Transcripts
1. Graphic Design for Lunch Create Hi Tech HUD rings Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class creating high-tech HUD rings in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Now today we're creating high-tech HUD rings. These are rings that you might see in a heads up display, which is why they called HUD rings. In creating the HUD rings, I'm going to show you how to make brushes that you can use for the rings. You're also going to see some tips and tricks for spacing objects out within a finite area and also how to create some really interesting effects that I think that you're going to really like and that have plenty of application in other projects as well. Now as you're watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which asks you if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class and learning from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, to the fact that you would recommend the class and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now if you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now let's get started making HUD rings in Illustrator.
2. Pt 1 - Start the Design: To get started with our drawings, we're going to need a new document. I'm just going to create a document 1920 by 1080 pixels, which is an HD image size, RGB color mode. If you're working with earlier versions of Illustrator, this is what your dialogue would look like. RGB color modes are going to be pretty important for these rings because of some of the effects that we're creating. I want some guides, so I'm going to choose View Rulers and then show rulers. I'm going to drag and I guide it to this position 500 here. I can double-check it by clicking on this reference point here and just making sure that that reads 500. If it doesn't, I'm going to make it read 500. I'm going to bring in another guide at 1300. Again, I'm going to make sure that it reads 1300. Now guides in Illustrator are just objects. I'm going to open the last pallet here, and I'm going to lock down these two guides, so that they can't move. Now let's go and create a rectangle as a starting shape. I'm going to click the rectangle tool. I'm going to give it a fill but no stroke, and I'm going to take it from one guide to the other. It's going to be a very narrow rectangle. Let's just zoom in here. We can double-check that it stretches all the way by clicking on the rectangle with the selection tool and just checking that it's leftmost reference point is at 500. When I click the rightmost reference point, it's at 1300. It's sized perfectly. While I'm here, I'm just going to drag a few copies of this out of the way so that I've got them in a minute and I don't have to recreate them each time. Let's just take this one and make it a bit skinnier. Now I'm going to add some filled rectangles here. I'm just going to start drawing some rectangles of varying sizes. Now, not too fast about spacing or size because I'm trying to make this interesting. I'm just going to go all the way across here, just creating some, just by clicking and dragging. What I do need to make sure is that if I've got a rectangle here sitting on this edge, that I don't have one sitting on this edge because otherwise they're going to be joined together later on. Whatever is on this edge is going to wrap around and join up here. You have to be continually looking at both edges of your document and just making sure that everything is balanced and things are not going to end up attached to each other that you don't want to be attached to each other. I'm going to select over all of these shapes. I'm going to the align panel and make sure that I show the options and choose align to selection. I'm just going to click here on vertical aligned top because that aligns the tops of all of these shapes. Now I'm just going to move them up so that they're just over the top of the line that I created a minute ago. Let's go and select everything here. We can just make a single shape out of that by opening up the Pathfinder palette and clicking Unite. If you don't see any of these pallets, you can choose Window and then Pathfinder just to show it. I've got a couple of starting shapes here. We're going on in the next video and we're going to look at some of the options we have for creating evenly spaced shapes all the way across between these ruler lines.
3. Pt 2 - Create Evenly Spaced Objects: Let's now have a look at a way of creating evenly spaced objects all the way across from one of these roller lines to the other. There are a couple of ways to do it. I'm going to show you both. We're going to start with the ellipse tool. I'm going to drag out a circle here, and I'm going to make sure it's a filled circle with no stroke. I'm going to apply that in position, so that it intersects with the ruler line. If I'm unsure, I can come up here and just click one of these leftmost reference points and just check that the x value is 500. That's lined up perfectly to our guide. Now I think I want to shrink it down a little bit, so I'm just going to do that before I start. Now we'll do a Distort and Transform. With the shapes selected, I'll choose Effect, Distort and Transform, and then Transform. I'm going to turn the preview on and I want 40 copies or 40 of these circles, which means I need 39 plus the original. Now if I divide 40 into 800, which is the distance between these two lines, it goes 20 times. I'm just going to type 20 pixels in here, and that's going to create a row of these dots that goes from one of the ruler lines to the other. If I just up this to 40, you can see that the last one here is sitting exactly in the same position as the first one. These are going to line up perfectly as our pattern brush but I only need 39, so I'm just going to click Okay. Now they're all attached to this one shape here. I'm just going to move it down a little bit. Actually, I think I'll take it all the way to the top for now. At this point, I can expand it with Object, Expand Appearance. I'm going to choose object Ungroup until ungroup is no longer an option. Then I'm just going to select Group. These are now grouped into a single group for all of these particular circular objects. That's one way of creating a series of objects that spans the full width of what's going to be our pattern brush. But it doesn't have to be done mathematically, so let's have a look now and see how we would do that in a non-mathematical way.
