Design Like Draplin: 21 Tips for Speeding Up Your Design Workflow

1. Introduction: Okay. This is Mike Hat. All right. "Jimmy, open the door. Open the door." DDC Skillshare number 5. Let's go. Hello, I am Aaron Draplin here, our fit skill share. We are calling this one, 7, 7, 7. It's tips for before you design, tips while you're designing, and tips when you get ready to hand that file off.This is all about productivity, efficiency, and just making things faster in your day-to-day. This is how I work. This is how I ensure that when I hand stuff off, the math is good, the files are tight, the folder structure is nice. This is the stuff that no one told me 25 years ago. I had to learn along the way. You're going to learn it today. This is broken down into three sections. You've got the before, the during, and the after. If you dig into that before, you're not even cracking open a document, you're building the right documents to go jump into. So we're going to build proper, new document profiles, things that are perfectly accustomed to how you want to work with colors, and symbols, and things. When we get into the during, the idea of being able to stop yourself mid project is to see where you are at. That's a healthy thing to do. I want to give you a number of tips to go through and just sort of clean things up a little bit. The final section, the after, that's where a whole set of art forms start. The handoff is just as big a deal as whatever you made on that page. How do you ensure that that is un-mess-with-able later on? We've got seven tips just for that. When you bought us out, I'm a little nervous to even say this stuff. We're not making something today. What we're making, is a better workflow. We are making them more productive, we are making this stuff bullet proof. We're making that. That's pretty fucking good. 2. How to Take This Class: We'll call this one, 777, and it's tips and tricks, and things that you just don't think about. What we're doing is we're attacking projects before, during, and after. It's a stuff you'd better have time because this isn't just about that project, this is about the rest of your digital life. It's like this; my buddies who lived down in Southern California, and they had to budget time in their life to just drive to wherever they were going. Over the course of the year, every year, they would talk about how they got to so-and-so and so-and-so, and they would add up and say, "Wow, this year, three-and-a-half weeks, I was on the road." This is the same thing. We're getting rid of your commute. Be it the way that you grab a symbol, or grab a shape or the distance that your mouse has to travel to get to this piece, and then travel back, or the amount of clicks you're using to get to a certain a folder. If you think about that stuff ahead of time, you're going to get time back for doing other stuff. I wonder what do people even do these days. They drink stupid little beers on a piece of wood with six little beers, here's a dark one, here's a light, here's a frothy one, stupid things like that. You'll have more time for stupid things like that. So this is broken down into three sections. You've got the before, the during, and the after. If you're digging into that before, you're not even cracking open a document., you're building the right documents to go jump into. Because if I've learned anything, it's not necessarily what you're designing. Sometimes, it's just how you're designing it. It's the space you're in. So we're going to build proper new document profiles. Things that are perfectly accustomed to how you want to work with colors and symbols, and things, and it's the idea that you're prepping your work space. You have the right pallets, and the right tools, and the right ways to do things right. That's in the before section. When we get into the during, I get cooking, and I have my little ways of doing things, but I have little checklists in here. I have little checklists all over littered, all over my desktop that makes me stop halfway because it just make things more efficient inside my document. To check the math on a color. Just basically, housekeeping. Tidying things up halfway through that makes it easier for me to finish that whole thing up later on. The idea of being able to stop yourself, mid project, just to see where you're at, that's a healthy thing to do. Check all your links, check all your stuff, check all your numbers, and just do a little bit of housecleaning. That's a good thing. I'm going to give you a number of tips to go through, and just clean things up a little bit. In that during process, there is a big one. I can't remember what number is, but it's this idea of designing with subtraction, this is a big one. If you were to watch this thing just for that, that's enough for this. Because it changes the way that you build things. It changes the way how you attack any vector for that matter. I'm not saying it's the right way, it's the way that I trick myself now. I use the shapes, and I use the program in a little bit different way to get somewhere quicker. The final section, the after, it's like I said, it's like, who even has time to think about what you're doing before or what you're doing in the middle, we just have to go, go, go. But when you are done with that piece, that's where a whole another set of art forms start. The hand-off is just as big a deal is whatever you made on that page. So we're going to give you tips and tricks, and goodies, and things to think about of how to hand things off a little bit more efficiently to basically just shave time off, not only your life but your client's life, and the whole process, or even better than that. We're going to give them less, and less things to screw up on their end because we all know what's like to give off a file. Someone clicked something, does something, drag something that comes back wrong. You have to change it, and we're adding time onto our lives. How do you ensure that that is un-mess-with-able later on? We've got seven tips just for that. Now, whereas the first four showed ways of making things, ways of designing in a circle, ways of thinking about a face, or just whatever pieces of type or whatever it was, this one is going to be a little more advanced. But here's what I want to say is, I want this to hold everybody. There's stuff in this 90 minutes that applies to every single one of you in a project you're in, right this second. Something you're starting tomorrow or something you might have even dealt with a couple of months ago that you have to crack open all the time. There's stuff here. If you can go through all the 21 pieces, the 777, awesome. We tried to build it that way. If some of the stuff is a little intense, just remember, just like myself, I need to remember to stop myself. If I don't quite get something, that's a quick Google. Go jump into Illustrator, Google that thing, figure out what I'm talking about and jump back in, and then keep getting quicker, quicker, quicker. But the idea here is there's enough stuff within the before, and during, and after for all of us here. That's a good healthy content to go and have fun with. Along the way, I have a couple little surprises with me refining some logos, and some sketches, and some things, and that added even more stuff to it. But if you are just to break down the 777, there's some pretty cool stuff. At the end, has all the dust has settled. There's a little bonus thing here. I designed a little tiny checklist. Here it is right now. Here it is right now floating in my hands. This little checklist that somebody can print out, and it's good at the end of every project. It's no different than how I do. When I'm done with the project, I go through these 15 little points just to check for all sorts of stuff. It's just a good protocol to make sure you're not missing something. It's not different that was making snowboarding magazines. Every page had about 22 elements we had to go check against. We would get done with the page, we'd go through the checklist, and we knew, we were that much closer to being done. So here's the link we can go get it. It's a downloadable forever. So you can download this thing, print them out, trim them out, put them right in your field notes, and that works at the end of just about every project. After a while, you get to memorizing it. But here's the thing, 25 years in, I still forget points on here. That's why these things are important. So download it, check those things off the list, and hand off bulletproof files. 3. Before 1: Take Control of Your Space: This is going to be tip one. All right. It's tip one and really what it comes down to is when I go and I look over the shoulders of some youngsters or colleagues sometimes, you see their workspace and here's the deal. On an iMac like this, on a big monitor, yes there's that much more real estate to work with. But on a laptop, I mean it's super tight but the idea is this is creating this culture of how to use your space well and how to use your space super refined. I look over the shoulders of these kids and I see there's palettes lying all over the place and they're just looking something like this. There's things just sort of willy-nilly lying all over the page and they're having to push stuff, they're having to make room and stuff, and that's just crazy because they were learning what these things were as they were going, they would leave them here, they would quit the program and then it would show back up, and after a while it's just this big Frankenstein mess. If you just take a palette and you just snap it just below, it nestles into that little column there. Now watch how quick if I decide to take these other pieces and slam into this, you start to make sense of this thing where it's like wow, that can be all refined down into this. Now, here's my workspace and you see these two columns here. What this allows for me is if I'm working on a page, you can see where that thing is resting here, a command zero brings that full-page nothing is messing with it over there. So if I was to go and show you all the pieces and why they are where they are, it's because there's a strategic idea to this. For instance, for your color palette guide here, you want that thing to be close to your swatches because as you're tinkering on something and you want to go pick this green here and we want to adjust that thing, that shouldn't be over here on the other side, it should be right below it. So as you go through here there's reasons that your gradient if you're to go grab that green build a gradient with that thing and grab a couple of different greens, you want that gradient right there so you can see what you're working on, and then adjust right here and it's all close. You see what I'm saying? It's all close. That's your color zone. You come down here, you transform, you stroke pathfinder align, info, symbols, my layers. Now, like anything, learning all these little tips and tricks. If I can't quite get to something or I need a little more room here as you see here, you just double-click the name and it snaps it back-up and I've got access to this stuff. If I open up another document here, it's you start getting tabs along the top here. So if you close that document here, you can see where I've got that little extra white bar. Well, no, leave that thing spaced where it's at because that is snapped to the perfect space for when you have nine documents open. So the idea is this, don't rely on the default, go on and learn it, learn how to nestle these things, learn how to push them around, and then when you get them to where you like them, quit and start over, and it's going to remember where all that stuff is at. All right. So we just talked about on the right side of the screen, we're taking our tool palettes and organize them into these nice columns, is super efficient. You have a maximum real estate to work in the middle of your screen. We're going to jump back over here into the Northwest corner, here I'm going to go up into the Seattle and the Oregon of your screen here, we're going to go and just talk about these tiny little tool palettes. I guess these are just your tools, which are my arrow keys, my little pen, take away anchor point, add a point, there is all the different shears, all the different little reflects and rotates and stuff, all the way down to these last three right here which I'll just pull out for a second before I snap them back in. These are all astute graphics and I know that in the last couple we've talked about astute. This is the only set of plugins I use, my main ones I'm using are like this line perpendicular to two paths and line perpendicular to a path and line tangent from a path and then of course the smart remove tool brush tool. In previous Skillshares, I've shown that stuff how I can use those things. Go explore astute graphics, get those plug-ins, check them out. But yeah, wrapping this all of this, is all about commanding your workspace and understanding how the tools open and close and then understanding what you are and aren't going to use and how to nestled them into nice columns or up into that top-left corner in the little parts and pieces you'er going to be using all the time for efficiency of clicks. All right. I hope that makes sense and command your workspace. 