks better to me. Okay. And because that's working there, I'm going to select the other keyframe as well, so Shift click and like we did last time, copy, and then just carefully with my K key no there isn't a keyframe there, so that won't work. I need to line this up carefully with the circular text layer. If I'm not convinced that's lined up, I can hold down the Shift key when I drag. So I need an opacity layer on that, sorry, an opacity property on that. So again, optional or T, and then I'll just command or control V to paste. So that should work fine. Let's see how the whole thing previews. I'm going to just drag the work area right back to the beginning right the way to the end, holding down the shift key just to get it properly lined up. Bring the current time indicator right to the front, press the space bar. Pretty happy with that. But if I wasn't, obviously, I can adjust the Keyframes or I can adjust the timing by dragging the layers back or forward. So at the end of this little lesson, what I'm hoping you're starting to get is comfortable with the layers and the timeline and the Keyframes. I know you've not built on anything yet in after effect, but that's what we'll do in the next module. You're going to build this completely from scratch and put all this together, and we're going to take it even further than this. Okay, so that's the next module. 102. Create an animation with Illustrator & After Effects (MODULE 23): In this module, we're going to set something up in Illustrator, and then take it into After Effects and then apply the animation techniques that you've seen, but doing it completely from scratch. So there's a lot to do. So let's start by just having a quick look in After Effects. So this is what you're going to end up with. So this is my version one. And what I want you to notice is how the layers come in. So the photo layer the logo layer, all the things we've been working with, succulents, house plants, cacti, et cetera, et cetera. Now obviously, when I turn these on and off, you can't see them because as you know, later on, they'll all be coming up in different timings. But the important thing is that to make it as easy as possible in After Effects, you need to try and imagine what you're going to be doing whilst you're in Illustrator. So when I put this together a few days ago, this is my file that I put together in the Illustrator. The size, it probably won't surprise you is 1920 by 1080. That's a commonly used size. The Quick Sprout reference that you've seen me use before, they've got a video version of that. So if you were to type Quick Sprout video size guide, there's all kinds of useful sizes there. So I've just gone for the standard 1920 by 1080. I think that all worked pretty well on Squarespace as it stands at the moment. So that's what I did. I made a new file of that size. Then I was playing around with various things to suit the branding. I had a background color, which I haven't ended up using because I found an image that didn't need cutting out. I created a guide. You've seen about guides and I wanted to create a rectangle lined up to the middle to help me just position these elements. So there's nice balance. You remember balance. We looked at that a while ago. So it's the guide layer. Then I put all the vectors on there, and then the text. Is on separate layers. So this is kind of typical playing around. Trouble is, if you then import that into After Effects, you'll get text on one layer, vectors on another layer, and I don't really want to be using them that way. What I want is this. I want a file like this where I can switch on the different bits that I'm going to animate. So the succulents, for example, instead of house plants and the cacti instead of the succulents, and then the strap line. So this is much, much easier if you get this right first in Illustrator. And it also helps you think about your animation because things get way more complicated, as you can probably see by the time you get into After Effects. So what I actually did, there was another stage here where I used multiple Artboard to kind of guess what this would look like. Probably the best advice I can give you if you do plan to do more After Effects is before you get anywhere near After Effects or Illustrator, scribble down on some pieces of paper and just try and work out how you want things to work. Because then if you have a bad idea, you've only wasted a minute or two, as opposed to wasting an hour or two, by the time you've animated it. You polished it, but you realize you've polished something that was never really going to look any good. Anyway, so I hope you're getting that that really what we want is to have the layers exactly as we want them in After Effects. So that's what I've got here. I think you're okay with that. You know, don't you that I can have a layer like that, and then I can just duplicate it and click on there and edit the text. So I don't know what this might be. Let's suppose it was what else might we buy from a plant shop? Succulent cacti. I don't know. Um I was going to say Marvelous Monstera, which is the plant that we've got there, but I don't know if it will fit. Does that fit? And did I spell it right? No. Okay, so if I wanted to do that as well, then there's the house plants copy layer, but I would make it more readable for me or for whoever by double clicking and rename it. So monstera. Okay, so that's ready to import into After Effects. The size is right, the layers are as I want them. And the next video, we'll look at how we get those into After Effects. 