DIY Holiday Gift Tags

1. Intro: Welcome to DIY Holiday Gift Tags. In this easy to follow Adobe Illustrator class, you're going to learn how to make your own personalized gift tags from scratch. We'll be using Adobe Illustrator in this class and if you don't have a copy, don't worry, you can download a free 30-day trial. This class is great for beginners, no Adobe Illustrator experience needed and no prior artistic ability is needed as well. We're going to follow along step-by-step to create beautiful tags. We're going to create a set of three, the first one is going to be a dear nordic tag and following in our theme, it's going to be a modern peace, love and joy and lastly we're going to create a be merry laurels gift tag. This coordinated set is going to make your gifts look beautiful. It's going to be time saving and money saving. It's going to be the best holiday gift giving season ever. Please, follow along in this class and we're going to save time, save money and have beautiful gifts this holiday season. 2. Deer: The first gift tag we're going to work on is going to be one that features a deer. Deer are very popular in all sorts of holiday gift wear, gift wrap, tags. It's just that Nordic look that everyone likes. We're going to begin by opening up a new file. So if you go to File New. You're going to select "Letter", if it's not selected, it will be in this drop-down. That gives us an 8.5 by 11 page. Just remember that you want your color mode to be CMYK, which is best for printing. Click "Okay". That's going to give us our board in that letter size. The first thing we're going to do is click on this rectangle tool. Again, if the rectangle is not there and you happen to have the ellipse selected first, just go to the drop-down and select the rectangle tool. I'm going to come here to my art board. I'm going to double-click and that's going to give me a small pop-up box. I'm going to enter the dimensions two by 3.25. This is just standard gift tag size. You can make it any size you want. If you prefer square, square tags are very popular as well. But this is just the industry standard for gift tag sizes. So we'll click "Okay". For now I'm going to take the fill off. So I'm going to click on this hollowed out box and select "None". Then for the color, I just want to give it any color just so we can see our gift tag while we're working on it. I'm just going to zoom in by holding down Command and the plus sign because I just want for you to get a better look here. Normally, I would draw all my icons by hand, then I'll scan and digitize. So it is a process and not everyone has a, the time or sometimes the ability to do it. I just want to show you that there are a lot of free clip art for personal use online. Some of them you can pay for if you want to license, if you want to pay for the license, and therefore be able to sell your gift tags online. But for the purposes of this class, we're going to be creating gift tags for personal use. So the site that we're going to visit is for personal use only. So just be mindful of that. When you do find clipboard online or any type of fonts online, that if you're using it, that you're following the artists instructions, that the licensing is only for personal use, that you only use it for that. If you do wish to sell them, a lot of them do have extended licenses that you can purchase, for you to be able to sell it on Etsy or any other store online or at any gift shows or anything like that. I'm going to visit this first site. It's called Open Clip Art. They have a lot of silhouette-type clip arts, which is really what we'd be looking for today. So I'm just going to type in here, deer. It gives me, here's a leaping one, it goes on and on. If you click through these pages, there's just a lot to choose from. But I think I like this guy here. This guy here would be perfect. So I'm going to click "Download" and it downloaded it here into my Downloads section. I'm just going to slide that over a little bit and I'm going to drag it into here, and here he goes. So I'm going to copy it. Then I'm going to paste it into here. I'm going to zoom out just so you can see. So by holding down the Shift button and then clicking and dragging down towards the left, I'm just going to size him a little smaller, just so he fits perfectly in our gift tag here. I want him to be a prominent size because he is the feature of this tag. So I think that looks pretty good, just about there. You can always align everything by just if you go here, as long as you have the selection tool selected, you click here and you drag down. That selects both the rectangle and the deer and we can align them. If you wanted them centered, it would center it as well, but I don't want him centered, I actually want him towards the bottom because we're going to put personalization up at the top. So that's pretty good there. Let's close this window for now. I actually would like him in a white, and I want this gray to be just a little darker. That's pretty good there. It's not quite black, but it is this smoky gray. So to finish off this tag, I'm going to click here at the top, and I'm going to drag down and I just want to put a bit of a header at the top here. That one I'm going to make in an orange. So see your gift tag is taking shape. Then I'm going to go here to the line segment tool. I'm going to select the line. I'm just going to line up my cursor here at the top, and by holding down Shift, it'll give me a straight line as I click and drag towards the right. That created a perfect line for me. I'm going to make that white. Then here, in this palette, I'm going to select dashed line. You can set the dash and the gap sizes. So I'm just going to put 3333 for now and see how that looks, because I want that stitched look to keep in our Nordic theme. That's good for me there. I don't want it too thin, I don't want it too thick. You can change the stroke and make it just a little