4. Before 2: Build New Doc Profiles: Now, you've adjusted your palettes to where you like them. There's something bigger at play here though. Because here's the deal. If I close out this document I've started, and you start a new document here, and it brings the new document window, there is different defaults in here. Their is print web, mobile, etc. I've got one down here that's called basic CMYK. Now, I'm just going to click on that, because you're going to go build your own here in a second. When I click on that thing, what's it going to do, it's going to bring up where my palettes, I had them adjusted to. The smart part about this, is you have complete control over your Illustrator program, and you tell it what color swatch set you want there for your specific needs, and you tell it what symbols you want inside there. But where do you even do that? So here's how you go find this thing. When you jump on here and you go take a look at where this. Here's my hard drive on my iMac. The user's, I go into Aaron drop, there's my deal. You go into your library, you go into application support, you find Adobe. There's Adobe. Now, there's a bunch of stuff inside here. Now, somewhere, I must have tried to load the new 23, but I think I went back. But I'm still in 22. How you check that, is you go back to your Illustrator, and just go about Illustrator, and then it will show up. There it is, 22. So you know what version you're in. So now, when you open this Adobe Illustrator 22, you go into the en_US, and scroll down a little bit here, and you're going to see New Document profiles. Now, here's where you need to go to. Now, if we just take a look at this lineage here. So I am just going to pause for a second, and you start from the root of your machine and work your way, all the way up to these guys. Now, you can take a look where that thing lives. So now, inside here, you can put anything you want in here. But this basic CMYK, if I double-click this guy, it opens up. Here is my basic CMYK file. It comes with all this stuff in here. All my swatch colors and my palettes and things. Now, check this out. If I go make a new color, a good salmon color. So here, we are in the Northwest, a good salmon color. Now, check it out. Now, if you go grab this piece over here, and you go grab this little swatch here and plop it into this, and you double-click it, and you jump into these scene and you make sure it's global, you call it salmon. Now, we're in a root file inside the new document profiles folder. Now, if I close this thing, save it, and I quit, you fire this thing back up. You jump into here and you go into your basic CMYK. So there it is. You are going to start this new thing. Basic CMYK, when you open that guy up, there is that salmon. See it? So when I go and I touch this thing, there's that new salmon color. So what you did was you're loading inside that folder, inside that new document folder. You're loading the pieces that you want, you're tailoring this thing. Every new file out there, from here forward has this stuff in it. So what you did there is, you just curated your start to this stuff. So when I'm starting a new document, like I'll do right now. Like I'll just go, and grab a new document, and I'll say, "Okay. New document." We're going to call this thing, SKILLSHARE_NO_5. There it is. You can see here, it's got all my parts and pieces, and my symbols. It's got all my little swatches because it's reading from that initial file there. So yes, that's how you build a new document profile, command that stuff, put exactly what you want in there, and why. So that said, moving right along, we're going into number 3, where how you add a color swatch to one of these things. 5. Before 3: Customize Your Colors: Now, what we're doing is we're sort of curating our perfect basic CMYK or whatever you want to call it for that matter. There's going to be two steps here. You have to load up the swatches with all your colors that you like and then load up your symbols. I'm going to talk a little bit about what I have and why I have it. So when I open this thing up, you can see here I've got CMYK, basic CMYK stuff. I've got a nice set of gradients. I've got all the Pantones. I constantly come back to your orange 21s, your Pantone 165s, just basic things. Like there's no sense of having to go load those color swatches back up every time for you to get to your Pantone colors when you can just have them loaded in here and ready to go, right? So what I'm constantly doing is I'm constantly adding to this thing because, like I say, a project comes along. I just did a logo that had a little bit of a salmon color in it. If we need that thing built in here, I know now to say let me go and tinker on the new document profile basic CMYK file. Let me tinker on that because the next couple of months, that salmon color will always be inside there. Here's what I want to ask you guys. If you think about how to use a color palette effectively, who here that's watching this right now, when they're working on a project they have to go and find, every single time they have to go here into your words. You go to your window, into your swatch libraries you'll find here it is, your colored books and you go open up that Pantone solid coated. I just took seven steps to get to that one color that you need for that brand. If you're working at an agency, if you're working at a college or you're working in your backyard like I am, and you're working on a client and they require a couple specific Pantones, load those into your new document profile because that means it's going to sort of open that thing up. So when I used to work on Coal Headwear and Union Binding Company, I had all the oranges of Union always in there for me. I always had the color palette of all the Coal because every time I open up a new doc, I had the guys I was working on all the time right there ready to go. So that's set. If we need a salmon color, I'm going to go grab a box and we'll just make a nice big salmon color here. So now that you've adjusted your color palettes, let's go and let's just hit a orange real quick. Go down to your color palette and then get that salmon color looking just about right. Okay, there's a good looking salmon color. Now if I go and I double click this thing, we want to make sure it looks right. It's got good math, fine. We call it salmon. We make sure it's global. Now, check it out. When I get rid of this out of here and I quit out of here, it's going to remember that the next time you start that thing, that salmon is in there now and it's like that's the idea here. Now you can curate and tune all those names up here. As you go through, you can see some of the old, residual stuff latte, cappuccino, mochaccino or mocha, whatever. Those are all colors from some old basic CMYK from I don't know, Illustrator or whatever. Three years or something, ten years ago, but they continue to work because it's a nice range of brown's for just my palette. So think through what you need. When I say, if you're working for a college or an agency or whatever, think of the time that you're banging around, having to go find those Pantones over and over and over again. That's where this really shaves a lot of time off. Okay, so that was loading up your color palette. Now, let's move into your symbols and why this is important to load that stuff with all kinds of cool stuff. 6. Before 4: Make Your Own Symbols: Okay, guys. Here's tip number four, where we add symbols to that route file inside your new document profiles. So you're adding symbols. Now this one, what is the symbols part? Number one, what it is, it's just vectors. If I go and I show you, I've got a DDC logo floating around there, cool. But I also have a small version. So when you go zoom in on that a little bit and you see here, see now this guy, it's ready to be used, you have to expand it. So what you do is you have to hit the break link to symbol. You got to get rid of the smallest smalls here to remind myself of what I'm messing with. But here's the thing is like the pro tip would be this. You come into that thing zero. Nothing. You group all this junk, and then when you go command Y into your preview, you can see what you're messing with here. That you'd seen two orange DDC's but actually, that's your proper dimension. This one, it's got the more rounded because the idea is if you're in the corner of some tiny little screen printed poster I made, you don't want that big one that's meant to be this big, just reduced stuff, I need a little bit of optical adjusting, and just a little bit of luck to just give that thing, just the right little sprinkles so it still works at this tiny little size. So here's what I'm doing is I'm loading up my symbols pal with all this kind of stuff. So if you go take a look here, if I want an arrow, there's an arrow, I'm going a couple of different arrows, for when you're doing your iterations or whatever. I have a heart, there's a couple of hearts there, couple different hearts. But even beyond that, think of rudimentary shapes. So check it out. Say I'm doing a design of a salad bowl, and I need that little half circle. How would you make that half circle? Depending on where you're at outside of your new document, probably you're in a new document, you're starting and you need to make this half circle. Well, here's the thing, watch this and count the steps. One, clicks the ellipse tool, two starts it, three after you shift and hold that thing down, and we made a circle. There's a circle. We go color that new salmon. Now, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. So check it out. There's nine steps to get to that little salad bowl. That's crazy because here's the thing. If you think about this the right way and you build these one time and plot them into your symbols palette like this. I want a little cell bowl shape or just a half a circle, I go over to my symbols palette, there's half circle, I pull out here, I expand it. Let's count those clicks. Grab it here, one, two, three. Three clicks versus nine clicks and that thing is ready to start playing with, So here's the thing. What I did was, I built like a circle, I built a little hexagon, I built the hexagon tilted to another 15 or 30 degrees or whatever it is, I built the little home plate, and I've got like a quarter piece here, I've got a little pill shape, and all the way down the line the teardrops and whatever. I've got my old dog Gary in there. If I miss my old wiener dog Gary, there he is. Or stuff where it gets really serious like this, like think of the coup here listening right now, has to rebuild pan tone chips every day. That's crazy. Build it one last time, plop it in there, and there's your Pantone chip. When you expand it now, and we're going to go get that in that cool salmon and we're going to call this just kind of salmon and you can see here now when I go to that salmon color, and I hit it and now this thing is just I have it built inside here as a symbol as aerial. Just a default typeface and now we'll just give that just a little kick of some Helvetica bold. You don't have to build your pan tone chips anymore. You've got it built inside that symbols pallet. So that said, here we are loading up the symbols palatable stuff because we're inside that new document profile. So whatever shapes and things you do, and you plot that thing, so check this out. Now, if I go to make some crazier shape real quick here, I just draw something. Here's my little thing. So that could have been a half circle, it could have been a square, it could have been a logo, it could have been, for instance, I have my signature. If I'm signing a PDF, that's just a vector. See it? That's just a vector. But that comes out of my symbols palette ready to go and I can plot that into a PDF. I don't have to go find that signature and some big spider web of files. It's in there in every document now. So if I take this new piece here, here it is, I just simply drag that over into this, call it new symbol, we'll call this the Skillshare_Squiggle. Now, this is going to be a static symbol, and we say Now, check it out. We get rid of it. It's there. Now, let's quit out of here because remember, this is in you're inside the new document profiles, you're in the basic CMYK or whatever you want to call it. We quit out here, save it. Now, we're going to fire back Adobe Illustrator backup, and we are going to start a new one. So Command new, we're going to go to basic CMYK, we're going to start this guy up, and check it out. So say we want that squiggle. You pull it out of there, you expand it now. That's an every document moving forward. So there's your squiggle. You want to color that thing salmon. There it is. Because if you go back now, so let's go back and let's review. You go back to that, inside that root folder, you can see here where this thing is buried all the way inside this thing. You go back to your route file there. You'd better get rid of that little squiggle because it's going to be at everyone moving forward. But as you look at this symbols palette here, I tried to be someone articulate, DDC logo, DDC logo small, DDC brand, color spectrum. Go in there and command it by double-clicking those things. You can give them the proper names, and have the proper hierarchies because remember, that goes with every file that you built out of this document profile moving forward. 7. DETOUR: Draplin Designs Symbols: Okay, so I just showed you guys how to use a symbol palette, right? The idea that if you build that really simple shape and put it in there, it just cuts down all those clicks. There's no sense in having to built a half circle over and over again. You've got one in there ready to go. So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to build a set of these things, right? Then I'm going to save that into a nice easily downloadable Adobe file. I'll save it back a bunch of versions. You guys can come and grab this thing. But what it's going to be, it's just going to be rudimentary shapes. You can take those things and plop them into your Symbols Palette. Then learn how to go, give them the right names and the right so you call them either a little movie clip or a graphic, if I remember correctly. But just figure that thing out, or do a web search for symbols, right? A web search for a symbols in Adobe Illustrator, and see how they tell you how to use these things. But here's what I'll do is I'm going to build a set right now so you've got some folder to play with and start plopping those things in there. So I'm going to build a bunch right now, and here goes. Okay. So I'll just walk you guys through here, but I'm just going to build a bunch of fun stuff fast. So one thing to think about is I'm making this a one-inch little square here, right? You just want to make sure it's a simple 100 percent blacks. Let's go find that. There it is, 100 K black, cool. So it's a square, and we take this off to the side and now you've got a diamond, right? Cool. All right, let's go make some little cool trapezoid or something like; a badge do dad here something. So I'll just quickly do this thing. Now what you're doing is you're taking that square, you're just given that thing just a little bit of a tweak, and you've got this next little shapes. So here, I'm going to grab my little star tool, right? This thing now check it out going up and down, you could add little points in the star, right? So if you just want a five-point star, there is one, there's a five. Now check it out, if you hit "Shift" and then "Command" that allows to mess with that. I don't even know what you call it the armpits of each or something, right? But if you hit, "Option" and "Shift, " that makes it into a perfect star, see that right there. So I'm just going to build you a star. So that's using the Star Tool. There's a couple different ways you could do this. You can go and build a triangle lots of different ways. But with this one, when I start that thing out, it's starting as a star you go down a couple clicks. Now you have that triangle, you have to get that little armpit figured out. By hitting "Option," it just makes it into that perfect little piece, right, see that? So there is your triangle. So that is the Star Tool and you're hitting "Shift", "Option" and then that shift keeps it from skewing any which way, and then the option keeps that thing straight along. You lift the option, see it's going back into that weird little armpit piece. If you hit the "Command" that allows you to tweet that armpit piece, see that? Right, there it is, a triangle real quick. Now I'm going to make a pentagon. So grab your Polygon tool here, and get that thing going. Now, it's built into that pentagon shape right now. But if you go down one arrow click, now it's four-sided, go up one, and you have five sides. If that shift, is the perfect pentagon, right? Same thing again over here. You've got your Polygon tool, go up one-click, now you've got that hexagon, right? So there's your hexagon. Now check it