Transcripts
1. Introduction: Press record. All right. Just get the thing. Am I even in focus? Hello, you guys. My name is Aaron James Draplin. I'm 42 years old. I'm a Graphic Designer here in wet, slimy Portland, Oregon. Of course, it's raining again today. We're here for our second Skillshare class. So what we're going to tackle today is one of my favorite shapes, the circle. For your project, you're making travel stickers using symmetry, and balance, and line consistency, and hierarchy, and how all those things pound together can make one nice, congruent, well-balanced, pleasing shape, and we'll punch off information. Why I chose this project? I'm that guy who's in the line at the airport, who can't quite get it right. Right? He has to get a Sharpie and put his name, and address, and phone number, and email all over the box, and people are mad. It's sweaty. They're waiting, and whatever else. So what we're going to do is we're going to take a circle. We're going to build a little travel detail with all your partner information in it. Right? The idea is when I take off on a Portland here, and I go to Tampa, something happens to the box, it's consistent from box to box to box. But along the way, there's a lot of little articulated tips and tricks of what key commands I'm using, how to set up your document, how to tear down your document, how to be efficient. At 42 years old, every day, I'm learning little tricks of how to get me quicker from A to Z in my document. So the same thing here is what can we hand off to you guys. I have no problem letting those secrets out. I got buddies who are smarter than me. They say, "Don't give out your secrets." I think that's bullshit. Like we're all in this together. We're all working on stuff, and if someone can figure out a smarter way to hand their file off to their T-shirt vendor or their sticker thing, well, that saves time off for all of us. Right? So that's a good thing. All right. Here we go. Here we go.
2. Workflow Essentials: In this section, what you're going to see is you're going to see the elements of my workflow come out. Note, there's just some overarching principles that always haunt me. It's kind of like a checklist. When you are starting the document, you are thinking about line weight consistency, you're thinking about hierarchy, you're thinking about balance, you are thinking of how typefaces work together. The trick is when you're done, you go through and you check, but also along the way, you're really watching for those things. So let's just talk about symmetry and balance. I mean, if I take a step this way, you look, I'm not, we have to get myself back where things are balanced and it's symmetrical, right? This idea of when you look at your document and you look at that little shape, are things lining up? You have to think of like if you take my name Aaron James Draplin, that A has a weird space on one side, and then I get to Draplin at the end, you have to fudge how those things feel. So it's always about stepping back and taking a look and see if things are lining up and how they feel and if things are just balanced. We're talking about hierarchy, right, how big things and little things and what's the biggest, what's the first thing you see all the way down to the last little secondary and third and fourth things that you see and how those things all work together. We're talking about line consistency, right, and how all these little lines, how they feel together because it's one thing to pound a bunch of stuff in. When you take a big overview of it, if one line is three points, one line's one point, two point, you're going to see that like this looks rough. You go grab them all, you make them one shape, and then make them all the same line consistency, and you pick your point and it's three, and then you can globally check how those things feel against the width of the type, and then how the lines that accompany that typeface, how do those feel together, right? Because really, you want those all. You don't want them to compete. You want them to feel like they were all, the decisions made were all meant to work together. So consistency.
3. Research: All right guys. So, I'm sitting down to start this project. This is always my first step. If it isn't jumping online and taking a look at things that would work in a circle, I've gone just around the shop here and collected a bunch of little things that work well in a circle. I'll just take a little overview of all my junk, just to kind of see what's happened. How people use things, how people use color, and then also size and scale on how much you can pack down to a really small space or at a larger space, because it's just amazing how this is something we're so comfortable with, be it a patch on some guy's railroad uniform or something, but it's something that works. It's very functional, and I think there's an art to how to attack these things. So, I just like to look at stuff. So, you pick up this little Babbitt's Cleanser, Be Sanitary Use Babbits Cleanser deal. The first thing you notice is this sort of consistency of the typography that's all one size and all sort of works together. The hierarchy, you can actually read the thing. If one of these things were bigger, that's the first thing you would see. So, it's interesting when you see the rhythm of this thing actually be readable, or when you come to this Blue Jays, the first thing you see is a big old Blue Jay, and that's the idea, the thinking there. So, that's what you should see, or this Museum of New Mexico with that incredible M. But what you noticed instantly with a lot of this stuff is this is like symmetry, this balance, of how these things pound in here, be it on a cap for your medicine or something or on this incredible- if you've ever hiked to the top of a mountain and you get to the top and there's some geological survey placard like this, this is just a little magnet from one of the parks. But when you get to the top, just take a look at that thing, how balanced it is, and how those principles apply through all this stuff in our work today, all the stuff. It's just interesting to see, I don't know, how things can work on an arc and then things can be broken just a little bit and be horizontal or vertical with inside these pieces, or this little guy, which is just a nightmare of information but I really packed it in there and it's all built on this circular thing and take it down of a DTC logo. So, digging in the stuff then I found this old Blitz Weinhard Beer patch. Now, this is, I don't know what year this would be from. I mean, I had it back in the '90s on a hat, but yet it's a reminder of line weight consistency. At least in this one, rounded edge line way and how it's one width all the way through. They use it for the beer here, little slogan, Blitz Weinhard, the little sprigs of certain size. So, there's a lesson here that one width works really, really well all the way through. If you were to take this signature you think it through, the hierarchy of that beer here was really, really light. It just wouldn't have that same consistency, that same feel. There's a certain harmony to how these little shapes and attributes work together. It can be really, really light in moments and then really, really dark in moments, or all just one way. That's something that you see when you go and graze the sort of world or all my drawers here. So, we've got a stack of envelopes here. This was just one little quick little grab out of my little flat files over here. This is your first day envelopes from back in the day to commemorate some stamp from, where the hell is this one from? Official first day cover of Ascension Island. Writing something incredible, a little graphic, and this cool, tiny, little stamp here to make that thing official from the postmaster. You just see how people use these things. Here's one from United Nations, April of 1968. You need to see that little tiny guy there, just a little reminder of how small these things can go. Here's a button I made, refund on those old little union pin backs and stuff from back in the day. That's a tiny little space, it's not even an inch, it's seven-eighths of an inch, and you can really pack a lot of data in there. So, just around the shop, I'll just take a big pile of stuff, play with it, look at it, enjoy it, and then just check all the weird stuff you can do. Hierarchy, scale, consistency, line weight, all the stuff we're going to be talking about today.
