Creative Type Design with Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction Type Design: Are you planning to create a unique type of graphic design with Adobe Illustrator? You came to the right place. I'm Martin. I have over 20 years of experience as a graphic designer, illustrator and Adobe certified instructor. I have worked with companies like BBC. These needs, google, ikea, and I cannot wait to share my best practices with you. This is a streamline hands-on course focusing on a real life design project. I will be walking you through everything step-by-step and you will get all the exercise files so you can follow along in case you prefer not to copy me. You can also follow my workflow using alternative assets provided and create something completely unique that you can showcase in your creative portfolio. I am pretty sure this course will inspire you to create something MAC. We will create four unique typographic compositions using Adobe Illustrator. In the first three designs, we will be focusing on individual letters. For the last one, we will be combining a couple of words together. We will be using advanced Illustrator techniques in our workflow, including the Shape Builder Tool three, the ants, opacity and clipping masks, compound parts, Recolor Artwork, and so much more. Besides all the technical stuff, we will also cover some important graphic design theory that you will be able to apply in any of your future creative project. You can join this course without any prior knowledge in graphic design, illustration or Adobe applications. But to complete the project, you will need access to Adobe Creative Cloud and a desktop or laptop computer, but now it's time to start creating. So I will see you in the next lesson. 2. Creating the shapes - Letter P: So here we are in Illustrator and above me you can see the sketches that I usually start with. So I explored the style that I would like to use for the alphabet. And I would normally start with the letter a. But then for this particular tutorial, I picked the letter P. And you can see this sketch here. The second one, I tried to have that second cube wrapped around, but I realized that it's not going to look good if it goes the same direction. So then I decided to flip it around and make it more intertwining so it wraps around that vertical tube. But then I also felt like it's looks less like a p. So to make it more similar to the letter itself, I decided that I reverse it. So this is the sketch I'm going to turn into a vector illustration now. So first, I will start by drawing a rectangle. So this is going to be the vertical tube. Say something like that. And I will move it to the side just so you can see what I'm doing. I will now use the pen tool and come to the top center point, click there ones, and then do the same thing here at the bottom. The smart guides helped me to find these placements. And then using the direct selection tool and shift up arrow on the keyboard, I just drag it up like that. Now then we can use the coronary rigid to drag it down and turn it into a nice round shape like that. Let's do the same thing here at the bottom, I select that point with the direct selection tool and then shift down arrow this time, which again pushes it down ten pixels. And then using the corner widget, I drag it up. Later on we will add the cap on the top, but for now, this is the shape I needed and we can change the colors so we don't need a stroke on this. Instead, I'm going to use a gradient and I will use this default gradient, the yellow to orange colors, but I will change its direction. I will first press X on the keyboard, which switches to the Fill Color. And you can see already the gradient showing up here on the panel. And then I will press G to select the gradient tool. And I could either use the angle option here or simply click and drag to define the direction. Now I actually prefer to keep the brighter colors on top, so I will drag from the top down and later on we will be able to refine this. Let's zoom a little bit closer and start drawing maybe from the bottom. So if I click here once, then I can click and drag to define the first curve. And notice that now the same color is used for the field color, but this time we will need the same thing as a stroke. So for this I'm going to swap the two colors. So I will press Shift X on the keyboard. This will use the same gradient but on the stroke. And we can then continue drawing. So I'm just going to click and drag again here. And we will adjust this later on. Click and drag once more. I tried to keep it nice and smooth. I click and drag, click and drag here. And then one last time, click and drag. Okay, so let's take a look at this. I think it looks quite good, but maybe here at the bottom, if I come back, I can adjust these points a little bit. Maybe just drag that back in using the direct selection tool. I'm just adjusting the handles and I feel like the rest of the path is good. Now what we need to do is to increase the thickness of this. So I will use the Shift key and click on the up arrow maybe twice. I think that's a good size. Now of course, we can always measure and make sure it's the exact same size as the other cube. Well, I'm not that bothered at this point, so I feel like it's quite good for the size that we need. We can always adjust things later on. Maybe one thing that I'm going to do is to just drag this point a little bit further, Somewhere around there. Yeah, I think that looks good now. Now, at this point, it doesn't really feel like a three-dimensional cube. It looks very flat because the illusion of three dimensions is something that we are going to add by using masking and by tweaking the gradient on this stroke. So let's put these two things together. I'm going to drag this here. And it should be somewhere around there. It doesn't have to be exactly the same as the sketch, but that looks promising to me because I already see a bit of contrast between the two tubes. So that's good news. 3. Utilising Opacity Mask - Letter P: But now what we need to do is to add an opacity mask on this twisted tube. And that is going to help us to separate them even more and to also create the illusion of it coming in front and behind the vertical tube. So having it selected, all I have to do is to have the transparency panel open and then click on Make Mask. And if you don't see this panel, just go to the Window menu and you will find it dead in the list. So once you have your mask ready, you just have to turn off the clip option that will have the mask empty. So by default, when you create an opacity mask in Illustrator, it starts off hiding everything of the currently selected object. But once you turn off the clip option, it becomes an empty mask and it works more like Photoshop by default. So at this point, you will need something to use as the mask. And the best thing that we can do at this point is to copy our vertical tube. So I'm going to select that and press Command or Control C to copy it. Then come back and select the twisty cube, click on the opacity mask. And notice that when we do that, the layers panel will tell us that we are inside the opacity mask. There's actually currently nothing in here, so it's completely empty. If I use Command or Control F, that will paste a copy of that vertical tube inside the opacity masks. So now it's showing up here and we just have to change the color to black. So what this is going to do is that it's completely hiding the twisty cube. So if I come back to the actual object by clicking on the other thumbnail within the transparency panel. Then I can show you here if I turn off that vertical tube, which is a separate object, now we can completely see-through these details. So the opacity mask is now working and it's completely hiding those details. I'm going to keep the other object visible as well. And I will come back to the opacity mask because now we will need to reveal those details that needs to come in front of the vertical tube. So we hit everything and now we are working backwards and revealing selectively some details. So if I zoom a little bit even closer, I can show you how I do this. I will use the pen tool. And I'm going to start here somewhere. So if I just click somewhere there, I will start a new path. Then I can click maybe here, and then I can keep coming up. And for now, I'm just going to create a very simple block here. So I like to block things out first. Now, it doesn't look great at the moment because we have to adjust its colors. So this became a separate object within the opacity mask. And this should be just using a light field but no stroke at all. So if I turn off the stroke and assign white fill, then it's already going to look a little bit better. Now just temporarily to make sure that we can see things better, I am going to go back to the actual objects, select the vertical tube, and reverse the gradient. This way we will have more contrast so we can see better what we're doing. So this icon here in the gradient panel is very useful. You can very quickly invert the direction of the gradient. And once again, let's come back to the other objects or the twisty tube and go back into the opacity mask. The reason I have the transparency panel here on the top is because I constantly switch back and forth between the mask and the object view. And I like to keep an eye on it at all times. Let's zoom back here and select this object which we just created. And now all we have to do is to just add just this shape a little bit. So this is essentially for us to be able to make it look like this tube is coming in front, as I said already. So usually the best thing to do here to create a nice curve is to use the pen tool holding down the Alt or Option key, we can bend that line that we originally set up as a straight line. And for now, I'm just going to set it up to something like that and maybe drag this point down a bit. Okay, So it doesn't have to be perfect at this point, but I think that looks quite promising. Maybe this point here can be slightly further out. So if I select these two anchor points with the direct selection tool and I use the left arrow thing that helps to make it even better. And maybe just drag this point back there. Alright, so there's no visible lines here. And the opacity mask is starting to work quite well. 4. Final Refinements - Letter P: Now let's do the same thing here at the bottom. And just to remind you, I'm showing you the sketch, we have to make sure that it looks like the front or the top part is the one that comes in front of the vertical tube. So we will do the same thing as before. I will use the pen tool, start drawing the shape here, come down and then wrap it up like that. Then hold down the Alt key and add a little bit of curve here at the bottom. Alright, I think that looks good. But once again, we will be able to tell better once we add the caps and refine the gradients. So for now, I'm happy with the way it looks. Maybe