out. That's on that one axis there. But what we'll do here is we'll make it one more 30-degree turn, because that's going to be like a beehive kind of shape, right? So if you go 30-degrees, what we're doing here is we're just making efficient shapes for you to grab and load into your Symbols Palette for later on, right? Now I'm going to make a whole home plate shape, right? So I'm going to grab this little six-sided, little hexagon over here. Now, before, if you notice here this is a tricky thing, because we took the bounding box from this. We took it over to this 30 degrees tilted. But you can see where it tilted the entire bounding box with it. Here's how you remove that thing, right? So if you go under "Object" and go to "Shape", "Expand the shape", now go under "Transform", reset the bounding box. That thing snaps that thing back, right? So now it's on this nice axis. Because if you look at all of these, they're all in that right axis, see right there? Now this one right here is going to be a little bit trickier, because when you go and you take the path, it's just a 45 degree tilted square. You take that onto your shape, expand the shape, and then go and transform, and reset the bounding box. Now you've got that bounding box. To see the bounding boxes there, there, there, there, there. Now this one here, because if we go remove this top piece and make a little home plate shape, right? Let's see another little odd shape you can put your symbols palette. Let's organize these real quick. This kind of goes back into like, now this is what you're going to see later on the download, right? So okay, these are just simple shapes. I'll just clean them up and using my align palette. I'll do the vertical align center, and then I'll go to the horizontal distribute center. It just cleans up that little line a little bit, right? Because if we're going to go into the next thing which might be like these circles. So here's a circle, but what I would recommend is go give it a safe, just a different color, right? So 50 percent gray. So these just bounce off, these are your rounded edges. Then up here, are your squared off edges, right? So let's just go over here and let's just quickly make these little shapes that we're going to load into your palate later on. Here is a half circle pointed up or pointed down, let's flip it back around. So now it's like a bowl, right? If you want to get real nerdy with this stuff, this is just shaving off if you need that half-moon shaped pointed this way. Now you've got these pieces, where when you load them into your palate, that many less clicks to get to that little piece, right? The idea is this, it's like, if we're going to make a face real quick here we make this. Then we say, "Okay, here's a little eye, then here's a little star for a little kiss eye or something". All right, cool. By the way, Gene Simmons, can suck it and that one's on the record for life. All right, there you go. You kiss fans out there buying all those stupid lunch boxes and shit and whatever else, kids man. Okay. Back to where we were we'll leave that star. But now we just changed all these pieces. So another one to think about is just a quarter circle, right? So if you get rid of this piece, and it's going to take me a second to get this thing perfect. Make a point here, you'd bring it out, touched up over here. Lots of ways to do that. You use your Pathfinder to divide it, and just go get that last little piece right here get rid of this one. All right. So I'm catching myself here, right? When I started to build these things and build them quick, I said some being a one-inch. Well, this one's not quite at one-inch. Let's go get it to be the one inch, right? So there it is, it's one inch now. You just want to have nice round numbers, and you blast these things out here. Let this one be one-inch tall will say. Because it's snapping into a nice size when you pull it out of these pieces, right? So all of these are going to be a one-inch tall, right? What those things do is, when we align those things nicely now, as you're pulling them out, the idea is this, if you say you hit "Command", comma and it turns on your little grid here. Then, you do a Shift command, comma and that means you're going to snap to the points now. When you pull one of these out here, that thing snaps nicely into a space. You see that? So the same thing goes for this little shield or something, that's hexagon. Well, I think snaps out of there. That thing right now is one inch wide. It snaps nicely into those pieces. So this is just the efficiency of, say, for me as a logo designer, as I'm building out a page of a 100-logo options or 50-logo options or 10 or whatever it's going to be, I'm using the symbols to my advantage and then also using the grid to my advantage. Because really all this is about, as I'm blasting through, I'm building simple things with simple shapes using the subtraction method and all this stuff but I'm also working towards that presentation. If I'm working on a logo, really the goal is to get a paycheck, but you're using these tools to your advantage. So what we've got here, just in this gray little zone here because you've got a circle broken down into these nine little parts. But what's cool about this now is, if you pull that into your symbols palette and you name it the right thing which would be like, I don't know, 9 o'clock to midnight or something, whatever that little shape and that little piece is. To go build with this thing now, you've got some nice math to work with. So for me, making all these fun little thick line shapes and stuff, you see what I'm doing here is I'm using that nice math and I'm doing just a really taking that one symbol piece and I'm taking that little guy and allowing it to be just this little rainbow thing here. Now that little cluster, you can do a mountain of things with. Like there's a cool little S. But I'll just go add a couple more little stars and stuff and here's a star. But once again, given other color. Just give it a little bit of a lighter gray because it's just going to delineate within or we give a little bit of lighter gray with a little hit of blue. So I just delineates within your symbols palette. You go from these squares and trapezoids and triangles down to these rounded forms in other circles and the little pieces of each of those circles and now down to these different little stars and stuff. So let's go to a star. Let's do a six-pointed. The star of David there, so there's that. Let's do like a seven point or something. So grab your polygon tool, and hold and Shift, hit up arrow. You can see here, now there's a seven-point little thing. Now what's cool about this now is like you're arming yourself. These are like maybe that's like a sheriff's badge or something. But the idea is this, I'm messing with that, it's up to you to customize these pieces and then plop your little proprietary pieces into that symbols palette, because when people ask me things like, "What will happen? I keep seeing this one shape. "Where did you get that shape?" I've been carrying that shape along for years, for instance, this shape right here. So you'll grab your circle tool here. It'll just make a quick oval. You're holding that option to keep it in the center. Now if you hit shift, it's going to go back to that square. So you're just holding the option to keep in that little center. Otherwise, it's all over the place coming off that corner wherever you clicked. Hit the object keeping that center and just make a nice oval and check this little shape out. So you do this oval first, grab it again. Command C, Command F, hit it real quick. Turn it 90 degrees. What we're looking at is we're looking at the space on the inside. So what I'll do is I'll do a quick little multiply on this piece. You're going to get you transparency tool palette, do a multiply. That's the space we want in there. So when I take this thing, I'm not just going to go knock this thing out just yet but we're making another cool shapes. So check this out. Now if I take this thing and I keep track of that, I'll watch this, watch this. When it go off here, we're going to make that and we're going to use the Pathfinder and we're going to use the intersect. So there is a cool shape right there. There is a cool shape you can put into your symbols palette. We'll do it again. Grab those two pieces and come down here and tweak this yet again. These things are live. So if you bring this thing out, now you're getting that cool piece on the inside of there. Here's your Intersect tool. There's another little badge you can put inside here. So that said, go play around these things and command this stuff because now if we take that guy yet again and take it 45 degrees, there's another cool little shape or holding space. I know that we've talked about this in last bunch of things but you remember something inside a shape is a safe place where to live because you still have the nice symmetry of the shape to guide the entire form. So whatever you put in there being a piece of type or a little icon. Now these shapes become these little safe spots for anything that packs inside there. So that said, because here's the deal. If you take a look at this and you just made this cool shape and we grab one of these little pieces and we plop it inside there, you need to got this cool like app-looking thing now. So I'm given out a lot of my tricks but it's up to you guys to go and make your own pieces and then load up your symbols palette, the things that you're comfortable with and then use these pieces in new ways. So now if we take a little audit here and go back and say, okay, let's put that shape in there. Let's make sure it's a nice round number of one inch. There it is, let's bring this guy in here. Let's make it just a half inch tall. So when it comes flying out of there, I'll make it an inch tall. So when it comes flat up. Now you have those pieces. I'll just do one more quick one here. Can we make guys a pill shape. But we're going do it the wrong way first using all these cool things that the Illustrator will provide you and then we're going to make it the right way so we have a bulletproof. So here we go. Turn on your grid. So that's Option, comma, makes sure things snaps to the point. It's stepped onto the point right now. But if we hadn't been turned off, you have to go turn it back on by hitting Shift, Command comma and that turns out so you can snap around. If you make a one-by-two inch shape, because you're thinking a little pill shape. I'll check this out the quickest way to do it and the wrong ways. If we take that thing off to the side and we just do, we grab those four corners, were just quickly round them down to a half inch, check out what happens here. It looks good. But it adds another little point in there and that's dangerous because later on when you're tuning these things, that extra point, it's just dangerous. But see we're allowing the default of the machined around that corner and we're not using the architecture in the proper way. The better way to do it is go back and grab that circle that you built a little bit ago, put it down below. Take the bottom part off Command X, Command F and just paste it back in place. Snap it down to the bottom of that one inch by two inch and now just add these pieces in. Connect those pieces using your pen tool. You're just connecting those pieces. So you've got this pill shape now and we're just going to give it that same blue color. Then what do I do is maybe just do one where there's the pill-shape vertical and the pill-shape horizontal. All right, let's just pull back for a second. What we've got here is we've got like eight shapes. There we've got nine shapes here. We've got another seven shapes here. So now, I'm going to go clean up this thing and then later on at this link right here you can go get this thing and download this thing and play with these things and put them into your symbols patent. Look at me mess with the link. I'm tilting it, I'm squishing it. Don't ever stretch type. I'm stretching it for a second leaving on the wild side. But here, take this link and go down on this thing and play with it and learn this your symbols and add to your tools. All right? Add to your tools. Link away. 8. Before 5: Start from a Template: Little review for a second, we'll be take a look at where we're at now. Jump into Illustrate, you can hit Command+New, and this thing pops up this dialog window. You'll see down here in the bottom left corner this thing called Templates. So I'm just going to click on that for a second. I'm going to show you something here. Now, I've got this thing built years ago. So here's DDC_ DECK_1up, 2up, 3up comes we grab the four pages one, 4up. So check this out. What's cool about this, now, you can see here, these are old symbols that show up in the same because this was built years ago. The palette might be a little bit different because I built those templates years ago, and I'm still using them in new ways, and here's how. It's like, when I open this thing up now, and I zoom in here and take a look at this stuff. Now, check this out. Now, this is my deck. Now, if I was to go show you an existing project here, and I to work for this thing called Super Deluxe. It's a new burger joint in town here. But you have to build the lowly, you have to build the t-shirt, you have to build the pins, all the stuff, all the things. What that thing looks like later on, inside this thing is like you can see here, these things are already built, and ready for people to review, and play with, and try to pick the logo. We land on the logo, we're somewhere around here. But all this little way finding, all these little pieces and stuff, all this stuff is editable inside your template file.So we go back to that template file. I backup for my 4up page here, and I go zoom in on that thing. If we're going to go build something for today and we take a look here. Now, I've already got this built into layers. So I've got the art that goes on the top layer, and then down below, and I've got the way finding. So that's where all your type in little pieces and little presentation round stuff goes. Because here's the thing, you're building outside out here on the outer fringes. You're building the logos, and tuning up. Taking your sketches out of your field notes bringing them in. Tuning them up, doing all the iterations there, and then you go plop them into these presentation files. Because now, when you go make a PDF out of this presentation file, nothing is ready to go. You've killed tons of birds with one stone because you're designing, you're iterating, you're making changes, you're trying new stuff, and then when you're ready to go, it spits it right out into presentation form. That's smart, and that all comes from a template. So here's how you build a template. So when I open up a new window inside the illustrator, I'm opening a new document. I'm going to new. Here's your templates. Where does that stuff live? Well, let's back out a little bit here. It's inside your applications, inside the Adobe Illustrator Application, Cool Extras, and then en_US. Let's go find that