4. Sketching: All right, you guys. So now here we are, we're in the cockpit. Before you go and jump on the computers, what we're going to do is we're just going to take a pencil and your field notes, and we're just going to start sketching. We've done the research now. We've talked about what this project's going to be, and really how you can use a circle for any number of things. It could be a property sticker, which is something that I need, of course, for my upcoming travels on the DDC tour. But also, if you take a look at just this little pile of patches, and you see this theme of circular type working around these little badges and something inside, there's a lot of ways you could go after this thing. You can see this cool little rodeo one with this little horseback in there, and there's other elements, numbers and things, so your thing could be just type-based, or it could have a cool little icon. We're going to do both as we get going here. Let's just start here. Let's start sketching here. We need to have things going in a circle and something can work here, and something can work here. Something can work here, here, and here. See now, the idea here is, we're not even really thinking of what's going to go in there as much as we're just going to look at the geometry of how these things can work. You take a look at this stuff just by passing out these little spaces, you're starting to see what opportunities can happen. Now this is just sketching. Now, for me, to make a list and for me to say, "Okay, I need a property of sticker." So, here's my problem. We've got the fellows in here. We're going to do this class. But selfishly, as part of this class, I need to make a sticker because when I go and travel, when I go travel, it takes me forever to write my name, and my address, and where I'm going, and emails, and phone numbers every single time I get to the airport. So, what I'm going to try to do here is, I'm going to try to build something that I can just make a nice sticker, that just quickly get slapped on all the stuff that's consistent, and that's where we're starting here. So, I guess where I would start is I'd say, "Okay. Well, I know my name, right?" It's Aaron James Draplin. What is a property sticker going to need to have? We're going to have to have property of. Then, what are the things you would need? Well, you need a phone number you would need maybe the hotel you're going to. What I'm getting at is, you're just starting here to think through what's your little list of stuff you want to put in there. Maybe it's bag one of two or one of three or something like that. Here's your circles. Now, what are things that could go inside? If it's a property of sticker, maybe it's just something where it's property of and then Aaron James Draplin. There's little opportunities for stuff right here, those could be a little DDC symbol or some little star or whatever little piece you guys want to do. Now in here, if we're going to try to be tactical about it, maybe it's something like, here's the phone number, here's my email and then something cool like one of three. Now what I'm getting at is, just in that zone right there, in that first couple sketches you have to think of what you want. I already came up with a couple of new little ways to attack this thing. Now that might not have happened jumping into your machine. So much of this that you're taking this class is like resetting. It's one thing to work fast, it's another thing to work efficiently. It's one thing to work a lot, but if you can be smart about how you attack these things you can shave a lot of time off and that time could be spent doing other things. Drinking, fighting, shoplifting. Whatever, you guys got to figure it out. But I'm trying to help you guys shave time off the whole process. What if it's just going to be type-based? What if it's type-based where it's- you've got these little guys, property of Aaron James Draplin. It's just type-based. Phone number, email and then maybe something like how the year I was born or my birth date or something, I don't know. But it's just type-based because the next thing over here is what if out of this guy here, property of Aaron James Draplin. We had some cool little icon because if you look through here, they've always got some cool little Payload Specialists little docking space shuttle thing. Some little thick lines, New Mexico State Museum look at that thing. What if we were to make our own little icon for travel, little plane or something? Because really what's important here is when you put your phone numbers as the secondary stuff and your email and then you've got this little sketch going here. These things can be cool too. So maybe it's something like you're starting to see where this goes here. There's your plane and you start to see opportunities come out of these things. Something can go up here, something can go down here. Then maybe it's something about the destination of where you're going to. Which might be something like, you put a little destination in here and then I have a thing coming up pretty quick here, I'm going to Tampa. So who knows the thing for Tampa? Tampa airport code. Okay, I'm going to Tampa. That's a chance for me with a Sharpie to write in a big old TPA, right? But maybe it's just about making a cool little stamp for yourself. You look at these old first-day issue guys there's always some incredible little stamp down here in the corner. The idea is, as you go through it's things that work in a circle. A lot of the tips and tricks that we're going to talk about today are how to make things align, how to make things work, balance in harmony within that stuff. The idea that within that little circle you can pack a lot of stuff in. So, what if your thing was to make some sort of very general thing of just who you are as a human being on planet Earth right now in this gigantic insignificant tiny little speck that we are inside the universe right this very second right now. Okay, that's actually real right now that you basically mean nothing in the entire span of the universe, but yet here we are learning how to make things in a circle and the first time you press that little stamp it's going to be so kick ass. So yes, grand insignificance and yet we're alive and we've got patches and fun shit to play with and computers and stuff and everything is cool. So here's the thing is, when you take a look at that and you say, "All right, my name is Aaron James Draplin." You have a name right, right, right. Where are you from? Well, I'm from Detroit, Michigan that's where I was born. So you can just see here how quickly- 1973 I was established. You could take these just a couple of tiny little things. To make things work within a circle, that's a bit of a skill in itself. To have these things, now here is my little version of this little badge of humankind. Aaron James Draplin. Detroit, Michigan 1973. That's where I came into the world because then it gets fun you could put Jim Draplin, Lauren- that's my mom Draplin. These different little pieces and suddenly, you've got your own little cool little crest here of where you're from, it's very personal. I've done this for years, so here's one that I built with all my little stuff in it. It's got general conversation and junking and gatoring and open road and vinyl. All the things; field notes, all the things I love in my life. Established in '94, my birthday when I actually became well, a design company or something. So okay, we've got to keep moving because I've got to make this sticker because I've got to pack everything, I've got to get the stickers on the parcels, and then I've got to get on the plane. It's going to be very sweaty down there, I've got to get a big thing of Gold Bond to take, check on the plane with me. Okay, everybody let's keep moving here. So, now we've done some sketching. Exhaust yourself on paper first and then jump to the machine.