this line can be a little bit further down. I feel like it might benefit from that. Okay. Something like that. If we zoom out, it should already start to look closer to a three-dimensional form. But now let's switch back again to the normal view or the object view. And I'm going to select this gradient, flip it back to the way it was. And then let's add the caps. Now for this, all I'm going to use is simply the Ellipse Tool pressing L on the keyboard. We'll get you that quickly. Then I am going to draw it here on the top and making sure that it is perfectly aligned to the width of this tube. Then I will zoom closer and we will just simply move it up and then drag it out a bit. I think that looks good. Now we just have to set this up as a color, as an individual color. I'm going to use probably yellow, but maybe make it even brighter than that. By shift clicking on here, I can add a little bit even more brightness, so something like that and zoom out. Yeah, I think that looks okay. And now we can just duplicate this cap, Alt, click and drag, and then I'm going to rotate it around and zoom a bit closer. Yeah, we'll make it smaller to make sure it's nicely aligned here. That's not bad. And then let's do the other one, old click and drag. This time again, we rotate it around and I will align it. And just to make sure the cap is completely visible, I'm going to drag it a bit further out here and maybe just adjust the path that we created. So I come back there, drag it out, and I can actually see that this path is supposed to be wider. So we need to make this cap larger. Yeah, let's just select the cap, drag it back out here, stretch it out. Think that looks quite good now, so making sure that it's nicely aligned. Yeah, I'm happy with that. So I'm going to zoom back out a bit. And now pretty much all we have to do is to adjust the gradients and then adjust the masks. So the biggest problem is that we don't have enough contrast between the two tubes. So what I'm going to do to fix that is to select this path and make sure I have the stroke attribute selected by pressing X on the keyboard. Then immediately the gradient panel shows up. And by the way, the option I'm using here is the applied gradient within stroke. You can always change this and have it along the stroke. To be honest, I feel like that actually works better for us. So it will be easier to generate the contrast that we need. Now we can still flip the gradient around, so reverse it. And that will look a bit more natural. Once again, we want the brighter colors on top. That's just the way we think that light is normally comes from above. So that's just also feels more natural when we set up the colors. But now that we've done this, we have to definitely fix a couple of things. First of all, this cap is too small, so we just have to extend this size. I think. Yeah, that looks better. And now we go back to our mask and select this shape that we created. And obviously now I can see it much better, so I can fix it much easier as well. Drag these up and create that twist data may be, it can be even higher, something like that. Yeah, that looks better. And if I come down here at the bottom, once again, these other shapes should be fixed as well. And here we will need to refine this. I can actually see that we need the curve to go the other way. So I set it up originally did wrong way, but that's no problem. I just used a pen tool holding down the Alt or Option key as I drag it the other way. And we can now use the direct selection tool and maybe just set it up here a little bit further out. This one we drag up and then we have that nice S curve that was needed here at the bottom. Feel like that is looking much better now. Now let's switch back again to the object itself. And I'm going to just adjust a little bit the colors here. So adjusting it will help us to see it slightly differently here at the bottom. Now, because there is a very strong twist or turn here, it is overlapping the shades of the gradient. So I can maybe try to drag this slightly further down to help it separate a bit better. Or we can also adjust this curve here or the handle until that artifact is gone. I feel like something like that looks a little bit better. However, I quite like the way that this transition is visible here. So I will actually leave it like this for now. And let's zoom out a bit. Let's take a look at the detail on the top. Once again, here, there is a bit of transitional glitch there. We can try to fix that by dragging this out, maybe a bit further, something like that. And then also just coming back to this gradient, if I select the fill once again and we can try to move this gradient color stop a bit higher. That way we have a bit more contrast there. Maybe even this one can come a little bit higher, something like that. And then on this stroke as well, if we come back here, we can stretch this out making sure we have better contrast between the two tubes. Okay. Maybe even that one. Yeah, that looks much better. So if I zoom out now, it's starting to take shape, but this cap here because it's facing downwards, should be darker. So once again, think about the light coming from the top. If this is further down, it should be probably more red. So if we come back here, maybe let's select the red and then Shift-click on here. Maybe heavy, brighter a bit than red or could be even darker. So if I'm thinking about the light, I think that looks a little bit more realistic. We should do the same thing here as well. So Shift-click up there. And for this one maybe I will just pick more like an orange color, something like that. Let's take a look. Yes, I quite liked that. And then maybe this top detail here just needs to be even a bit more brighter just to separate from the tube itself. And that is pretty much it. Of course it can be further refined, make it look more glossy by adding some reflections and highlights, shadows. But I'm going to reserve these techniques for another tutorial. 5. Workflow explained - Letter M: Like always, the first thing that I do before jumping into Illustrator is to do a couple of sketches. The two drawings that you can see on the top left, I've done in Procreate and then I further visualized and refine them in Photoshop. I find it easier and faster to work in Photoshop in the beginning. But then of course, I prefer to do the final artwork in Illustrator to keep everything completely vectorized when it comes to illustrating ribbons and visualizing that twists and turns. The most important thing you have to learn and understand how they behave in certain angles. Most of the folds that you would need for typography is 45 degrees and 90 degrees angles. So this fault here would be probably around 45 degrees, while this one, the next Ford would be 90 degrees. And notice how the board looks different here compared to this fold here on the left and on the right. Now you can see on my first sketch, I wasn't a 100% sure how these folds should look like. So then I decided to use something that can help me to understand how best to illustrate this. And I looked around and I couldn't find any enlarge ribbons. I decided to use toilet paper. Now, this is something you will have at home for sure. And you can see when you do the tons, this is actually perfectly showing you the angles that you will need. So there's the 45 degrees and there's the 90 degrees angle. And you will see how we get that straight line, which we seen here earlier. So instead of having a detail that falls like this, we should keep it straight. Now once I've seen how I need to do the tons, I had to decide here in the middle whether I want the ribbon to come in front and constantly coming from the back towards us, or it's starting coming towards us, but then it turns back. And then finally again it comes in front. So it's more like an alternating pattern coming in front and then back and so on and so forth, or constantly going in one direction. And of course the whole thing can be reversed as well. So there's quite a lot of variations that I can do, but I decided that I like this version the better. So this is the one I'm going to recreate now in Illustrator. And without any further delay, let's get started. 6. Creating Shapes - Letter M: I am going to create a new layer. First of all, we will be able to keep track of all the objects that I create here on the right side. So I won't need to draw directly on top of my sketch. I only use it as a reference. I am going to use the rectangle tool and we will be able to add the rounded corners later. So let's just draw this main rectangle. So the first lag, let's just place it somewhere around here. Now I'm going to use the eyedropper tool and sample the color I used in my sketch, and then duplicate this and sample the other color again with the eyedropper tool, you can get to it quickly by pressing I on the keyboard. Now in Illustrator, sometimes when you place in a raster image and you try to sample from it with the eyedropper tool. It might not pick up the color in those cases, all you have to do is to double-click on the eyedropper tool here in the toolbar and make sure you have these options turned on. Since we already got the colors. I don't really have to worry about this anymore. And what I need to do now is to set up the angles that we need. First of all, we need to turn this 45 degrees, holding down the Shift key. You can do that very quickly and easily. Or also, you can always go into the Transform options and you can change the angle here. The good thing is that we can always come back here and change these angles. So if I want to go back to 0 degrees, I can select that or it once again, I can just type it in here, 45 degrees. It's great that even when an object is in a certain angle, you can still adjust its size so you can extend it or shorten it without messing up the proportions or the angle itself. Now let's select both of these shapes and holding down the Alt key or Option key, we can make duplicates of them by pressing O, we can get the reflect tool with which we just have to click and drag and hold down the Shift key to flip it around. Here, I am going to change the order of the colors. So this one should be the blue color and the other one should be that mint color. The order should be also setup already. We can drag this here and we will need this to be behind the others. So I'm just going to use Command left square bracket a couple of times until it lands in the right place in the stacking order, we can keep track of our objects here in the Layers panel as well. So far we created four rectangles and I can start moving them around. If I wanted to shorten maybe the legs, I could just use the direct selection tool, select these bottom points, and just simply drag them up. And that's probably good to hold down the Shift key if you don't want to end up moving them to the side. So holding down Shift key, I can keep it worked equally moving maybe to somewhere around there. As I said, I'm