thinner, and that looks pretty as well. So maybe at 0.5, that would be good. So now I'm going to select it, and by holding down the Option key, I'm going to click and drag and that just makes a duplicate copy. That looks good, just like that. So now I'm going to go to the Text tool. I'm going to click and I'm just going to type, "Love, The Andersons." Then as I said before, you can go on any of these sites. Illustrator comes pretty preloaded with a bunch of fonts, but you could find beautiful types online for free that are for personal use. You can also purchase some at very reasonable prices from Creative Market, from Font.com, DaFont has a lot of free ones. You can pretty much select any font that you want that will work with your personal style. I'm going to go here and there is one that I wanted to use. Let's use Andale. So that one's good. I think it looks better if all of this was in caps. I retyped it, but actually, if you go into the type and then format, there's a way that you can actually just make them all caps without having to retype it all. But this was a short way to type, so it's not that much of a problem. If by chance your type looks this way when you type the two lines, you can go here into this paragraph palette and just click "Align Left". So for now that looks good. I'm just going to make the letters white. I just want to put a tiny dot, an ellipse right here. So I went to the ellipse panel. Now, remember the rectangle tool was there, so we're going to actually click and then go down and select the ellipse tool. Then I'm just going to go here at about the height of this T, and I'm going to click and holding down Shift, I'm going to drag down towards the right. I just want to make a tiny circle. It just gives us another design element there. So that's good. Then I'm going to click and hold down the option key and then drag all the way to the right, and that's also going to give me now a duplicate copy. By selecting it all, I'm going to actually just move it over a little bit, just to center it somewhat. I'm going to move this all down a bit, just because I want to leave enough space here at the top for our punch hole. So there you have it. This is the first gift tag. 3. Peace love joy: The next tag we're going to work on is another popular one. You see them everywhere. They just pretty much are pretty fonts that say peace, love, joy. It's just going to be lettering. It's not going to be any icons or anything. We'll add a small heart just for an added touch, but the feature will be lettering. Again, we can go ahead and go into our rectangle tool and double-click and select two by 3.25 or we can select the gray rectangle here and by holding down the Option key and clicking, we can just click and drag to the right and that makes a duplicate copy of that. I'm going to go here to my Type Tool and I'm going to type peace, love, joy. I'm going to see, maybe I'll just leave it where I don't do the caps. Let's see how that looks like first. I'm just going to make that just a little larger just so we can see for now, peace, love, joy. That actually looks nice just like that in the same underlay mono type. But I'm going to go and find something more with a brush lettered look. You open up a new window here. I'm going to go into dafont D-A-F-O-N-T.com. I'm sure most of you have heard of this site. They have all the fonts are free use. They are property of the author. If you do use them anywhere, if you post IT on a blog or anything like that, it's always nice to give credit to the artists. Just make sure you do that. You're not allowed to share it or anything. Always make sure that you read the licensing instructions. But these are all for personal use for the most part. Some of them do say that you can use them in commercial projects. But again, it may be very specific to that author, the artist who owns the font. Just make sure you read through it. I had gone through this site before and there's one font that I do like, and it's called winter brush. As you can see it here, it's just like that real trendy brush font that everyone is using now. It's like that hand lettered brush look. I've already downloaded it, but for you, you can just click download and then it'll open up in a font. Just double-click on it and install it onto your system. I'm going to go here because I already have it installed. I'm going to go here and find it amongst my fonts, so winter brush. There it is. Now I want it to be just a little bigger, but I don't want it to be this spaced out. In here inside my character palette, I'm going to go here to set the leading. This is going to actually be, that's too much. You can play around with the preset one, or you can actually do this yourself. As you can see here, here the gap is nice, but from here to here it's not, so I'm just going to select this guy and move him up just so he can be at the height of the others. That one as well, I'm going to put, let's see, well for now let's just leave him there. Actually, let's select, let's cut it, and then let's paste it. I just want him to be aligned here with the end because I do want to add a heart and I want the heart to be right there in front of the joy. Move him over a little bit more. I'm going to go actually [inaudible] I'm going to go to the pencil tool. I'm just going to select a color just so you can see. But I'm going to just draw a heart loosely with my mouse and it doesn't have to be perfect. We do want it to be just a very loose shape so it's not, sorry. I usually do this much quicker. I don't know what's happening. Just so it'll be a nice loose shape and it's not too digital looking. I'm actually going to redraw the bottom here. I don't want it to be that pointed. There we go. You can find all sorts of hearts online too but this is an easy shape for you to draw. It's very simple. Just going to align it right here and then I want this guy to be in a nice strong yellow. Yellow and gray is very popular