4. Pt 3 - Evenly Spaced Objects Another Method: The second option for doing the spacing effect is one that is not reliant on any mathematics. First of all, I'm going to make a small rectangle here. I'm going to zoom in a little bit closer, and I'm going to make two additional copies of it by holding the Alt or Option key as I drag two copies away. I want to make sure that these are aligned at the top here and that their horizontal centers are evenly distributed. Having done that, I'm going to group these with object group. Now, I'm going to create a spacer. My spacer is going to be a rectangle that has a stroke but no fill. We can even give it a colored stroke if we like. I'm just going to drag out a rectangle that will be my spacer. The space between these sets of objects is going to be a little bit more than this, but I'm just using this as a buffer. I'm going to select over all of the shapes and choose Object Group. Now, I have these three shapes grouped and then that group, grouped in with this one. They're all going to travel together. I'm going to line them up so that their edge here is right on the guide. Again, I'm just going to check that and it's not quite right, so I'm just going to make sure it's perfect. Now, I am going to zoom out because I need to be able to see the full distance between these two guides. I'm going to select this shape and effect distort and transform and then transform. I'll turn preview on. I'm going to set my copies to two just to start off with. I'm going to start moving them horizontally. I just want to work out what spacing I'm going to look for. What I want is for the edge of this red shape, my spacer shape, to be just about over the next group of three objects. Having achieved that, I'm just going to start increasing the number of copies until I get this. I don't want to go over the edge here, I want to be within these boundaries. I'll click "Okay". Now, I'm going to expand this shapes. I'll selected and choose Object Expand Appearance. In the last pallet, you'll find that we have a series of groups here. We're going to burst these out of the groups at one level, so I'll choose Object, Ungroup. Now, I've got a group that is these set of three and this spacer is in there as well. Well, I'm going to go one further assault, choose Object, Ungroup. But I do want to keep my set of three shapes as a group, that's really important. I haven't deselected everything. Everything is still selected at this point. Now, I'm going to click away from it and I'm going to take this shape here, just this one shape at the end and I'm going to move it across so it is perfectly lined up here with this guide. Here I'm just going to check its rightmost point and it should be at 1300. Now, I'm going to select everything in this line. I'm going to the Align panel. I'm going to make sure that in the options here it's set to align to selection. Now, I'm going to click here on Horizontal Distribute Center. What that does is it takes each of these objects, this group, this shape here, this group, this shape here, and it makes sure that there's an oven space between all of them all the way across the document. That's going to mean that these are going to be perfectly spaced when we come to create our brush from them. But we don't need these red shapes anymore because they were only there as a spacer. I'm going to select one of them, but I need to select all of them to delete them. I'll choose, Select, Same Fill & Stroke. That selects all of the shapes that have the same fill and stroke. In other words, all of our spacers, and I'll just press delete. Now, I have groups of groups and I'm just going to select all of them and just put them in a single group. Now, their spacing is going to be constrained. They're not going to move and I can move them around into a different position, but they're not going to change in position relative to each other. That means that they're going to be perfectly spaced for my brush. I'm going to bring this shape up here now and size it down a little bit. Now, I can grab my group and just move it a bit closer.