only using the illustration on the top as a reference, so I'm not going to keep the proportions are the same. I will be able to adjust that as I go along. I most likely will need to have this rectangle stretched up a bit further. And even this one, we can just stretch a little bit further out to make sure that we get things right. And now it's time for masking. I decided to use an opacity mask this time, not a clipping mask, is just going to be easier to work with it because there's less details I need to keep visible than the parts that I need to hide. The thing about using a clipping mask, you have to define the areas you want to keep visible. So whenever I want to just chip away smaller details, I would rather use an opacity mask. And this can also be applied on a group. So that's what I'm going to do first select all of these objects together, turn them into a group that's Command or Control G. We can see that group coming up here. And then we just need to go to the transparency panel and click on Make mask. You don't need any shape selected for the Mosque itself. By default, Illustrator completely hides everything, so it creates a black mask and this can be removed and turned into an empty mask by clicking on clip. Once the mass turns white, that means nothing is hidden currently and everything is visible from the group. From this point on, it will be important to switch back and forth between the object view and the mosque view. So that's what you can do by clicking on these two thumbnails here. For these type of workflows, I recommend to keep the transparency panel, all these visible and ideally close to the layers panel. So you have to keep an eye on these two panels at all times. Otherwise you can end up making mistakes easily. So we add in the mosque view, that means if I start creating shapes now, they will appear inside the mask. So I'm going to use the rectangle tool and I will first of all draw a rectangle here at the bottom, something like that. Now this is a rectangle with a white fill, which is not making much difference. But as soon as I change the fill color up here to black, you will immediately see that is going to hide all of those details. And wherever I move, this rectangle is going to keep hiding details. And the whole thing is completely non-destructive. So I can always come back and make adjustments on. I'm just going to put this back where it belongs, something like that. And I'm going to refine this fold further. But first, let's pay attention to the left and the right side. So in these cases, again, I'm going to use the same rectangle. I will just duplicate it, holding down the Alt key, click and drag and then rotate it by going to the corner, start rotating and hold down the Shift key. We get the 45-degree angle. Can drag this up here and set it up somewhere around there. That looks quite good. Now of course it doesn't have to be perfectly 45 degrees, but I think that works for this composition. It keeps things nice and tidy. And I am going to use again the reflect tool pressing on the keyboard. I will just define the center point of the object which is here. And then I can click and drag, hold down the Alt and Shift key together to set it up on the right side. Now if I wanted to make things perfectly symmetrical, I would have to move things slightly around. However, one thing that is even more important is that the height on both sides will be exactly the same. Otherwise it will just look weird. So I'm going to use the rulers That's Command or Control R and drag a guide down from the top, align it here. And that way we can make sure that the height is going to be consistent. So now what we need to do these to come back again, select the object, in this case this, and just move it slightly to the left until it's aligned on the top. And then we can drag it up so it doesn't show up underneath. And then we can just go back again to the mosque. So select the group, select the mask and select that rectangle at the bottom and move it up until it's aligned. I feel that looks quite good. But of course, we can always come back and make changes to everything because everything is set up completely non-destructively. 7. Adding details, Curved folds - Letter M: Now it's time to set up those lovely details which will make it look more like a realistic ribbon where we have these nice curved folds Instead of these sharp angles. If we wanted to have things more geometric or angular, this could actually the final style that we end up with, but I prefer to have those nice wells. So let's zoom closer. First of all, switch back to the objects. Select both of these ones on the left and the right. I'm using the direct selection tool and I'm going to increase the corners by dragging the corner widgets up. So probably something like that will work nicely. And if you want to be a little bit more precise, you can always use actual numbers up here. So we can set it up to four millimeters or three millimeters, whichever works better. Now if I switch back to the selection tool, I can still increase or decrease the size of this rectangle, just making sure that it's not showing up underneath the actual coordinate radius that I added. And also it's not showing up too far up here. So it just has to be in the right position, somewhere around there. However, if I wanted to make sure that this coordinate here is not going to be visible, I can just simply click on it with the direct selection tool. And that way when I'm used the corner widget, it's only going to affect this corner. And for this to work, first of all, we need to draw in an additional shape. I'm going to use the pen tool and I start in this point here, come down along the edge and then maybe hold down the Shift key and close it up like so. Now the color of this shape should be the same as this folded detail up here. But then we also need another shape and an ellipse. So I'm using the ellipse tool pressing L on the keyboard and drawing a perfect circle by holding down the Shift key. And the color of this one should be the other color. And let's zoom a little bit closer. Now we just have to align things. Well. First of all, we need to make sure that this anchor point here is aligned to the edge. And then we have to also make sure that this edge here is aligned to that diagonal line that's going down. The easiest way to see this would be to switch to the outline view, that's Command or Control Y. And now all I have to do is to just drag this ellipse down until we have that point aligned there. So we need to have a tangent here and also here on the left side, I can see that my triangle we will need to be adjusted. And of course, at this point, I can just simply move it down maybe here, again following that edge. And also here, it has to be aligned to the anchor point on the left side. When we switch back to normal view Command or Control Y, you will probably see straight away what I'm working on. And also we can see that actually this anchor point here needs to come hire where that meeting point is probably somewhere around here. So that circle was very important to create this perfect round shape that we needed. But you can also see that this mass that we used earlier will need to come down a bit. Now, let's first of all put these two shapes inside this group. So the mosque met we created will also be able to affect them. So both of these shapes will need to be underneath this diagonal line and the triangle will need to be underneath the circle. So there's the ellipse underneath it, there is that triangle and all the other objects are setup already around them. Now it might look a little bit complicated at this point, but this is the hardest part of most challenging part of this workflow. And if you do it yourself and do it a couple of times, it will become much easier. And this technique will really help you to get used to working with opacity masks and multiple shapes within the same mask. Now that I have the objects in place, I can come back to selecting the whole group, then switch to the opacity mask, where I can select that shape that we had up here and just drag it down. The angle won't be affected by me just simply dragging it down. And once again, all I have to do is to align it to make sure it's tangent to that circle. So I can obviously Zoom much closer. And I wish there was a snap option here. There are plugins which will help you to be able to snap the tangents. But by default, you just have to hope that it gets in the right place. I think that looks fine. I press Command or Control Y. We can go back and see it in the object view. I'm still in the mass, by the way. And what we need to do now is to get rid of that little detail there. So we have to chop that off. Now, the way we can do this is by drawing another rectangle. This is just going to be a small rectangle, literally hiding that detail. And this rectangle is also using black fill like before. It might not need to come all the way down there. Probably just roughly around here. But then I switch back to the object again using the transparency panel, select that ellipse that we already use once, copy it, That's Command or Control C. Then switch back to the mask, press Command or Control F to paste it in place. So the same circle in, in the exact same position will get re-used within the opacity mask. And all we have to do here is to make sure it's set to white. So let's see, that was the trick that without this ellipse, we would start losing details. But the reason why we had to add this additional two objects into the opacity mask is to be able to carve that little detail out. So first, the black rectangle takes it out and then divide ellipse shows those details again. Obviously at this point we can always come back and refine the placement and alignment, but I'm not going to waste time on that. And instead I will just show you one more detail here on the top to make sure that you understand how to use this technique. And then I'm going to fast forward to showing you the shading technique, which is also crucial to make this style really work. So to fix the top, we actually don't even have to leave the opacity mask. All I'm going to do here is to duplicate that ellipse that we have already here. So that's a white ellipse holding down Alt or Option key. I can drag it up and then just try to align it so it fits in here and tangent on both sides. And then also duplicate that other rectangle. Click and drag. Move it up here. And notice that because I already had them in the right order, I don't even have to move things up and down. I just have to set it up somewhere around there. And when I zoom closer, I can just make sure that the alignment is correct. So moving this ellipse a little bit up until we get the alignment right. Now if I zoom back, we can see that this left side is now ready. Alright, so as I promised, let's jump ahead and I'm going to show you at the end how to do the shading. And then. 8. Shading - Letter M: So just