Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Maja Ronnbock, and I'm a surface pattern designer from Sweden. In this class we will talk all about lookbooks and how to create your own digital lookbook and publish it online. Lookbooks are great way to showcase your artwork and make possible clients visualize how you are designed could look on their products. It also gives your artwork a polished and professional look when you present it in this format. It's completely free to publish a lookbook online, and you can even embed it on your website to add a little extra flair to your digital portfolio. This is a technical class where we will focus on how to actually create the lookbook. I will show you how to do this both in Adobe InDesign and in Illustrator, so that you can compare both workflows and use the one you prefer. We will go through the basics and you can be a complete beginner at both Adobe InDesign and Illustrator to take this class. This class is for you who have artwork to show and wants to learn how to create a lookbook for pattern design. You can also use the same techniques, if you are an illustrator. I want to show your illustrations, or a graphic designer, how to work with branding projects, or if it just wants to learn how to create a digital book and publish it online. Join me in this funny quick class, where I will show you how to present the artwork in the lookbook in a polished and professional way.
2. Before We Begin: Let's start with talking a bit about what you need to take this class, the project that you will create, what to include in a Lookbook, and why you should even make one. A Lookbook is basically a way to showcase your artwork in a polished and professional way. You could just present your work as it is or on a single product mock-up, but for me, a Lookbook gathers my work and shows my style and brand in a digital flip through book, where it's easy for possible clients to get a cohesive look at my designs. It's also easy to show my Lookbook when I published it online, just by sending a link to it. For me, there's no rule on what a Lookbook should include. If you Google pattern design Lookbook, they typically include patterns and product mockups, and maybe a short introduction of the designer and contact information. It doesn't need to be more than that, and I would also suggest that you gather your best work to show in your Lookbook, instead of just showing all of your work. You don't want to bore the reader, but rather you want to inspire with your designs. My tip is to keep it short, cohesive and interesting. Your project in this class, is to create a Lookbook, and if you feel like it, you can even publish it online. You can upload images of only the cover page or a few pages of your book and share a link to your published Lookbook on the project page here in class. We will use images of your artwork and mockups in the Lookbook that we create in this class, so be sure to have some mockups ready. If you're not sure about what mockups are or how to make them, you could have a look at my other class here in Skillshare, Showcase Your Artwork, Make Your Own Mockups, where you will learn all about mockups and how to make them. When you're ready, let's head over to the next lesson where we will start with preparing your files.
3. Prepare Your Files: First things first, let's prepare our files so that they're good to go and use in our look book. Let's start with the mockups. I've gathered all of my mockups that I intend to use in a folder. I named them so that it's easy for me to find and I've saved them in RGB color mode. That's basically all you need to do with your mockup files. If you haven't changed your color mode after you made your mockups, they usually are set to RGB profile. I use sRGB as it's the profile used by most web browsers to display images on the web. We will publish our look book digitally. To check and see if you need to change your color profile open your image in Photoshop and click on Edit color settings. Here you can see which profiles your software is set to use. I use a custom profile with sRGB and coated FOGRA39 as my CMYK profile, as they are the most common for me to use. But you could also use a standard profile here. I will recommend that you use sRGB for images that you will publish digitally online. If your image isn't set to the sRGB profile, go to edit and convert to profile and convert to sRGB then save your image and you're good to go. Next we need to prepare our artwork. I create my patterns in Adobe Illustrator and usually I export them as JPEG to avoid getting these mysterious white lines in my patterns. If you create repeat patterns in Illustrator, you've probably seen this issue with the white lines. They actually doesn't exist in your pattern, but they will show if you print the file that has these white lines in it. To avoid this, I export my files as art optimized JPEGs, which usually makes the white lines disappear. What I do is that I gather all other patterns that I will use in my look book in one document in Illustrator. Basically I just made a swatch in my saved pattern file with the pattern swatch, and I copy that swatch to my new document. When I gathered all of my patterns, I create letter-sized rectangles as we will make a letter-sized look book in this class. I select the rectangle tool and I click one time on my art board, which will make the rectangle to option appear. I then type in the width 8.5 inch and the height 11 inch and click Okay. Then I make copies of my first rectangle by holding down my option key on my Mac keyboard, clicking with the arrow tool on my first rectangle and dragging to the right to make a copy. I then click Command D to repeat the steps to make more copies of my rectangle. To fill the rectangles, I select the Eyedropper tool, and I press Command and click on a rectangle to select it and then fetch one of my patterns from the pattern-filled squares above to fill the rectangle. When I hold down the Command key, I will access the selection tool and are able to switch quickly between the eyedropper tool and the selection tool to fill my rectangles. Then I can scale the patterns to a scale that I prefer by clicking Object transform and scale. I make sure that the transform object isn't checked in. Then I just scale the pattern in the swatch. When I'm happy with all of my patterns, I open the Asset Export Panel. This is a handy little panel that allows you to quick and easy export your artwork in your wished format. If you don't have the Asset Export Panel, go to Window and click on Asset Export. Then you just select your artwork and drag it into asset export. Click on the little Menu to the right and format settings. I use JPEG 100 and baseline optimized as compression method and art optimized as an anti-alias. Then click Save settings. I almost forgot, just as with the mockup images, we will make sure that our artwork is set to a RGB profile. Go to edit color settings to check out your settings. If your document isn't set to right profile, you can go to edit and assign profile and then click on sRGB. Now that we made sure that the colors are right, let's continue with our JPEG export. So to make sure that images will be high resolution, click Scale and resolution. In the Asset Export Panel, I am going to use 300 ppi here. Usually you don't need that much online but as I want to be able to print this look book as well in the future and I know that my images won't be that large file size if I export as 300 ppi, I will just go on and do that. Now we have all of our mockups and our pattern files ready to use in the look book. Don't mind the size or scale of your artwork at this point. You could always go back and change that later. What we want now is to have images to place, to be able to plan our layout of the look book. When you're finished, head over to the next lesson where we will start with working in InDesign. As I mentioned before in this class, I will show you how to make the same look book in both Illustrator and InDesign so that you can compare both workflows and see which one you prefer. Let's start with creating the look book in InDesign.