5. Pt 4 - Add More Elements: One of the other elements that looks pretty good in these brushes is a shape that has pieces cut out of it. So what I'm going to do is go and make a series of small rectangles here. I'm going to make sure that again they're lined up perfectly. So this one is lined up. I'm going to use effect distort and transform and then transform. Now with this one, I want 20 of these across, so that means 19 copies plus my original. If I divide 20 into 800, which is the space between these two guides, they go in 40 times. So I'm going to move this 40 pixels across, and this is nicely spaced out. If you want to test it, just take it up one more and you should find that this extra shape is just the other side of this guide, should be butted up against it. We don't need that, so I'm just going to stop at 19 and click okay. I'm going to expand this and ungroup it, until ungroup is no longer an option. Next up, I'm going to borrow a copy of this line. So I'm going to alt, drag a copy of this line. Because it was created earlier, it's right at the very bottom end of the last pallet. Was going to size it up, I'm going to move it. So it's just over these other shapes, and then I'm going to select all of the shapes. From the Pathfinder dialogue here, I'm going to click minus front because that will subtract all of these front shapes from the back one. Now I have this sort of teeth here, so I'm just going to shrink down the size here and use this element in my design. Another shape that looks really good is a elongated ellipse. I'm going to go to the Ellipse tool and drag out an elongated shape. Because this will be pulled more towards being a circle when it appears on the outside of the pattern brush shortly. So let's just put that into position. I think I want mine to be a little bit smaller and a little bit skinnier here. Checking how far it needs to go probably, about eight pixels will be perfect. If I'm using eight pixels of movement, and if I divide eight into 800, which is the space between these two lines, then I would get 100. So if I make 99 copies, as it's going to scratch perfectly between these two guides, and I'll click okay. Again, I'm going to expand this, ungroup it until ungroup is no longer an option, and then just group it just to make sure that my layers palette is staying really, really need. Now, the last few elements I'm going to create are going to be some incomplete lines. So I'm going to create some very thin lines here, select them and make duplicates of them. They're going to be unevenly spaced and unevenly lined up as well. But just so I can be sure, I'm going to make sure that they're all exactly the same height. So I'm going to use 2.5 pixels for the height, and that will allow me to create some additional shapes, or at least check the shapes to make sure that every single one of them is the same height. I'm able to select on them and just Alt or Option Drag a duplicate away. To make these smaller, you might find that it's easier to actually type a value in here, than it is to try and drag on these to make them smaller. If you do that, make sure that this icon here is unlocked because you want to keep the depth of 2.5 pixels, but you may want to change the length of the line. What I would do here is to go and create a few of these interesting arrangements of lines here just to finish of the shape. Now, once I've done that, we'll come back in the next video and we'll get working on creating the pattern brush for our hard ring.
6. Pt 5 - Apply the Brush: We're pretty much ready now to go ahead and to create our pattern brush. I'm just going to move this last shape into position and just make it a little bit narrower than it is. I'll do one final check to make sure that everything is nicely lined up on this edge and if it's not, I'm going to make sure that it is lined up correctly. Everything looks pretty good here. I'll select either all of the shapes and we're going to the brushes palette, click the "Flyout" menu, choose "New Brush", and then choose "Pattern brush" and "Okay". Now you don't need the corner tiles on this, so if you're working in an earlier version of Illustrator that doesn't provide automatic corner tiles, that's just fine. You're not going to be using them anyway. The thing we are going to change here is, we want to change the colorization method to tints, and we'll click "Okay". I'm going to test this brush out at this point by creating an ellipse. I'm going to hold the "Shift" key as I do so that it's constrained to a perfect circle. I'm going to apply the color to the stroke and have no fill on this shape, and I'll click once in my brush. This is the hard ring that we've created using this basic design as our pattern brush, but this can be altered. With the circle selected, I can go to the options of selected object here, turn preview on, and I can reduce the size of the brush and when I choose to do this, you'll find that the entire pattern becomes so much smaller and you may find that more interesting. You can also use the flip across option here and if you click "Flip Across", what happens is that what was on the outside is now on the inside. You'll see that these lines are here now on the outside and these dots are on the inside. If I flip it, then the opposite is going to happen. These dash lines are on the inside and the dots are on the outside, but that also means that you've got two brushes for the price of one. I'm just going to leave this one as it is and click "Okay". I'll choose "Edit", "Copy", "Edit", "Paste in place", and I'm going to make the second copy smaller than the first by holding the "Shift" and "Alt" case as I drag in on the handles to create a smaller internal shape. Now if I click on this and flip it across, I'm going to get a totally inverted brush on the second shape. We've got a really complex design created from just this simple design and what we've done is just flipped it on the second one. At this point, you might want to go ahead and create one or two of these sets of brushes just so that you've got a bit of variety to choose from. We are going to come back in the next video and see some ideas for putting these together, and also learn how to make a really interesting circular shape that I know that you're going to really like.