thing. Let's go get new window going. We're going to go into our Applications, into Adobe Illustrator, into Cool Extras, and then you're going to see in this en_US is a little templates folder in there. To start a new one, if we did this. Now, check it out. We're just going to go real fast now. Must start a new document. Can we go into basic CMYK that we had built. Now, I'm going to start this whole new thing now. Let's just say we'll make a new template now. All right. Now, check this out. When I go here and I'm going to put something down in the corner, I'm going to put a DDC logo down in the corner. It's going to make this big, so it's easy for you guys to see. Then here is the logo, and I'm going to put something down in the corner here, and something else. I'm going to give it a piece of type Helvetica Bold. I'm going to put this piece over into here. Now check this out. Now, that is your document, what the thing looks like. Turn-off your page tiling. When you zoom out here, there's a nice template page. Now, check it out. I've got all my swatches in there, all my stuff. I've got all my symbols, all my things. Now, when you save this thing out, you save it as an Illustrator template, ait. So we'll call this one, here I am, I'm inside my template's folders. We'll just call this SKILLSHARE_TEST_TEMPLATE. We'll save that there. We'll close that thing up. We'll go test it now. Well, jump into Illustrator, Command+New, we're going to templates and there's my SKILLSHARE_TEST_TEMPLATE. I opened that thing up. There's all the parts and pieces, and you can now, you can go. If I build something today, it goes into this piece. I would adjust all that and customize all that type. Then here's the real tricky part. You have to start a new doc on that. You have to save as out of that template into your folder. So let's go to Dropbox, open projects, down to Skillshare, and then we'll call this one SKILLSHARE_TEST. We'll just go check where this sinks or lands up. See now, you've used your template to start this base piece because if you're going to build this thing out, just watch how quick I can start a new document. If I'm making a logo for Skillshare or something, and I need this. I'm starting round one. I've got a bunch of sketches in my field notes. I'm going to go in, I'm going to start taking these sketches and start building them into vectors, and iterating, and making new pieces all gunning towards that first presentation. Here's how I do it. I would go into my templates, I go into a four-page, probably to start off. So if you take a look back here on each one of these pages, it all says something that's a little. But here's a quick little pro tip for how to switch this things up quick. Go into Edit, Find and Replace. Anywhere that says,''something.'' You go switch that into SKILLSHARE LOGO. Find it, replace all. It says four changes were made, and then you could check yourself. There's that first one, SKILLSHARE LOGO. Here's that second one, here's our third one. Now, it says round one. Let's go put the date in there. So now, here's a little pro tip, just go and copy that real quick, Command+C. To Edit, Find and Replace, put that in, and then go put today's date. Today is 12/03/18. Cool. Find It, Replace All. Now that you've opened your template with four pages, you've got the sink. Now go save this thing as out of the template into the SKILLSHARE folder. I'm going to call this thing SKILLSHARE_LOGO_round1. Now, that thing within those couple steps out of the template, you're ready to start designing. The cool part, that thing is like bulletproof. You've got all your way finding on one layer, all the art up above it. Now, you're ready to start designing that thing. It came out of that template, it's just that much quicker. But see the bigger thing here, an the bigger thing to talk about is consistency. For me as a brand, as this designer, I want to shave time off my life. I don't want to spend my whole life back here. Even though I do, I want to have more time to design and just dink around and play records and stuff, of course. This is the stuff that shaves time off that stuff later on. So understand that when you're building that template, you're just arming yourself for speed later on. Remember, you could build anything you want into that template, and you just have to know where they live, where they reside, and how to use them later on. So that's how you build a template. 9. Before 6 & 7: Organize Your Files: Okay. So this is tip sixth and seventh. This is where you really dig into folder structure in naming conventions to your folder. To give you my best recommendation, hold on to a good solid folder structure to save you later on. Why I say that, is because if you take a look at some of the stuff I'm working on right now. These guys got some e-mails. These guys in the UK, there's a bit of a problem with the, I don't know, printer spreads or the walk-a walker of some shit. If I go look at what I'm supposed to send off these guys in, and I don't want to drag into this too much. But here's the deal, when you open up my Delines, this is a new records coming from this band called the Delines. When you open up that file structure, this becomes everything for me later on. It comes down to just thinking through how this thing is going to grow inside the project. It's like, if your stuff is just blasted into that one folder all over the place, you're asking for trouble, you're wasting way too much time digging around and losing things and stuff. If you're just smart about how you name your files and then name your folders and where they go on where they live, you're going to shave a ton of time off. So here's my best recommendation for this. There's an album, my CD, there's the UK CD, there's imagery working MP3s, holding pages, all the different things that go inside this thing. But for us, if we were to do this today and soak, here's Skillshare number five they were working on right now. You start with a folder. First of all, just remember you call that thing plopped in there, it's hard to see. I recommend always doing the list view, right? Rename this folder now 01_SKILLSHARE_NO_5 and then we're going to go underscore, and we're going to drop down to like, we'll call this one documentation. So every time that like Bill or Jimmy or Becca writes me and has a contract to sign or has a little bit of something, this is just where I start the whole project. You can even call it zero zero, right? Because that's going to stay at the top of your list. Now, just a little pro tip, just go and copy all that stuff and start another one. Now, we go into this one, it's 01_SKILLSHARE_NO_5, and we'll call this the project or something. Now, what you're doing there is just trying to delineate between, here's where all the little documents go and all the emails and all the little snippets and stuff they go into that. Then the work is actually going to stay in that project folder and then maybe there's another one where you're going to number two. Now, remember we copied and pasted that piece when you're going to number two here. Then we would call this one something like final_ output or something. But see, just in a visual level, on a visual level, you see Skillshare, Skillshare, Skillshare. You see that the name of the class we're in here, we have this documentation, we have projects. You've built a proper file structure to save you later on. Here's the thing, if you are 20 years old and you're in college, now is your chance to be smart about this stuff because I spent the last 25 years opening up new windows and opening up existing windows and digging around in folders. Sometimes, when I go and I open something, I'll just open anything here. If I open my Merch app here, look at all this Merch. Did you see one action cap all the way down to DCL, whatever we got. We're working on a Stone or Sabbath sticker. Here's a deal, this thing is tight and right, and I'm using it to my advantage. As these new pieces of Merch spill into there, it's smart and it's like, "You're not digging around in the dark." If you're 20 years old, start now. If you're 45 like me, I'm not going to fucking desk door or whatever it is. Well, I could die any minute. Like, imagine if I died over filming this thing right now. Now, that wouldn't be fun for graphic design, huh? By the way, it's on you, Bill, just so you know if I die right now. But if you're young, start. If you're 45, start going back and cleaning stuff up, start going back and cleans up. So let me recommend a product, here's a little product. I want to recommend, it's called Better Rename 9. Use this stuff. Use this stuff. I don't mess around for a lot of apps. I keep all my Adobes down to just the three or four I need, that's it. Same thing goes for adding stuff onto your machine. But this Better Rename 9, I use it hourly. I use it hourly. So let me just show you what this looks like. In just in one little thing, if I go make a folder here, and this is what they look like in 1990. Here's just a bunch of garbage. I make another folder, that one. I wan t to make another folder, this one or whatever, whatever. So here are these five folders name look rough. They're all these old names and old stuff, they look rough. Just to start for today, if I put Skillshare number five in there, what this thing does is it adds clean to the front of that globally, right? So that's where this thing is super smart. Now, we can go back and read and say, "Well, get rid of all this deck of hacka-hacka, shacka-shacka," or whatever the hell that was. Well, there's ways to pick that stuff out of there. You can just start a file over, explore that within this Better Rename 9. I don't know why it's number nine and not 10 or eight, I don't know. It's still number nine, I use it daily. But it'll just help you clean up along the way. So it's a little pro tip there to use as Better Rename 9. We're at the end of the before section here. This is if you go and review all this stuff, What we're trying to do here is, we're trying to make you- I'm trying to pound into you before you even start designing. Be smart of what you're building blocks to start with are. Be it a new document, tailored right to your customized liking. A template, that's pretty advanced stuff, but the idea is, it's pretty simple once you go learn what the file structure is and [inaudible] where that lives, and how to name it, dot ait, and then and how you can use that then to start up and really shave a lot of time off. Then here, it's like once you're ready to start going and grabbing from either templates or new documents or whatever, where that stuff's going to live? Be smart about this, be smart about this because if I back out here and I go look into my Dropbox and I jump into something like field notes, it's all- I mean, I'm in and out of this in all the time, but it's just a subscription, photography, collabs, e-mail attachment financials, it's all there. I live and die by that stuff, and that's something that probably could used to tune up. So there's another little pro tip. Every six months, go in there and just clean all the stray stuff up. Because when I go, and I'm really proud. I'll go show you my my gig section here, and I go into gigs from this year, and it was a hell of a year. From Greensboro all the way up to Chicago next week, that's what a whole year looks like. It's organizing your files, it's organizing your folders, it's organizing your life. The whole time, you're just shaving and time off, all that stuff. So be smart about that. How do you learn how to learn? Well, you can go look through all these online tutorials and things, click around in here. Command this stuff and command your digital life, right? So that was the before section. Now, you're ready to get going and dive in and start designing stuff. 10. During 1: Become an Airdrop Master: All right guys, we're in the thick of it. This is the during section. So here is seven tips to stop you along the way and just to do a little bit of housekeeping, and see before you get too carried away, better ways to make a smarter file. One of the first things I'll talk about is, how to bring an image in, and how to think about that a little bit. Because one of the things that you'll see people open up a file, and I see the file size, and the file says, it's 900 megabytes, almost a gigabyte size file. It's because they brought in 20 images at 60 megabytes a piece, and that means it's 1.2 gigs of data inside there, and that is hyper inefficient. These are vectors you're working with, and that's a reminder if you find yourself there, because you're plugging things in and you're stopping and you're realizing that your stuff is chugging, take a step back, take a look around them just on that page, and see what are little things you can do to make them more efficient, and that's what we're going to talk about here. Okay. Here we go. Now, I did this sketch at lunch, this little arrow thing here, and I want that thing to start playing, with really go build that thing in Illustrator. The first thing for me to get this sketch from paper into the machine is, now I'll get my phone out, and I'll go to the photos, and I'll take a photo of this say real quick. So I'll go grab this thing, I'll get it in focus cool, I'll take a photo. Now, the quickest way back in the day, I'm showing my age. At 45 years old back in the day, I would take this thing, lay it down on the scanner, I'll scan it, I would save it, I would put it into the document, into the folders under the machine that way, right? But this AirDrop way, it's super quick. As now if I go grab this thing and I tell it to AirDrop to my computer here, what it's going to do is, it's going to come to the machine, it it's going to open up into Adobe Photoshop. So here it comes, it's flying over. It's in, I open it, and now that thing is on the machine. If I was to go grab the image and just put it, let's just go and do this. Well, I'll save this thing out, because what I want you guys to be careful about here is, if you go take a look where this thing is landing, and we'll just put it to the desktop. If we put it to the desktop right now, and we're just going to call this the skill share sketch arrow to the desktop right now. Here's the weird part, if you just go check that thing Command I, it is 3.1 megabytes as a JPEG, and that's a lot of weight to be carrying around. I mean, if you open that thing up into Photoshop and take a look at where that thing weighs, like right now, like do an option Command I, which is image size, 42 by 56 at 72 dpi, that's 35 megabytes of data, that's just like way too much. So the first thing to do is like, just chip it down, be smart about this stuff. You really only need to grab this one little piece. So there's a lot of ways you can screen grab that, and take it into your document, or you could just be like a good little custodian with your files, and clean it up. So crop that thing down, go make it. You don't need it to be a full color grayscale that thing, bring it to a reasonable size which might be three by four at a 150 or something, now save this thing. It'll save it into the proper folder here, and here's how we built this stuff out. Here's the project, here's final output whose documentation, so go into project, SKILLSHARE_SKETCH_ARROW, save it into the project folder, and that things are, you're starting to cook now. So now, when you go jump into a new document. So now, I want to go into Illustrator, Command New, and I can go grab your basic CMYK or whatever you build. I'm going to go start that thing up with a basic CMYK, and bring this thing in here. Now, and when you place it in here. Here's the first thing that we're doing, is we're going to go grab this thing out of that project folder, we're going to place it in, and now this guy just as it sits here, that is the size that we made it. That's the size that it was optimized to, and that's a good spot for it. So that's how you AirDrop something out of your field notes, through your phone right into your document. 