4. Cover Page in Indesign: In this first lesson, I'm actually creating the Look Book. We'll start with the cover page. To make this technical class a little easier to approach and understand, I'll try to explain the tools as we'll use them. In this first lesson, there will also be a little bit extra focus on the tools we use, as it will be the first time we use them in this class. When I've explained the tool one time, I won't explain how to use it more in detail. If you follow along in the class from start to finish in chronological order, you get all of the tools that we use explained at least once. Let's start by making a new document in InDesign that is 8.5 inch wide and 11 inch high. We want a portrait orientation. The little checkbox facing pages checked in, and just type in a number of pages. We can always add and remove pages later on, so it doesn't really matter what you choose here at this moment. Then, I'm going to select zero in margins as I don't know yet, if I want margins. We can always change this later on as well, so it's no big deal in if you type in margins here or not. Then we'll use zero in Bleed and Slug as we won't print this book at the moment, but published it digitally so we don't need any bleed. I'm going to start with 10 pages, and then just click "Okay". I'll press and hold the Option key on my Mac keyboard, and scroll with my mouse to zoom out a bit. As you can see, we have a single cover page, and then some pages in the middle that are facing, which will make it easy for us to build our layout that can overlap both pages in a spread. If you want to see your full page size, just double-click on the "Hand" tool, and you'll zoom into the full size of the page that you have selected by either clicking on it or you'll zoom in to the last page where you were active on. The right tool panel, you have a pages panel which is handy to get an overlook to your pages. I usually have this open when I build a layout in InDesign, and we use this too more later on. Let's start with shaking our color settings in InDesign, and make sure that you have your sRGB profile selected for this document. Go to Edit and Color Settings to check which color settings you have for InDesign. As usual, I have my sRGB profile, I'm a coated forward 39 as my standards in my Custom Colors Setting mode. What's a little bit different in InDesign with the color settings is that you need to make sure that the images you place in your document have the right color settings for your purpose. In our case, that is the sRGB profile that we made sure that both are mockups and our pattern images have. The easiest way of thinking at this is that InDesign is a software where you create layouts and not designs or photos, such as Illustrator or Photoshop. In InDesign, you need to prepare your artwork before you place it in your layout. I hope that make sense, otherwise you'll see what I mean later on in class. Moving on to some other settings. Even though we'll make a letter size Look Book, and have typed in the size in inches, I like to work in millimeters as that's what I'm used to, and for me it's easier to think in millimeters than in inches. I go to the menu, and click "InDesign CC" and select Preferences and the Units, and Increments. I'm just going to change the horizontal and vertical ruler units to millimeters. Then I go to the Guides and Pasteboard settings, and increase the size of the horizontal margins of my pasteboard to 500 millimeters, which will create a larger area outside of my page where I can place objects when I work with my document. Now, we made some basic settings. They are totally optional, but it's just a little tip to change some minor things that will make your workflow smoother before you start with your layout. Let's begin to work with our cover page by zooming in on our first page, and selecting the Rectangle Frame Tool. Click on the upper left side of your page, and drag down to make rectangle frame that covers your full page. Then, we'll place one of our images to use as a cover image. For this Look Book, I'm going to use this mock-up of one of my new favorite patterns as fabric. You could use a mock-up or a pattern image as you cover here. I think it's nice to use a bold image that draws attention to it as a cover image. I placed the image by dragging it into my document, and then I click at the upper left corner in my frame to place the image. There are several ways you could place an image in InDesign. You could also, for example, just drag in the image, and click to place it in full size like this. But I usually think it's most handy to create frames and place images in so that you get them in a manageable size. If you want to scale image without losing their proportions, hold down Command and Shift and click, and drag in any of the corners to change the size. If you just click and drag in a corner or point, you'll just change the frame size and not the image like this. You can fit the image within your frame by right-click and select Fitting, and for example, Fill Frame Proportionally. If it looks like your image is low resolution, just go to View Display Performance and High-Quality Display. If you have many large file sized images in your document, you might not be able to work in high-quality display depending on your computers capacity, of course. You can lock the image by clicking "Command" and "L" on your keyboard, which is a good feature if you want to work with objects on top of image without risking to move it around. I'm going to make a white rectangle to place underneath my text on the cover by selecting the Rectangle tool, and make sure that I have a fill color by clicking "Switch Fill and Stroke" color in the color settings in the left tool panel. You could double-click to choose a color, but in this case, it's easier to just click on Swatches in the right tool panel, and select Paper. Paper is the same as white in InDesign. Then, I click and drag to make a rectangle, and I make sure that it's centered to my page by using the Align tool, Align to Page, and I click "Center." Let's write our text. Select the Text tool, and click and drag to make a text box. Choose the Character tool panel in the right tool panel, and select the font you want to use. I'm using Parkside for this, and I just increase the size a bit to 40 points. Then I write Look Book, and next I use the Selection Tool to select my textbooks. I go to the Paragraph panel, and center my text. Then I can drag in the corners of the text box to make sure that it's centered on my white rectangle. I increase the size of the text a bit, and if your text disappears and you see a little red box with a plus sign in your text box, it means that there are texts that doesn't fit in your box, and you need to