7. Pt 6 - Begin to Put the Image Together: I've gone ahead and created a second set of objects to use as a pattern brush. In this case, I interspersed some filled dots with some hollow ones. I also use some dots here along with some rectangles that have a stroke and no fill. Everything is stretched and lined up to these two guides, with one exception and I just want to show you the problem here. I have a rectangle here that has no fill, but it has a stroke. The problem is that the stroke is appearing over this line. If I want to tuck this into the area inside these two guides, I'm going to need to select the shape and go to stroke and make sure that the stroke is on the inside of the shape and not the outside of the shape. That will ensure that it's going to butt up to this line really nicely. Because all of these other shapes were created using copies of the original shape, I'm going to just make sure that all of those have their stroke on the inside as well so they're all going to look the same. Although that will be a little hard to tell on these small shapes if they're not correct because they are so small in the arrangement. But you do want to make sure that they are just sitting on this line and that the strokes are not over the line. I'll select over this set of objects and make a second pattern brush. I'll choose new brush, pattern brush, OK. I don't want the corner task, because we're not using them anyway but I do want the colorization method to be tints and I'll click OK. Let's see how this one looks as a pattern brush. I'm drawing a circle and I'm going to apply my brush to it. I'm going to click here on Options of Selected object and let's just reduce the size of it. This is one instance of the brush, but let's have a look and see how it looks when it's flipped across. Well, it's a totally different brush. It's just really interesting how different a brush you can get in this instance by just flipping it across the line so you've got two very different effects here, and you just need to flip it to get the one that you want. Now at this point, I may not want to assemble my final image in this particular document, but I certainly do want to save these brushes. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select All unused brushes here and with them selected, I'm just going to drag them onto the trash can. Now, I'm going to save this brush set. I'm going to choose Save brush library and I'm going to call these hud rings and I'll click Save. That ensures that these brushes are now going to be saved where I can get access to them in future to use in any document at all. We're going to go ahead now and create a document that we can use these shapes in. I'll choose File and then New. I'm going to create the same size document as I was working on before. Again, RGB color mode. I'm going to add a rectangle that is the size of this document. It's going to be filled with black and it's going to have no stroke at all. From the align panel options, I'm going to make sure that I am aligned to art board this time so that I can center this shape on the art board. I'm going to the last pallet and I want to lock down the background so that I can't get to it so that will stop it from moving unexpectedly. Now we can go and get our brushes. I'm going to open the brush panel. You will see that the brushes are not in this panel because they're not automatically loaded by illustrator so I'll click the Fly out menu, open Brush library, user defined and I'm going to select the Hud rings brushes. Now I can grab both these brushes and just drag them into the brush panel and I can just close down the hud rings panel cause I don't need that any longer. Now let's go and create a circle for our first hud ring. Now I'm going to give it a stroke and no fill but the stroke, I want to be white. Then from the brush panel I'm going to click on one of my Hud ring brushes. Because we set the brush coloring method to tint, the brush is now being colored the color of the stroke. I can click here and I can resize it if I want to and I can also flip it across. It really depends what I want, the look of my brush to be. I'm going to duplicate this with edit Copy, edit Paste in place. I'm going to re-size this holding Shift and Alt, and for this one I'm going to flip the brush. Next up, I want to put a shape in the middle here so I'm going to go and make a second art board just to allow me to create that shape. I'm just going to drag out a second art board, it doesn't need to be particularly big. On this art board I'm going to put a ellipse. I'm just going to drag out a reasonable size ellipse and I'm going to give it a black fill and no stroke. Next up, I'm going to use a tool to wrinkle the edge of it, but I'm not going to use the wrinkled tool, this time I'm going to use the crystallized tool. With the crystallized tool selected, we'll just double click on the tool to see what the options are. I've got a width and a height of 100, an angle of 0, intensity of 50 percent, complexity 1 and detail 2. We've got brush size shown, that's just a saved default settings. What you're going to do with this brush is, you're going to sit inside this shape and you're just going to pull over the edge. As you pull over the edge, interesting things happen. You can pull more or less. You can re-pull something if it doesn't go far enough the first time, you can pull it again. If you don't like the result, then you can just press Control or Command z to undo it. What you're looking for is something that is an interesting shape, but not something too complex because you're going to have to take this shape with your design. I've got a reasonable looking shape here. I'm just going to select it and what I'm going to do before I do anything more is just simplify it a little bit, to get rid of some of the points that I don't need. With it selected, I'll choose Object to Path and then simplify. An illustrator will tell me how many points they were. Well, in the original there was 361 points, but I can get it down to 334 and if I decrease my curve precision, I can get it down a little bit lower. That's just removing some of the complexity for this shape and its complexity that I don't really need because this is just a organic shape. I'm just going to wind it down a little bit and click OK. Now I want to put a circle in the middle of this shape. It will help me if I change the fill color just temporarily. I'm just going to do it as a pink, I'm going to go and drag out a circle and place it in the middle of this shape. Now, moving it as I'm drawing it by holding down the space bar because that lets me move the shape as I'm drawing it. Basically what I want is for this pink shape to be inside the black one, because the next step is to cut the pink shape out of the black one. I'm just going to select over everything go to the Pathfinder palette and I'm going to click Minus front, because what that will do is take the pink shape out of the black one. We just end up with a hole in the middle of our shape. Now we can go and fill it with some color and we can bring it into our design.