11. During 2: Embed Your Images: Okay. Now we're into tip two of the during section, where here's the thing that this is varietal because if we were to go on and take a look at this thing and I guess you would go into your, I don't quite have it open here, but if you go find your links. What links are, this is a link right here, this photo has been placed in, it's linked here. Now the thing is what that's doing is it's relying on the file to be connected into the folder wherever you have it living because it's telling the file here, place this image from this folder. That's just a little bit varietal because if you were to hand this file off, you're going to have to connect it to that folder. You're going to have to send the Illustrator file and the connected Photoshop file along with it because it's being to place it in there. If we are going to check this stuff out here and you can see here you, as you bring pieces in it, it'll start to list them out here. But now if we just go check this thing, it tells you the name, all the data here on this little arrow right here, it's telling the name, the data where it lives, all the DPIs, the PPIs all this riffraff stuff things whatever. But it's one thing to bring it in and have it linked and showing up in the links, it's enough to embed it. It's still going to be in your links. What that means is that it's snaps that connection, that umbilical cord back to that folder, it just snips that thing and now just lives inside your document. But to do that, you have to do it responsibly. So that said, when you go up into object and rasterize and we're just playing with this one image that we brought in. We're going to go to grayscale, we're going to do it at 72 DPI with a white background, hit okay. Now you've seen that links palette, which is documenting what comes in, where, and where it lives and where it's connected to. Another thing has this little thing on the corner which means this is just an embedded image. It's just been placed in there, it adds whatever this amount of data is here, in that little file snippet it's not connecting to another folder because otherwise, that's where the size would live and then it would just place it in there. Now, this is at full size, so you have to be careful what you put in here because all we're trying to do here is like no for tip two. This is about how to get an image in responsibly because now that this thing has been embedded it's unmess withable. It's there when you save the document, it stays in the document. But you have to be careful with these things because you have to strip them out of there on those final working files and stuff. So now we've got it in hear it's time to start building this thing. 12. During 3: Design by Subtraction: So we have this image, it's been placed. It's been embedded. It's been done responsibly. So it's not too big, and marking up your file size. Let's save this file real quick. Here's a little pro tip. You can just simply go back a little bit, take a look here. Skillshare one, Number 1, Skillshare Number 5, go into that thing. You can just touch another piece inside there to get that Skillshare, so you have to type it. So we'll call this Skillshare Number 5, and we'll call this the arrow that we're going to play. Save it in there. Now, this thing is in there, it's safe, it's got good file structure. It's ready to start building. Now, this is tip Number 3, and this is a really big one. This is called designing by subtraction. So if we see this sketch, now if I was to take a little pencil and say, "I'm going to redraw this in real quick." Here is this, I'm doing this. This thing comes to here. This thing somehow comes onto here. It does one more little spindle right here, and I say, "Wow. We are in Illustrator. I can just go and flip these things and flap these things and get a little bit quicker to that sketch." Here's the thing is I'm going to go try to rebuild this thing and if you take a look at this thing being parsed out of this sketch, that's the same thing if I'm inside my field notes or whatever. That's the same thing. But if you think about it, your add it's, I guess an additive process, you are adding lines to a piece of paper. Think about this stuff just a little bit differently when you go to try to build this thing and design this thing. So check this out now. If I just want to make that first set of arrows back there. Now watch what I'm going to do. This is just a little bit different thinking. I'm going to go here into my symbols, and I'm going to grab a triangle, nice equilateral, nice 60-60 degrees, note each one of these little armpits or crouches, whatever, that's 60 degrees inside there. But it's got nice math to work with. Because the thing is so much of graphic design is based on 30 degrees, and 45, and 180, and nice 60 degrees, nice round math. You don't want those little angles to be 51.2, that's just gross. Use these pleasing shapes to your advantage. So check it out, if I'm just going to go lay this thing above this, now you start to see like think of it just a little bit differently. If we're trying to make that arrow shape that's back here, check this out. Now, if I'm going in, the math is going to get a little shitty for a second, and I go and I expand this thing which is called breaking link to symbol. So I expand it, I give it an outline, and I just lay over that sketch. I'm just trying to get that same geometry for my sketch to be respectful of the sketch. Now check this out. Now I've got where that arrow was. Now watch this. If I'm going to go off to the side here and just build off this thing, and make us a black shape, and then take another one and dupe that thing, and make that a white shape. Now see, just that thing laying over the other thing, that is designing by subtraction. Because all this thing is, if we go Command Y to your preview, you can see here that peace is just laying over the other piece, but it gives the illusion of what we're trying to build here. So the same thing if we wanted to have that extra stripe in there, the extra little line, and we grab this piece and we just go do a white outline. So see that? We give it a couple of clicks. Now you've got the illusion of those two lines. That's just three pieces. That's a black shape with a white shape laying over it, and then a white outline, you can see how that white outline feels laying over that. See, what you're doing there is you are designing by subtraction. You are just using this good math. Why this is so crucial is because if that thing now, if we go and lay this thing back over this sketch here, to check ourselves and say, "You know what? That's just a little too thick." Well, you've got these pieces to go play with. You can grab these things and try it again and say, "Okay, cool. I'm going to adjust this one, and then I'm going to just this guy just a little bit." Now, that's getting just that quick. You've got the proper math all the way through. So we've built these little arrow pieces just with those three arrows, and we're going to start to build these little spindle pieces here. We don't want to spend a tone of time knocking things out, by using your sketch, let's just go and take a line, click it up above, bring it down straight one. You click and drag using that bezier whatever it is, and then just bring it out to about [inaudible] , and then go give it a little bit of thickness. Then you can start to see where it starts to add up and be about the same as your sketch. So now when we give that thing a little bit of a dark color here and go grab it. Let's go make the other little spindle here, and bring that piece over here, and just bring it to where it feels right. We brought our sketch in responsibly. Now we want to make sure that this thing works in here, and then we're quickly. See that's quick enough right there. Because now if we take these two pieces, we've got these two pieces. You wouldn't want to try to redraw them over again, group them, bring them over here, flip them. What is it called? Reflect them. Then we get those things to line up just about right. So we're using these things to our advantage. So check it. I'll show you a couple of little tricks here. So now we're getting down to where we have all the components that we need to make our little sketch. So if we pull these pieces off of here, and we line them up with this arrow and we take a look at where our sketch was. So we grab those pieces off of there at all times. You're keep in all this stuff. Because it's a little off, that thing needs to be a little bit bigger. But here's what's cool about this subtraction thing. If we just go and lay these things over that piece, so you can see where that thing is becoming convoluted until we start to use some of the little tricks that we're using by design, by subtraction. If you were just to go and lay a white box underneath, so here's this white box and we go lay this piece underneath, we'll call it the four spindles. So bring those four pieces up above, see it's starting to happen now. That thing is tricking those three lines behind it. So let's give ourselves a little bit of room to work with here. Let's just grab all these pieces, and let's go off into the ether here, and start to mess with it. So check it out. So what if we did something where you've got the little white box behind there. Let's grab one of these guys right here. Let's take the white box up above. Now check this out. We're going to bring this thing down. We're going to put it behind. We're going to shear that thing off. We'll just go give it a little bit different color because check this out now. When we go lay this thing up over these pieces that certainly get that, see that? It's starting to get the arrow feel out of it. So now when we go lay these three arrow pieces behind it, you're starting to trick that thing to wear like. Now you can start to adjust all these piece. If you go take a look at our sketch over here, here's the sketch. Here's what it's doing, and these things might be just a little too thick. But what's cool about this is, if you remember where you're at here, what's cool about this thing is, if we go and we dupe it yet again, and we bring these four pieces in a little bit. Now watch, this is cool. When you just bring those, you shear those down. It's still within the same little bits of weird geometry to work with those pieces because now just go extend these other two pieces right here because those are going behind the yellow shape. Then here, if we want this line right here to be as thick as this, just adjust that little white bar, and then adjust this line, and what you're starting to see here is like. Now, if you just want these four lines to go up and over it, go do it again, bring this piece over here to check it out. Trick this thing now. So if you do this, you just bringing this up above. Now, these pieces are starting to like, all this stuff is still infinitely adjustable. That little line right, there that little shear right there, that is just a trick. That's a trick because this line and this line, those are two black lines that just has a white line laying over it. Well, bring this piece in just a little bit, color it black, put it behind the yellow, and you see what you certainly do here. Put the yellow up above it, we'll cover that one just right now, we'll color it dark gray. Then lay that over those pieces. You see what you're starting to do there? You're starting to trick all this stuff to get the right shape and the feel of what we're trying to get to from this sketch over here. So let's go do it one more time because I want those lines to all be one connective piece. So watch. So we want that little earpiece that feels right there. That feels right, we want the same thing happening right there. So just grab these two pieces right here, you'd have to ungroup them. Shift, Command, G, ungroups all those four pieces. That piece right here, this one feels right. See how it goes up and it comes back down? We want the same thing right here. But how do you trick [inaudible] not that white line laying over it, and then there's that black shape in there. So let's go and gray that thing out. You can still see it a little bit, there it is. Now, just grab these pieces and bring him to the front. Shift, Command, right bracket. That brings it to the front. Bring that yellow one to the front. There it is. Now, go and grab this thing turn it back to black, and we're getting close. When you start to get a lot of layers here and certainly get a little crazy. But the thing is like all we want is, we were just tricking the stuff. You can go grab another piece and put it in here and mess with that black PC. Bring the yellow up above, and now that thing is starting to feel like what our sketch was meant to do. See, if you take a look at that and it's a little crazy, but it was designing by subtraction. To stop for a second, and to say that is a really big thing because what you're doing now is you just control that entire process if we were to take this piece here, and get really nerdy. This is some of the stuff that when I'm building, yes and say, Okay. This line right here and it's still as a live line, that line right there is 19.75 points. So if we were to take this thing and test ourselves and say, "We want this thing to be 19.57 lines." So you grab one of these lines Command C, Command V, and then color it something weird, purple or whatever, something, pink, nice bright pink or nice bright cyan, and tell it to be 19.75. Let's check this out. Use this thing to your advantage. Get to where it lines up just where you want it, and now go adjust these pieces. You can see here what you're doing is you're like tricking the outer piece. See this? You're tricking that outer piece to fill. You have to bring this guy out and now get that out of there. Now what you've got is that line right here is the same width as that line. That one right there, that one's a little thin. See, it's little thin. So just grab that white box and bring it down. Go check yourself. See? That looks pretty damn good. There's a lot of ways to do this stuff. But what's cool about this subtraction stuff, is you have all the pieces there now to go and dissect. You have all the chunks in there, and that is a giant way to look at this stuff. Remember, if you plot that piece now as this little productivity arrow or something. If I want to adjust this thing now and check it out. If I want to go on to say those things are just a little to grab all this stuff, dupe it, bring it off to the side. I just want to adjust those things, just a little bit. It's feel a little too tight in there. That's all it took. It still creates that illusion. You have to find what piece that- what have I just adjust? See, you grab those little pieces and just bring them a little bit taller in there. But was that quick of a tweak that fast? Because here's the thing. The client, they won't know that. They're just going to see it flattened in to your template, spit out as a PDF. They are going to see that, these positive shapes. That's it. But the idea is that you are using uniform pieces, good math, and then tricking it with the program just by laying things over each other, using that bring to the front and center the back, all those key commands back and forth to just layer and trick these things. So yeah, design was subtraction. 