increase the box size to make the text show. I'm just going to experiment a bit with the text size, and the white rectangle size here until I get it as I wanted. Then I make a new text box, and I use Mr Eaves Mod font for this, and will write patterns by. Then I'm going to place my logo after this text. You can of course go on, and design your cover as you wish. I'm just showing you the tools to use, and how you could use them. I place my logo from a Creative Cloud Library where I have saved all of the different versions of my logo that I use. I find this a handle and a way of always having my logos ready in which ever Creative Suite software I'm working in. As you can see InDesign will show you all of these frames for your objects, which can make it hard to see your finished design. So if you want to preview how your design will look, just makes sure that you don't have any object selected and tap "W." Sometimes for details, I work in the preview mode, but it's good to switch between the two modes to make sure that everything looks good. You can fit your frame to the text to make it easier to handle the text box by right-clicking and select Fitting, and Fit Framed to Content. You can also drag down a guideline by clicking the "Ruler," and dragging down the line to make sure that your text is aligned. If you want to move your objects, you could just click and drag with your mouse. But for detailed moves, it's easier to use your arrow keys. To adjust how much your arrow key will move an object, go to Preferences, units, and increments, and then type in your preferred measurement in the cursor key box. I'm going to go for 0.1 millimeters here, and then I can move my object with the arrow tool. To group objects, select both objects and click "Command" and "G" on your keyboard. Then I'll just move around my objects, and resize them until I'm happy with the look. I'll also make a line between the Look Book text and the patterns by text, by selecting the Line tool and make sure that I have a stroke color and no fill color. Let's make the line a bit thinner by making it 0.5 points, and a bit lighter by just dragging down the tint of the black color in the swatch panel a bit. Let's arrange our objects and resize them until we're happy with how it looks. Zoom out a bit to see the overlook, and how your cover of the Look Book will look in a smaller image. The last little detail that I make on my cover page is to add my contact information. I make a white rectangle again, and place it at the bottom of my page. Then I use the text tool, and write my website, my e-mail, and Look Book. I center it with the align tool, resize it, and arrange to texts, and the white rectangle until I'm happy with the result. That's it. Our cover page is finished. Let's move on to the next lesson where we'll create a presentation spread.
5. Presentation Page in Indesign: Let's make a presentation page. I will present myself at the first spread in my lookbook and then let it be all about my designs in the rest of the book. I use some kind of about text here and I have this short presentation text above me, that I use at my website and in other situations where I present myself. Sometimes I change it a bit depending on the context, but it usually looks something like this. I'm just going to copy that text from my pages document and make a textbox to paste it in InDesign, will format the text in a bit. But first, let's place all of the objects on this page. I will use the of photo of myself here above the text and we'll select the ellipse frame tool and make around frame to paste my following. Then I fetch my photo and drag it in and click in the frame to place it. This is a nice feature in InDesign. It's easy to adjust your images after simple shapes like this ellipse. Then I place my logo and make text boxes with my website and social media account. I have these social media symbols and I drag them in from my Creative Cloud Library. I use these forever and I can't remember where I found them. But if you Google free social media symbols, you'll find some good ones for sure. Now, we have all of the objects on this page so let's format text a bit. First, let's uncheck hibernate in the paragraph panel. In short texts like this, it just looks better this way and then I like to use this alignment in the paragraph panel, it's called justify with last line aligned left, which makes the text fill out the box to designs and still align at left the last line of the text. Then I just arranged the a little bit so that it looks good. I'll change the font to Mr. Eaves Mod and adjust the size of the text and the text box until I'm happy with how it looks. To add some headline here, I'll just write "Hey" in a new textbooks in the park side font and adjust the size to that a bit. Next, let's arrange the photo a bit, so here's a new tool or feature that you can play around with and use when you work with images. When you hover with your mouse on the image, you'll see a symbol appear in the middle, if you click on that, you get a red frame, is that of the blue frame around your photo. With this frame selected, you can change the size of your photo within the original frame. If you want to change the size proportionally and keep it at the same position, hold down "Command Shift" and "Option' on the Mac keyboard and drag in any other points to adjust the size. You can move the photo by click and drag with your mouse or click and move it with your arrow keys. When you're happy with it, just click with your selection tool on your pasteboard or page to unselect the photo. This is a basic move in InDesign when you've used a tool and are finished with it, you should always go back to the selection tool, then arrow and click on your "Pasteboard" without selecting any object, is just a basic little tip that will make your workflow move easier. As you know that you don't have any object selected and won't move any objects around or change anything in your layout when you continue with your next tool. Now, I continue to arrange my texts and objects until I'm happy with the result. At least for now, we can always come back and change details later on. When it looks good, I go to the next step, I create a layout with a few images that I feel presents my current work in a good way. I use the rectangle frame tool and we'll make four frames that I can place images in. I left the frames overlap the middle of the spread, as you won't see this line in the middle when we publish our book, you will see the whole spread. To arrange the frames in the same distance from each other, I go to Preferences and units and increments and changed a cursor key to one millimeter. Then I can move the frames so that they are aligned and hit an "Arrow Key" multiple times until I feel