to recap, this is the final design. So I needed a few additional elements to create the folds. And also within the mask, we have actually quite a lot of smaller shapes on the corners. Just to show you, if I shift click on the Mask thumbnail, we can see the actual objects without any masking. And this is once again how it looks once the mask are activated. So setting up those folds and the coronaries this way is quite fiddly, but it allows you to work completely non-destructively, meaning that you can go back and make changes at anytime, both the shapes within the mask and outside of the mask. But now let's jump back into the actual object view. So I get out of the mask and I will draw these shapes based on the already existing shapes. So this is the shading part. This will actually be quite simple now, all I have to do is to use the direct selection tool. Select this shape here, this other shape next to it, by holding down Shift key, I can add them to the selection, and we will also need this little circle here. So Shift-click on that too, and then Command or Control C to copy these three shapes. And then to make sure that they are pasted not inside the group but outside of it. I'm going to select this guide which is above the group in the layer structure. And then I just press Command or Control F. So notice that now they appear up here and I can even hide the group at this point. And having these three shapes still selected, I can now use the shape builder tool, which is shift M, holding down the Alt or Option key. I can get rid of all of these details here on the top. And then quickly just merge these two shaped by simply drawing over them without holding down any other shortcuts. So this is the shape that we needed. And for this I'm going to apply a gradient. I already have a gradient prepared here. I will just click on this. It's a linear gradient, darker blue color on one side, fully opaque, and the same color on the right side, but set to 0%. We can refine this much better if we actually turn back the original object. And by pressing G on the keyboard, I can adjust the angle of the gradient and also the length of it so we can decide how long we want it to go. Let's set it up somewhere around here and then we can even adjust the spread and again, further drag it out if I wanted to. But I think that looks quite good. Let's just click away. And let's see without shading and with shading, I'm quite happy with that. And now we just have to repeat the same thing here on the right side. So once again, I'm going to use the direct selection tool, select all the shapes that we need. So there's that little circle. We have these two rectangles, but this time I'm going to also select this shape here, that other circle as well. And I think that is all that we need. So we can copy this Command or Control C. That makes sure it's not ending up inside the group. I will select that path outside of the group and then Command or Control F to paste them in place. Now we can turn off the object in the background and switch to the shape builder tool by pressing Shift M, I will hold down the Alt or Option key to remove the details. We don't need. All of this can go. Then we can also get rid of all of these details and even that little corner part there. So on scan, Alt or Option, click on that. Then the remaining parts we can merge simply by just drawing over at them. So we will end up having a single path here in the layers panel and then press I to select the eyedropper tool. We can sample the same gradient we have on the left side. And then let's turn back the objects so we can see what we created. And then going back into the gradient, we can set it up slightly differently this time. So what we need here is actually shading in both angles or both sides. So I'm going to stretch the gradient out like this. And then I can move these Gradients stops here directly on the annotator. So we need one, stop it there than this one which is the empty one. I'll drag up here, probably somewhere around there. And then I hold down the Alt or option key to duplicate that color, stop, drag it all the way on the right side, and then maybe also duplicate this one here. Again, Alt or Option click and drag, drag it out. And that's like a limiter or the end of that shade on the other side. And we can soften it out a bit, maybe dragging these points further closer to the edge, something like that. Now let's take a look without the selection. That looks quite nice. However, it's a little bit darker than on the left side, so I will just come back, press G on the keyboard again, drag these points further out on both sides. So here as well, we can drag it out and we can even reduce the opacity just to make it more softer, maybe to 60%. Once again, let's take a look without and with the shading. That's always the easiest way to judge whether you've done a good job or not. I can now even put these two parts that we use for creating the shading into a group. So I selected them on the Layers panel and then I press Command or Control G and can even rename this shading. And I can now hide the guide. We don't need it anymore and we can just quickly check how it looks without shading and the shading back on. There you go. It looks quite similar to my original mock-up on the top-right corner. However, the big advantage of doing this in Illustrator again, is that it's completely resolution independent because everything is recreated in vectors and all that. Struggling with the opacity mask allows us to come back and make changes easily. So nothing is deleted, it's just simply hidden away. So if I ever decide to make the proportions different on this character, I can just come back and make those changes very quickly and easily. 9. Creating Shapes - Letter D: Like always before I jump into Illustrator when it comes to designing something, I like to do some quick sketches. I do my sketches digitally, usually in procreate. And you can see here first the rough drawing and then a little bit more detailed drawing by holding down things in procreate, I can keep my lines straight and I can even create nice curves and then quickly fill in the details with different colors just to have a feel for how this twisted optical illusion will look like on this letter. I was inspired to do this particular tutorial by the game code Monument Valley. Here's a few gorgeous screenshots from the game. If you haven't played it already, I highly recommend to try it out because as a designer or illustrator, you can get a lot of inspiration from it and also learn about how to create these interesting optical illusions. So you can see I already selected a font that I'm going to work with. This is Gotham bold, regular and to be able to work with it properly, I will have to outline it. So we go into the Type menu and choose Create Outlines. There's also shortcut command or Control Shift O. When we look at it in the layers panel is going to be a compound path. Now the reason why it's not a single path because it has the counter or the empty space in the middle. So it's actually made up of two separate parts joined together. It's useful to know how you can separate path from within a compound path. I usually use the keyboard shortcut Command, Option Shift H, or Control Alt Shift eight on PC. But this is also something you can find from the Object menu, compound path release. So when you do this, you will get two separate parts. There's the one in the middle and then the large one which was our outline. But we don't need to do this. I'm going to go back and keep it as a compound path. Maybe I'm just going to remove the group. So I will use Command or Control shifted G shortcut because I prefer to keep things as simple as possible in the layers panel. And then I'm going to move this a little bit down and duplicate the whole thing by holding down Alt or Option key, I will click and drag to create a duplicate. Now I will change the color of this just so we can see it better. And then I would like to align it perfectly on top of the other letter. If I press Command or Control Y, you can see that these two lines are perfectly aligned. So once again, this is the shape that we have on top. And when I drag it back, you can see how it's going to snap into place. Now let's zoom out a bit and then command or control via go back to the normal view. I will select both of these objects and then press Shift M to get to the shape builder tool. Now what I would like to do is to join these details together. So from here at the bottom, I will start drawing over these details and it will become a single, separate shape. At the moment, it inherited the same color. So it's a little bit hard to see what's happening. But if I select it separately with the direct selection tool, I can pick a different color and immediately it's starting to look interesting. So the two shapes are starting to merge or intertwine with each other. But when I look at the layers panel, I can see that there's an additional shape that was created when I use the shape builder tool, which I can move to the side. And this is the leftover from one of the letters, but I'm not going to get rid of it. I'm actually going to use it. Since we need this rectangle here, I will place it all the way to the top. That was Command or Control shift, right square bracket to quickly drag it or place it all the way on the top in the stacking order, then I'm going to place it somewhere around here. Now let's zoom a little bit closer. I want to align it to the left edge or the right edge of this shape. Easiest way to do that would be to use a ruler, align it to this point here. And then now we can just align and snap to that ruler. Now let's select this shape and drag it up a little bit. So we will need to go further out that way, then select that other shape behind on. So again, use the shape builder tool that's Shift M and combine these details together. So I will just draw over them. And like before, I'm going to select this shape and change its color. And I can also select the leftovers and delete them. We don't actually need those. And if you've done everything correctly, you will end up having three separate objects. This yellow one here ended up being a compound path. But because there's no gaps or hollow spaces inside it, it doesn't have to be a compound path. Again, simplify whatever you can use. The shortcut I showed you before, Command Option Shift H or Control Alt Shift a. And then we have three separate parts. 10. Recolor Artwork, Continuity - Letter D: Now it's time to get rid of these guides. We don't need it anymore. And it's time to also make the colors a bit more interesting or pleasing. So I will select these shapes together and click on the re-color artwork option here on the top. There, I can go into the edit option and even choose harmony rules. Maybe use a nice split complimentary colors setup and then start moving these colors around. Maybe something like this will work quite nicely. I quite like that one. Let's click Okay, we can always come back to it and make changes later on. By the way, if you want to learn more about color harmonies, recently, we published a video on the channel which started talking about color theory. And there's a lot more coming soon as well. So in case you don't want to miss them, make sure you subscribe and also hit the little bell icon to get notified whenever we release new content. But let's jump back and fix this design. Because if they zoom closer, you will see that there is actually one detail that needs to be refined and that is the continuity between these two curves. So at the moment, there is a little dip there which we need to refine and keep straight. Now to make this work, I will, first of all drag a guide out from the left ruler and align it to this anchor point here. So that's the furthest to the right. The curves go. This guide is tangent to the curves. And then I am going to use the rectangle tool, find this other point here on the curve where it says intersect that has the anchor point of the curve. So there's the point furthest to the right. So from there I'm just going to draw the shape and come down all the way here once again where it says intersect and then just joy to the left until it's covering that space that we need to fill. Now I'm going to fill this shape with the same color as the color on the top. By using the eyedropper tool, I can just click on that. The shortcut for eyedropper, by the way, I was using is I. And then I am going to now set this back a bit by using Command left square bracket. I can push it down until it goes behind that shape. Now if I want, I can even keep this as a separate object, but I like to tidy things up. So first of all, I will get rid of the guides and then we need to copy these shapes so we will need a duplicate selecting it. I can press Command or Control C and then Command or Control F, which will paste it on top of the previous shape exactly in the same position. Then I can shift click on this other shape, and I can shift click on this other little rectangle that we added. Now pressing Shift M, we jump back to the shape builder tool. And with that, all I need to do now is to hold down the Alt or Option key and remove the details that we don't need. So this whole big shape here we don't need also this one we don't need here. And then we just need to merge the remaining elements by simply drawing over them. So if I zoom closer, you will see this better. I will just draw over these to connect them and merge them into one. And we can also merge into these neither moment it looks like we messed up the colors, but because I had it already saved as a swatch, I can just jump back to that color we had originally there. But now when we take a look at this detail here, now it's perfectly straight, exactly how I imagined it. 11. Adding 3D feel, Alternative version - Letter D: Last but not least, to add a little bit more three-dimensional feel to the whole design. I am going to select this point here on that blue shape. So only that coordinate on the left using the direct selection tool. And then I will use Shift down arrow or maybe twice, and then select this other point all the way at the bottom on the other shape and use Shift Up Arrow twice. But you can see that there was no breakpoint there to stop this detail moving. So we have to just go back to steps and get another guide here in place. And zoom closer, select this shape. And using the add anchor point tool, I can just click on the intersection point there. So that's going to stop the rest of the shape moving when I select this anchor point again and use Shift Up Arrow twice. So that's 20 pixels moved up. But actually we need to move it even further than that. I just realized this point needs to go all the way up here. And in these cases, you can even just delete the anchor point using the pen tool. Again, just setting it to Delete Anchor Point tool. We can remove that point and that way it creates a perfect straight line without no interruption. So now zooming back, this is how it looks. And I feel like we should have the same angle here on the top. And to get that right, I'm going to use a shape. It's like a placeholder shape. With Mitch, I measure this distance, then just drag it up, place it here, and just stretch it out, drag it onto the other side. And then I can select this anchor point and drag it down until it snaps to that point there. So this way I know exactly It went down the same distance that the detail at the bottom. So we have exactly the same angle on top and at the bottom. Now, it's time to get rid of this guide and take a look at the final design. I like it. I think it looks quite nice, but we can create an alternative version for this with maybe a different color setups. So I'm just going to duplicate the whole thing, group it together just to make sure it doesn't fall apart. And then select it. Go to the re-color artwork option as go into Edit and maybe try a different color harmony. This time, I will choose analog colors and drag it further down towards here. I think that looks interesting, but then I will remove the restriction of the harmony, and I will probably make this one a little bit darker. So that's, I think is the point at the bottom. If I make it darker, it's just going to add a bit more contrast to the design. Now we can jump back into the Assign tab, where it's a little bit easier to see what we're selecting. So we have these three colors used. And this is the brightest color, which is on the top, which we can again make slightly brighter either by adding more saturation or just removing the saturation, I think is going to work better at this time. By the way, here in the Assign tab, there's also another really useful option. Whenever you select a color, if you're not sure which one you are making changes to, you can just tap on this icon here with which you can find it within the artwork. When you turn that off, you can see the adjusted colors. And if I select another one, again, we can check where that is in the artwork. The re-color artwork feature is a very robust tool within Illustrator. And there's so much things you can do with it if you want to learn more about it. I have a separate tutorial which covers all the features in great detail. So after finishing this one, don't forget to check it out. The link is in the description below. But the best thing about this method was that we ended up having a very simple design made up of three simple parts. 12. Type composition - Light the way: I have already all the elements on the top, and I'm going to build everything around this little light bulb here in the middle. So I prepared the font and the text is found, by the way, is called heavy tests. It's a free font. I love it. It's a really cool time face to work with. So first of all, I'm going to turn on my guides so I know where the center point is. And then I'm going to use the circle or ellipse tool. Go to the center where the guides intersect each other. And then holding down the Alt key or Option key, I can start drawing my circle. And while I'm doing this, I'm also going to hold down the Shift key to make sure it's going to stay a perfect circle. So this circle is going to be the outline on which I'm going to place the text. I will probably put it somewhere around here. We can always change the size later, but I think that's a good size. Then I am going to copy the text. So I just highlighted command C or control C. And then using the type tool, go close to the edge of the shape and holding down the Alt key or Option key, notice how the cursor is changing to this shape or this type of icon. And if I click here, it's going to already turned this circle into type on a path object. Now if I use Command or Control V to paste the text in, as you can see, it's already there. Now, at this point, it's important to switch to the Direct Selection Tool, which is a on the keyboard. Once you have that selected, you can drag the end point all the way here on the right side to three o'clock. And then drag the starting point all the way to here, nine o'clock. And then you can see starting point is here and the end point there. Now if I wanted to make sure that the texts sits exactly in the middle, I have to set the text to align center. Once I choose that, you can see it's perfect. Now that we have this, I'm going to duplicate it by using Command C or Control C and then Command F or Control F to paste it on top of this, it's the paste in front feature which you can find in the Edit menu as well. I'm going to hide the original version. And this new version I'm going to replace with the other texts. So I'm again just copying and pasting that texting. And once again, set a line to center. Now comes again the direct selection tool, the white arrow tool. And at this point we don't even need the guides anymore. If I want to see these circles better, I'm just going to put them on another layer where the highlight color is red. So you can see it also better, both the start and end point and the center point. This center line is what I'm going to grab with the direct selection tool and drag it inside the shape. See what happens there is that the texts now is inside. The reason why I'm doing this is because if I keep the texts outside, obviously, it's not going to work well because it's going to put the text upside down. So if I drag it inside, that's going to work much better. But what we have to fix is the same as before. We have to drag the start point. So that little line here and the end point a little bit further out. Now, the end points sometimes is a little bit tricky to find, but I managed to find it here again to the right and this one to the left. What we need to do also is to select all the texts. So double-click on the text and then press Command a or Control a is to be able to move this outside the circle. Because what happened by moving it inside the circle is that it's now not aligned with the other text. So you can see while the lead your ideas texts sits on the circle, so it uses it as a baseline. This other texts here is sitting inside the circle and it could be an artistic decision that you want it to do it like this. But what I would like to do is to select this text here and then move it out so it's aligned to the texts on the top. So what I'm going to do is a useful shortcut is called baseline shift, which is Alt or Option Shift key. And then down arrow to push it outwards. Up arrow would be to push it in towards the center of the shape. And you can see how I managed to align the circle to the top of the characters or the cap height of the characters. And then now what I need to do is because I moved it out, I also need to reduce the tracking. Now this is something you can do from the character menu up here. And you can find the tracking here. And we can set it to probably something like minus 100. But even that is a little bit too much. If you want, you can also