13. DETOUR: Watch Draplin Work: We're already going off the grid here. We're in number 3, subtracting, by designing, by traction, by designing. I don't even know what it was. I want to grab these pieces and just go mess with them and then slam them into something. Get a little bit of color, get a little bit of paper around it, and just see what happens. Just sit tight and watch. 14. During 4: Organize Your Colors: This would be number four; During, mixing good colors. How to build a kick ass color palette that has good math involved. All right. So now we've got this little funny little shape. We know this piece, we remember it from the space shuttle from all that junk I've made over the years and things and stuff. It's actually taken its own little life but we don't want to use those same atmosphere, space shuttle colors of this thing blasting through the atmosphere like I built it back in 2010 or whatever I built that thing. We want it to be its own little things. So if we keep on going out here, what are the colors of productivity? It's green. It's like go, and money, and being positive, and the next stuff, and gaining, and ascending. So let's just go and let's just color these things some greens here. Let's get some good acid green in there and work our way back down. Now I'm picking these things fast because they're coming out of my palette. But like anything, we want to make sure that they are all their own and as lethal as possible. We'll just say, we don't want them to be just what's the default there. We want to make sure if we're going to go on this top bar here, we're just going to make that thing black because that's the classic forming I have for this stuff. That works pretty well, but it is getting competish with some of this other green here. So let's go back down and go a medium green because now what we're doing is we're starting to see this thing come to life and have its own little spot, and it's taking on its own little bit of weirdness. That's a good thing. So see what I'm doing here. I'm just trying to work my way back up to this green. So if we just land right there and we say, okay now this thing has its own set of greens, it's got this weird little arrow creature upward, little shuttle. I mean we could even go to just clean it up a little bit faster where it's using all of these pieces. If we start to take these pieces out of here and we grab these three, put them together real quick and then push this piece, the ones that are sitting behind there up into that. See that? That's an illusion that they're underneath that. Now that becomes its own little upward little guy. He sings productivity. Things moving up and getting better and better with our time and whatever it is. So if you really start to dissect this stuff, as we start to whittle this thing down to just being this one little piece that this all we're concerned about. As we pull back from this thing, this is the Skillshare sketch shuttle format, whatever but we go back to this. All we really need are these greens. We don't need all the rest of this stuff. So here's the thing is like just get rid of that stuff. Then what you want to do is you always want to check and here's where you're just getting it down to just the greens that you need. But at all times you want to check the math. Now these were from my original color palette. They have pretty good math. What I mean by that is simply this, if this is the green that we're feeling for this one or maybe it goes a little darker or something but that's the green that we're feeling for that one. When you double-click that thing and you take a look inside here, take a look at the math. You see the math here it says 100, 0, 100, 0. Now what you don't want that thing to have as 99.7 and 98.3 and then you'll sometimes see some of this stuff 0.4 and then down here one. Here's the deal, that piece right there if you lay it over this other piece right here and go back to this, whatever green we were working with over here, there's going to be some differences. So you just have to check your math on the stuff. You have to be smart about these pieces. You just seemed to be responsible about those numbers because this is the true mark of someone with a little bit of class and craft is understanding how that stuff works and that's 100 percent cyan, no magenta, 100% yellow makes that nice medium green there. That's good solid math now as you go through and you check all of these pieces. Now if you take a look at this green here, that's a nice one there. It's 25, 0, 100. Here's the thing, it's like what you're doing is you're just creating little spaces to where this thing can grow within itself and use nice math. See now this one right here might be a little too puky and it's green. So let's go and adjust that stuff. Now remember, all these things they are just color. Those things just have that color attribute of that 25, 0, 100, and so on. So if we do another version of it, now go into your color palette here. Just take out that yellow. Take that yellow down a notch, bring up that cyan limits. Now it's getting a little more of a minty quality, and less of that acidy green or yellow green and just take it down a notch, just toning things down. You can do it again right here where you bring down, that's still a little greenish, yellowy. Bring that down a little bit. Bring up that cyan a little bit. Check our numbers 60 and 80, good math. See how that changed from there? That changed just a little bit from there to there. We can go do this one just a smidge too. I'll show you why we're doing this. We're bringing the yellow down a little bit, we're bringing that cyan up a little bit. Now it's just changing the tone of the entire piece. What's cool now is think about what parts you really need of this thing. We can do here is you can go like this. Here's how you can start to test what colors you really need for this thing. All right. So what's important here is you have the greens that you like but we need to get them over back into an isolated down into these colors. Because say this was going to be a sticker or something or a patch or something, you want to be smart the entire time you're working that you're thinking a couple steps ahead. You don't want them just to be the willy-nilly. What do you call that? What's the little tool over here where it's just- the Eyedropper tool. You can just go eyedrop that tool on anything and get that green that you like. That's just a little dangerous because it's going to be lots of decimal points and things and stuff and it'll be might be hard to go find it again or something. Own the numbers, understand the numbers. Understand how to work with the palettes. So check this out. We're going to go grab these three tune greens right here. We're just going to pull them out of here into your color palette. Double-click it. Call it something logical, Skillshare Green One. Make sure it's global so we can change that stuff and affect the rest of the document later. Now click off. Now if you go and make a little folder here, call this New Color Group. We'll just call this the Skillshare Greens. Put it inside that piece, put inside that folder. I'll do it again. Go grab the second one that we tuned, pull this thing off into here and I'll just do this on all of them. Now see this one's got a little bit of weird math and make that a nice 80. I'm going to call this one Skillshare Green Two. Save it in there and then plop it into this little folder because what we're doing is we're testing what we have here. Then let's go get a good black out of this thing. Here's a black, and we'll pull that down there. That leads us up into number five in the during section of what I call a rich black. A rich black color. 15. During 5: Use Rich Black: Okay. Now, before I pick any more greens, now I'm moving on to number 5 of the during section which is about the color black, and about how a build of that black can really bite you in the ass a couple different ways. Right now on the screen, this color black right here is just a 100K. So if we're trying to isolate these colors down into its own little pocket of five or six colors, whatever it's going to be, that color is black. Let's put it over there. But what I want you to think about is the idea of owning what that black is going to look like later on. If you take 100K black, and you just print it that way, sometimes it can look like 95 percent, like a really, really, really dark grey or just a lighter black or just kind of say. But there's a thing called a rich black which the colors inside it are just a little bit richer and really what it is is if we take this thing and we double-click this thing now, we say, "Okay let's go," a nice round number 35, 35, 35 and we're going to call this one Skillshare rich black because check it out. What this means is simply this, make sure it's global. Now you can't really see it because I have something set in my illustrator to where all blacks looks super-rich and look like overprint kind of black or something. I don't even really know what that means but what you notice is is like you go put it on the web and the black on a RGB which is what zeros, zero, zero or a 225 whatever it is, all the way to one side all the way to the other side, whatever that full build is, that is a really rich black. It's got a good deep feel to it, right? So here's the thing is like in controlling that, you just have to understand what that means is if you take 100 black, there it is, there's 100 black, there's a 100 points of black in there and it's 000100, right? Then you take 35 percent of the cyan. So there's that and then you take, now check this out, you take this one and go 35 points of the magenta, do it again with the yellow, 35. The idea is by multiplying these three colors up over that thing, that little section you're going to get right inside of there where all four overlap, that is what we just built right there. So check this out. Now, it's hard to see. You can't really see it on here. You have to do it like this. Just for the sake of the screen, I'll just trick it like this. I'll just go and do something like this just to trick it for the screen. So I'll go like say, we'll, let's call it 90. Now, watch this. Now, I'm going to grab all these pieces right here and I'll multiply them as if we're printing. See that black and sadly you have to get really subtle. You see that right there, that is a rich black because what it's doing is it's taking the 35 of this, 35 of this, 35 of this and it's like a density thing. So it's just the idea of understanding the color black and how it works inside here because you can be tricked by it. It can be maybe a 90 percent feel later on when you print. Always just own that and understand exactly what those dots mean and how they're leaving your file. So let's just go color everything, that nice rich black there. So there it is. You can't really see it here but it's in the file and that's what's important. It's just understanding what you're going for later on. There it is and that was number 5, rich black. 16. During 6: Clean Up Your Iterations: Okay. We're in number six in the "during" section, and this would be cleaning up iterations. Now, what this means? If I go back into that arrow, that Skillshare arrow file and I zoom back out and I start to see where I started, and this is a quick one, where I started and where I ended. Here's the thing, just to test ourselves. We save this thing and we close it, we save the shuttle format and we close it, we go look at where this thing lives. We are going to "Dropbox", open "Projects", we're going to the Skillshare, we're going in to number five, we're going into project, we take a look like, check it out. This is like irresponsible, because you don't really know what's going on inside. You see them by the preview. You have to be smart about that. Instead, like for this sketch shuttle format thing, if this is the piece that we landed on right here, go put that guy on the art board. Go and clean that up. Go and grab all this stuff, pull it off to the side. Put this piece right here. How do you do that, is by going Command+0, Command+V, paste it in there, bring it up nice and big, save that thing, close that thing. Now, you see what you're working with. Where you landed or something, is just a little more like a better read. Same thing on the Skillshare number 5, arrow file. When we go into that, because where we started was over here with the sketch in the things and the pieces. Make sure everything is unlocked. Now, you just want to do a little bit of clean up. So if we landed right here and we liked that one, pull that one over here for now. But let's bring this piece down so these things are all in one nice good strong line here. We bring this piece into here and now we know what we're doing here. When we say this one now, that's what you're going to see if you go check it, you're going to see that and that's where you landed, cool. But if we go back in here, here's just a little tip and this is a quick one. But by just understanding that we started there and we ended there, go clean these things up a little bit. Maybe we went to here, we kept going, we kept going, and then just go use one of your symbols. If you built a little arrow and I've got one right here for just this, just go in there and plop that piece in there. So you know which way you were heading, because that will help, later on when you open this file up and you get to see, could we kept everything live? We would keep doop it, doop it, doop it. We just know where these things went to. We just want to keep track of that stuff. Because nothing sucks more than going back and having kept everything, and then not understanding how you got to where you got. This is all about just tidying up your zone. Always thinking about this now, I'll do this in the middle of the project because if I don't, I suddenly have these weird little spindly, little filaments of a galaxy. As the thing is sucked by gravity, another galaxy smashes into a galaxy over a billion, trillion years, these little filaments of smaller galaxies and planets, and stars, and we're all stardust, and we could all die any second yet we're all living. I'm rambling. I'm rambling, anyway. You get these filaments of bullshit inside here. Before you know it, I don't know what you're looking at. Just be smart about that, be organized, go through, clean all that stuff up. Yeah. That's number six, cleaning up your iterations. 