that it's a good distance. I experiment a bit here. Let's try out eight or seven millimeters at first. Basically what I do is that I drag one frame so that is perfectly aligned with the one next to it and then I hit the "Arrow Key. " I think I'll go for five millimeters in this layout, I'll just continue with all other frames and move them five millimeters from each other by clicking five times with "Arrow Key." You could of course type in five millimeters in the cursor key box in the units and increments settings. If you know that you want five millimeters, then you can just hit the "Arrow Key" once instead of five times. When we're happy with the frames, let's play some images. I'm using some mockups and also images of my fabric collection Garden Glory here. Then I just arranged the images as I want them, I resize them and move them around inside of the frames to make it look good. After this, I just make some minor changes to the objects or my spread and I fix them details with the text and the images until I'm happy with the result. Then we're finished with our presentation page. Let's head over to the next lesson where we'll continue with the overall layout of our lookbook.
6. Layout in Indesign: Let's continue with the overall layout of our lookbook. Don't mind the order of the pages that much at this moment, we can always arrange and adjust the order later on. Let's start replacing one of the mock-ups. You could just drag it in and click to place it like this, and arrange the size of the frame and image after you placed it. As we did previously, fit the content to the frame. I will do a full size image that covers the whole spread here as it suits this mock-up image good. You can also make a frame before you paste your image, as we also did previously, and then drag in and place your image in the frame. I will focus on mock-ups in my look book as I already present my patterns as swatches in my catalog and on Instagram. But I will also bring in some patterns to give the design a nice flow to it. The basics of a good layout is to make it valied, so you don't want all full spread images and you don't want all the same size. What we're after is a variation amongst the spreads, so that it feels interesting when will flip through the book. For this second spread, I'll make an image that covers three-quarters of the full spread and then I'll place the pattern image next to it so that it match with a mock up of the rugs. To make these frames a third of the page height, I just create one frame that covers the full height of the page and then I make sure that the little chain symbol is broken and I divide the height of the frame with three, which gives me a rectangle that I duplicate by holding down the option key, click and drag to make a second and a third rectangle. Then I'm just going to place my patterns in these frames, this is another way that you can place an image in a frame if you place your image first in your document, you can cut it out with command x so that you have it in your clipboard and then right-click on your frame and choose paste into. Then you can fill the frame proportionally. So with the other two patterns I'll just place them by dragging them in and click to place them in the frames. I'll also fill the frames proportionally with the images here. I think that I want to have a 5 millimeters margin here too between the images. You could do the same technique as we did on the presentation spread using the cursor key. But here's another way to do it, select one of the three frames and as we want a 5 millimeters margin between these three images, we will need a total of 10 millimeters margin and 10 divided by 3 is 3.3 something. I won't be that, picky here so I'll just do for 3.3 millimeters. I go to the heights settings and I type in minus 3.3 and hit "Enter" which will decrease the height of my frame with 3.3 millimeters. Then I do the same with all of these three images and arrange them even, that looks good, let's move on to the next brand. We need to add some more spreads here as we only have one spread left so go to the pages panel in the right tool panel and select the last of your spreads. Click on one page and hold shift to select the other page in the spread too. Then go to the little menu up to the right and hit "Duplicate Page" and then repeat the process a few times so that you have a few more spreads to work with. Let's move on to the layout of the next spread. For this one, I'll do a split layout with the pattern on one page and the mock up on the other page of the spread. I'll start with placing a pattern and then I use align panel to make sure that the frame is aligned to the right and top of the page so that it covers the full page. Then I make a frame on the other page and place a mock-up that matches the pattern, I have two mock ups to choose from here, this quilt or the baby romper. I think that I'll go for the quilt at least for now so let's see if we want to change that later on. Next brand, I'll do a full cover of the spread with this fabric mock up, which suits for a full spread fill. So what's next? Maybe a split spread again, it will probably look good with the yellow from the last spread to flip to the yellow at this spread in this mock-up. Let's try that out so I paste the mock-up on one side and a matching pattern on the other side. Maybe I'll just change the side of this too so that it feels more flowing in the layout. As our last splits spread was a mock up on the left and the pattern on the right. Let's do the opposite on this one. Next, let's do a full spread image maybe with this gift wrap mock up, basically I place my patterns and mock-ups over the whole look book and I keep a variation from spread to spread to keep it interesting to flip through. As I do this, I also start to think about the orders so that it will make a nice cohesive look when you flip through the look book. I'll try things out and see what fits and not if I feel that something just doesn't fit, I'll just skip that mock-up or pattern. On the last page of my lookbook, I'll add an image of a pattern and my contact information just as we did on the cover page in the previous lesson. So let's scroll down from the cover page to get a feeling of how it will look as a flip through book. If you want to change the order of the spreads, you can use the pages panel and select the spread that you want to move and drag it in the pages panel to a new place like this. Maybe you want to change a pattern like in this case, I think that the pattern will look better in a larger scale. I'll try it out like this and just adjust the scale here in InDesign to get a look at it. But if I want to keep it, I'll need to adjust the original image otherwise, you will get a low-resolution image