103. From Illustrator to After Effects: Okay, so we're about to take our first steps in After Effects. So we've done the preparation Illustrator. If you get After Effects running, and then if you say, I want a new project. And you got a couple of options here, a new composition or new composition from footage. And because we've created what we want in Illustrator, that's known as footage. So if we click on this button here, that's going to make life much more straightforward. So click on that. Now, let's just take me to the right place. So I've created this. You saw the one in Illustrator that was kind of well, it looks the same as this, but the one with all the layers as I want them. So I'll choose that. Then Import as footage, I could do that, but better to say import as a composition. We talked about compositions briefly. But if you say retain layer sizes, then it comes in at exactly the same size. Okay, so let's choose. Press open. There it is. The final and here we have all the different layers. But let's go and double click on this composition to open it. And there we go. So there is our composition. So what you saw me working with, I had version one, version two, version three, but that's what you're going to start with. That's your start point. So we've got it in. So you'll notice that currently in time, it's filling up. It's actually 9 seconds. It's remembered the settings from last time. But what you might need to do is comp composition settings, control or command. Okay? So I've made mine 30 frames per second. There's all different frame rates you can have. I tend to choose 30 because I find it much easier to calculate. 24 is one of the standards that people use. I find 30 easier for obvious reasons. Then change it to 30 frames per second and change it to 9 seconds. The background color in this case, doesn't matter. You can change the name if you want to, so I'm going to just call this power plant power video version one. Press Okay. Notice it changes there. Notice it changes down here as well. And let's just check these layers have come in. So if we turn off house plants, we can turn on succulents or cacti, or strapl. Yeah, that's all looking good. All right, so we are ready to start to drag these layers around, which you've done a little bit, but let's spend some more time on that and throw in a few more shortcuts as well. So that will be in the next video. 104. Animate in After Effects: Alright, so we've successfully taken our Illustrator composition into After Effects, and now we're going to animate it. So let's have a look at what we got. So in terms of the timings, we've got 9 seconds. But the way I want this to look, is that house plants, succulents, cacti, and the strap line. Originally, that was 6 seconds, and I thought 1.5 seconds each will take us all the way through. So that's that rolling animation. And that's nice and easy. But what if we had 1.5 seconds for this layer, this layer, and this layer, and then this one until the end. So that's what we're going to do. So on the house plants layer, that will start right at the beginning, then it's going to finish at 1 second and 15 because if you remember, it's 30 frames per second. So that's where we're going back to. And one way to trim this is to just drag back like that. Okay, that's good. So then succulents layer is going to start at that point. If we go 1.5 seconds from there, we end up at three. Notice it's 250 and then three, 250 means two frames and 15 seconds. We want to get to three, which is 3 seconds. We're a third of the way through the animation now, and then repeat. As I said before, the more you can do to prepare this in advance, the easier it gets. So that goes to 415, and then the strap line. We'll kick in then. But we'll continue all the way through to the end. And as we've decided, we actually want the logo kicking in a little bit after that. Don't know quite when yet. Let's keep it with the same setting so far. So six is the same gap. And then the circular text. Well, by default, let's just keep that going. Let's do 7.5. So before we put any more animation in there, let's just get this back to the beginning, press play and see how that feels for time. Oh, it would help if I showed the layers. Let's do that. Okay, back to the beginning and space. Yeah, great. There we go. That's how we can change the timing. And my advice is that you get the timing, roughly right before you start animating, because, of course, once you start animating, it gets more complicated. So there we go. That's how we can tweak the timing. And then the next bit, actually, you know, I'm going to just remind you. So on the house plants layer, that's going to fade in. So Alter option T for opacity. So we're going to change that so it comes in at ten. Hit return, and then in the middle, roughly, that's going to be 100. Hit return, and then at the end, actually a little shortcut is you can do copy. And then line that up and do paste Command C, Command V, making sure that the time indicator is right, making sure that the correct layer is selected. Okay, so having done that, let's select all three, press F nine or right click on any one of them, choose Keyframes assistant EZ Es. Let's just check how that looks. Great. Okay, so let's select all three of those. And each layer in turn, we're going to do all option, T, a hat. You saw the trapper fell into you. Alter option tear as I've just done, and then paste. And then do a couple of K keys. Okay, while we're talking shortcuts, if you do command or control up, can you see that takes you to the next layer up control or command or control down, next layer down. So then again, I can do the same series of shortcuts. That one didn't quite line up for some reason. That looks better. There we go. I think it's not quite lining up, but I'm not going to waste any of your time because you know what's going on here. Then with this last one, yeah, the logo is going to fade in, but it's not going to fade back out again so I can get rid of that one and also on the strap line layer. Again, it's not going to fade back out again. Circular text, though, is going to do that. So again, I put that in the wrong place. This is kind of how it works. Okay, so let's paste those three on, but then take that off. Alright, let's see how that looks. There you go. So from scratch, we built something in Illustrator. We brought it as a composition into After Effects, and then we repeated the same transformations. So that's a really good start. The final thing we're going to do in After Effects is just something slightly more complicated if that's of interest. So well done, take a break, more coming up later. 