8. Pt 7 - Flare Pattern Brush: Now, in the last video, we created this interesting little element for the middle of our hub ring, but we can also create it as a pattern brush and that might give us a little bit more flexibility. I'm just going to show you how you do that as a pattern brush. I'm going to select a black fill here and no stroke. I'm going to drag out a nice large rectangle. Am going to the crystallized tool and am going to pull up the top edges of this rectangle. I don't want to pull into the shape so much as have things that are sticking out of it. I'm going to drag out another rectangle, but let's just change the color so that you can see what's happening a little bit more easily. What I want to do is work out how much of this shape I'm going to leave behind. That's going to move this up. That's pretty much what I want for my brush. I'll select the wrinkled edge shape plus my rectangle, go to the pathfinder, and click minus front. That gives me this bit left. If I try to make a pattern brush out of this though, it's not going to line up properly at either end, because these two are not going to join together around a circle. To solve that problem, I'm going to zoom into this end of the brush. What I can do is I can cut it off here. I'm just going to cut this piece off my brush and select both pacers and click minus front. Now if that happens to you, just undo it, choose Edit, Undo or press Control Z. Now instead of choosing minus front, because obviously that's destroying my entire shape, we can select trim and that will trim that end off. I'm going to double-click on this shape here and remove it and you can see that the end has been trimmed. I'll press escape. Let's go and have a look at this end. I'm going to draw a rectangle over a pace that I can easily get rid of. I'm just going to carve it out through here, select both shapes and try minus front again, and that's fails. I'm just going to undo that and I'll click trim. I'm going to get rid of this shape here and press escape. Now, I want this to wrap around and create a really nice pattern brush. Right now this end and this end are different in size. What I'm going to do is divide this into paces. I'm just going to go and make a line segment to just run through the middle of my shape here. I'll select all of these pieces and click divide. That's divided this into two pieces. I'll choose object ungroup. Now I have a left piece and a right piece, and I've got a few extra bits that are being left behind. I'm just going to get rid of those. They would have been ones that were causing trouble with my minus front bit. Now I've got my left and right and I've just reversed them. I brought one piece over here and one piece over here. I'm going to maneuver them so that they stick together. I'm going to start reshaping this. I wont have to reshape it very much. All I have to do is just pull this shape down so that it blends in here. You don't want to spend too much time on this, but you will want to make sure that you've got even blending between these two shapes which we've got now. It's really a seamless blend. Now select over both of these shapes with the selection tool and click the unite command to create a single line back again. Now because I cut the shape in half and reverse the pacers this piece and this piece, I got to match perfectly because they came from each other. They were split at that point in the first place. Now let's select that and make our pattern brush out of it. New brush, pattern brush. We don't need a corner tile. Don't worry if you haven't got one. We do want to be able to recolor this so choose "Tints" and click "OK". Let's try this out on a circle. We're expecting this to join up perfectly so that we won't be able to see where the same is. We have a perfect brush here you can't see where the join is and you shouldn't be able to. But because this is a pattern brush, we have one thing that we can do with this that we couldn't do with the previous one. That is that we can flip it across. We can have this wiggly shape on the inside or on the outside. You may want to spend that little bit of extra time creating a pattern brush here rather than just a circle, so that you can actually do something with it. Of course, what you want to do is to make sure that you save this pattern brush as we did earlier, so that you always have that available too.