here when you scale it up that much. I'll show you in a minute how we change the original image. Before we do that, I think that I would like to try out to make some margins on my spreads to get a little bit more air in the layout. To do that, make sure that you have a spread selected you can do that just by zooming in on that spread. Then go to layout margins and columns, and type in margins. I will use 5 millimeters and make sure that the chain is selected so that all sides will get 5 millimeters margin and then I make sure that the little check box that says adjust layout is checked in, that way my layout will adjust to the margins like this. Then you can do this and all spreads manually just like this. Or you can go to file documents, setup and adjust, layout and type in your margins here. This will change the margins of all pages and adjust the layout.You might need to go in and fix some details when you did this as, for example, I don't want my cover page to have margins, so I'll just go in and fix that manually. The last thing that I want to do in my lookbook is to change the scale of this pattern in the original file. So I go back to Illustrator and my letter-sized pattern rectangles. Then I scale up the pattern and that will automatically change the asset in the asset export panel, I just select that one and export it. I save it as the same name and replaced the old file. That way I can go back into InDesign and relink the image by using the link panel. If you look at the image here, there's a little yellow triangle, which means is not linked correctly. As we save the new file with the same name in that same folder, you can just double-click the little rectangle to relink the image. We can also do like this, go to the link panel and right-click on the image and then relink the image to a new image. So this is important to understand with InDesign, all of the images that you place will be linked until you export a PDF. So if you move an image, a file that is linked in an InDesign document to another folder, you need to relink the file in InDesign. Otherwise that file won't be included when you export as PDF. That's it made the whole lookbook layout in InDesign. Let's export it as a PDF in the next lesson so that it will be ready to publish online.
7. Export in Indesign: In this lesson, we will export this look book in two ways, as full spreads and as pages. To upload it online, which I will show you how to do later on in class, we will need a PDF with single pages.But if you would like to use the look book as a PDF to scroll through, you would need a spread view. I'll teach you how to export this in both ways. I'll also show you how you could reduce the file size of your look book before you export it if you need to do that to be able to share it as a PDF in an e-mail, for example. Let's start with that. How to reduce the file size? The file size of your exported PDF is depending on the resolution and the file size of the images that you placed in your InDesign document. Depending on the purpose of your look book, you might need to think about reducing the file size. If you create a look book to publish it online, like we do in this class, then you could have a maximum file size of 100 megabytes, which is huge. If you create it for print, you need to make sure that it's high resolution, which means a high file size, usually. If you want to be able to share it as a PDF , for example in an e-mail, you need to have a low file size. In this class, we will publish our look book online with a publishing tool called Issue. In the free plan on Issue, you are allowed to publish a maximum of 100 megabytes in one publication. We don't need to worry about the file size of this look book because it won't be that large when we export it. But I will show you how to reduce the size here anyway, as a little bonus tip. If you would like to make a low file size PDF to reduce the file size of your images, you could right-click an image and select "Edit With Photoshop". This image is over 9.7 megabytes at the moment, which you can see in the Links panel in Illustrator under file size. When we are in Photoshop with the image, click on "Edit Image Size". There you can change both the resolution and the width and height of the image.What we want to do is to resize the image to the exact height and width that we will use in our InDesign document. I know that in low resolution, a letter size image would need to be 792 pixels high and 612 pixels wide. How do I know this? I Google it. As this is a square image, I first reduce the size to 792 pixels and then I click "Okay". Then I go to the Crop tool in the left tool panel and write the dimensions 612 wide and 792 high. Then I can crop my image to the exact size that I need in my InDesign document. When I've done that, I just save the file and then I go back to my InDesign document, and I can see that the image is reduced to 898 kilobytes in file size, which is much less than the original 9.7 megabytes. This is how you resize your images to reduce the file size. What I learned when I went to a graphic design course is that you always should reduce your file size to exactly what you need, meaning a file shouldn't be bigger in file size than it needs to be for its purpose. You could work like this if you want to, and it's probably smart as it will save you storage on your computer if you keep everything you create in the maximum file size of what it needs to be. I'm a bit lazy and I also feel that it can be time consuming to do that detailed work with reducing file size if I don't need to for my purpose. I only reduce the file size when I need to. Otherwise, I tend to keep it as it is. Moving on to exporting the file, exporting as PDF is really easy in InDesign. Let's start with a spread export. Go to "File", "Export", and write the name of your file. I'll select PDF interactive for this one as we will use it digitally online, and then I just make sure that the Spreads is selected and All Pages. You can also check that it says 300 ppi under Compression and Resolution. That's all there is to it. Export it and here it is, our exported look book in spread view. Let's head back to InDesign and export it as a single pages PDF, which is the one that we will upload and publish online later on in class. Go to "File" and "Export" again, and instead of spread, just select Pages and all other settings should be the same and then hit "Export". This is how it looks as single pages export. That's it, you created a look book in InDesign and exported it as a PDF. In the next few lessons, I will show you how to create this look book in Illustrator and we will compare the both workflows to see both which one you prefer and also which one is the best use when we work with layout.