5. Starting the Document: You're getting a glimpse here into the mania of how I work. If I'm not careful, this thing will turn into this shit pile of dead stuff and there'll be one space just the width of my arm just down to the mouse, where I'm just allowed to just click a little bit. It's just insane. I try to keep this place as clean as possible because I can think a little clear. I've got my game plan here, that's figured out. You know what's amazing, I got this shammy shirt from Cabela's. It is basically a gigantic dandruff, debris, debris, bric-a-brac, crumb and just magnet. At the end of the day, at the end of my working day, and I get in here pretty early. I get in here around nine-ish and I leave around nine-ish. I do a nice long day and I try to get home and have somewhat of a healthy supper. But if you were to take this shirt and simply shake it, you would collect about a soup bowl worth of dead skin, debris, hair, things, stuff, crumbs and bullshit. I don`t even know why I'm telling you guys this, but you signed up, that's your problem. All right, watch. Let me just clean it up. We're good, all right. So, now we're going to jump on the screen. Now what's so important is starting a new document, is thinking through. You can see how I try to be smart about the space that I have. Now, I've seen some of your screens. Now I'm going to go, this is just for fun. We're going to call this one, it's called the junk workspace. Because I know how people work, you know what I'm talking about. Right now your screen looks like this. Some nightmare of dialog Window boxes and you have to move things and you get this space. Use your machine to your own benefit. Use your space to your benefit. Be smart about your dialog boxes. That's a big one here, is just how to set up a thing. Remember, if your thing looks like this right now and some do. I look over shoulders when I'm out travelling and I see these screens, and it's like there's no way I can get any work done because the stuff's just scattered. Work how you want to work. But what I've found is, when you start to snap these things into one space, you can see quickly here. If you go through all your software, they'll tell you how to do this but you have to go dig into websites and things to show you how these things snap around. But you can quickly see how to clean up your zone. Get this stuff all piled in here so it's nice and clean and smart and you're unfettered, you have a bunch of stuff competing. Just like where I work here, you're trying to be smart about how these things look. So, now I'll jump back to where mine was, and here is your nice strip.
6. Type Based Stamp: So, I built this little badge that is sort of a universal, sort of I'm a human being. Who I am? Where I'm from? Who spawned me? Et cetera. But to build this thing, it really is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Ten pieces. So, let's build this thing again just to show you. So, get a weird color going, I've got this magenta going here, and we're going to make three circles. But before you go, and try to draw another circle, instead, you can use your little scale tool here, shift option command, start dragging and hold that down, and you'll just simply scale one down from the edge. Right? Do it again. Down to that middle circle. Right? The third circle. Okay. Now, to get these all consistent, you grab the three, you grab you little eyedropper, and you hit this third line. So, now those are all 3.7 point. Now the next thing you're going to do is you want is you have to get this line going to put your name or put the title of this thing. Right? So, grab that middle of those three. Do it again, shift option command and drag. Now, check it out. If I lift the shift, now you've got this you can do, oblong or tall. If you hit that shift, it keeps it as that circle. See? So, you get that other little guy. Now, color this something different, color this one you know, cyan. Okay? Now, we need another line for the HUMAN BEING. So, we're going to bring that in again. Shift, option command. This is for your HUMAN BEING. Okay, cool. Now, if you notice over here, these lines are on yet another line, but on the outside here. So, you want to take this this line, and we're going to bring this guy out. So, you're going to go shift, option command. Get out your scale tool and drag that guy out. Okay. So, you'll notice here these guys over here on this BORN DETROIT MICHIGAN, that's on an outer line on the outside. So, you want to take this third or the second sign line here, and put your scale tool. Shift, option command, and bring it out, again, and now color this thing green, let's just say, and you're going to need another one for the SPAWN by JIM and, JIM & LAUREN down here. So, bring that one again. Okay. So, now if you're just to take a look here, at least these are the steps of what to bend the type around. Right? So, while you've got those things pristine like that, grab them all, and just bring an extra copy up here because see you can just kind of see like just drag that thing off to the edge, because this way when you go when you start to change these things, you've got your original copy. So, you grab all that stuff, group it. So, case you to do it again, you could bring it back down and start over. Okay. So, now we're going to jump in here now. I want to start putting this type in. So, you grab that blue line. You make sure that's above everything else. Grab your type on a on a path or a line tool, and touch it on there. Type in your name. So, I am going to do AARON JAMES DRAPLIN, and now, I'm going to bring this little, I'm going to twirl it around here, and see, now check it out. By holding shift, you can put it at 90 degrees, you know what 45 degrees or right back to just 180 or whatever it is, but the idea is now that thing is perfectly BRAC around. All right. Now, so we're going to put the HUMAN BEING part in here. Right? So, grab your blue line and bring it to the front. Jump on your type on a path tool. Touch that there, puts it on the bottom, but just type it in HUMAN BEING, now twirl it around. Hold your shift key. Okay. So, that was the two blue lines of those, to get the top, and the outside of it. Now, to get the stuff on the inside, now watch this. So, we're going to put the BORN in DETROIT MICHIGAN, along this green line. Right? Grab your type tool, bring that thing forward, that green line. So to see how it's a little above, the AARON DRAPLIN? Type on a path tool. Now, check it out. I touched the bottom and put it to the top for whatever, you