for the holidays, is just that modern look. There you have it. I'm going to move the love word just to the right a little bit too, so it all aligns just a little better. Then let's see, maybe the leading needs to be a little higher for the love. and then we'll move the joy up and the heart can move up as well. That looks much better. Now to add the personalization here, I'm actually going to use the same one, love the Anderson's. I just clicked and dragged or you can retype it as well. You want to steer clear of too many fonts. I know I'm a bit of a font addict myself, so I can get a little carried away sometimes. But the rule of thumb is if you already have some script font or a hand lettered font, you don't want to add another hand lettered font, a different one somewhere else. Let the hero of the piece be that brush lettered font that you already have and then this way, the other personalization at the bottom can just be a nice, clean font, just a typewritten font that's not too fussy, that's easy to read and doesn't detract from the brush lettering that you have above. I think this looks good, just like that. We're going to create a couple of copies here. I'm going to select this whole one and then bring it down here. I think I'm going to make this guy into some kind of, green is popular too. Let me see if I can get a teal. We could go with a strong teal of some sort. That looks pretty there. Then I'm going to do another color variation of this one as well. So I'm just going to click and drag. Let's click and drag. Let's make this heart that color as well. Starting to think that maybe this should be in this yellow. That looks prettier actually. You can play around with it. See this combination here looks nice so maybe this combination here should be orange. That looks pretty as well or let's try the teal on that one. All I'm doing is clicking the eyedropper tool just to select these colors here. That actually looks nice. There you have the peace, love, joy, gift tag. 4. Laurels: The last tag we're going to work on is a nice, modern one with just a pretty detail. I'm going to select the rectangle again here, and I'm going to hold down option and just click and drag to create a copy of this rectangle. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to go to Dafont, and I'm going to look for a font titled laurs nobilis. This is pretty much it here. It has just these pretty laurels and it has so many to choose from. These are very modern-looking. It's usually what we see these days and for you to draw these from scratch for this quick gift tag project would be very time-consuming. This is just a quick way to add a beautiful, simple design element without really getting into too much work. Go ahead and download that if you don't already have it. Now, the tricky thing with Dingbats, because that's what those are called, they're not actual fonts, they're Dingbats, is that in order for you to see all the characters, you're going to have to type out every single letter. First, let's go into a normal font here. Here, I'm in small caps, so I'm just going to type out every letter of the alphabet. Then I'm going to select laurs nobilis. Let's see if it comes up. There we go. See now you can see all the options that we have. Some of these Dingbats do come with different ones for caps, so let's just try to see what that looks like if they do happen to have. I'm going to set my caps lock on. This one does look like it does have some different ones. There are a few different ones there as you can see. There's so many pretty ones to choose from. I think I like this one the best so far. These are duplicates, so I'm just going to hit Edit, Cut. Then I'm going to get rid of these, and I'm going to paste it right in here. Let's just change the color so you can see. I'm going to click and drag just to make it just a decent size. There we go. Let's bring it down a little bit. You know what, I'm going to actually line it up to the center. I'm going to go here Horizontal Align Center and then here to this one, Vertical Align Center and that centers at perfectly in this middle there. The system is still recognizing it as a font, so I like to go to Type and then create outlines. That makes it into a vector and no longer an editable font. Because sometimes you can run into trouble when you're saving it, especially if there's licensing restrictions. It doesn't allow you to save it as a PDF and a lot of that other fun stuff. For this design, I'm just going to type. Let's change this to a myriad font. Let's see. It's just to Myriad Pro. I'm just going to type. Let's try that again. Caps are on, that doesn't help. Be merry. Let's make that in white. I'm going to click this over and then just holding down Shift and this corner, I'm just going to drag up towards the left just because I want it to make it smaller there. Be merry, period. That's just nice, simple words. It's all small caps. It's just very modern-looking. Then I'm going to put here, The Carsons. Bring that down as well. This I'm going to want to Align Center, so paragraph Align Center there. Let's make that white. Let's keep it towards the bottom because I think I'm going to take this heart and just drag it to make a copy of it. Let's put just a tiny heart. Love, the Carsons. Perfect. Sorry. It's a lot of junk mail. There we go. Let's bring this up just a little. I'm actually going to make this in a nice hot pink. There you have it. I'm going to make a copy of this guy. Because what I really ultimately want to do is just set them all up for printing, which I'll do in the next video. Let's just change the color of this one and that looks pretty good to me. There you have it. There you have three distinct designs. They all will look pretty together. This way everyone can have a unique design. You can have your own personalized gift tags for your gifts to look beautiful this holiday season. 