8. Cover Page in Illustrator: Let's start to work in Illustrator to create the same look book as we did in InDesign. As illustrator isn't a layout software but illustration and design software, there are some things that will look a little bit different in the workflow. We can still do everything in Illustrator as we can do in InDesign, it just works in a little bit different way. We'll start with creating a letter size art board, 8.5 inch wide and 11 inch high and RGB as color mode. I usually start with deleting all of the swatches without black and white to clean up my swatches panel when I make a new document in Illustrator. That's what I do here. Let's begin with placing our cover image, I'm dragging in the image to Illustrator and click to place it. Then I resize it to fit my art board by holding down Shift and click and drag in a corner to scale it proportionally. To be able to crop this, I'll create a rectangle that is the same size as my art board and to make sure that it's on top of the image. Doesn't matter if it has a fill or not. Mine is black here. You select both the image and the rectangle by clicking and dragging over them with the arrow tool, and then I hit Command seven to make a clipping mask. You could also go to object clipping mask and make, to do the same without the keyboard shortcut. If you go to object, clipping mask and edit content, you will be able to move the content inside of your clipping mask like this. That's the cover image. Let's make a rectangle to place underneath our look book texts. Make sure that you have white as fill color and use the rectangle tool to click and drag and make a rectangle. We'll add some text by selecting the text tool, click once on your art board and I'll write look book. You can change the size of the texts by holding down Shift, and click and drag in any one of the corners. This will change the texts proportionally. I'll change the font to park side, adjust the size and alignment so that it looks good. Then I place my logo from my CC library and adjust that in size and placement. I think that I'll change my interface to a darker one here because I prefer that when I work with layouts. I go to the menu, illustrator CC, preferences, user interface and choose darker interface. Moving on, let's use the text tool again and write patterns by. I'll change the font to Mr Eaves Mod. To make sure that the texts and the logo is aligned, I go to view rulers, show rulers, then you can drag down a guideline from the ruler and adjust your objects so that they are aligned. I want to move my object with the arrow key. But before I'll change that setting, I want to change my units to millimeters, here too, as I did in design. I go to preferences, units and change the general to millimeters. If you want to move your object with the arrow key, you can hit Command K as a shortcut to preferences and change how far your arrow keys will move your objects. For this, I will type in 0.1 millimeters, and then I can move around my objects with arrow key and they all move 0.1 millimeters for every time I press a key. You can go up to objects with Command G. Just make sure that you don't have the ruler selected when you group, then that will be included in the group as well. I will just undo that, and I will remove that ruler, select it and hit Delete. Next let's make the little line. Use the line tool from the left tool panel and type in 0.25 millimeters. Click and drag to make line with black stroke color. You can use the color guide panel to choose a tint of the black color, or you can double-click the stroke color in the left tool panel to change it to a Grey color. That looks pretty good, I'll arrange and adjust these objects a bit. Maybe something like that. Then I'll use the text tool again and write my website, email and look book. It's already set to the last fonts I used, so I don't need to change that. Then I change the size of it and the line texts to the center of the art board with the align panel. The very last step is to make that white rectangle. I select the rectangle tool, double-click on the fill color and choose white as fill color. I click and drag to make a rectangle that fits the text, and then go to object, arrange and send backwards. Then I adjust the size of the rectangle and the text until it looks good. I'm pretty happy with this and that's it. The cover page made in Illustrator is finished. Let's head over to the next lesson where we will create the presentation spread.