105. Create an animated social image (MODULE 24): Welcome to our last module on After Effects. In the first one, you took an animation and you edited it. In the second one, you started to create that animation completely from scratch. Now, in the final one, we're going to just look at a few finishing touches and look at a few key animation principles at the same time. You can see here we've got playing the version of the animation that you've created so far, you've used the Keyframes and the timeline to get the timing out and you've got a bit of a fade going on, and that's working great. Let me just show you where we're heading here. We're heading to just zoom in a little bit to this one. You can see that the text now zooms out towards you. So it continues doing what it did before, but it also zooms out towards you. That's one of the things we do, and then the final thing we're going to do is if you just wait for the end that little circular bit of text about to come on here, you can see that does a little wiggle. We're going to learn those two things and a bit of theory along the way. 106. Understand Keyframe Velocity: In the previous module, you learn how to use so called Easy Ease Keyframes to make the transition from one keyframe to another a little smoother. Now, I'd like to explain a little bit more about what's happening there and how you can further control that to finsce your animations. So as you can see here, we've got a ball going from left to right over 80 odd frames, not very exciting. But I want you to compare that one. So let's say this one. Looks a bit more interesting, doesn't it? So it's got a bit more movement in it. It's got a bit more kind of contrast in it. So I want to try and explain the difference between some of these. I've got various different ones that I've pre made and you've got this file so you can have a look at these. You can see we've got various numbers here to try and explain what's happening. Let's stop this playing and take a look. We go back to the really dull one. Well, I think it's really dull. If you disagree, that's fine. And what I want to do here, I'll press the J key to get onto this keyframe and then right click on it and choose Keyframe Velocity. And you'll see that the outgoing influence is 1%, okay? And press the key, K key to get this one. And now select it. Now the shortcut for Keyframe Velocity because you'll be using this a lot is command shift K or Control Shift K on the PC. And you can see here that the incoming velocity is 1%. Now, you can think of the velocity as a hand brake. Okay. You might wonder where we're going with this. But as the outgoing velocity of this one is virtually none, and the incoming velocity of the second one is virtually none, then there's no influence on those Keyframes, so it just moves in a very ordinary way. Nothing is influencing it. Whereas, if we look at, let's say, this one. Now, this takes the same amount of time to go from one side to the other. But you can see there's a dramatic shift. It starts slow, then speeds up, and then finishes slow. So if I just turn them both on at the same time, you'll see they take exactly the same length of time, but one of them moves completely consistently. The other one moves with a bit more, I would say, interest. So if you can start to control this, then you can really start to control the look of your animations. So let's look at the velocity on the second one. If I can stay playing while I do this. So if I select the keyframe and do command or control shift K, you will see that the outgoing velocity is 88. Now this is out of 100, so this is a percentage. So now we've got an awful lot of handbrake applied at the beginning, and then you can imagine it kind of comes off. And then at the end, it's exactly the same. We've got an 88 on the incoming actually the 66. That's not what I was expecting, but you can see, there we go. That's what's influencing that. So you can adjust the influence, and it dramatically affects the look of something. And this is one of the frustrating things when you're starting to animate, you kind of know what you want, until you understand this, it can be pretty challenging. So that is one way of adjusting the keyframe philosophy. So you've got access to this file. What I suggest you try is selecting a keyframe and then just adjusting it. So let's say that was going to be well, let's say that was 88 instead of 66. Press Okay. Might take a while to adjust, but you can see, look at that. That looks great now, doesn't it? So this will dramatically improve the quality of your anlations. So I really encourage you to have a play with this particular file. 107. Use the Graph Editor: When you first learned about After Effects and Keyframes, you only knew about linear Keyframes and so your animations would have been pretty static. You then learned about easy ease and that improved things a little bit. Now you've learned about velocity Keyframes velocity. That's going to improve things a little bit. The final step to go is to learn about the so called graph editor. Once you can start to manipulate that, you've got all the control over Keyframes that you could possibly want. This is a little bit more advanced, but I really hope you get on with it because it will really help you improve the quality of your