5. Print set up: So the next thing I want to do is fill this whole 8.5 by 11 page with our designs that we've created here. You want to be able to do a full page, so you don't waste any of this blank space here when this could all be tags. What I'm going to do is, first, I'm going to, let's see, let's make a copy of this one, move it over here. You have to be very careful. It depends on your printer also, if it'll do full bleed or not. So you may just have to leave yourself enough space. Depends on where you're going to get these printed. You can upload this file to your local Office Supply store, Office Depot, or Staples, and a lot of them do same day or next day printing, and you can print off as many of these sheets as you want. You can also, there's a lot of printers online or you can print it at home and a home printer. But just be cognizant of the bleed area that you do have to leave. Let's see. I'm going to make this one orange. Let's make the little heart block into this dusty gray. Then once you finished designing it, just group it because we're going to try to do is align them the best we can, so it'll make it easier for you to cut them in the end. Let's group this one, and let's make ourselves a copy of this guy. Then maybe here we have an orange heart. Maybe we can leave that yellow actually goes nice. Let's select it all and group it. I just chose four colors, which I'll give you the color formulas if you're interested in these colors for your project. But I just usually stay to four or five colors in a theme, and that's pretty much it. So I can have all these different designs, but they're all in the same color palette. So when I gift wrap all my presence and I have the money to the tree or I have them on the mantel, it all looks cohesive, so it's all part of the same collection. This way, it just won't look to mismatched if you just keep adding colors and colors, just like a font obsessed on color obsessed, so I can get carried away as well. So just tried to pick 4, 5, 6, colors the most that really speak to you, and then just stick to those colors, add them to your color palette, and makes sure that reaches stay in that color theme. Here we go. I'm going to make a copy of this guy just so we can have a yellow one of him as well. So here could be yellow. Just make sure that when you use the eyedropper that it's not adding a stroke at all, so we don't want to stroke added. Here I would have to take that into this dusty gray, you have seen happen to vary though. We lost along somewhere. What happens when you don't zoom in? Let's just go back. There we go. Select these two first because those two need the color here. There we go. I don't want to fill that dashed. There we have it. Actually, I think these can could've stayed white. A seat belt like that because we're gong to make this yellow, I'll take that looks pretty like that. Once you're done designing it, just make sure you group it. We could actually fit just a few more, but we can leave it in the same color palette. Let's try to see what one of these looks like with the background in a color. Nothing is set in stone, you can play around with these. It's not, maybe this hot pink. Then maybe this could be this dusty gray. That looks nice too. It really all depends on the possibilities here are completely unless you can do as you please, these are your tags. Just go ahead and have fun with it. Let's try one of these in white. It's always smart to and the other color first, but did that backwards. Let's agree there. The Anderson's maybe should be in this hot pink. That's nice as well. Now, here's one thing that I want to point out. This one, because the background is white, it'll be hard for you when you're getting ready to cut it to actually see the edges. Make sure you add some stroke to it. Just make it a fine strokes so just so you can see where it starts and ends there. Just so it doesn't confuse you when you're getting ready to cut that. Let's just make sure that we have everything grouped. You don't have to get crazy with this many designs. I mean, you can stick to two designs, with three designs, or one design. But just make sure you fill your whole page with it because this way, you just won't have any problems when it comes to cutting in, you don't waste any paper. Especially if you're sending it out to print, you'd be wasting money by just having two or three on a page when you had plenty of room to print out others. I think they're all group now. I have space for one more and this guy with the yellow, so I'm just going to put him down here. That's what happens when you don't click option and click and don't let go of it until you've placed it. There we go. That's a full page of these tags. I'm just going to align them. Select them all, and then vertical align center. That means to me that something wasn't grouped here. They're all grouped. Let's see, vertical align center. Just move these guys down. Then we're going to align them this way. There we go. Plenty of room in the middle there. Again, like I said, it all depends on your printer. If your printer is unable to really leave such fine bleed lines there, you may have to bring it all in, but just make sure you leave yourself enough space here because you're basically going to go with a paper cutter or with scissors. If you do it with a paper cutter, it's easier and you'll be able just to cut along a full clean line. Then it just cutting vertically and then diagonally and not have to worry about whether or not your dealing with uneven unlined objects there. That's what you're finished page will look like. In the end, you'll have a nice full sheet of give tags. You can even send these off to be stickers on sticker sites. There's a lot of print sites online that will make these into stickers for you. So the possibilities route pretty much are endless with these, but it is a nice touch to have something personalized for the holidays that you put your own stamp on. I hope you enjoyed this. Thank you.