use option left and right arrows or all left and right arrows to quickly set the tracking. And the same short gap can also be used for kerning, which is what we call them. You refine individual spacing between characters. So here, for example, the th is a little bit too close, but the E can come a little bit closer. And then especially between the w and a, we can just go a little bit further. I mean, just keep them closer to each other. That's again Alt or option left arrow in this case. Then I think the G and H can go a bit closer as well. I-n-g and the L and I can be separated a bit. And this was mainly important that the bottom to be fixed. But we can also check the top text here. And I can see DNA can be separated at bit D and E can be closer slightly. And then you are or you, this one. Y and o can be closer as well. These can be moved apart slightly, so already looking much better. So a bit of kerning is very useful, especially when you start putting text on a path or whenever you work with headlines or titles, always pay attention to this. And now that we have the texts in place, we can get rid of these original ones here on the top. And let me show you one thing before we go any further. That is a tool that I love and sometimes I would use even on circular text, it's called the Touch Type Tool. You can get to it by pressing Shift T or right-click on the Type Tool and select it from the toolbar. Now, what this tool can do is to individually move or shift and rotate even scale characters around without losing the edit stability of the text. So for example, if I want it to move you a little bit down, I can do that. If I wanted the r to be rotated slightly, make the text a little bit more playful. I can do just that. I can also make the text or individual character smaller or bigger. Maybe have the y slightly bigger. And you can see already how it's starting to look a bit more interesting. 13. Adding elements to the composition - Light the way: And I could spend a whole day doing this, but let's move on. And I'm not going to repeat the same thing on the text on the bottom because it's very simple and easy to work with. But most importantly, the text is still editable and it's still on the path that we created for it. So the next step is going to be to start adding all of these elements here, maybe starting with this little star here on the right. I'm just going to place it somewhere aligned to the center, just going to bring back my guides as well so I can see where it needs to go. Maybe make it slightly bigger and I'm going to put it on the right side as well. Just rotate it around slightly so it looks more like a slightly different angle. Alright, that's starting to look good on its own already. It could work as a design like a badge. But let's take this to the next level. And by the way, the finalized started with is something that we are sharing with our members if you want to get access to it and additional exclusive content that we do for members only. You can find the link in the description below and you can check out which tier you prefer to join. But let's not stop here. I'm going to show you a really cool way of using the transform effect to create a radial pattern. I would like to use these elements here on the top-left and make it look like they are just spreading or scattering out from the center. So really representing ideas floating around and just spreading out from the center where the little light bulb is. To be able to do this. First of all, what I'm going to do is to turn back my guides and draw a rectangle. This is going to be the area in which I would like to draw my elements. Now this rectangle I'm going to set to be transparent, so I remove the fill and stroke colors. By the way, you can do that by pressing the question mark on the keyboard or the forward slash key. And whatever color is currently highlighted by the reads, the fill or the stroke, that keyboard shortcut is going to remove it, so set it to none. Now this is a completely empty shape, and I can see it's centered in the middle of the composition, which is perfect. But if I want, I can also move this around and make sure it's aligned to the center, to the guide. Now that it's there, I'm going to copy, paste this, and then use another shortcut Command or Control F5 to turn it into a guide. So this is something you can find in the View menu. And under guides, make guides. That's the one I used. So now that it's turned into a guide, I can just put it onto my guides layer. And you can see if I turn that off, I still have the other rectangle, which I'm going to use together with a line. Now I'm going to draw that line. And I actually need my guide for this as well, because this should start from the center point, like the original circle that we started with. And I'm going to start drawing this and hold down the Shift key to make sure it's completely vertical. Now it doesn't need to go really high up. I'm just going to draw it somewhere up to there. I'm going to turn off my guides. I will select this and the other shape. Now both of these are invisible or transparent because there's no fill or stroke assigned to them. Let's just play something like this camera somewhere here in the middle. Alright, let's just select these shapes again. I need my invisible line as well. There you go. Now that all three of them are selected, I can use the Control G or Command G shortcut to turn them into a group. So this group is the one that we will be using for the transform effect. So now that the group is ready, we can go to the Effect menu. And from distort and transform, I will use the transform effect. And it opens up this lovely but slightly complicated dialog box. Well, first of all, what you need to do is turn on preview so you can see the changes you are doing. And I'm going to set the copies to five just so we can see what happens. When I start dragging the angle to the left. You can already see what is happening here. So why is it rotating around itself and not around the shape? Because the reference point currently set to the center point. Once I change that to the bottom, it's already fixing itself. Because now the whole selection, this whole group is used as the reference point. And the bottom point of it is in the center of the original circle. So that's why we needed that empty line. That's the one that's anchoring it to the center. And you will see why I needed the other empty rectangle as well. So now all we need to decide is how many copies we want. Well, I think I'm going to use 45 degrees. And for that I can use seven copies. And this is also, by the way, a shortcut I use very often whenever a dialog box is selected. You can use up and down arrows to quickly increase or decrease a value. And you can see how quickly I can see how many I need. Now 45 degrees is exactly 360 divided by eight. And the reason why we need seven copies, because one is the original one plus seven. So that's how you get eight times 45 equals 360. And the reason I mentioned that is because if you want to use a different angle, so let's just say 60 degrees. Again, you just need to do a quick math. Six times. 60 is 360. So how many copies do we need? Five. So if I have four, that's not enough because we have one here on the top and four copies, we just have to increase it up to five. If I, for example, want to have nine copies, I know that the angle should be the D6. And just to show you, if I reduce it by one, That's exactly ten instances. So the original M9 copies. So again, this is 36 degrees times ten, which is 360, the full circle. But let's just go back to the original idea of using 45 degrees with seven copies. And that's what we need here. So I can click Okay, and now transform effect is ready. Now comes the interesting part. I'm going to select all of these elements here, cut them out, Command or Control X, then select the group and double-click on it. This is called isolation. When you double-click on a group, you start working inside it and you can see that little breadcrumbs on the top as well. So we can see we are working inside the group. And if we rename this group and call it, let's say just pattern, then we will be able to tell that we are within the pattern. It's always good to name your groups anyway, so it just helps you even when you're in isolation mode. Now I'm going to use Control or Command F to paste all the elements in. But what happened is that because these elements are outside of our safety rectangle, the whole composition is getting messed up. But look at this one sine, move them inside that rectangle. Actually things are going to work fine. Let me just turn back my guides. If I double-click outside and turn back, the guides will be able to keep track where that rectangle is. Now if I double-click again, start moving these shapes around. You'll see that as long as I stay within that safe, the rectangle, the camera is not going to move around. But as soon as I move outside of it, the whole composition starts to blow up and completely get messed up here at the bottom. So that's why it's very important to create a rectangle like that. Because as long as you stay working within the rectangle, you are free to place these elements wherever you want. And obviously the Transform effect is going to copy them, in this case, seven times rotated around the center point of the design. But of course, I want to scatter these shapes around more. So I'm going to just zoom a little bit closer. And let's just have some fun moving these shapes around. And I will probably speed this up because it's not that interesting. I'm just scaling and moving shapes around. 