9. Pt 8 - Another Handy Brush: There's another brush that's quite handy for these huddling effects. I'm going to show you how to create it. I'm going to the rectangle too. I have a black stroke selected. I'm going to create a rectangle that is 150 pixels by 150 pixels, so it's a square. I'm going to make two copies of this. I'm going to out drag two copies away. I'm going to select either all of those. I'm going to the align panel. I'm going to make sure that I have the option selected. Right now, mine are visible, but if it says Show Options here, you'll click on that. I'm going to choose align to key objects because that will allow me to adjust the spacing. I'm going to put 50 pixels of spacing in between each of these shapes. Am typing 50 in here, and then we'll click here on horizontal distributes space and than just adds 50 pixels of space. I have a shape that's a 150 pixels or 50 pixel gap and other 150, 50,150. What I want do is I want to evenly spaced these. What I want is a shape that is the sum total of all of these bits plus an extra one of these 50. What I need is essentially this amount of space three times, and that amount of spaces is 200 pixels, so I want 600 pixels. I'm going to make a rectangle that is 600 pixels wide. That's going to give me perfect spacing. The height doesn't really matter. I'm just going to make it 50 pixels. That'll be perfect. and click Okay. Now, I'm just going to position it over my shapes. It's going to be the bounding box for my pattern brush. With it selected, I need to choose object, arrange, center back because they no fill, no stroke rectangle bounding box for our pattern brush must be behind everything. Again, I'm going to make it no fill, no stroke. Now if you're curious about bounding boxes and pattern brushes, and if this is a little bit strange to you, then I have a class on bounding boxes and pattern brushes. It's going to explain everything. I'm going to put a link to that in the class project area for you. We're going to new brush. We'll click New Brush. Pattern brush. Click Okay. I don't want the corner. I just want the edge bits here and I want it to be tints and I'll click, Okay. At this point, you might be a bit curious about what exactly pattern brush are we're going to get out of this. It looks like it's going to be a string of boxes. Well, it's not, it's really interesting brush. Let's go through the Ellipse tool and drag out an ellipse. Let's give it a stroke color. Let's just settle for black right now and let's go and apply a pattern brush to this object. What we get is a series of squares. But because they're a pattern brush and because they're applied to a circle, they've actually found out so that they look like these arcs of a circle. If I click the stroke weight, I'm going to get less of them and that's really what I want. I want less of them and a slightly thicker strokes. I actually want three. This is perfect. I'm going to expand this because right now this is a brush applied to shapes. I'll choose object, expand, appearance. Now I'm going to go and grab this. Let's take this to our drawings. I'll press Control X, Command X on the Mark to cut it. Then I'll press Control or Command V to move it into position. While it's selected, I'm just going to make the stroke color white and I'm going to increase the stroke. This is no longer a pattern brush, so I can increase the stroke without changing the number of segments. Just going make this a bit larger. Let's position it pretty much in the center of our circle. If the stroke weight is too much, I can just decrease my stroke weight. If you don't want all of these shapes, you can go into the last pallet here open up this group and you'll see that every one of these shapes is just a path here, so you can just delete the one that you don't want. I've got this path selected, I'll just press backspace to get rid of it. But now I have two of these shapes surrounding my HUD ring.
10. Pt 9 - Gradient and Pattern Texture: At this point, you're just going to be looking at finishing touches for your design and there are any number of things that you could do. I'm going to show you some of the possibilities in this video. I'm going to start with an ellipse. I'm going to drag out holding the shift key, I fairly decent size ellipse. I'm going to hold the space bar as I just move it into position. It's pretty much centered over the top of this object. Now I'm going to fill it with a gradient here, and I'm just using a gradient that is shipped with illustrator. It's a gradient called Summer, but you could use any gradient that you like. If you need more gradients, click the swatch libraries menu and go to gradients and then you can see a whole heap of gradients that you could use. Now with my shapes still selected, you can say it's above everything. So I'm going to drag it down to sit just above the black filled rectangle. The black filled rectangle is providing the background here to my art boards. I want this just above it. We're going to open up the gradient panel. I'm going to work on this gradient. First of all, I'm going to this end of the gradient and I want it to be zero opacity at that end, which is going to block it out. It's just tapering off really nicely. I'm going to double-click on this end because I want to choose a different color for it. You've got a couple of ways of selecting color here. I'm just going to select this sort of blue color. I want to add another stop in here for my gradients. I'm just going to click here underneath the gradient bar and I'll double-click on that so as to make sure that I have a color selected that I liked. I'm going for this sort of orange blue look. With this selected, this gradient's topic, and see that it's going to be given an opacity, which is going to be somewhere between 100 and zero because that's what this gradient slide is working on. But I want it to be a little less transparent, so I'm going to take it up to 50. Let's just check this one here. This is 100 percent. This is now 50 because I put it in there, but you can put whatever value you like and this is zero, so there's no gradient at all, no color at the very edge of this shape. Now you can sort of manipulate these stop marks to work out exactly where you want the transition to take place. So if you want a bit more blue, you can do that. If you don't want it quite so opaque, then you can come in here and dial down at opacity a little bit. Now I also want to add in a sort of pattern behind this. I'm going to show you a pattern that