know whatever the logic is there, fine. I'm going to put BORN: DETROIT, MICH. Okay. You grab the outer edge now, the outer line and bring inside here, and so it's along the bottom. And now remember we can center all this stuff later. Okay. So, now that's on the inside. Now we put the SPAWN, you know of JIM & LAUREN, here inside these guys. Grab that green line, bring it to the front. Once again, put your type tool on it. Now, it's going to go on here, say; SPAWN: JIM & LAUREN. Now, bring that thing inside here. Now let's put the established 1973 EARTH. Go grab your type tool. There's your establish piece. Here's your 1973. And there's your EARTH. So, you want to take all these guys, and get them in there. Okay. Now, you look here it's like now we have the one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, you know. Seven pieces that go in there. Then eight, nine, and ten for the lines. So, now we can just go and start to tune these things. So now how I do this, it's all about math. When you zoom in a little bit, and you take a look at this AARON JAMES DRAPLIN up here. Now if you want to mimic this one, how you would do that is you would sort of take a guide, turn on your guides by hitting command semicolon, and then bring either, bring that, if these guys are meant to align, you have to click past all these pieces to get to that, that pink line. Lift that thing out, bring it in a little bit. Shift, option command, to where it's aligned to the other one. That will make an extra one, get rid of the other one. So, now I make sure that the AARON JAMES DRAPLIN, and the BORN in DETROIT MICH, which are both on the same, they're both the same size, they're wrapped together, they're working together. We're going to center those in between this line and this line. Now, there's a couple of ways you can do it. You can kind of eyeball it, kind of eyeball it. But you could also put it a little measurement. So, I'll now go over to your command Y to your preview mode, and you can see this space is different than this space. So, grab these two pieces. Right? Group them, cool. Now, make a circle over here just make a circle, and then what you're doing here is you're just, you're making this little circle to go from that edge to that edge. Now, go measure over here. You'll notice you're missing a little bit. That's pretty small, but now you can take those guys and just scale this whole piece that's both, you're scaling both, by hitting the scale and the shift, you can bring those things up until when they're above just sort of equal distance in between those two edges of the circles. The idea is now, now that piece, is centered in between this line and this line or this pink and this pink. You see what I mean? When you zoom back out, now things are aligned in there. You get rid of these little dots. So, that one's ready to go at least for being inside there. Now, we'll go do it again inside here. You bring your guide to match this one over here, to the edge. You can see this one's just a little big. So, we'll just scaled down just a hair. Now, bring your eyedropper tool to get that same width, 3.7 points. Now take a look ahead and see how this is kind of rough. Let's see what these sizes are. So, first of all, let's go take the type tool over here, and eye-drop on these guys. So, now those are all 33.74 or whatever. So, you just want to come over here and here's what you want to do. You just want to use, shift, option command, and that would be called a lesser than, and you bring that thing down, and you can bring that thing up. That's you mess with your point size. So, just get that thing down to where it visually looks like the same, like it's the same width, because what you want to feel like. It's all about this sort of general balance of this thing. What you want to feel like, is you want to feel like the same sort of feeling over here to scale down. Right? So, you bring this guy. Now, watch this. We are going to HUMAN BEING, so, it's to the edge, to the top of the JIM & LAUREN. We are going to go use and your eyedropper tool to test that. Now, when we go take a look. The HUMAN BEING goes to that outer edge, and then it is set to go and just quickly test to see if it's centered in there. So, let's grab a circle. Let's take a look at where we're at. I think we're going from pink to pink. Make a circle. Okay? Grab that circle and go test down here. All right. Close enough. Right? So, you see how we're testing that. So, now, as you go back out, it's looking a little better. Now, just to go tune up this inside part here. So, let's take a reading on this. This guy's 57.63. So, make that thing. Let's just say 58. Great, but look how big and defaulting tracked out it is. So, let's bring that in. Now, what we're hitting here, is we're hit option and back arrow. I'm just bringing those things in. Now, if you want to go in here and really fine tune the stuff? You go click between the one and nine, because if you see where that gap is, and that gap is rough. If you take a look here now, there's too much space there. We bring these guys down. Shift, option command, less than, that brings those guys down to this size which would be 25. Okay. So, bring them down to 25. So, now we've got basically just one to one. All those pieces, there's 10 pieces there. So, here's a cool way to check how many pieces you're messing with. Let's go make that those all black. By hitting X, it toggles between filled and outline. Make that outline black. Now we've got that same piece built just and just that quick. Okay. Now, let's now, I'm going to just quickly see what I can get pounded into this thing for a PROPERTY of sort of sticker. Okay, because remember I'm flying out to Tampa on a couple days here, and I need to, I'm tired of having to write my stuff out on the packages with a sharpie or whatever and having some gate agent all over my ship because I'm disorganized, I'm sweating and whatever else. Okay. Let's let's see what we can do here. So, okay, and then you want to go in here and you want to put your phone number in here. Okay. Put your phone. Get your phone number in there. Cool. Put your e-mail in here, and then maybe where you're going to. I don't know. Now, what's cool, is say is just say I want to go and print this piece out right here, you know there it's got; ABSOLUTE PROPERTY, of AARON JAMES DRAPLIN, it's got my phone number, it's got my email. All the basic things that you're going to need if your bag, I mean they're going to have stickers next to this stuff. What's cool is the next time I go in a couple