9. Presentation Page in Illustrator: Before we continue with the presentation spread, let's save the file. I'll just name my file to look book illustrator. The first thing we need to do is to make a new art board. Click on the art board 2 in the left tool panel, and then just click on the little page symbol to make a new art board as the same size as the cover page. If you remember how it looked in design, where we could put two pages together as a spread. It would look something like this. But in Illustrator you don't have the export spread alternative. As is meant to be mainly an illustration software, as I mentioned before, and not Layout software. Which means that in Illustrator, we will actually create two versions of the logbook, one single page version, and one full spread version. I'll show you more about that later on in class. But for now, we'll start with a spread version of the Notebook. So to get a full spread, select your art board with our portal and multiply the width of the art board with two. Then I'll just click and drag to a position where I prefer to have it. Then I'll make a third art board just to prepare to create the rest of the spreads by holding down the option key, click and drag to make a copy of the output. Next, let's place the about text. So copy the text to the clipboard, make a text box and paste the text. My font was already set to Mr. Eaves Mod, maybe I'll go for Mr. Eaves Mod book for this one. I'll adjust the size a bit and go to the paragraph panel to uncheck the hyphenate box and change the alignment to justify with last line aligned left, just as we did in InDesign. Then I'll just adjust the text a bit, so maybe something like this. Let's bring in the logo and social media icons and write my website and social media account. This time, I'll just click one time on my art board with the textual selected and write my text. The difference between these two ways are creating texts in Illustrator is that if you click once, you get a point type, which will create a bounding box that fits the text you write perfectly. You can resize the text just by click and drag in one of the points in the bounding box. Point type is great for headlines or short two text areas where you want to be able to quickly scale up and down the text with a simple click and drag move. The other way to create text is area type, which is what we did with the about text. Where we will click and drag to make a bounding box before we paste in the text in the books. This is more similar to in the science text boxes and suits paragraphs or longer texts where you want to format the text more in detail. So let's just fix the details and adjust this a bit. Then I'll use the point type and write my headline, Hey, changing the font, and then I click and drag in a corner while I hold down shift to adjust the size proportionally. So to place the photo, just drag it in and click to place it. Then we'll resize it a bit and we'll make ellipse clipping mask with the Ellipse tool to be able to see how the placement of the photo will be within the ellipse. I'll remove the fill from the ellipse and as I can't see the line of the ellipse shape here, I click Command H on my keyboard to show it. Command H is a shortcut that allows you to hide or reveal the anchor points or lines that you created, which can make it easier to see what you work with. Try it out and you will see what I mean. So let's move around the photo bit and resize it until it looks good. Then I'll just make sure that the ellipse is on top. I go to object, arrange, bring to front. Finally, make the clipping mask go to object clipping mask and make. As you can see here when I hover over, is that the full photo is still here. We'll just hide it with the clipping mask. Next, let's make frames for where we will place the images. I'll hit Command K and set the keyboard increments to five millimeters directly here. Use the rectangle tool, and I'll just make a black rectangle to see the placement of the images. To be able to see where one page ends and one begins on the spread so that I can place my images, I need to drag in a guideline from the ruler here. I'll just put it at the very start of the page from the left at zero to be in width. As I've said, units two millimeters, I need to change them again to inches first to be able to get that line in the middle of this art board. So this is a much easier way than to try to calculate how many millimeters 8.5 inches is. So then I make sure that I have my guideline selected and I'll just type in 8.5 inches in Xbox at the top toolbar. With that done, I'll just arrange the settings to millimeters again. Then I'll arrange and adjust rectangles using the align tool to make sure that they are aligned to the outer edges of my art board. I use the arrow key and click ones to move them five millimeters apart. So let's drag in and place the images that we will use here. Recites them and make sure that they are sent to the back before we select both the rectangle and image and hit Command seven, which is the shortcut for making a clipping mask. So I'll place and make a clip in masks of all of my images first. Then I can go in and fix the details and edit the content in a clipping mask to align the images as I want them in the frames. Then we're finished and have created a presentation spread in illustrator. So the workflow is similar as in InDesign, and as you can see the result is the same, but the process to get here is a little bit different. So let's head over to the next lesson and create the full layout on the logbook in illustrator.
10. Layout in Illustrator: So let's build the full layout. Let's start with placing the next image. As I already made an order with the images when I built the lookbook in InDesign, I will just follow that order here so we don't need to think about that. Before we continue with placing all of the images, let's just make all of the spreads that we will use. So select the Artboard tool, hold down the Option key and click and drag to make a copy of the artboard. Then, repeat until you have all of the spreads needed. I need to make some more spreads and we'll just move all of these artboards a bit up. So I'll use the Artboard tool and hold down Shift and click on each of the artboard to select them all. Then, I'll just drag them up a bit and continue to make some more artboards. With the last page, I'll just copy my first artboard, my cover page, and then, I'll delete everything on that last page. This should move pretty quickly now as we already know the order of the images and we went through all of the basics with a clipping mask in the previous lesson. So I'll zoom in on the third artboard by holding down the Option key and scroll with the mouse. I resize the image and create a rectangle above the image that covers the full spread and then I hit "Command Seven" to make a clipping mask. If I want to do a margin of five millimeters here, I found that the easiest way is to make a rectangle that covers the whole spread and then, transform it to minus 10 in width and minus 10 in height. That will make a margin of five millimeter on each side, and then, just make sure it's centered to the artboard. Then I'll just hold down the Option key and duplicate that rectangle to the next spread to easily make a margin on that spread as well. I'll just place that aside for a moment and make it black so I know where it is. Then, I just continue. I'll bring in the next image and make a clipping mask. To add the patterns here, you have a choice to either use the JPEGs that we saved previously, then you just bring in the JPEG and make a clipping mask, which will assure you that you don't have those mysterious white lines in your patterns. Or you could do this way, just copy in the pattern swatches to this document. The perks of doing this is that you can scale them freely and it's quick and easy to get the pattern frames as you want them. Sometimes, you might get the mysterious white lines when you do it this way, but as it's so much easier and so much more efficient, I would try this out first and see if you don't get the white lines, then this way is the most efficient. So to make the three rectangles, I do the same here as in InDesign. I make one rectangle that covers the full height and then, I divide that by three and decrease the height of the rectangles by 3.3 millimeters. Also, make sure that you have your smart guides turned on here, go to View to see if Smart Guides is checked in. This will help you to snap your objects in the right position. When I have my three rectangles, I'll just fill them with the pattern and scale the patterns a bit with Object, Transform, and Scale. That's all there is to it as far as comes to tools and how to use them in Illustrator when you build this layout. I'll just fast-forward here a bit until the full layout is finished. When it comes to the final piece, the back of the lookbook, I'll fetch that pattern 2 and paste it in as the pattern swatch. I fill the rectangle with the pattern and scale it and then, I copy my logo and social media icons and the text from my presentation spread, place them at the last page, change the color of the text to white, and then, just switch to my white logo and social media icons. Then, the lookbook made in Illustrator is finished. Let's move on to the next lesson where I will show you how to quickly make the single page view version of the lookbook and also how to export your lookbook as a PDF.