I created in my Galatea class. If you want to see how to create some of these patterns, you can go to that class, but I'm just going to quickly do a pattern here. I'm going to draw a line and I'm going to give that a black stroke. I'll choose effect, distort and transform zigzag. I want it to be smooth and I want this end and this end to be either both above the line or both below the line, but not one each. This is looking good now and can make it a little bit steeper if I want to. I'll click "okay". I'll Alt, drag a duplicate of this line and if I add the Shift key, it's going to be placed immediately below the original. I'll select over both of these and make a blend from them object, blend, make. Now my blend looks pretty good. Yours may not look this good depending on how you have your settings set up. What I suggest you do is double-click the blend tool, go for specified steps and then just adjust the number of steps until you have something that you like. I'll click "Okay". Now at this point I want to select over this shape and I want to read off its dimensions. They are really, really big, confusing numbers so what I'm going to do is make them less confusing. I'm just going to make them round number. This is 450 and this was 305 and change. I'm just going to make it 300. This selection here is 450 by 300. I'm going to make a rectangle that is the same size, 450 by 300. This is going to be the bounding box for my pattern. If you're unsure as to why patterns need bounding boxes, again, I've got a class on bounding boxes and that's in the class project area. Probably want to have a look at that. Then select either both these shapes. I'm going to make sure that they are centered. I'm going to align to selection and just hit the vertical and horizontal center options. This rectangle is at the front of everything right now and it has a stroke, none of which it should have. I'm going to select just the rectangle, I'm going to give it no stroke. I'm going to drag it below the blend. That's important because otherwise this is not going to work as a pattern. I want my pattern to be a sort of lighter color. While I'm here, let's go and grab this blend and let's make it a lighter, sort of neutral gray color. Well, I think probably something like this. Now I'll grab the blend, and then I'll fill no stroke rectangle and with the selection tool going to drag these into the swatches panel to make a pattern of them. Now, I can just duplicate my rectangle here. Let's go and get this black filled rectangle and make a duplicate of it because it's exactly the right size. Now, unlock it, target it, go and select its fill and fill it with my new pattern. Now, that's a little bit intense, but it's going to be easy to resolve because I'm going to the appearance panel and with the fill selected, I can just dial down the opacity of the fill so I just blend it in to the black layer underneath. That just gives us a little bit of texture through the design. If I don't want that to move, I can lock that down as well.
11. Pt 10 - Glowing Text: The next finishing touch I'm going to add to this design is some text and we're going to do that on a path. So I'm going to select the ellipse tool, it's got a black stroke but no fill. I'll hold the Shift key as I drag out an ellipse. So I'm going to position it using the space bar to move the shape as I'm drawing it. So I don't want it to be very big, I want it to be just outside this largest shapes in my design right now. So now, I'm going to the Type tool but if you're working with illustrators, CSA, any of the CSA versions, you may want to check this setting first. I'll choose Edit Preferences and then type on a Mac that would be Illustrator, Preferences type. You want to make sure that this film new type objects with placeholder text option is disabled. Otherwise, some placeholder text is going to be automatically inserted in your document and those just really annoying. So disable that and click okay. Now, we'll go to the type on a path tool and we'll hover over the path and when I do, you'll see that they fill and stroke invert and we're now in type mode. So if you want to choose a color for your type at this point, you can do so. I'm going to select the same blue colors I'm using in the center of the document. Now, I'm just going to type garbage and having typed garbage, I want it to be unrecognizable garbage. So I'm going to select over at, I'm going to probably increase my font size just a little bit. So I'm going to take it up to about 14. Now you want to select a sort of garbage font to use. So what I'm going to do is roll up to the top of my font list and have a look through and say the kind of font I could use. Well, bizarre, I could use because it seems to be just mathematical symbols. I could also use bookshelf symbol because again, that mathematical and I'm going to actually select that, but you can have a look through your font list and you'll probably find fonts that are just numbers or mathematical symbols or something that has the suggestion of being interesting but totally illegible, so you're not even inclined to try and work out what it is. So I've got that bookshelf symbol selected here. Now, what I want to do is give this a glow and what I found with Illustrator is that some of the glows don't work quite the way you expect them to. So I'm going to show you a trick with this. I'm selecting the object that is the text on a path. I'm going to choose Effect stylize out a glow because this allows me to add a glow to my text. I'm going to make my glow color somewhat similar to the text color, just a bit lighter. I'm going to set it to Screen, and I'm going to turn preview on, and you will say that you may see the slightest hint of a glow, but not very much at all. Make it about three pixels blur, and I'll click okay. What I'm going to do is, I'm immediately going to go and do the same thing again, effect, stylize, afterglow, and I'm going to apply a new effect. I'm going to turn preview on and you start to see your glow. Now, this is way too much of a glow of course, but it does allow us to see a realistic glow. So I'm going to take it down to about 10 percent and then wind down the blurred to about two pixels, and I'll click Okay. So that's given me some type with a glow effect, but I did find that having to apply the glow twice, gives me a much better result than even implying a glow at a very high level once. So just offer that to you, glows twice rather than just once seemed to work a whole lot better.
12. Pt 11 Blend Effect and wrapup: Another way to add some visual interest to the background, behind this shape, is to use a blend. Before I do that, I'm going to lock everything down, not the Layer itself, but just everything that's on the Layer. Going to the Pencil tool, I'm going to set no fill at all. For my stroke, I'm going to choose a color. I'm just going to use the light blue that we've been using first of all. I'm just going to draw out a pencil line. Then I'm going to change the color. I'm going to use this orange that we've been using also. With this, I'm going to draw a line that intersects the one I already have created. Then finally, I'll choose another color. I'm actually going to use a yellow here, and I'm going to draw a third line. The pencil tool settings I've got are fairly smooth, so I've got this accurate-to-smooth selector, pretty hard towards the smooth end so that my lines are getting smooth as I draw them. You may want to do that with your tool as well. Now, I'm going to select over these three lines. Because I've locked everything else down, they're the only things I can select. I'm going to the Blend Tool. I'm going to click on each of the three lines in turn and that creates a interesting blend. Now, you can take it as it is or you can go and adjust it. What I'm going to do is double-click the "Blend Tool," click on "Preview." I'm going to go to specified steps and I'm just going to reduce the number of steps a little bit. I don't want it to be quite as intense as it is. I'll click, "Okay." Now, this has a selection box around it. If I want to rotate it, I can do so by selecting it and just rotating this blend. I can also size it up a little bit larger if I want to. You can also warp this object. So with it selected, you could choose Object, Envelope Distort, Make with Mesh. For example, I'll use a four by four mesh and click "Okay." Then with the mesh I can go and select individual mesh points and I can warp the shape underneath. It allows me to do things such as just rearranging the shape if I want to, and making it thinner in some places, thicker in others. There's lots of things that you can do with this blend once you've made it. I'm just going to bring mine across the document a little bit. When I'm happy, I can just click away from it. Now, this Envelope Distort here is in my Layers panel. The Envelope Distort has the blend inside it. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to move it down over the top of the gradient filled shapes. I'm just going to take it down here. Just on top of my gradient filled shape. But that is behind the actual HUD ring. The colors are behind the HUD ring and if I lock it down, It's not going to flicker every time I go somewhere near it. From here I'm going to leave it to you. There are like a zillion things that you can do with these shapes. I just want to throw some ideas at you of the things that you can do to create an interesting background for your HUD ring. You could of course, add some additional HUD rings. If you wanted to, you could add glows to your HUD ring, all things. I'm sure that you are going to have enormous fun with this. I'm sure that you're going to come up with some really amazing designs too. So I'm really looking forward to seeing those. Your class project is of course, to go and create a HUD ring. Go and create some interesting designs and create some interesting and fun things for backgrounds. I'm going to give you some links to other classes that have these background effects and the Galatia effects for you so that you can be familiar with those if you want to learn a bit more about them. Also, got a class on text on a path which you might want to look at too. Post an image of your completed project in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and you've learned lots and lots of things about Illustrator that you didn't already know. As you're watching this class, you will have been asked if you would recommend it to others. Please, if you are enjoying and learning from the class, do two things for me. Firstly, say yes that you would recommend it to others. Secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is the class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
13. Bonus Extra Embellishments: In this video, I'm going to speed up what I'm doing and just go through a few extra additions to this project. I'm going to add some glows to some of the shapes here in the hard ring. I'm going to add another blend. I'm going to make a scatter brush and use that to add some little stars to the background, and I'm also going to go ahead and add a gradient as a background instead of the black. So I'm going to speed up the video. I'm not going to talk as I go through this, but I'm going to just add these additional elements, and I just thought that you might like to see it as it's being done.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