14. Gradient Opacity Mask - Light the way: Okay, so something like that. I'm quite happy with. By the way, let me know if you are interested to see how to do these little icons that I created. So the camera, the brush tool, the Pen tool, I can show it in another tutorial. Just let me know in the comments if you're interested, and also maybe tell me what type of objects would you like to see created as icons. And last but not least, I would like to teach you how to use a gradient opacity mask. So this whole shape that we have here is generated by that group, the single group that we have here on the top. By the way, because the Transform effect is a live effect, we can always just select the group and turn it off from the appearance panel. If I turn it off, we can see it as the only element or the only part of that whole pattern that is generated. And all the rest is something I can't even select at this point because it's all part of the effect. But if you want to make more variety on the shapes around it, you could go to the Object menu and choose Expand Appearance, which is going to get rid of the effect, but it will turn all of those elements into editable objects. Let me just show you how it works if I click on Expand Appearance, now, all of these elements are selectable, so I can double-click and you can see each one are still in groups. But I would be able to double-click again, go inside and start moving things around. So that just helps to create a bit more variety if you want to. But I don't need that at this point. So I'm just going to undo and go back to the original transform effects setup. Because what I'm going to do here is to go to the transparency panel and choose Make mask. While I'm on the group, I click on Make Mask. And by default it starts with a black mask. Now, that's actually not bad, but I just wanted to show you that if you have the clip option turned off, then it's an empty mask, something that completely shows everything. So when this icon here is invite, that means everything is visible. When it's black, everything is hidden. So this mask, by the way, is applied on the selected group, not everything else in the design, just a selected group. Now, this is important as well to be able to start adding designs into the mask or to actually define what's the mask is going to do, you have to click on the icon again. So this is how you work with the objects, and this is how you work with the mask. And the way you can tell that you're working within the mask is by looking at your tab. It should say opacity mask up here, but also the layers panel will say opacity mask. It's almost like a separate realm. You are working either in the object dimension or in the mosque dimension. We are in the mask realm. And what I'm going to do now is to draw a circle. I'm going to use the Ellipse tool and we actually need to show our mask. What I'm going to do is first of all actually turn the guides back on because we will need them. Then go back to the mosque section. And then I'm going to use the Ellipse tool and What click and drag from the center, point out something that completely covers the whole area. And then now I'm going to switch to the gradient panel. Radial gradient is what I want. And you can see I have white on the left and black on the right. And that's actually all we need it, because that is the opacity mask that's going to keep the center part visible. And as we get closer to the edges, the gradient turns black, which means they start to hide those elements. So it creates this nice feeding effects. So from the center outwards, like a radio faith in a way you can think about it like that. So you can see my transparency is showing that exactly. And by the way, if I want, I can go back to the gradient and even adjust the fade itself so I can get the little star to the right, which is going to show more of the objects or drag it further to the left, and then it will show less. Also, you can press G on the keyboard and then use the gradient annotator, which is even easier because you can do it directly on the design. So this is quite cool. You can even drag the end point out further or further in. So if I drag that point in, you can see we can hide even more from it if we wanted to. But I'm just going to keep it somewhere like this. So it's almost like a backdrop. I don't want the pattern to be too overpowering because the most important design element is actually in the center. So I'm going to just leave it at that. And don't forget to go back to the transparency panel, come back to the normal real-world and leave the mask around behind. Now we can turn off the guides, click away. And maybe as a final effect that can tie everything together. We can add another circle. We then another gradient on it, which I actually already prepared. But it's the same exact thing, what we've done in the opacity mask. In this case, it's outside. So it's not in a mosque is just simply sitting here at the bottom of the composition. And I can show you That's the gradient I used. So it's two colors. There's a feed between the two as well. And I have this set to Hard Light blend mode. This is how it would look like in normal mode, but I think hard like maybe overlay, that's a little bit too dark. I think hard light is probably the best combination with the background color and the whole composition in general. The cool thing about opacity masks is that they are completely editable, so they are non-destructive. So we can just select the group. And within the transparency panel, if you want to see without the mask, we just shift click on the mask, which reveals how it was before. And then we can see after by just simply undo and redo. Let me know in the comments section, which one do you prefer? Do you prefer it with the opacity mask or a V doubt? They both look quite nice, but I think with the mask is just a little bit more subtle and easier to read. 15. Blend Tool - Intertwine : As usual, I start off by having my sketch on a template layer in the background, and I'm going to work on top of it on the separate layer called the artwork. I will start using the ellipse tool and holding down the Shift key, I'm going to draw my first circle that I will place here on this part of the text. I'm going to also select the color for this. And notice that I have phi swatches. I actually got this swatches from the Color Themes panel, which you can get to by clicking on this little icon. So if you are not sure what colors you should work with, choosing the Explore option, you will be able to find lots of user defined color themes. And they will all have five colors in them. Let's see if I like this one. I can just choose Add to Swatches. And there you go. We have another color group. So this is a brilliant way of finding inspiration and testing out different color themes. I'm going to pick this one that we created here. I'm in the original circle and then I Alt, click and drag to duplicate it, will change the color, maybe to this other color or even a completely different color there. Then Alt, click and drag, duplicate it again, change the color. Then keep doing this. I can even alternate these colors. Now that I have three different colors, I can just hold click and drag this one down here, then Alt click and drag that. And essentially, what I'm trying to keep in mind is that these will be the anchor points in my blend. So once I create the blend, I will join these together and I think already ahead like the way I would draw with the pen tool, I'm placing down these anchor points. If you're not familiar working with the pen tool. And this is something that you need to experiment with until you get comfortable. But even if you do the wrong placements, you can always amend them later so it doesn't really matter. Now, let's just continue placing them down. I'm going to again use this color and then the darker purple. And that's basically all we need it for the first word. So I'm going to now switch to the blend tool. W is the shortcut for it. And all I have to do is to click on this first circle, then the next one, then the next one, and the next, and so on and so forth. Just make sure that you go through them in order, in the order you wish to create the text. And of course it doesn't look anything like the shape behind it, the path that we created. But once I press Control or Command Y, I can switch to the outline view. I will actually be able to refine the blend path to whatever we need. So all you need to do at this point is to switch to the pen tool and holding down the Alt key, you can start bending these curves. So Alt, click and drag or Option click and drag will bend those path segments. Now unfortunately, this is a shortcut that only works, I think from CC 2018 onwards. So it's for newer versions of illustrator. But let me just keep doing this. And if you have older versions, you can probably do the same thing just by adding additional points with the pen tool and then start dragging them around, adding the anchors. But this shortcut just saves a lot of time. So it's just much faster. Bending these straight lines around and also holding down Alt or Option key, I can drag the anchors or handled points as well to get them in the right place. And notice how the little circles are staying in the same place so they're not moving around. They are just static, staying in that original place where we place them down. Now, I am going to refine these curves a bit like this one here as well. I'm just going to drag the handles out a bit further. And I think that looks quite good. The only sharp coronaries here on the top. So I'm just going to try to smooth that out by using the handles. Okay? Something like that. Now, if I press Command or Control Y, we can switch back to seeing the actual colors that we created. And we can even temporarily turn off the background just so we can see how it looks. Now, even at this point, it looks quite interesting. So we have these little dots. But once we select the shape and we double-click on the Blend tool in the tool bar, we can specify exactly what settings we want to use with this. So instead of using this option, we can switch to smooth color for the spacing. And immediately you can see how much better it looks. So if I click away, you go, it looks perfect. Now the only thing that we need to fix, of course, is the alignment. So at this point I'm just going to drag the anchor points with the direct selection tool. And I'm not even bothered at this point to make it exactly the same as my original drawing. That was more like just a guide to create this shape. But now that I have them in place, I can set it up. And it looks quite nice. And this is the point where I would actually continue doing the same thing. But all the rest of the details. 