of weeks here, where am I going? I'm going to Kansas City. I think that's MCO. But what's cool is you've got this sort of like editable little piece now, and every time I go I would just print out a couple of these things under one page and then I've got my three boxes, got a big thing or posters. Now, I've got some box of all my merch, and then a big thing of more merch, whatever that would be, field notes and stuff and put them all of your stuff. Tape that stuff on there. So, you've got this stuff consistent. That's pretty cool, and quickly we just did this thing. I'll get some orange paper and print them on orange paper. So, they're super visible as we go jump in here, these things around these crazy you know colors, whatever color you can get your hands on to make that as bright as possible, which is just sort of like fast kind of cheap quick little paper. And you've got your own little graphic on your own little stuff. That's actually pretty cool. With a couple of quick sketches here. There's a magic to these pleasing shapes of a circle and how something, you take this pleasing shape, and you pack a bunch of information to it. Be it the way these guys did it with an old button or something. Right? There's just something about it. Now that you have the math right, you can add also, each of these also have a little icon to them. So, what if I went and grabbed some of that architecture there, duped it yet again, and then put a little icon in there? I was sketching before and that's what we're going to transition to now is to go and draw this, and build this in Illustrator. Right? So, you guys ready. Okay. Let's go.
7. Type and Icon Graphic: Okay. So, now, that we've got this type base piece bill, now, let's go on, and I like popping a little icon there, of some sort. So, now, we're going to build this quick little jet plane, airplane, plane. We'll start with just a very simple rectangle, you get my little white arrow tool, and start messing with some of the points to build that wing. You just eyeballing, and by grabbing edges, and grabbing points, we're just trying to tune this thing, into what a wing might feel like. Now we're to go grab your little point tool, and draw the fuselage of the plane. Simply by clicking and dragging you get that little arc, and I remember, I'm just eyeballing this stuff. It's actually coming up pretty precise, which is weird, but a lot of it has to do with using things that are snapping to guides, and snapping the points, and of course keeping your little command you going. So, now I'm going to make that back, with a little tail wing, then scaling that thing down, so, now I'm just grabbing it and making a couple of quick little engines, and just plop them in there. It doesn't have to be perfect, but the idea is, with all this stuff later on, we can totally mess with, to make feel right. To make it all feel right. I'm going to grab all those pieces, and then flip them horizontally, and just have them line up down below, and have a plane there. Mess with the fuselage a little bit, and just tune it up a little tiny bit, just going to bring the tail section, or just a smidge, and remember, all this stuff, we're just eyeballing it. Because later on, if something didn't feel right, we could mess with it again. I'm going to grab it on, make it all black, so, it's going to see how the things feeling. It's actually feeling pretty good. Attune this little, springing it just a little bit, I messed that tail fin just a little bit, so I'm going to grab this guy, group it all, and then taking on to use it in our next design. So, I'm grabbing that plane, I'm going to drag it over into a new deal here, I'm going get the plane, I'm going to go back, and I'm going to grab that finalized type based a little travel sticker, and I'm gonna grab those pieces, and we're just going to try and combine the two, and see what happens. So, I'll get rid of all this middle stuff here, I'm going to take our new little plane that we just built, put it in the middle, and I'm just going to add some of these cool little lines. I love things that having on lines coming off of it. So, we're just going to grab some lines, and just see what we can quickly, and just add to this thing. Just to add a little plane flying through the sky. So, when I leave these lines up above, and quickly, there's a couple of little tricks you can do. You just grab a piece of white, put that behind everything here, just to let that lay over those back lines. So, send that to the back, send these lines to the back, now, that's creating this illusion of these things, resting over that. Now, you just go and mess with the sizes of these things. So, let's see here. Depending on what my final email is going to be, of course for privacy reasons. But now, we've got that little guy blasted, or you can just quickly go, as you grab this thing and start to tune in a little bit, or maybe, it's not about having things down below. You could just have it go, or wrap right around with it. I'm just go add another a little space, and then put your email in there. Then just go tune this guy, so he fits in there properly. Once again, get my full name in there of course, you get that thing to fill right. I think before we started saying absolute property, but now, we just step back from that thing, and said, "Wow! That's pretty cool." It's a little sticker, and grab this little guy, and pull them off to the side here. Now, that could be a plane, a train, an automobile of some sort, but it's my travel sticker right now. So, just again there, I'm going to tune up to stiff even a little bit more. We're always check in size and scale. Always bring things down, to see how things feel. Those line should all be the same. Width, it's got my phone number, it's got my name, it's got my stuff, because you can go through in there, and just give it even a little bit more of a touch of a DDC, I'm bringing in your little logo off your palate, your symbol, symbol palette, and let that guy rest in the tail wing there. Now that you have these pieces live, you can take it, and do all sorts of other things. Add color, and add shapes, and still work within that circle. Now that you've got the parts, you can quickly tweak those things to add an icon, change colors. Change lines, remove things, add things, make it more simple, make it more complex, you've got the architecture now, and I think that's the power of this thing. Is within that circle, you can really pack in a lot of information, and then also, really handle this thing to be completely yours.