animated work. So here we are looking at the very ordinary linear animation. If I click on the position keyframe and the position layer, I'm going to click on this thing called the Graph Editor. Now, I've already made this a little bit taller on my screen. If you're working on a laptop in particular, you might just need to drag this line up a little bit. What we're seeing here is this is the position and this is the time. So as the timeline goes forward, as you can see, the position remains increases, but it increases in a very static way, a very linear way. This is literally a line from one to the other. Whereas, if we were to look at, let's say, this one, I think this one's probably easier. It's really open. Let's hide the other one. Just look at that for a second. You can see the time indicator is going. That's going at a standard rate. But obviously, you can see the circle is speeding up and then slowing down, it starts slow and then goes fast and then goes slow again. That's what the graph is showing us. Notice that when the graph is flat. When I say flat, I mean a line like this, the brakes are on and when the line is going vertical, it's going faster, it goes slow, fast, slow. And that corresponds to those numbers that we talked about earlier. So the brakes are fairly highly on. So the graph editor is a way it's another way of seeing what's happening. To some of you, this will really appeal, others less so. But the best thing is you can actually control things using the graph editor. So that's what we're going to have a look at doing now. So I'm going to go back to the very basic what you might want to do when you're doing this is leave the basic one there. If you do Command or Control D, you can duplicate it and then work on the copy. Press the U key to open the position keyframe. Now, you can only control things with the graph editor so well when you're using the position keyframe because position controls what's called the X and the Y position. X is going across, Y is going up and down. So what we need to do here is right click on the position keyframe and choose separate dimensions. So we've got the position that goes across and the Y position. But the Y position isn't changing, so we'll leave that one alone. We'll click on the position here, and here it is in the graph editor. You can see that it's pretty static. But notice little yellow thing, and I click and drag this and look what I can do. As it's playing whilst I'm working, it will try and catch up with me. Take a second or two, but look what's going to happen now. It's going to go slow and then get faster. What's lovely about this is that I can really control that. I really pings off at the beginning, and that's because there's a really vertical line there. I it like that. But it's a bit funny at the end, doesn't it because it slows down, then it suddenly speeds up. I can control that by dragging this one back here so it goes flat. We're now going really fast and then slowing down gradually. So as I do that, you might look at that and go, Oh, yeah, that makes absolute perfect sense. So that's great if it does. If it doesn't I encourage you to do is play with this file. Don't worry about damaging it or whatever, play with it and see what happens. So for example, if I thought, I like that, but I want it to maybe stay faster for a bit longer, then I could sort of drag that up like that. Maybe like that, and it stays a bit more vertical for a bit longer. If I didn't want it to sort of gradually slow down, well, I could sort of pull this back down, and then we could do something like that, and then it would go more like the other ones, so it goes fast and slow then fast again. So this is definitely one to keep playing with. But this is just with two Keyframes, remember. So just a pair of Keyframes, but now being able to manipulate these handles on a graph, you can do an awful lot. So the technical term for what we're manipulating here is what's called the timing and the spacing. So the length of time it takes to get from one keyframe to the other is the same as all these other ones. It's just that the spacing of what you might think of the cells of the animation are adjusted. So that's something you can play with there. Now, now that we're looking at the graph litter, we can do something a bit more interesting too, and we can add another bit of animation theory. So that's where we're going next. 108. About Overshoot & Anticipation: Now that you're hopefully starting to understand the graph editor as well as everything else we've been looking at, we can introduce a couple of bits of animation theory. This is Anticipation and overshoot. So I'm going to just do a few undo keys just to get this back to where it was a bit earlier, yes, something like that. So this is started off fast and ends up slowing down, which is nice. But the way it stops is maybe a little bit unrealistic. I'm going to just tweak something here. Can you see the subtle difference at the end? It just goes over a little bit and then comes back again. So a little bit more realistic. When things stop, they often don't just stop. They just maybe go a little bit further forward and then a little bit back. That's because zoom in on here, you can see that in terms of this is the exposition, so it goes a bit further and then it goes back again. That little extra because I've pulled this line up, it would rest there, but it goes up and then back down again. So if I want to tweak that a little more and make it maybe a bit more abrupt, then it will go a bit more abrupt there. Let's have a look at that. There you go. So you can really start to control things. Again, this is just with two Keyframes. So that's overshoot. The other one is anticipation. Will something just go straight out or might it just have a bit of a run up first. If I want to do that, sometimes you can do it just with a pair of Keyframes, but sometimes it's good to add another one. Let's just try see what I can do here. Currently, I've got just the two Keyframes. Now, I'm actually going to add another one. I'm going to shift this forward a tiny bit. And add another keyframe here. I'll do that by clicking that little button there to get another one on the position. Rather than playing the play here, I'm going to just drag that and actually, it is doing a little bit of a wobble and then it goes forward. But now I can actually control this. If I go to the Graph Editor, click on this layer, go to the Graph Editor. At the moment, it's going to go back and then it's going to ping off. Let's play that and see what happens. Not very dramatic. I'm going to click on here and try and just drag this handle a little bit like that, and you should see now. I just it's doing something, but I think it needs a bit more time. I can go back and just adjust the timing of this here. You're getting a sense of it, but I think we'd be better off going back here. It's maybe going a bit too far now. This is all about the timing and the spacing. So you can see it has a run up and then goes. Now, I could spend forever trying to fix this. It's a cost of how long it needs to do the run up and how far it needs to go back. Let's first look at how long it takes. I think it possibly doesn't need to take quite that long. So the other way of adjusting the timing is just dragging that back in time. Now, because I don't need to see all of this animation here, I'm going to drag this back and drag the playhead back into that area as well just so I can focus on this little area. I think that's all right. But I think now that we've got the run up, it needs to go a bit crazier when it goes forward, something like that maybe. I hope you're getting the idea, even if I'm not doing it absolutely perfectly first time around. But this is entirely realistic. You'll just manipulate the timing here and you'll manipulate how far you're pulling back. So remember, we've got three Keyframes now. We've got this one. We've got this one, and we've got this one. So we've got the overshoot there. We've got the anticipation here. And it's understanding the Keyframe Velocity and the graph editor and the anticipation and the overshoot that will enable us to do our final animation. 109. Finesse the animation: So we're now going to take everything you've learned in the previous couple of lessons and use that to finis your animation. So currently looks like this. But as you know, it's going to end up looking like this one. But I've just zoomed change the play area, so we're just looking at one of these layers. So this is the first thing we're going to do. We're going to make the text come out at us as it disappears. So it's a commonly used effect. So if I just stop that playing for a second, you can see we've got two properties. We've got the opacity property that you've already worked on, and now we've got the scale property. So there's just a pair of Keyframes. So this one, the scale is at 100%. And this one, as you will see the scale is at 200%. That's obviously much bigger, but the fact that we're seeing the opacity reduced as well, it comes at you and then disappears. So that's nice and easy. You just add a scale property. The two Keyframes going 100-200%, and then you just adjust the Keyframes. I think I had 33% on each of them. So if I was going to just do that quickly, let me just go to the same spot. So it was sort of round here somewhere and then we've got the opacity layer. If I do At or option S for scale, that gives me a keyframe there. That's 100%. That's great. Then let's scoop that to the end there and then let's change that up to 200%. I'm going to do that by dragging. Thinking like that. That's close enough. Then I'm going to select the two Keyframes, right click and choose EZ Es. Keyframes assistant and Easy Ease. Then I'm going to change to the Keyframe Velocity. Actually, it's 33 either way, that's fine. That's what I was aiming for. Let's just press the playhead. In fact I'm going to grab the play area, press the minus key to make my screen a little bit zoomed out. The timeline bit zoomed out, grab that back again. Let's just press play and we'll see what happens. There you go. So that's not happening quite as quickly as I want it to happen. That means really what I've got to do. I've got to adjust the timing, so I'm going to grab this easy mistake to make. I grab them both. Just grab that one. Now it happens much quicker. Maybe that's too quick. But that's pretty much what I wanted. So if that didn't happen quickly enough, you'd adjust the timing, but the rest of it, it's all about the velocity of the Keyframes, which again, you can do using the graph editor. So that's the same for all those other text layers. As before, you can copy and paste those Keyframes, and so long as you add a scale property to all those other layers, you can do that. So if I go to the version four, that's effectively what's happened here I press the U key over here. It's thinking about it. There we go. So we've got these scale Keyframes all the way across. Okay, so that's that one. The slightly trickier one, which I've got here in this finished one. I've already zoomed in on this area. If you have a look at the circular text. So this time it has that little wiggle. So this is using the rotation property, but I just wanted to make this use a little bit of anticipation and overshoot. I'm not completely convinced that looks great, to be honest, but hopefully you get the idea of what I'm trying to show you. So let's pause this for a second. So let's look at the rotation layer. So at this point, the rotation is as it wants to be, so that's starting from that point there. And then it just has a little wiggle back and then it goes all the way around to sort of plus 90 degrees and then comes back to a bit past. That's the sort of overshoot and then back to zero again. So it starts at zero, finishes at zero, but in the meantime, it pulls back a little way, and then it goes to that point, et cetera. So let's look at that in the graph editor. Looks a bit scary I realize. We can see that's zero there. That's where it starts. That's also where it finishes. But this time the rotation so down means, as you can see it goes down that way and then it goes up and then it's virtually still where it goes flat and then it leaps back down again really fast and then pings back up again. That's how that looks in Graph Editor. Again, the way you just set that up is you add the Keyframes and then as you've seen, you can go in with your handlers like this and just manipulate them. So I'm going to just play that. And whilst that's playing, I can just say, Well, what difference might I want to make? In fact, just that little tweak there makes it look much better, I think, but maybe I want it to ping back a little more at the end there. So that would mean just dragging that down a little bit. And then if I thought I wanted to ping back maybe a bit slower, then I just drag this point up a little bit. So I realize that obviously I've done this before, so I kind of know what I want and also how to do it. And I don't suspect you'll be at that point yet. It also might be that this doesn't really appeal to you at all, but if it does, the more time you can spend on this, the better your animations will be. So that's the Graph Editor, which is a pretty advanced feature in After Effects. But again, if you like it, I just encourage you to play with it as much as you can so you can get real finesse on your animations. So good luck. 110. Export the final animation: Once you finished creating your animation in After Effects, you're probably going to want to display it somewhere in a presentation or on a website or whatever. And you've learned in a previous module how you can do that on a Squarespace site, but you're going to need a video to do that. So the way you do it, there are a couple of ways, but one way you can do it is go file and then export the alternative way that I'm not going to show you now is you add it to something called the Adobe Media Encoder Queue. That's what the professionals do because it's ultimately much quicker and great if you're running lots of things at once. For us, it's okay just to add to the render queue, and that opens up the render queue down here. And then there are lots of settings, render settings. You've got different qualities and so on. That's too big a subject to get into now. For now, what I'm going to do is show you how you can choose where to output it. So we're going to just say output to. I'm going to put it in the same place as this. But notice it's saving it as a dot mOV, so it's going to be a movie file. But let's press Save. And then you press the render button over here, and it works through the video Now, one of the reasons why you've got this separate Adobe Media encoded queue is that it obviously takes time to do this. So if you've got lots of other projects going on at the same time, it's good to add it to a queue, and then that just can't happen whilst you do some other work. In our case, pretty nice and quick, quick enough anyway. So now we'll go and find the file, and you'll be able to see it. So, here it is. It's a movie file, and I can send that to Vmeo for example, put it up on YouTube, and there we go. 111. Goodbye and next steps: Huge congratulations for getting to the end of this really sizable course. It's no small thing to have learned so much in such a short space of time, well done. What next you may be thinking. Let me paint out a couple of possibilities. What I'd like you to do is look back. Hopefully, you did the homework right at the beginning where you wrote an email to yourself and said where you'd like to be at the end of it. If you read that, it might well be that for some people, maybe this is you, you've learned everything you needed to learn and maybe even more than you thought you needed to learn, and that is great because that leaves you in a really good state as you come to apply, maybe for other jobs, more creative roles, that kind of thing. In terms of creative marketing, you'll be well ahead of the field. I can guarantee you that. However, it might be that for some of you, you haven't quite learned enough and you might want to learn a bit more, maybe because you can see there's a niche that you could fill maybe as a side gig, something like that. It might be that you want to learn a bit more. It also might be that having done this course, you realize actually you want to change direction completely and go far more in the creative route and less in the marketing route. So if you're in the second or third of those categories that I just mentioned, it might well be that I can help. So what I can offer is, if you get in touch with me via the link below, we can arrange time for a conversation because I'm well aware of the wide variety of courses and extra training that you might want. Some of it's really easily available, some of it's more expensive, but I can definitely guide you. And as you're aware already, there is mentoring provided on this course, and that can continue if you would like me to mentor you. So there are lots of options. So the main thing is think about where you want to be if you're not there yet and work out kind of where you'd like to get to and talk to me, and I can help map the route to that. So again, well done. I think it's probably time you had a good rest now and maybe step away from the screen. But I hope you can keep developing your skills, and I really look forward to you getting in touch if I can help you further. So all the best.