11. Export in Illustrator: Let's start with exporting this spread view as a PDF. So I go to "Save As" and choose PDF, and then I'll select all pages and hit "Save". Let's see which sort of PDF we would like to export as. As I prefer to keep the file size down, I select high-quality print here, and I know that that will be enough resolution to publish online. I usually check the preserve illustrator editing capabilities books, as I know that this is the final export file and I don't need to change anything in this. I have an AI document for that. If you uncheck this box, you will get a PDF with a lower file size. The last thing that I usually make sure to check is the output. Here, I want to use convert to destination and include destination profile. I usually do this with all sorts of exports to make sure that the export had the same color profile as my original document. So now we have our spread view export, let's make the single page view version as well. To do this, create a new letter sized art board with our art board tool, and just drag it to the place where it will fit all the pages below. Then I hold down the option key and click and drag to duplicate the art board. Then, I duplicate one more and place it to the right of my second art board. Make sure that you have the smart guides turned on here, so that our boards will snap in place. Let's make some more spreads by selecting both of these art boards, and hold the "Option" key again to click and drag to duplicate. You can zoom in as much as you can, to make sure that the art boards are right next to each other, and then just repeat the process until you have all of the pages in the look book. Next, go to view guides and lock guides, so that you won't move the ruler guideline when you will copy the content on the pages. Then I select all objects on the cover page and group them. Hold down the "Option" key and click and drag to duplicate. Make sure that it's aligned to the art board with the align tool, and then I just repeat this for all of the spreads. Select "All" on one spread, group, duplicate to new pages and align to the art board, until I have all of the pages in my look book. Let's export this single pages PDF. What we need to know is the number of the art boards here, as we also have the spread view version in the same document. So I'll check and see that the cover page is an art board 14, and the last page is art board 37. So I go to "Save As" and select PDF, and I'll just name it single pages. Instead of selecting all here, I select a range of the pages 14 to 37. Then I'll just use the same settings as before, and I hit "Save PDF". That's it. Now we have exported one signal pages PDF, and one spread view PDF from illustrator. So let's head over to our next lesson where we will publish our look book online.
12. Publish Your Look Book: It's finally time to publish your look book online. So this is how I use my look book. I publish it online, and I embedded on my websites so that future possible clients can get a visual angle, also look at my style and artwork. The platform that I use for this is issuu. I find it so easy to use and they offer all the functions I need in the free plan. So go to issuu.com and create a free plan account. If you feel like it, you can always upgrade later on. So this is how my dashboard looks like, in my publications, I have the two look books that I've published so far. The look book that I made in this class is a yearly look book that I probably will update during the year as I make new patterns and collections. We can also do look books for certain collections like this one that I made for my fabric collection Garden Glory. Okay, so let's start with the publishing. Click on "Add Content" and I'll just drag in my exported PDF with the single pages. Issuu will convert this to a flip through book. So you should upload a single pages PDF here. Write a title and a short description. Then I'll just click in the type, and this is for promotion marketing. Then there's a bunch of other settings that you can check out. Many of them are only available in the paid plans, such as if you want to publish an unlisted publication, you get to publish one unlisted publication in a free plan if you feel like doing that. Okay, so there's not much more to it than that. When your file is uploaded, you can preview and flip through the book to see that everything looks good. For me, it looks good. So I'll just click "Publish Now" and then it's live. Here you get option to view on issuu, enhance or share. You can just click around here a bit and experiment. For example, you can make a little teaser GIF and embed the publication on your website. Usually I just published a look book on issuu and then I embed it on my website. Okay, so this is how the look book looks on issuu when you flip through it, and that's all there is to it. You've learned how to make a look book, both in design and in illustrator, and how to publish it online for free with just a few simple clicks.
13. Final Thoughts : The class is finished. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed this class, and that you got to see how you can use InDesign and Illustrator to design a Lookbook. As you might have guessed after watching this class, I would recommend to use InDesign. The workflow is so much easier when it comes to layout as the software is built for that purpose. If you have any questions at all, please ask them on the community page here in class. If you liked this class, you can hit the "Follow" button by my name here below to make sure that you don't miss out on my future classes. Also, make sure that you share your class project, I would love to see what you create. If you share your project on Instagram, feel free to tag me with @majaronnbackdesign. If you enjoyed this class, feel free to leave a review here below, I would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks again for watching and have fun creating.
Maja Faber, Surface Pattern Designer