16. Adding more details to the composition - Intertwine : Now you might be wondering why I didn't do the whole thing in one. The reason for that is I'm trying to keep it simple for the blend tool. So instead of doing it all in one, even though it's continuous line, as you can see the design, it's better to separate the artwork into 34 or five separate blends and then try to get those blends matching on the meeting points. So you will see exactly how this work, but if you try to do it all in once, it will either crashed Illustrator or you will be really struggling to get the right transitions. So it is definitely worth splitting it up like I'm doing it here. So let's carry on. I'm going to use the same circle that I had before by just selecting one of them from the layers panel, control or command C and then Control or Command F to paste it in, drag it out of that blend group, and then I can now move it freely and place it down somewhere around here. Okay, so now we can do the same exact thing. Old click and drag, or click and drag. And then just first I'm going to place down these points just very quickly. There, there, there. And then I can now change that color. So this one can be that bright color. This one can be the darker one, and then just alternated. So again, maybe select these two can be the bright color and then that can be the dark color. And that's also the dark color there. So it's almost like an alternating pattern in a way. Now, to make sure that the blend continues, I'm going to also duplicate this point, drag it up here, align it with the other shape, sent that to the same exact color, and that will also be part of this second blend. That way I can connect the two together. So that's an important step there to make sure that I don't mess up my previous blend. I'm going to lock that. That means I won't be able to accidentally selected. And now I can use the blend tool and start from the first circle and click on the second. And then just keep going through it like before. Make sure we go through in the right order. Okay. So this is probably a little bit longer and has more joints than the previous bland. But still I think this should be fine. Hopefully it's not going to crash Illustrator. So it's always good to save. I'm just saving at this point. And then what I'm going to do is to switch again to the outline view. So Command or Control Y on the keyboard. And at this point we can even turn off the visibility of the other shape just so it doesn't get in the way. And using the pen tool, I can Alt, click and drag to create my first curve. Then drag this one out, holding down the Alt key continuously. I'm not even letting go. I can control the handles as well. Then I can bend this shape. I can bend this other path as well. Also adjust the handles straight away. This shape. And these are the tricky ones here. So you want to make sure that the handles on top of this are continuous so there's no break between the two handles. Something like that. Maybe we can drag this out a bit further and then drag that out further as well. That's quite good. Then holding down Alt key again, Let's just bend this and that. I'm using the handles. We can add a little bit of curve there. We can also add a bit more smoother curve here. Again, avoid having a break between the two handle points. Something like that. Which closer, that can be a bit further out. Alright, and then Alt click and drag again. Alter option like that. And the easy one here at the end. There we go. So now if I press Control or Command Y, we switch back to the normal view. I can turn off my original drawing just so we can see what we've created. And as always, we have to select the path, double-click on the Blend tool, and then choose Smooth Color and click Okay. And it's going to regenerate the design. And now we can turn back the first word that we created. And you can see because we aligned the point where they are joined up and we use the same exact color. It looks like it's a continuous path. So that's a clever way of avoiding creating a blend that is too long. So just breaking it up like this. And of course, if you feel like that, you want to move things around, you can do that. You can select circles. Let's say in this case I just click on this and I can even use the arrow keys on the keyboard. So up, down, left, right, I can nudge them around. I can also move this May 1 be a little bit and just refine the shape. So there's no overlap, even this one here, we can just move a little bit further out. That's the fun thing that once you have these shapes in place, it's so much easier to make a man's and you can really refine, get the negative space nicely filled in. So I'm just going to unlock this other shape as well so I can start playing around with these points. And oh yes, this is the point where we have the meeting part. And if I want to move this point here, I have to make sure I create a marquee selection there. I'm going to select both of those circles. And then I can move them at the same time. Then I can move with probably around here. 17. Recolor Artwork, Color Picker - Intertwine : And now let me speed up the video a bit because I'm going to repeat the same steps, but then I'm going to explain a few more things before we finalize this artwork. Okay, Now that we have the final result, let me show you a few really cool techniques the way we can improve this composition. First of all, what if I wanted to change the colors? So at this point, I'm happy with the way it looks, but what if I want to use or just test out different colors? Well, the easiest way to try that is by selecting everything Control or Command a, and then click on this icon on the top, the re-color artwork feature, and you can select individual colors, double-click on them. And then from the color picker, you can either pick colors manually or switch to the color swatches, which we list all the colors in your document. And then you can pick another one. Then click Okay, and that's going to update it. Once again. Maybe instead of this color, I'm going to use a gown color swatches and this yellow. And then for the purple, I'm going to switch to this turquoise color. And we can see already how this new version looks like. So if I click Okay, we can compare before and after. So it's as simple as that to make changes. Or you can also use the re-color artwork feature in edit mode, where you can move the points around in the color wheel freely. Or if you'd like a combination, you just want to change the hue. You can look these together by clicking on this little chain here. And then when you start moving them around, you will see how it's going to re-color all of them at the same time, but keeping the relations between the colors the same. That's quite a nice color combination there. So once again, That was before, and this is after. The next thing you can do is to change the settings of each of your glands. So for example, this one up here. If I go to Object menu and choose blend, There's two options. First of all, reverse spine, which would change the order of the blend. Instead of starting with this bright pink and ending up in the dark, purple, is going to reverse the colors. So now you can see we have a bit more of a jump on each end, but this could be also an intentional, and it actually looks quite nice. It just defines the words a little bit more. So I had to have a little bit of a break between each of the glands. But I'm going to undo this and show you another feature again from object blend. This is called reverse front-to-back, but this will do is to change what's on top and whilst behind in the pons. So for example, here you can see we have these bright color on top, but once I choose reverse front-to-back, we will get the purple or dark purple detail coming to the top and every other overlap is going to be reversed. That's also quite useful and sometimes you can get to better results by playing around a little bit with the settings. Once you have your blends ready. 18. Stroke thickness, final details - Intertwine: And finally, probably the coolest feature is that you can actually change the thickness of your strokes. Now because they are not actually strokes. They are the blends between these circles that we created in the beginning. You have to be a little bit more clever than just simply changing the stroke settings. What you need to do is to go into each of your blends and make sure you lock the path, which is also referred to as the spine of the bland. So let's just lock that in each of these I'm going to lock it here as well. Going there, It's usually on the top in each of the blends. So it's easy to find it. And once I went through and logged everything, now if I do a select all or Control or Command a to select all the circles in the design. Now, the reason why that is useful, because now we can first check whether they are all aligned. So where there's a join, it should be aligned and I can spot that there's actually an issue here. So I'm going to use the direct selection tool and start dragging this until it snaps and aligns to the other one. I was a good way of spotting the mistake here and actually still not aligned. Let me just move it away and then move it back. Now, it should be aligned. I can select the two together, move them up there. That's looks better. Now for this feature to work, we have to make sure that we have only the circle selected and not the parts. So the spines within the blends and even though will be logged, those, they actually get selected when we use the command or control a shortcut. So instead of using that, there is another tool called the Magic Wand, which can select the same objects within the design. And what I would do is to click on one of these circles. And you can see immediately it selects all the other circles in the design. I can go into outline view as well, and it looks like it's all selected. Now, if I check my groups, I can see that the parts are not selected. So this was much easier and quicker way to do the selection. By the way, if you want to refine how the magic one is working, just double-click on it and you can choose whichever filtering you would like to work with. I was using opacity and that managed to filter out only the circles and not selecting the outline. Now that I have the circle selected, you can finally use the effect I wanted to show you. So we go to the Object menu, choose, Transform, and Transform Each. So you don't want to scale because that would just increase, decrease the size of the whole composition. You want to choose Transform Each, which means that you will be able to re-size the circles individually and keep them wherever they were originally so without changing their position. So I'm going to turn on preview. And I will change the horizontal scale to 50. And then the vertical scale or so of the 50. And there you go. That's the reduced thickness applied on the design. And the same way, if I want to make it thicker, I could say type in one hundred and twenty, hundred and twenty. And now we have a much thicker line which fields in the negative space more. So at this point you can experiment and see what thickness works best. If you want to make it really thin, you can go down to 25 per cent and so on and so forth. Of course, you can even do individual changes. So if I just do 5050, then I can select one of the circles, let's say this one here and then use object transform scale in this case, and maybe type in 200. Then you can see we can create variation in thickness as well by individually adjusting circles. Of course, we can even select multiple circles. So maybe select this that, that I'm just holding down the Shift key, randomly picking a few, and then go back again using transform each disk this time because we don't want to move them around. So once again, just type in two hundred, two hundred and there you have more variety, again in the width. So the possibilities are really endless and it just comes down to your creativity. What your final result will look like. 19. Conclusion: Well done for finishing this course. I hope you had just as much fun going through it as I had recording it. And of course, don't forget about the class project. Because remember, practice makes perfect. I can't wait to see your work, so make sure to submit it. And in case you like this course, and you would like to learn more from me, then there's plenty of other courses that you can find here. Go ahead check them out now. I can't wait to meet you in the next one.