17. During 7: Check Your Spot Colors: The tip number seven, the during section is simply this, checking your spot colors. Here's a quick little tip where you reduce everything down to a zero, a zero bit of data, or a white color on each spot color, to test if everything's been colored the proper way. Here you go. Here's the thing, is if we go back into that Skillshare sketch show format design we were making. We want to be careful how we go to hand this thing off. I do a lot of posters and stuff. Like here's a recent poster I made. So I'm going to find something fun here. I'm going to go check my math. DDC189, pizza slice. I did this poster. The poster is a little pizza slice poster. You can see the format, you know these things, double cheese etc. But when I handed that thing off to the printer, it's a dance of spot colors. You want to make sure that your spot colors are perfectly all the right attributes, good clean math, everything is supposed to be colored the way it's supposed to be colored etc. You just want to go check that stuff. So the same thing here with this guy is this green right here obviously it's meant to be this green right in here. So just, there it is. So as we check our colors here, so here's this green. This green, there it is. There is that green. There's these two greens right there. Cool. This one right here is the other Skillshare green one. This one is that nice rich black with a 35, 35, 35, 100K. Good deep dark value. If we're down to that point in the project where I know that this is our design, this is what we're going to go with, but all this other stuff here, get rid of it. The cool part about this is if we say these are just feeling a little bit dull, we'll just give them a little bit of a kick, and we just pull out some of that blue and preview it, you're just working with spot colors at that point. Because now, if we go have good clean math, 40, 0, 70, and now those things, because people always say things to me like in these, I do these workshops and stuff, and they say, "Man, your colors man. How do you get your colors to stair step the way that they do?" It's like, "Well, this." If I'm going to go check this green and there it is, give that just a little bit more green. There's 10 more points of the cyan. Check it, preview. Okay, that's stepping in a cool way. Because now it's like green, lighter green, lighter green, but it needs just a little bit more yellow to it. So you go back up to 100 yellow, and now that thing is in the right zone. This is the deal. It's like now what we have is we have these things go down. So here's a pro tip for when you right to handoff that final file, or just to check your spot colors. Now, it's one of the thing to go through and say, "Okay, is that one that one?" What if its really complex document with a 1000 things, hard to isolate, they're on different layers, they are on different software, and different things, whatever it is. How do you check it? Here's how I trick. I'll just simply do this. I'll double-click this, and you let it go to white, zero, zero, zero, zero. If that's the deal, then that thing will drop out. The idea is by the time we're done bringing all these colors down to white or no data, it should all be white on the page. So we're just going to go fast. I'm going to go back down, zero, that one drops off. I'm going to go back down, zero, that one drops off. Cool. We're going to do it again. That one drops off. Technically now, and you go back and go zero to zero, zero, zero. We're done with this, there should be nothing on that page because that means all those five spot colors, now they're all reduced down to white. All those five spot colors, we had the right amount inside there. See what I'm saying? So now, if you just go Command Z, Command Z, Command Z, Command Z, all the way back up, that's how I test this stuff. So let's open up more of a complex document and try this little trick on something that's going to be, that you just can't pick each part and peace out of this. You're really relying on the colors and the attributes and how you color the pieces. So I'm going to find this fender thing. I open this thing up. Now, check this out. If I was to go through and just real quick and be patient with it, and we take that real deep rich black, 35, 35, 35, all the black colors, that all reduces down to white now. We do it again over here, down in this gray, that goes down to this. If we did our job right, so now we're getting into the panda, and you have to trick this and just let it go to zero. By the time I'm done, it should just be a white page, because that means everything has a home. Now, I'm down to that final blue color there, and we'll just go real quick. We're just testing ourselves to see, because some of the colors are paint on, some aren't. So what that means now, with all those colors reduced on to white, there's nothing you see on that page, and that's what's important. It means you stuff Command Z, Command Z, Command Z, and you work your way back up to the screen print colors, back up to that final black color that holds all that stuff. That's how you test this stuff. That would be like, as I'm cooking in the middle of a document, I'll stop myself and just say, "God, I've made 19 different colors of green in the last couple days, because I'm just going too quick. I'm tweaking here, I'm tweaking there," let's just go into little bit of housekeeping, clean those pieces out, reduce everything on the page down to these five green colors, because later on if I need to go make a tweak somewhere else and grab that thing, we're working with the same. You refine after a while, down into this color palette that is feeling right. So that would be the final tip of the during phase. I hope you enjoyed that. That's this idea that while we're cooking, while we're working, while we're trying new stuff, you remind yourself to stop along the way and do a little bit of housekeeping, because frankly, that is going to make you more productive at the end of the document and the rest of all your files for the rest of your life. Trust me, 25 years of this stuff, trust me. Now, we're getting ready to wrap this file up, and we're going to go into the after section. All right. See you. 18. After 1: Clean Out Your Color Palette: Now we're in the after session. Now, that the file is done and ready to hang this thing up, here's seven tips to think about before you go make a fool of yourself in front of that client or whatever you've got going on, this good housekeeping or how to button this thing up the right way. All right. So the first thing we're gonna do with tip number one in the after section here, is this cleaning out any unused swatches. Now there might be a way to do that. I remember there was something in here where you could go in here and select all unused. So I trust that stuff, it's too easy to do it that way. Go through and because what happened was as I was getting whittling down to this final productivity little shuttle graphic, little graphic piece here, I brought in one of the old stickers and that brought with it a bunch of these old attributes and these old spot colors with it, right? We'll clean that stuff out of this. So if you look here, these things just came flying in. Go get rid of these things, you're not gonna need those things. Then also when you're inside here, get rid of all your symbols. okay? Just get rid of all that stuff. I mean if it's not in your file design, just get rid of it, cool, find, delete instances. Because you're giving them that much less stuff to play with. This is the final step. If we're going to go save this thing out, so let's just go here and let's just say it's been called Skillshare Sketch Shuttle Format, right? Well, let's just wear this thing down to the final one, right? So I'm going to call it underscore, lowercase finals. There it goes, now we've got this thing. In the end, we're just going to have that one graphic there in the middle in the end. But for now, this is sort of the checklist. It's just for safety when you hand it off, these are time-tested things for me. Because the scary part is say, you leave all those other colors in there, and an operator somewhere opens it up by accident which happens all the time, they click on something, they click on another thing. Then it's up to them to go make that call. If you are organized, they know where to grab it from, if you are organized, they know how to get back to it. If your shits are all over the place and there's 19 different greens and 19 different everything else, pantones, things, stuff, RGBs, whatever the hells, you're just asking for trouble. Strip all that stuff down so they have less and less opportunity to make mistakes, right? So that's really tip one. So we just clean that stuff out of here, and now we're moving on to the next thing. 19. After 2: Organize Your Layers: So now I'm moving on to the next tip here in the upper section. That'll be tip two, and that's just organizing your layers, cleaning out any extra layers you don't need. When you go through this, and if I just take a look, and we were cooking before. We got all these cameras and stuff in here. I'm not on my A game because I'm going too fast, I'm nervous. That's no different than when you're on the job. If we're to go through and test this thing. This is the final graphic that we want. Let's just make sure that we're not, all our layers look right because if you go through these, start clicking on stuff. Well, let's see what is that. That's something over here, and it's just going to be all over the place. It's just weird as you cut and paste stuff in here. Now, you can go through and isolate. Where was that? Those little pieces here. You can go isolate those into one graphic onto- excuse me. Isolate those and put them onto one layer, cool. Then check that layer and nothing's- okay, you're not losing that stuff. I'm sure there's other ways to do this stuff, but this is more me just really testing my file on the way out as I'm welding this piece down. Now, let's go check what's this layer is. See now, there was something I must have brought in here, these extra pieces. So once again, grab all that stuff and just put it up to that top layer. See what that just did? So check that out. When I put that to that top layer, you can see here. Now, you have to watch yourself. Imagine, handing off seven layers and someone trying to clean this up for you and not quite knowing, and one thing overlapping or one thing getting screwed up. That's why we're doing what we're doing. So check all your layers to make sure everything is on that proper layer because don't worry about the layer. We'll clean all this stuff out of here in a second. You want all of that stuff on that one layer. So that's really the first thing. It's just remembering to go check your layer to go through that stuff. 20. After 3: Manage Your Artboards: Typically in the AFTER section, and this one is all about the artboard. Right now, I left a bunch of stuff on this artwork, when you zoom out here. I want to tell a little cautious tale and I won't tell any names but I've heard these stories and I've heard the lore of this thing and I heard of a buddy who dealt with a little bit of this. But here's the thing, who have experienced the phantom click here, right? What the phantom click is, it's this weird thing where like even if you just kind of do this, you're grabbing your type tool and you just touch it and you can see it blinking there, somewhere is blinking and there it is. Yet if you go look at that thing you'll see it, there's that little x, you'll see that in the outline preview but out here it's just painted nothing. There is no color, it is a piece of myriad and just really watch those things. Because that said, if you've experienced this now watch what am going to do, I'm not going to kind of fake this. If you've experienced this with your mouse, using a Bluetooth mouse where you click here and it drags off into the ether and before you know it you can't even control it because it's a little bit of a glitch. Well, this is something that still happens to me. I don't know if it's my Bluetooth or my firmware or software or hardware. I don't even know. But you're out here somewhere and then you do a Command V out there, then you realize you're out in the middle of nowhere and go back to command zero to get back to where you were. Here's the thing when you zoom out and here's the probe tip, watch all that stuff out here because here is the cautious tale. There's a tale out there floating around where the account manager was working with some kid, underneath them, working with him to finish up the feedback from this project and they get this email from the client. The client sends the email and then the account manager, he takes this stuff and he writes another email, he cuts and pastes the email from the client, he puts into a new email for his design and he says, " Hey man, she doesn't know what she's talking about. He doesn't know whatever, whoever it was. They don't know what they're talking about, just make this change, that change, this change, this change and send it back to me and I'll send it back to these turkeys and we'll be done with this." Okay, something like that like how we all talk, right? So he puts that in this email and he sends it to the kid and then the kid does something where he takes a screengrab of the email because he's tired of going email, illustrator, email, whatever he's going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth in making these changes. He takes a screengrab of the email, puts it into his thing. Somehow, one of the copies gets way out here and if you look here, here he's working on it somewhere right over here, he's reading the feedback from the screengrab, it's sitting over here. He hits return when it's time to delete this thing, but when you zoom way out somewhere out here in this weird spot out here, one of the copies of that email or that little screengrab was pasted out there with a phantom click or who knows how he got it out there. But somehow it was out there and here's the deal, he sends off that document, he sends off that document and it's bad. They have the little PC worked on, that's all the account manager sees. The account manager sees it, opens it up, sends that piece off to the client, the client opens it up. The first thing the program says is it says, hey we're missing this image and at 72 DPI it shows a read of the image, and they get to read the email as they spoke about the people the way they spoke when they thought no one was looking at it. So that is just a word to the wise. First, if you're going to leave chat windows and stuff open, do them at your own discretion whatever good luck with that. But when you work it on the, you know how we all talk. The client this, the client that, the client this whatever. But if you're not smart about how you let that stuff live and die either on a chat or in your email, or whatever and try to be professional when that thing leaves your hands, you can get in a lot of trouble. Just be careful, always zoom out to see where you're at. Always zoom out, okay? 21. After 4: Convert Type to Outline: Now we're on the tip number 4. This one, it's a quick one. Just make sure all your fonts, all your typefaces are converted to outlines. It's very simple, and how I do this, I just grab everything. We're just worrying about these three pieces on the screen right here, and just do a quick shift command O, and that converts it to outlines. If you don't know about this, the reason being is, one second ago, if we go back to that command Z, this is a typeface. It's a program and it's telling those little forms to sit in that little family of typefaces. It has to read that typeface. If we were just to send this document off right now, we have to also send the typeface, so they can load the typeface, and then that will show up inside their version of Illustrator or whatever they're working in. That's dangerous because not only is it editable, but there's chances they could call it the wrong helvetica bold into different cut and it feels wrong, and the kerning that we toil over is off. That kind of stuff. This is just good practice. When you're handing stuff off, make sure that everything is converted to outlines. Now that gets tricky cause what if it's a paragraph? It's really, really elegant. Well then, you have to be smart when you package all this stuff, that you include all the typefaces. Then maybe put a little document in there that shows them how it's supposed to look, as a PDF or something, so they see that. Then you get your proof back, you have to really watch for that stuff. So when I'm working on a sticker, or something and I'm into this final stages like this, you just make sure that all that stuff is just reduced down to shapes. So in step number 4, make sure all the type is converted to outlines. 