8. Advanced Icon Graphic: Okay, guys. If you're still here, I've been cleared by the Skillshare top brass, just to go on riff on this thing and just see what happens. We're going to go quick, we're going to get weird, were going to get dirty, If you can keep up and keep up, cool, if not, I don't know. When we take a look at this thing from an overview and say "Okay. We made a little circle type base lockup." and your second one which was traveled decals. The second one had to plane, motion across, right? Let me step back from those things. When you look at the wonderful world of graphics all around us this. I have tons of these old United Nations envelopes and it's cool little globes and planes whizzing by and cool stamps and stuff, and this idea of like how can you take this stuff and even riff on it even further. We've got these basic elements but stuff in a circle. Okay. So, let's just see if we can't make our own little travel Decals or some little weird thing that looks like it would be on some old piece of luggage or something. We're to sketch this thing, started with a couple circles. So, as we're looking at this little guy and we're sketching this little piece, let's go build this thing real quick so make our little travel decal. There is your little plane. Let's get a couple circles going here. Now, I'm just going go quick, so just let's see what happens. Along the way, just color these things really any old color just so that you can see what you're working with, right? Because you've got your sketch and you're kind of thinking, but the crucial part is you keeping everything alive all along the way. So, now we're going to go and make a line and make that line pink, magenta, and laid over that stuff. Now, if you take these things and they're all wonky and they're all dispersed however you're doing to build them and grabbing center all up, right? Okay. So, now that we've got these things, ever thing feels good, they're all centered up. Keep a version of this. Now, dragged it off to the side. Now, let's just go try to get this little left piece radius little horn, right? So, go over here. Get those shapes. Cement one to the back. Now, you've got your little shape of where you're jet going to go over, okay? Color that something else for now. Now, let's go make a globe real quick. So, come over here, grab a weird line color. Magenta, that's fine. I'll center this up real quick, vertical and horizontal, right? The idea being that we take these little guys, they're all wonky, let's give them all centered up, nice and tight. I'll just take these guys and twirl it up. By using your option key you can make an extra one, and by hitting the shift it constrains it all, right? I'll put one at the top, put one at the bottom, and put a couple extra ones inside here and don't worry about line these up just yet. We can make those equidistantly align. So, here they go. Okay. Now, before you go and mess with this thing, always make another version. Let's get those latitudes or longitudes or parallels, or whatever the hell they're called, inside their. Use your little eyedropper tool there, okay? Now, watch. I'll put that off to the side for now. Let's go in here. Get rid of the stuff you don't need, the bottom and the top. Now, let's make those things, let's just make this little guy blue so you can see we're working with, make all those lines white, right? Okay. Now, we're working with the little globe. So, now my eye instantly goes to the top here. Where if you beef these things up a little bit, now that thing feels pretty good. It aligns okay, but if you had your circle just a little bit differently. Say a little bit smaller and you step back and take a look now. See how that line kind of dips? That's just a little weird. So, just what feels good right? These spaces seem a little wonky so you can kind of bring that thing in just a little bit. Okay. Now, you got yourself a quick little globe, right? So, let's make sure that those are all those lines we've got. Okay. Now, watch you grab everything, Shift hit the blue and now you've got all the lines are laid over the top, hit your little eyedropper and make sure that those are all two point. Now, remember, just grab a version of this and put it in a way because we're going to go flat this thing out here now. So, now we're going to lay this thing over. Now, a quick way to do it, would be this. To keep everything live bring that to the front. Grab all of it, commands seven. Going to go back and get the things some blue but now those little lines are just mass inside there, right? Bring this little circle and aligned it to the bottom of this yellow, and your globes in there. So, now color this little blue and behind that white. We're starting to kinda get a little bit of a graphic going here, right? So, let's go take a look down here at the bottom, there's our plane and we'll get that thing just land over there, just kind of quick for now. That's cool. That it looks pretty good, okay? Remember, we're just going to do this fast. Now, come back out and take a look at this whole thing and say alright. I want one more big circle, so you can put some tape around this thing. So, let's get to the top of this guy. Let's make a circle. Let's align them. Let's get to the bottom of that orange circle. Okay. So, now that thing is aligned with the edge of that orange circle. Let's bring this thing that's outlighted. Let's bring it out a little bit bigger. Let's make another one. Okay. So, this is going to be where your type is going to be resting. Now, subtract this inner one out of this outer one. Okay. Let's give it a color. Okay. That's cool. Now, let's go through here. Let's put another line, scramble these lines over here. Bring it to the front. Now, check it out. So we want to keep that circle at all times, right? So, this is where you're kind of planning as you're going. So, you've got an orbit circle for later on if need to adjusting the type you just give it some weird color. Now, I just want to make these into two shapes, right? One eighty and 180. So, I'm going to grab one back here. Lift it up above. Grab that little line, those two pieces. Let's color this something from the document. Let's color it orange. Okay. Now, we've got these little pieces that are starting to come together. Now, lets bring one of those orbit lines, that's your good math, right? Let's bring that thing back inside here. I'll color that a weird color so you can see it. We're going to the front. Now, let's see here. Okay. Let's grab another piece of that. Put along the bottom here. Now, you could do something cool inside here and say, I want maybe a little DDC logo or something. But the idea is we just built this quick little guy here. This quick little piece. We'll Skillshare travel thing, Skillshare airlines here. Now, you could just go back. All this stuff is still live inside there, right? We'll make it a whole different color palette. So, let's see. What's a cool color? How about some cool greens or something? Now, just quickly you've got this cool little travel sticker. The idea is if you were to put one big circle around that whole thing, go grab one of these outer circles here. This is like we're going to mock up what the sticker might look like. You'll find a piece of luggage. You can just kind of quickly see how these things might work on something like this, right? If you're traveling and that was your little, and there you go.
9. Wrapping Up the Document: So, now that we have the design done for this travel sticker because I have to take off tomorrow morning. It's one thing to design, it's another thing to actually wrap up the document and do it professionally. So, that said, we got to clean up the desk here, let me get all my stuff, all my junk put away. I'm going to grab that final travel sticker. There was one with the icon, of course, then the one that was just type-based So now, grab these two. Grab these two because here's the thing, when you zoom out on your document, zoom all the way out. Now, that it's time to wrap this thing up, if you've noticed here this, thing is called Skillshare circle badge round one. So, what we're gonna do first is we're just going to save everything at this level out to a new document. The next round, we'll call it. Then we're going to take this guy here and we're going to call it round two. So now, we're at round two, but see when you zoom out here, take a look at this. There's this big old space. What you have to be really careful about is we've got those two pieces we zoomed back in here. We've got these two pieces selected, so let's let's grab those, command X, and let's go plop them down on the work page or whatever. So, you've got those guys right there on your on your page. Because now if you go to command 0, that's where it shows. But see look at all the rest of this stuff. I'm going to grab everything, I'm going to hit shift and just grab the two pieces I don't want to delete and now delete, and that gets rid of everything. So, I'll just do a big command all, I'm going to unlock everything, option command 2, that unlocks everything. To clean these things up, now, this would be round two. These are our final pieces. The type is right. Everything is still live and what I mean by that is if you take a command Y, your outline mode, you can see all these little pieces, this is all still live type. Then we're just going to grab an extra piece here. See that? It's a shift option command drag. We're going to drag those little guys, and now we're going to go through here, and we're going to clean these things up. Let's get rid of all the typefaces. So, the other typefaces, we're going to convert everything that outlines. So, I just did shift command O, that converts everything to an outline. So, what we're doing is we're basically stripping these things down to make them less and less volatile. Because if you were to hand these off to some, let's say, a sticker vendor or upload it to somewhere to make a button, or send it off to make a patch or something, you want to strip away as many options for them to screw the thing up. So, one of the things is you take a look here, these guys are all told to be 3.7 points. So, you can go through and you can make that so it's just a shape because what if someone opened that thing up on their end and they went and beefed that thing up for whatever reason? That's not what you want. You want to take away that option for them, so they're not allowed. So, what you do is you grab those three lines. We'll do in this first one here. Now, do option command O, and what that did was I just made that thing a shape. It outlined the line. So, if we zoom in here, and you grab all these things, I'll just explain what it does. Because we had this one filled with a black outline and then filled with white, you can see here if you were just to cover those things just to see what you're working with, it's going to cover all the inside because it makes another inside circle too. So, you have to get rid of that stuff. Or if we were to back out, we'll grab all three of them and then fill them with nothing. Now, outline those guys and now those are all just shapes. So, what you're looking at here is this whole piece right here now, this whole piece. It's basically just one big shape. So, when you hand this guy off, now you just want to go back, group all that stuff. When I come over here, we're going to do the same to this guy. Take a look at what it looks like right now. There's some stuff happening here that we're going to have to go clean up. I'll show you how that all works. So, let's grab these three lines, ungroup everything. Let's grab these three lines, let's make sure there's no fills, something's filled in there. You can test to see where you're at. Let's make them all nothing, outline those guys. Now, just for the sake of to see what we're working with here, I'm just going to go and hit them with a real quick bit of cyan. We need to strip these pieces out because I don't want to hand this thing off live. What if someone was to shift this little piece? Even if it's grouped, it's locked in there and it's just dangerous. We're basically flattening everything to make it one shape. So, let's take a look at this. Now, take this little guy, let's color it something weird and now go over here and take these three pieces, make them all one shape in your Pathfinder tool, and then subtract that green over it. Now, go grab these three pieces that you outlined, make them all one shape. Command A makes them all one compound path. Now, you can take this little shape that's fudging, that's just lifting over those pieces, you can take a look here. You color it green and send it to the back. Now it's behind those lines. If you send it all to the front, you're just going to go and subtract it over that one shape. We've got these five lines going into the plane now and you want to make all of those one big shape with the plane. So, let's go grab here. Let's check out this little DDC. Now, if we were just to go and grab one of those lines and put those things together, watch what's going to happen. We're going to pat find those things into one piece. See it puts the whole shape. So, what we're going to want to do is we're going to make sure that this piece right here is expanded and stamped out in its own. I just quickly go grab a little square, lay it over that line, subtract it out of that line, and now put those pieces together. Because the idea is we're just separating all these little chunks. So, we'll grab these five lines, we'll pathfind those into one shape, cool. We'll grab those three lines, pathfind those into one big shape. Cool. Grab your your plain here with the lines into one big shape. Just to know, we're working away out into that DDC because now, that is one piece right there. So now, this is round two. We've got your original graphics, everything is still live. Nothing's been pounded down into just shapes yet. You can still change the type. You've got a version of that. Then down below here you've got these refined versions, they're now ready to hand off to your vendors or print out or whatever you're going to do. So, what you'll do is you'll grab those things, grab command C on those guys. You're going to save this one as, I'm going to call this one the final. So, we'll save this thing out into this final file. We'll get rid of our live ones. All right. So, we're down to these two refined little lockups here, these two around, we'll just call them even shapes. Because they're basically just all one big shape, one big vector. So now, let's say I had to hand this off to a to a T-shirt vendor or something, or to a guy for a sticker, or a badge or a button or something and, I just want to grab this last little piece here. Going to a new document. Now we're going to save this thing out and there's a couple of cool things here. Now, first thing is you want to strip everything out of your color palette. It's that much less stuff for anyone to color what's going on here just down to its very rudimentary black shape. Out of your symbols palette, go clean all your little goodies out of there. It's just that much less stuff we're going to mess with. Now, to save this thing out, so we're going to call this one, we'll call it Skillshare T-Shirt. Call it final. All right. As just a service to whoever I'm handing off to, you can leave it in your Illustrator CC. That's fine, but I always go back to CS3. The problem is if someone doesn't have the latest version of Illustrator like I'm lucky to have and they're on Illustrator 6, there's no way for them to open it. If they don't learn how to communicate that to you, you have numbers of emails and bullshit and things happening, and you'll be wasting time. Now, for one last final step, let's save out a PDF of it. All right. So, I go to PDF, save, PDF X-1a. So, let's go take a look at where we're at here now. We're just going to see what we've got in the folder. We've got round one, round two, we've got the final. But over here we've got these two finalized graphics, so grab this little guy here, just the title, Skillshare T-Shirt Final. Make a folder, get rid of the final, and put those two pieces in there. Because now when you open this thing up, what you've got in there is you've got your final Illustrator file, so there it is. Zoom out and take a look at what things are looking like and you've got your PDF. Now, PDF you can see it there it is, it's in there. What's cool about the PDF is it can. If for whatever reason they can't open your Illustrator file, this is just a little way to ensure if you take that PDF, and they open it into Illustrator, there you go. You have to get rid of this outline, but the idea is you can get to the stuff, it's still there. Can we go back into around one and grab one of our original? Probably get ready for tomorrow. So, we'll grab that, we'll start a new document. We'll get that in there and now, to put this on my on my box, I've got a eight and a half by 11 printer here. Do that thing as big as we can get it in there, absolute property of Aaron James Draplin etc. But we're going to Tampa. We're going to TPA and now that thing is ready to go to print. So now, we'll save this thing out and we'll call it Skillshare Travel Prints, and we'll just call this one Tampa. Let's go back in here to our little Skillshare thing that we can see here, the travel prints, there's your Tampa. There you go. Something that I try to do a good job of everywhere is naming conventions. Now, as I start to click on stuff here, take a look here and go into our Skillshare here, I'm really thinking through what these things are going to look like as you type them in your naming convention, how to plan, think through. So, I guess just in general, all your file names and your naming conventions, think about those a little bit ahead of time and be smart about how you build up those final folders because later on, it's going to be so crucial how you can search for stuff. Ultimately, go find things when you're in a pinch or re-link a file or whatever the deal is. You're just going to shave a lot of time off. On top of that, every time you open a folder, your stuff just looks better.
10. Conclusion: All right, you guys. So I guess that's it, we're done. We're done. Thank you for coming. Thank you for taking the time to watch me nerd around and make things in a circle that are type-based, add a little icon, some tips and tricks, and efficiencies along the way from my workflow. I just want to say thanks to everyone who's going to go and use these things in their day-to-day design. So the top brass from Skillshare, they're telling me you guys are going to upload your stuff again, and I will, as my commitment to you guys, I'll come on there, I'll check out all your work, make some comments, mess with you, offer some tips and tricks. All right. So one thing I noticed this last time, is some of the stuff really closely matched what I had made. Now, if that's how you're learning, that's incredible, that's great. But I would challenge you guys to learn it, and then make it yours, because all you people, you guys have all this information, and different styles, and different cultures, and different names, and birth dates and heights and weights and all that stuff you can pack into that little thing, and really make it yours. So I'm really excited to see those come to life. What if the top five travel stickers that you guys make and you show me from airports and stuff, and we'll put that on my blog, and blow it out of the water. You guys make your thing, it's got to get beat up, so like all those pricks at the airport who throw your bag when you're sitting on the plane. You watch them throw your guitar, and throw your garbage, and bend all the corners on the posters and shit. Those guys, you put that sticker on your box, they beat the thing to shit, you get to wherever you're going and you take a picture of that and send that to me, or send to these uploader or wherever hell is it's going to be and we'll celebrate those things. Let's see these things working in the world. All right.
11. Learn more from Draplin:
Aaron Draplin, Designer and Founder, Draplin Design Company