22. After 5: Dissect Your Vectors: Going to tip five, and this is a heavy one. I call it vector dissection, you're dissecting pieces and you want to make sure that what you handoff, it has beautiful math right? Now, if you look at the graph we have here and we look how these thing sort of, this is a version of this thing I built somewhere some way when I don't know, it must be in that sticker or something, where all these pieces were masked inside that shape. So if we go unmask it again, command seven, they hide nicely in that shape. But if you pull them back out, which is option command seven, and now you get to see this outline, what color is this? Something red or pink or something, just so you can see it. Here's the deal, it's like that's a pretty junky file. You don't want to hand it off this way for a couple of different reasons. First of all, pride. Just be a good little citizen, but beyond that it's more like, if that thing came out of or they tried to build a bleed out of that thing or something, maybe that's what this was for and I extended them, I don't know, I've built this thing so many different times. There's a lot of riffraff and that's kind of like my own problem. So this is how I ensure that the stuff I'm handing off is nicely done. It's really as simple as this. So if I wanted to share all this stuff off right here because it's junky here or whatever. It's just been riffraff into there, the fastest way, there's lots of ways to do it, but how I'll do it is I'll take the shape that was masked in and I'll just go a little bit bigger outside of that shape. Let's just go point, let's go one inch bigger. So there's this like outer shape now, put that behind everything with a shift command send to the back and then grab the inner one and now that one is lifted above the outer one, pull them to the front, command shift right bracket, so they're all in the front. Now knock that piece out. So you when you flip this around, knock that top piece out. There it is, because now what you can do is you can use this piece right here to shear these different pieces off. So for instance, starting with that first one, you grab it, you grab the pink, Command C, Command F, Command Copy, then paste and place. Grab that back one and shear it off using your minus front, there it goes. You can see what we just did there is I just made that nice-looking shape. We got rid of all the other junk. So shear that piece off, there it goes, send it to the back, Shift Command left bracket. Okay, cool. Then you have to go deal with the rest of these. I'll just do it real quick. Command C, Command F, and then use the minus front, and clean that piece out. Right on down the line, Command C, Command F, Command C, Command F. Cool. Now, here's the deal, there's a couple different ways you could do this. I will get rid of that piece up. See, there's something still and they're looking pretty rough. Use that final piece to do this, clump, and then put that one behind it. Now, you could grab everything and then go use the tool divide. But that gets a little tricky because here's why, if some of these lines weren't quite lining up on each other, and I've built this thing so many times and I have stinky suspicion, some of those things don't quite line up in those angles in there. You want to go through and shear each piece so it's not mucking up the other stuff if that makes sense. Use their outer rim then just to shear that piece off because now when you start to go and tear this thing apart, and this is the sort of the dissecting quality of this right? When you take these pieces apart you can see here. Oh, look at that, there's some garbage back in there, see it's a good thing, I went and looked for that. Because now you've got, there's another piece back there. Now go back and then do little bit of surgery, get rid of that thing, check for that piece. There it is, out. Get rid of that one and now you are just down to these four or five pieces, that's all it needs right?. So that's that kind of quality of like, leave these things lifting up above, just leave them lifting up above. Now to go do this little piece right here, it's kind of the same thing. We just have to think through what's the fastest way, no don't just do it inside that, take it out here. You can see where I was doing there, designing with subtraction, I was laying things over to trick what this thing is supposed to look like. Same thing again is like, just keep track. Now, go and outline all that stuff and that is option Command O. There it goes. Then Shift command G, ungroups everything and now you just have to go subtract all this stuff and minus all these pieces. There's a piece right there, bring it to the front, color it something weird, and let's go shear off all these other nice pieces, so we're going to make that all one piece in the back there right? Then just sheer off because, see what that's doing right there, it's not shearing along that line, it's shearing on the middle. See that? It's in the middle. So we are going to go shear that piece and minus front that. Now you've got this little chunk, you can get rid of all the stuff back in here. Now, what you're left with is you're just left with that piece riding over that piece and I'll show you the next step here is like. Once again, take this piece off to the side here, make this all into one chunk, cool, then watch this one, when you pull this off to the side here, what we want is we just want that white to be its own layer. How you do that one is Shift, option Command eight. So with that one, that's called releasing of the past, the releasing of a compound path because what you want to do is grab everything, grab the black one, isolate those into one shape and now you have that white piece laying over that black piece. Because now, when we take this thing, Command C, Command V, take this back into here and yet again do another one of these, what you're doing is you're just wiggling these things down right? So this thing lays back here and you make sure the thing is all nice and snapped in there, lock it, get rid of all the other stuff below it. Now, what you have is like, you've got that white shape, you've got that white shape laying over all these pieces. When you check this stuff, you hit a Command Y and go to your outline, that's just piece by piece. It's built with a little bit of strategy and that should be the final thing you land on the page. So to go clean up your stuff real quick here, there's a couple ways you could do that. You just take this, put it underneath here, take this put it underneath here, put a little arrow, whatever because you want to keep this one here, you want to keep this filed all these pieces. Now check this last one out. 23. After 6: Save a Clean Document: This is tip six. Now when I pull back here and I see all this on the riffraff, here is the thing is that last thing that learnt when we dissected these things down to the perfect little pieces of the vectors. There's a couple of ways you could do it. You go back to this thing and put it right here. Hold back get rid of everything else, but that is a little dangerous because, even though I told you guys to check the layers and stuff there are extra layers and there's different things combined in different stuff, and just for the sake of time save this one and we'll call this one something like, I don't know, we'll call it round two or something. You can go back and keep track of all this stuff inside your file folder. We'll call this one round two. But here's the real trick, grab this piece right here, I want to show you something. Remember when I told you that little fable about like all the extra stuff being left in stuff, that it's just super dangerous. The most effective way I've learned how to do this to trick myself into bringing only what I need to bring into that next document is through this, do a new document and then go into what I call this one Clean_Doc, you can call it whatever you want. But watch when I open this one up. Now, what it's like when I go into that profile and open up a basic CMYK which is all the stuff had been carrying along for 25 years different symbols, different palates. Now, you're stripping all that away, right? So when you go into Clean_Doc, you open this thing up, check it out. There are no colors in there, there are no symbols in there. Now, you can trust that there's nothing out here in the ether because this is just, it's as simple as like, I built a doc we're only allowed to have the color white and the color black, no symbols, no nothing and then I called it Clean_Doc. Put it inside, go back and look at the hierarchy all the way down to EN-US wherever that was, in the new document profiles folder, put it inside there and then that is another option for me to open up when I'm at the final steps of a handoff right? So now on this thing is ready to go, I plop in our little piece of art, there it is, and you see it brought in all the little swatches here. Now, let's go clean those up a little bit and we'll call this the SKILLSHARE_PRODUCTIVITY_EMBLEM, fine, and there they go, see it's got everything and I can get rid of all this other stuff here because what that means is that cleaned up now, you've got this nice, linear quality from the lightest green up to that and that's all that's left in this document. This is what we're gunning for, when you save this you got to save as, you save this thing as and you to go back in here and we're going to call this one, SKILLSHARE_SKETCH_SHUTTLE_FORMAT or whatever we were calling on it. There it is, cool. Now, that thing is saved, there's nothing else out there in the ether, it's that last piece there. Then really, this is just good management. There's going to be a checklist you guys can download, that you put into your field notes that reminds all the 777 here, but there's one last step. 24. After 7: Encrypt Your Work: Tip number seven, the after section here, is the final tip of this stuff. Let's just say that a client is reviewing this stuff, so this is still in the review phase or something. Before you just hand off a vector, always give them a PDF for them to check it out, and that is just one tiny little thing I want to show you guys which is super crucial. When I go to make a PDF out of the thing, I'm just going to save this as. I'm going to go down here and I'm a jump into Adobe PDF. I'm going to save this thing. At this point, showing to them at all its glory. So PDF/X-1a is fine. But I like this one right here. See this one right here? You have to go to number five and then right here, use a password to restrict editing security permission setting. So the idea is you have to use a password just to open the thing up, but when you go right to here and think of your favorite password. I'll just go with the ASD, that works. That's easy. Now, what this does when you save the PDF, you got to do it again, ASD. So it saves this thing. What it's doing is it's basically ensuring that this stuff can't go down. If this is your final, you want them to see it this way. They're getting ready to sign off on this thing and they're going to review it. This is round two out of 10 or something. The idea is what you just did there was they're not allowed to do this. They can't take this piece, plop it into Illustrator. Do you see that? They have to have that ASD password. If they don't have that and you make something proper there, the strong encryption or whatever, they can't just open that thing up and start using it. Who's going to go really rebuild it? Maybe someone. But the idea is you're just protecting yourself along the way. If that's final sign-off, and they see that, and they go, "Yes. That's it. Totally cool". Because depending on how you work, you might say, "Cool. Pay me the final half and then I release the files to you". The scarier part is along the way and it's only happened to me but a couple of times. Someone opens that thing up in Illustrator, grabs it, tweaks it, and says, "We want this". Along the way, every one of your PDFs up until that very final, you've been paid or that final hand-off, that trusting hand off, make sure that you encrypt that thing, so they can't open it back into Illustrator because otherwise you're just asking for trouble. They can hand it off to anyone in their company and that kid can start tweaking it, or messing with it, or whatever, or suggesting weird things. So that's just a pro tip at the very last step. When you look back at how we talk with clients, be a good citizen. When you look back at how we dialogue, and how they look at stuff, and how they deal with things, always over exceed, but protect yourself along the way. 25. Final Thoughts: Alright guys, that wraps up discussion number 5777, before, during, and after. Things you can use to make your design life faster, make the rest of your life a little bit slower. Thanks for coming you guys, thanks for being a part of this, thanks for watching, and that's that. 26. Watch More Classes with Draplin: