Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi guys. Welcome to the Illustrated Series of Icons or Badges class on skillshare.com. This is the introduction lecture and I'm your host teacher and instructor, Dominic. I'm super excited to be here today and really inspired to see how many people have signed up for the class already and who are interested in the knowledge that I have to share with you guys. I want to start off just by saying thank you for signing up and for joining the class. When Skillshare asked me to teach this course, I thought maybe 50 people would sign up and as of today, which is actually a week before class starts, we've got already three times that amount. I think with that size of class, we should have a lot of potential for interaction and collaboration. So I'm really looking forward to seeing you guys all give feedback, and talk back and forth with each other, and learn together to make all of your projects better. This is the first class that I've ever taught with Skillshare and the first class online that I've ever taught period. So I hope that you guys will forgive any blunders, or errors, or nervousness that I have. I'm not used to being on camera, but because I just couldn't say no to Skillshare and because I love you guys all so much, doing it for you anyways. Got a couple of things that I just want to go over in this first video. Let's switch over to this here. I want to just first of all go over the course structure and talk about how it's going to break down over the next two weeks. Then I want to talk about ways that you can use the classroom environment here on Skillshare, to not only build your own project, but really get the most out of interacting with your fellow students. The course is broken down into three different sections. I've labeled them, building ideas, building consistency, and building a series. Each one of these translates into a different unit inside of the curriculum that you can see on your syllabus. The first section is all about generating ideas, it's about sketching, it's about research, it's about discovering the potential with those ideas. You'll probably have a whole lot of bad ideas and so it's about how to weed through the bad ideas to find some good ideas that will help make your project a success. The second section, since we're talking about icons and badges here, we're going to talk about some of the basic design principles, about how I can take just really basic shapes but make something beautiful, and interactive, and pleasing to look at without having to resort to covering it up with superfluous fluff like drop shadows, and textures, and all other things. Don't get me wrong, I think that there's a right time for textures, and drop shadows, and patterns and all of that stuff, but what I really want to focus on is design something using only basic shapes. Along with that also cover a lot of my workflow techniques, some tips and tricks inside of Adobe Illustrator and how you can use just those circles and squares inside of software to draw almost anything that your heart desires. I had couple of people ask me already like, "What software is required for this course?" The short answer is, none. The better answer is some software that you can generate vectors in. You can use free software like Inkscape. Do they make CorelDRAW anymore? I guess you could use that if you wanted to. You could even use Photoshop and use their vector drawing tools that shape tools inside of there if you wanted to. But the one that I'll be focusing on is Adobe Illustrator. It's the meat and potatoes, the bread and butter of the illustration and design industry and it's one of the most fluent. After we've gone through and built some of those ideas, we've started to bring those ideas to life through design using Adobe Illustrator, we'll talk about, in the third section, how we can build a whole series of things out of those ideas. [inaudible] we'll talk even more about [inaudible] up color palette, we'll talk about using the principles of unity and variety, using the idea of bringing something new to each one, but keeping it part of the larger whole, and then just finalizing the teeny tiny small details of each piece to really make it a series of icons or badges. So that's the basic breakdown of class. Got these three sections. Each one gets unlocked after a certain date. Each one contains videos and tutorials that I'll be posting. There are also links to references, inspiration, and research, things like books and other tutorials that you can be looking at. There are also be a deadline associated with each section to keep us on track with the project. Then in the second and third sections, I'll also be posting some live office hours during which time I will answer your questions. One of the cool things that I love about the classroom environment here on Skillshare is that, you've got the opportunity to, basically, run wild and do whatever you want to. I want to encourage you to do a couple of things during your time here in class. The first one is to just explore. I think at least for me, a lot of times it's easy to get locked into just doing what I do and then doing it over again. But without the presence of a client, or a boss, or an art director, anybody telling you what to do, I think you should take the opportunity to try something that you've been thinking about trying and maybe haven't had the opportunity to yet. I think also as you move forward with your projects, you should take the opportunity to get creative. That's a pretty broad statement and doesn't have a whole lot of parameters about it, but I just wanted to make the point that even though I'll be showing you my approach to things and how I draw using these basic geometric shapes, I would hope that you would take parts and pieces of that and come up with your own style or explore what you can do with it in ways other than what I'm showing you. The last part that I think will really help you guys take the most away from this class is, if you engage with the other students here. Like I mentioned before, we've got a great turnout for class and you've got the potential to interact with a whole bunch of people who you wouldn't see on a daily basis. I'm going to be commenting, emailing, talking to as many of you as I possibly can, as often as I possibly can. But on top of that, you'll really get a lot of benefit from contributing to other people's projects so leaving feedback and to listening to what other people have to say as well. There are a couple of different ways you can do that inside of Skillshare. You can create groups, which is a pretty cool way to work in smaller clusters inside of class. Right now, we've got about 150 people enrolled and that can quickly become overwhelming. But if you create a group, you can interact with as few as 20 people, or actually, I think that's the max, 20 people or less. So you can have a little bit more of that one-on-one discussions with people inside of those groups. The main thing that you'll probably do though is, be leaving feedback on people's projects and getting feedback left on your own project. That's really the time when you're going to get the best critique, the best feedback, the best contributions to your project from other people. The worst place for a designer or artist to be is inside of their own head and so to help get out of that, the best way to do that is just hear what other people think about your work. The last thing you can do is post discussions. There's a Q&A section and one of the main purposes of that section is, it's a place for you guys to leave questions directly to me. If you're having problems with Skillshare, if you're having problems with software, if you're having question about how to do something, post a discussion topic and I'll answer it there, or I will categorize it later for the live Q&A. However, that's not the only thing you can do in the discussion sections. It's an open bulletin board type of thing and so you can post resources for other people to find, you can post questions that you want to hear from other people, you can ask people how their day was if you really wanted to or maybe more appropriately like, how they approached their projects? You can take opportunities inside of those discussion forums to interact in class also. That's about it for this introduction lecture. I want to say, thanks again for signing up for the class. I'm really looking forward to moving forward, and hopefully right after this, you guys will watch the first video about sketching and building ideas.
2. Building Ideas: Hey guys. Welcome back. This is the first actual lecture and the first section, the building ideas section of the create a series of icons or badges Skillshare class. Hopefully by now you've watched the introduction lecture. If you haven't watched that yet I would recommend going back and checking that out first and then coming back and watching this video. What I'm going to be covering today is how to get your project started. How to build ideas, how to do some sketching, and how to keep yourself free from the creative block that can be associated with starting a project. I got a few tips and tricks to share with you and got a sample project that I've created that I'm going to show you guys where my thoughts came from for that project. Before I do that though, I do want to make one edit to the first video. In there I talked about posting Q&A to the questions and answers section of the website and then I would answer those in a live stream video. I have heard from Skillshare and they've been having problems with their livestream setup. So we're not actually going to do any livestream question and answer stuff in class, but do post any of your questions that come up along the way, post them in the Q&A section and I will respond to them. If I start to see topics or threads that need a video answer of some kinds, I can illustrate what I'm talking about, I will add additional videos as we go along. Hopefully some of you guys have already seen this series of badges for local Wichita, which is the town that I live in, attractions that I've been working on. I've created these for this class as an example as to what you might create or to illustrate some of the stuff that I'll be talking about. I'll be referencing this thing several times throughout the course just to show you how I'm actually drawing these things, but today I'm going to show you how I came up with the idea to make this series. Where do you start? That's always the hardest part with any project. If you're lucky you have a good creative brief, if not, you will have nothing other than a client who doesn't know what they want or when they want it. That can always be a hard thing to begin with. For this class I think what you should do to start off is to just put everything aside and just make a list of a few topics. It can be anything really, I wanted to keep the parameters of the class pretty loose so that you could pick and choose whatever that you wanted. I didn't want it to be any set guidelines or restrictions. We do know that we're working on a series of things here so you need to think about how a series of stuff might play out, but outside of that it can be anything from animals to aliens, to people, to different activities like sports or campaign or the nightlife or it could be a particular movie that you want to focus on or TV show. It can be almost anything. I would pick a few of those and just jot that down, just to get your mind started. From there, the first thing that I do when I start almost any project is to create what's called a mind map. Got this example here of mine, and it's a free association, free writing, just literally spewing ideas and words out on paper as quickly as they can come. There's not a whole lot of science to it. For me all I did is write down one word in the center, badges, and I've got a couple of things that I have been thinking about. So I just start branching off from there. I started with design in general and then design history, and artists, and designers, and names, and maybe their initials. We could go to Boy scouts or awareness rewards, answers, kind of things. There are stamps, stickers, people, activities. I'm a big fan of mid-century and that pops up in a lot of my self started projects. I'm thinking about mid-century, but I'm thinking about mid-century architecture and Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago, in Palm Springs area, I'm thinking about furniture, and life, and living, tables, beds, chairs, etc. Sorry about that. I'm also considering this Wichita area, which is where I'm from, tourism or attraction stuff. I take about 15 or 20 minutes and literally just write down everything that I can as quickly as possible. After I've got this mind map thing done, a lot of times what I would like to do is just let my ideas set for a while in the back of my head. The brain is a funny thing it'll actually keep thinking about stuff when you're sleeping, when you're thinking about other things, and things that are living in the back of your head. I actually build some of my best ideas after I let things sort back in there for a while. We don't have a whole lot of time here, but we've got a couple of days and if you get a jumpstart on this idea you can let ideas set for a day or two. It's probably all you really need for this project. After I've thought about it a little bit more I come back to this thing and then I circle some of the things that I'm liking a little bit more. The two ideas that come out of it are this mid-century living and this Wichita attractions stuff, and I'm actually gravitating more towards the mid-century living idea. I'm a huge fan of mid-century modern illustration stuff, and recently been more intrigued with mid-century architecture. Then along with that there's a lot of interior design and elements that were crafted to go inside of these homes, and that idea really intrigued me a lot, mostly because I don't know a whole bunch about it. So I did a little bit more research on that, I looked at a lot of photos, I read a little bit, I looked at books that I might buy on Amazon, and I just started sketching. One of the hardest things for me to do with any project is to just put pen to paper. This is a huge hang-up for a bunch of people. Do not be afraid of sketching ever. Just put down your pen to the paper, start getting those ideas out somehow because when your ideas get stuck in your head, they go no where. A lot of stuff that I generate is obviously really sloppy. This stuff is not pretty by any means, but the purpose of sketching here it isn't to get to the final product. All that I'm trying to do is get my ideas out on paper, so the sooner I can do that, the better. I try and carry a pen and paper with me anywhere that I go so that I can sketch anytime ideas start to hit the back of my brain. Got that idea sitting back there, and if I've think of something that comes up while I'm driving, or while I'm sitting in another meeting or something, I'll just start sketching that stuff. Some of these first sketches came over about a day and a half, just me scribbling ideas, and you can see a record player, clocks, houses, phones, and all these interior elements that you might find inside of a mid-century modern home. This actually got a little bit more complex than what I wanted it to, so I actually ended up killing this idea. That's the purpose of the mind map, and this building ideas at the beginning. You want to build two or three, at least good ideas. You'll probably build 20 or 30 bad ideas. We've got to be able to cross those bad ideas off the list, explore the few good ideas until one of them rises above the other ones. I went back to my Wichita Area of Attractions, badges, and I started doing sketching on those. I did research, I made a list of different locations that I thought might be interesting to people who were either from Wichita, or even people who lived in Wichita, and hadn't been out for awhile, or were looking for something new to do. So I had a decent size list of a few, I think like six, or eight, or nine different places that I liked too, that intrigued me. I just started sketching these ideas down. Again, I'm being totally lose, these are pretty incoherent scribbles to anybody, but it's not important. Just got to get those ideas out on paper. While you're doing this, it's not too early to start thinking about these series of things. I had this idea, I had these locations, I started sketching things, and thinking about how I can bring these all together into some consistent series. After I think about another day of sketching, I had this idea to put all of these things into a MapMarker, kind of this location you are here sort of symbol. After I had that idea, and I felt like it was a pretty good idea, then I really started to explore that. You can see me start to work everything up into circles here. Once I've gotten to that point, I start doing a little bit more sketching just to make sure that everything is going to work out. I get to the point where I've got, eight, nine, or ten ideas for different badges that I feel like are really going to work out here. At that point, sort of hit this internal resolution checkpoint where I just say, "Yes, this is what I want to do, this is where it's going to go, I feel confident that I can work out any problems that might come up. I feel like this is going to turn out well. Even if there are bumps along the road, I know that I can work through them." That's really what you're trying to get to here in this initial sketching phase. Don't feel like you have to have the final answer to post your sketches. Go ahead and post them to your projects, sooner rather than later, and get feedback on them. While I was working on this, I've talked a lot to my wife, and to few other close friends about it just to get their feedback. When people had positive things to say about this idea, then that's my validation, it's definitely a good idea and I'm ready to move forward. That's really the purpose of this class, is to get that outside feedback. When you create your project, don't be afraid to post stuff. Everybody here will be really friendly, and have generally good things to add to your project. That's what we're looking for here. I'll be going through and commenting on your projects, but hopefully, everybody else will also. They'll help you build those ideas, they'll help you work out any problems that you might have. That being said, I also wanted to show you this sample project that I've created. If you come into the project's tab of this class, you'll see this sample project labeled Wichita Area Attractions. This is the project that I've created, showing you my process for the whole course here. We've got each phase broken down from sketch to early ideas, to refinement, to the final product. By no means should you feel like this is a template that you have to follow though. I just wanted to post this thing as a reference for you, so that you can see how a project might look. I've also got a ton of writing in here. Do not feel like you have to include all of that by any means. Just post early, post often, edit your project whenever you want to. We've got deadlines associated with the class, but don't feel like you can only post associated with those deadlines. Just post your work as it comes to you, and start getting feedback from other people. That's about it for this first section. Again, the main idea is just to start to get ideas out of your brain onto paper, and hopefully end up with something that we can pick, and choose, and start to create things with. In the next section, I'll start to dive into building vectors inside of illustrator, and really starting to figure out the look, style, and aesthetic of this series based on the idea. I'm looking forward to that part, and I'll see you guys in section 2.
3. Introduction to Shape: Hey everybody, welcome back. This is the first video of the second section of this class, and today we're going to be talking about shape. I'll show you the different types of shapes that there are. I'll show you some of the basic geometric shapes. I'll show you an example of how I use just even one geometric shape to create a small illustration. Then we'll talk about shape relationships and how to build those and strengthen those as much as possible in your icons and badges. So let's just dive right in here. The first type of shape that we're going to talk about is geometric shape. If you guys have studied the Bauhaus at all, you'll know that they really stress an emphasis on simplifying everything as far as it could go. When you simplify shapes as mathematically as possible, you get down to some basic geometric shapes. These are the three real basic shapes: square, circle, and an equilateral triangle. There are obviously a whole lot of other geometric shapes like parallelograms, and rhombuses, etc, but these are the three basic shapes and I use these a lot when I'm drawing. I draw a whole lot of stuff with just squares and circles. They're pretty powerful shapes and you can make a whole lot of different stuff with them. Following geometric shapes is some organic shapes. In Illustrator, usually organic shapes are shapes that you're creating with the pen tool. I've used the pen tool here to create these different organic shapes, using the Bezier curves on these points to give them not mathematical, more natural and seen in real life curves, and shapes, and forms here. After organic shapes, we've got rectilinear. These are all straight line based shapes, but they're not something that can be explained mathematically. When I talk about a square, we can easily say it's got equal distant lengths on each side, every corner is a 90-degree angle, and that's what makes a square. I can't really describe this. We can go through and figure out angles and lengths of each side, but there's no real relationship or reason why they exist together. But there are also non-organic shapes like we just looked at, they're called rectilinear; straight lines, not geometric. When you combine organic forms and rectilinear shapes, you get these irregular shapes. Lot of times I think this is a funny way to classify shapes, because it's basically everything that I can't fit into some other classification, but they're usually just called irregular shapes. The last type of shape here we have is hand-drawn. A lot of times this gets used as texture work, because this is some stuff that's made with ink and the brush and then Live Traced inside Illustrator. But it's something that feels totally like it was made by human or a person. It's not geometric, it's not organic type of shape, and it's just hand drawn and shows that personal touch. Those are the five main types of shapes. Again, we've got geometric, organic, rectilinear, irregular, and hand drawn. We need to still everything down, especially in the flat two-dimensional world, we can usually classify all of the shapes that we create in one of these areas. I think that's a pretty interesting thing to think about; no matter how complex you make something, in the end we're just going to be working with these basic shapes of one type or another. So for the purpose of this class, we'll be primarily focusing on geometric shapes. So I've outlined just a few of the real basic geometric shapes here, some we've talked about already, the square, the circle, the equilateral triangle, and a right triangle. Triangles are interesting because they can have different types of triangles: an equilateral, right triangle, and a 30-60 triangle, which I didn't show here because it's difficult to draw on Illustrator and it's just one that I don't use a whole lot. All of these shapes can be drawn with the shape tools inside of Illustrator. I'll talk more about these in the next video where I'll talk about drawing with shape. But right now I just want to show you a quick example of how I can use even just a right triangle to almost complete a whole illustration. So I've got an example of a part of one of the icons that you might have seen in the info section about this class, and this thing is created almost entirely with right triangles. When we look at this, we can see the basic right triangle shapes here, they're just rotated at 45 degrees here and here, and down here. But even these other shapes that I'm creating are built with right triangles also. You can't quite see, but let me show you an example here of how I would take a right triangle and quickly make this shape. You can see here that by just using four right triangles I'm able to create this parallelogram shape. I've used that several places inside of here, even a slightly different parallelogram shape with two right triangles, here's one with four. Then I'm also using four right triangles in here to build a two by one square rectangle. By square rectangle I mean there's two squares stacked on top of each other. What happens when I build all of these things with this one geometric shape is that I create what are called shape relationships between each one. They share similarity and shape type, they share proportional similarity. Then your eye will start to make the relationships between those and when we work with these shapes and when you work with any shapes, what we're trying to do when we design is to make something that's interesting to look at by building these relationships with different types of shapes. When you have something that has a lot of interesting relationships, your eye will almost start to examine it without you thinking about it. Then when you think about it even further, you can start to see really how those relationships build something together. That becomes what is really interesting and cool about design and icons illustration. What I want to talk about is different ways that shapes can relate to each other. First of all, we've got type of shape. In this example, I've got two squares. They're different sizes, they're in different places, they are not touching or anything like that, but they're both squares and so I make that relationship pretty quickly. Also I've got similarity in scale or size. Here I've got a square and a circle that are two different shapes. They're both geometrics so they relate there, but even when they're different shapes, when they're the same scale, they make that relationship even stronger. Another type of shape relationship is proximity. This is basically just saying that two shapes that are close together will relate to each other more than they relate to shapes that are further away. So if I zoom out a little bit and we go back to the scale reference here and I look at these two shapes, they look more closely related than say, this shape and this shape do even where the circle on this organic shape shares some of the similar curved shapes to them. These two will feel more closely related because they're in proximity to each other. Then the last shape relationship that you can build is with color. In another video, I'll talk about building a color palette. But the principle here is that if I have two shapes that are different types of shapes or different scales and even not in proximity to each other, so if I move this one further away, they will still relate to each other through color. One of the reasons why I choose to use just geometric shapes is because I find that it's easy to build a whole lot of those shape relationships when I'm just drawing with three or four different geometric shapes. I've got an example here that we can talk about a little bit. One of the badges that I created. We'll talk in the color palette video about how building on my color palette helps me relate this to all of the other badges that are created but inside of here I want to talk about some of the shape relationships that I'm building. You can see that when I use just circles, I build this relationship between the clock here and the bike tires, which is interesting and then the bike tire and the central section of the tire, there's also a circle, and so I built that relationship, then this one that is the yellow color, also relates to this part on the pedals and the other one over here. I've got that relationship which is interesting, I've got these elongated rectangles over here and over here, which is pretty interesting. I've got some balance of color between this side with this white sign, and then on this side I've got, one and two white little shapes in here, which is pretty interesting. I've got the relationship of the cloud shape and slightly hard to see, but the same shape here with the foam on the beer mug. Then even start to get slightly more complex, I've got this circle here, which there's a circle down in here, joined with a square to make this shape. You'll start to see these relationships with your eye almost immediately. That's what keeps things interesting. Again, that's one of the things that I really enjoy about geometric shapes is I can build a whole bunch of these relationships pretty quickly. However, I don't want you to feel limited to geometric shapes for whatever it is that you're designing for your project here. You might have seen already, but I posted a link to a bucket on Dribbble that I keep that has a whole bunch of different types and styles of icons in here. You might browse around in here just to sort what different shape types are being used and how they're being used. There are some examples with line only and you can feel free to use line in here. You don't even have to use shape if you want. Again, this is outline work with basic geometric shapes in a lot of this stuff. I think using geometric shapes, you can still draw the icon but when we don't have any of that actual plain work inside of there, it just becomes line and not shape. Please do check these out, don't feel like you have to draw in the same style that I do or use just circles and squares. You can use organic shapes or rectilinear shapes or irregular shapes even. The main idea is that we're drawing with some basic shapes and we're building the shape relationships as much as possible to keep things interesting throughout the whole series of icons or badges. That's about it for this video. The next one we'll talk about actually drawing with these basic geometric shapes inside of Illustrator. I'll give you a few tips and tricks there. So I'll see you in the next video.
4. Drawing with Geometry: Now that we know a little bit about the principles of shape and different shape types, in this video, I'm going to show you some of the basics of drawing with geometric shapes inside of Illustrator. I'll toggle over to my computer here, and we will mostly be talking about the shape tools and how to use those to draw all different types of things. Then I'll go over a few basic setup things inside of Illustrator to help speed things along, as well as some additional tools like the reflect and transform tool. Then I figured I'd take this little monster guy here from the Starlight Drive-in badge that I made and walk you through how I made this monster character. We'll come back to that in a second. Let's get started with the shape tools. I've undocked my shape tools from the toolbar here. Normally, you would see it in the toolbar as the rectangle tool. Looks like this small little square. But if you click and hold on this, you'll see the whole drop-down of different tools underneath the shape tool; the rectangle tool, the rounded rectangle tool, ellipse, polygon, star, and the flare tool, which I will not be talking about because it's a piece of junk. If you click this little arrow here, it'll undock and you'll see all of these things underneath here. This can be a pretty easy way to access the shape tools inside of Illustrator. Normally what I use though, or shortcut keys to get to these; the ones that are built into Illustrator for the rectangle tool or M for the ellipse tool or L, and then I've gone in and added my own for the rounded rectangle tool to be N, and for the star tool to be S. So if you see me switching between tools, I'm probably using the shortcut keys to do so. Let's start off with the rectangle tool here. If I just draw some shape, like red here with the rectangle tool, you'll see if I click, hold, and drag this out, I'll start to draw a rectangle. If you hold down shift while you're drawing, you'll constrain the proportions, and if you constrain the proportions that means it'll keep the width and the height equal, and if I have an equal width and equal heights rectangle that makes a square. Also, if you hold Alt or Option, it will draw out from the center here. You can see I draw from one corner without it, and if I hold Alt or Option, then I'll draw from the center. I'm holding Shift also, so I'm drawing a square from the center point out. Finally, with this tool, if you click once, it will pull up this little dialogue box and you can type in a rectangle of a specific size. Just enter the width and height here, look like a 200 pixel by 200-pixel square, and if you click this chain link, it'll keep them exactly the same. So if I type in 250 for the width, it will automatically put in 250 for the height, and it'll make me 250-pixel square. Next, let's talk about the ellipse tool. This functions exactly the same as the rectangle tool except I'm drawing ellipses or circles instead of rectangles or squares. So if I just click and drag this out, I'll make this oval shape or ellipse. If I hold Shift, it will constrain the proportions and I'll draw a circle. If I hold Shift and Option, I'll draw center, and if I click once, I can make a 250 by 250-pixel circle. I'll let you explore most of these shapes on your own, they all function in the same basic way. The one last thing that I want to show you because it's just a little bit strange the way that it's put it in there is the star tool. The star tool, if I click and drag it'll draw a star out. If I hold Shift, it'll actually keep the star upright instead of being able to rotate it around. But the main thing here that I'm want to show you is that if you use the Up and Down arrow keys, I can add or subtract points to or from this star. The reason this is important is because a star with three sides is an equilateral triangle. I can hit M, draw a rectangle; hit L, draw a circle; hit S, and draw a star, which is actually a triangle, and that gets me the three basic geometric shapes using these tools. There's lots of other options inside here, including the polygon tool and the rounded rectangle tool, which are nice, and other things that you can do with the star tool as well. Please explore those quite a bit. I posted a few tutorials on the basics of drawing in Illustrator that you might watch also, as well as the pathfinder, which I will talk a little bit about shortly. Be sure you check the resources section in the class and watch some of the tutorials there because they cover a lot of stuff that is done quickly and more thoroughly than I would be able to do in this one short video. Now that we've got these three basic shapes, I want to talk about how you control them once I've got them out here. The main way that we move them around is with the selection tool or the V tool here. I can just click and drag these things, it also gives me these points around the side or handles on my transform box, and I can transform the scale of these by clicking any of the corners here. I click the center or the side, I'll stretch this thing here. If I hold Option also, it'll scale out center, and if I hold Shift, even though I'm dragging the top and scaling the top and bottom here by holding Option, and by holding Shift, it will scale the sides out also. So I can scale pretty easily with the selection tool. You can also rotate using this selection tool by just mousing over these corners until your arrow changes and then you just click, hold, and drag, and I can rotate this. Holding Shift will rotate in 45-degree angles, and that applies to anything, not just the square. The other way that you can rotate stuff is with the rotate tool. The basic way to draw shapes is with the shape tool. The basic controls is with the selection tool. But then there are a couple of slightly more advanced tools used to rotate and change these things and they're right here in your tool palette. It looks like an arrow moving in a circle, and they're the rotate and reflect tool. These come with built-in shortcut keys of R for the rotate and O for reflect. These can come in pretty handy to do slightly more advanced transformations of your shape. With the rotate tool, just click R to switch to, and then it basically functions exactly like those handles around the edge here. The nice thing is that I don't have to find this exact spot. I can just hit R and from way out here I'll rotate it, or from inside here I'll rotate it also. The additional neat thing about the rotate tool here is that I can set the center point that it rotates around. Right now everything rotates around this little point in the middle. It looks like a cross there. If I click once, I can set that. If I click down here on the bottom-left corner and then click and hold, I'll now rotate around that corner. I can set it anywhere inside of this square or outside of the square and rotate objects around that point, or I can even set it on a different part of a different shape and we can rotate around that shape. Underneath the Rotate Tool is the Reflect Tool. You won't see much with squares, so let's pick this triangle. One of the shortcut keys that I'm using here that speeds things up is for me to hold the Apple or Command key. On a PC, I think maybe it'd be the Control key, but I'm not 100 percent sure and that'll automatically switch back to the selection tool no matter what tool I have selected. I can hold down the "Command key and pick a different shape while keeping the Reflect Tool selected. The Reflect Tool is nice. It basically flips a shape around the center point and if I hold "Shift" it will constrain things along 45-degree angles also. Then this one functions similarly to the Rotate Tool and then I can just click on any point and flip it around that point also. If I make copies of this thing, I can quickly make this flower shape that I use I think in the botanical gardens badge. I'm doing this by just using the Copy and Paste in Front commands to generate multiple versions of this shape. Under your Edit menu, you've got Copy and Paste in Front. The shortcut keys are Apple C and Apple F. If I copy this and then paste in front, there's actually two versions of this right now. Then I'll use my Reflect Tool with the shortcut key of O. I'll set the point up here, I hold "Shift" and flip this, then I'll take both of them, use Copy, Paste in Front, hit "R" from my Rotate Tool. Hold "Shift" to rotate in 45-degree angles and will rotate them 90 degrees. By doing that, I can make this shape pretty quickly. Those are the basic tools from the toolbar that I use most often, the Shape Tool, the Selection Tool, the Rotate and Reflect Tool. The second part that I want to explain in this video is the Pathfinder. I pulled the Pathfinder window out of my collection of windows over here. If you can't find it, you can go to the Window menu and choose "Pathfinder", and it should pop up for you. The Pathfinder has got some cool shape modes that I can use to combine different shapes to make new shapes. To illustrate my point here, let's take this square, and make a copy of it, and then we use the Circle Tool and draw this out. Then if I just pick two or more shapes and then hit any of these buttons either in the Shape Modes or the Pathfinders, I will either unite, or subtract, or intersect, or divide these things to make new shapes. I posted a tutorial on more of the Pathfinder explained here. The two that I use, well, I guess there's four out of all of these that I use most often. The first one being the unite, which makes a new shape out of two shapes. The second one being minus front or I usually call it subtract because it'll take the top shape and cut out that area of the bottom shape. I also use the intersect one pretty often, which takes anywhere that it's overlapping and keeps that area, and removes everything else. Then the last one I use is divide, but I'm going to show you a slightly different way that I use divide here. I'm going to make a copy of this circle and then I'm actually going to use the Line Segment Tool here, which the shortcut key is backslash. Using this, I'm going to make a line with no stroke or no fill drawing from the center of the circle, Copy and Paste in Front, use the Rotate Tool, it's rotated 90 degrees around this circle. Now you can see I've got a circle and two lines coming from the center of the circle. Then I'll use the divide Pathfinder and that will cut out these quarter circles shapes. If I had only one line, I would cut half circle shapes and I can do this with any shape using as many or as few lines as I want. That let's me generate even more shapes in here. One other thing that I want to show you is even though I'm drawing these things, I'm not being 100 percent exact. I've actually got this line directly out of the center of this circle shape, but if you want to make sure that you're snapping things to points and getting things exactly lined up where they need to be, there's two pieces to set up inside of the Illustrator here. The first one is under View. There's an option here called Smart Guides with a shortcut key of Command U. When you turn this on, as you start to move your mouse around, you'll see all sorts of new stuff. As I mouse over this circle, I'll see that I'm actually directly hovering over the path or an anchor point of the circle. I can also pick this line and you can also see the center point of this circle or where things intersect. I have Smart Guides on almost all the time when I draw so that I can be exact in everything. That way when I mouse over to draw my line with the Line Segment Tool, I can know that I'm drawing directly out of the center, and then I hold "Shift" and that way I'll get this thing exactly lined up. The other thing that you want to set up inside of Illustrator is under the View menu also. You'll want to Snap to Point. When you Snap to Point, it'll let me align things like center or snap to the side here. Snapping can be a little bit weird at first. You'll see when I drag this thing, it'll snap down right there. That's just directly aligning this thing with the side or the center. Let's say I draw a line to the center point there and then I know I've got this center point aligned with that center point, and that helps me keep things organized as well. Using our Shape Tool, our Rotate Tool, our Reflect Tool, and the Pathfinder, let's take a look at how to draw this monster. First, actually I'm going to come in here and just cut off this monster and delete all these extra shapes, so I have only this guy to reference. Then I'm going to start with is head and body shape here, which is a circle. I use the Eyedropper Tool to pick the right color. Then I'm going to use the Rectangle Tool, I'm going to mouse over this anchor point and I'll draw a square holding "Shift" until you see the Smart Guides, help me snap it down to exactly the other side of this circle. Then I'm going to use the Pathfinder when I pick both of these shapes and I'm going to unite them. If I want to be really sincere about it, let's see if I can get this to about the same size. I'm going to come in here and let's draw two circles for the eyes. To make sure that the eyes align, I'm actually going to use the align palette here. I'll pick both of the eyes, I'll group them, which can be found under "Object", "Group". I use the shortcut key of Command, G, and then I'm also going to pick the body shape, and then I'll click the body shape once, come to my align palette, which, again, if you can't see normally, you can come to "Window" and click "Align" for this thing to pop up. Then I'm just going to click "Align Centered Horizontal". That'll perfectly line up my eyes in the center of the body here, because when I pick both of them and then click the body shape again, you'll see this change to Align to key Object, and you'll see the outline change. That's going to take whatever I have selected and align it to that object. So without me having to move the body shape, I can align the eyes directly to the center here. Then I'm going to do the same thing with the rounded rectangle tool, which I want to make the same width as my eyes and its proportion to a square. We'll use the eyedropper tool to make it black also. Before I start to add teeth, let's add the arms. I'm going to do that by drawing a circle using the line segment tool and the trick I just showed you to cut out a corner circle, and we bring that down to here, snap it along his body, scale that up, make it the same color, use the rectangle tool and draw a rectangle for his arm up to here, and then I'll pick both of those shapes. He's looking a little too skinny. Let's draw that a little bit thicker, and then I'll pick both of them. I'll use my pathfinder and combine those two shapes, and then I'm going to zoom in. I'm going to click and hold on this anchor point and draw out a square. Will use the rotate tool, click that anchor point again, rotate it 45 degrees, and then I'm going to make a copy by holding "Option" and dragging out until it snaps down. So that two squares here, and then I'll pick both of them, and right now the handles for me to scale this thing are a little bit weird. This is actually a good thing to come up randomly here that I hadn't planned on. What I want is the bounding box to be outside of these things. I'll use a quick shortcut key to make that happen, by just going to "Object", "Compound Path", and "Make" or Apple, 8. So if I hit Apple, 8, it actually transforms these two shapes into a compound path. Then I can scale that down with my new handles that are up here in the top right to be exactly the width of this part of his arm. Then I'll scale this up until I intersect and hit right along the top there, and then I'll pick that shape and this shape, and we'll use the Minus Front key to finish off his hands here. Then I'm going to use the rectangle tool again. I'm going to come up right to this point where everything intersects and I'm going to draw out this rectangle. I'm going to actually use the pen tool here to subtract that top shape, and then I'm going to make a copy of the arm, paste it in front, pick my shadow here. I'll use the intersect and it's going to tell me that it didn't work. The intersect filter is a strange one. Often when I combine two shapes or multiple shapes with the pathfinder, it'll turn things into a group. For the intersect filter to work, I needed it to be a compound path again. So if you ever run into the error where it says that it produced no results, just hit Apple, 8, make that thing a compound path, then pick both of the objects, hit "Intersect", and it should get that shape so that I can get that shadow exactly inside of this shape here. Then I'm going to pick both of these. I will use Apple, C, and Apple, F. I will use the reflect tool. If I hold the Command key, I can mouse over other objects and I can find the center point of the mouth here. If I set my reflect point in the center, and I reflect that copy exactly across, it should align right back up to where it was at. Two more things to go. First, let's add some teeth by drawing a square, rotating it 45 degrees to the right, subtracting one of the points with the pen tool to get my triangle. Let's use Command, A to get my handles back to where I want them to be. Then I'll make two copies of these thing that slightly overlap, and then pick all three of them, group them, and make sure they're aligned to the center here. Then I'll make a copy of my teeth, use the reflect tool over the center of this and flip my teeth down there. Now, his mouth and teeth are a slightly different shape because my rounded rectangle has slightly rounder corners on this one than on this one but, for this, I'm okay with that. The last thing I need to do is add my little bit of shading in here. To do that, I'm just going to pick his head and body shape, I'll make a copy, I'll paste it in front. I will use my line segment tool to draw from the center, and then I'll use the divide pathfinder, which cuts that shape in half. I'll delete one-half of it, and then I can pick both of them, send them to the back, and pick this, which is actually black, multiply it down 15 percent. There's my monster. If I went too fast during any of these, please feel free to post questions to the Q&A section. But make sure that you go through the tutorials that I posted also because they'll explain a little bit more in-depth some of the basic things that I've been cruising through here. I wanted to create something that's slightly between beginner and intermediate. So if you were confused at any point, just let me know and we'll straighten things out for sure. That's it for this video. In the next one, I'll be talking about some of the Gestalt principles, and then, after that, we'll move on to building a color palette so that, by the end of the second section, you should be in pretty good shape working on your series of badges or icons.
5. Gestalt Principles: The last video on drawing ran a little bit long, and I apologize for that, but I had a lot to cover. Hopefully, these next couple of videos will be a little bit quicker and to the point. In this video, we're going to cover some of the Gestalt principles, which are principles of visual design and how the human brain interprets things that it sees, and how we can use some of those as tools to create something slightly more unique or interesting. We'd jump in an Illustrator here, we'll see the first one, and I want to show you is similarity. I have some examples here, some are from the badges that I made and some are actual other logos. In this case, the similar shapes that I've got coming around the sides here of the rays of the sun that also sort to make up the feathers of the neck on this eagle shape, the shapes share similarity both in shape type, also in shape scale, and also in color. When we start to see those similarities, our brain will interpret these shapes both as part of the rays of the sun and also part of the neck of the head of the eagle here. That can be pretty interesting, pretty quickly. One of these Gestalt principles we can use to make visual ponds or tricks. Adding those little aha moments for people when they figure it out makes things all the better and all the more interesting. The second one I've got illustrated here is called anomaly. This is the principle that something that is different from a larger group of things will stand out from that group. I can use this, actually, to help build compositions inside of these icons or to create a focal point. In this case, I've got an anomaly happening here, which is Saturn or this planet, whichever planet that it might be. First of all, in the area of the night sky, it's an anomaly because it's larger than anything else. It's also an anomaly because it's yellow or orange, yellow and red here where nothing else is. It's also the only thing that has rings around it. So when I have all of these things that are an anomaly among this group of other items, this one item is going to take precedence or become the focal point, which gives me this place to start looking as I examined this whole badge or icon. To illustrate the third Gestalt principle here, which is continuation, I've actually got an outtake from the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame badge that I created. If you flip over and look into the example project that I've created, you'll see I ended up going a totally different direction where I showed the actual architecture, the front of the Sports Hall of Fame here. But initially, I tried to do something with this trophy cup here in the middle and these different sports items all combined into one. The principle that is illustrated here is the fact that all of these things continue in one line, although pretty much, the line actually isn't there, but just the way that they're organized and the way that they scale up together makes this movement that directs your eye in this circle around the composition to where I start over here and then end over here with the basketball going into the goal. You can use this to imply a direction of movement. You can use this to connect two thing, two or more things even. There's a lot of other ways that you could apply continuation inside of your icons. The fourth one, which I've illustrated with the World Wildlife Foundation logo, is closure. This principle basically states that, "The human eye will continue to build a shape as it views it even if that whole shape isn't there". As this, the body and the head of the panda bear here, there's no actual outline of this. But because these lines are curving up and towards filling out those shapes, your eye will actually fill in and it'll see that head, it'll see the body without those having to be there, which will make this a little bit more interesting, and it comes down in the amount of visual mass that is here because it allows for me to have more white space in these areas, which is nice and gives a relief for the eyes. I look over the whole logo. I can use the principle of closure to create forms that don't even exist. The next one chosen to illustrate here is proximity. Basically the principle of proximity says that, "When things are closer together, your eye will form them as a group or as an object". This seems pretty straightforward, but it's just a tool that we can use to help us build different things. In this case, I've got these flowers here. I've got these different shapes, a lot of different shapes in there, but when I look at the petals of the flowers, if they aren't in proximity to each other Well, they might have some relationship with the fact that they're the same shape just rotated differently, they're the same color, and they're within the same canvas or picture plane. They don't form a flower yet until they come into proximity of each other. You might even imagine this as a flower petal, but even the shape is still a little bit open ended. What you need is for those shapes to be in proximity of each other, for them to form something else. The brain will recognize that shape more easily when those things are in the right proximity to each other. For the last one, we've got the FedEx logo here. This is the most probably and commonly used, or understood, or recognized Gestalt principle. That's the idea of figure and ground. The idea of figure and ground, or foreground, or background, or dominance or relief is basically the idea that I can not only create shapes with the foreground where I'm drawing a shape on top of the picture plane or background. But I can also draw shapes with the background just by creating the outlines of the shape with the foreground shapes. In the FedEx logo here, you guys have probably all seen or recognized that there's an arrow inside of the negative space. We've got a slightly better example here, where I've filled it in with purple. A lot of people might not see this immediately. But once you've see that shape in the negative space, it's again that aha moment that really leaves an impression with people. Using this idea of figure ground, if we can create that aha moment, it'll make your work more impactful than somebody who's just glancing over things and then not remembering that. Figure/ground is used a lot in logo design. All of these principles are actually used a lot in logo design. But figure/ground, again, is probably more oftenly used than some of the other ones. It can be a pretty powerful idea. The last thing that I want to show you in this video is not exactly a Gestalt principle, but it's the idea of dominance and relief. For these badges where I've created an illustration, albeit in a pretty small illustration and a minimal amount of space, I've still have a composition here. Some of you guys might be making icons that are just objects, and there's a slightly less desirable need for the idea of dominance and relief, because you basically have one dominant icon and that's all you need. But if you're making anything a little bit more involved, you'll probably want to spend a little bit more time thinking about what is dominant inside of that, and what is the relief that is provided in the composition? In my Kansas Aviation Museum badge here, I have one thing that's dominant, and that's the airplane. It's dominant not just based on position, it's also the complexity and then the negative space that are surrounding it with, makes it the dominant object inside of this whole badge. Then the rest of it becomes the relief. But even after that, I've got overall, I have a dominance of the figure here and a relief of the ground or the background. The background, the sky here becomes my relief. It's that visual rest for the eye as I'm looking through this thing. Also, as you look closer, I've got dominance on this building, on this tower, but then I've got the relief of the upper portion of the tower, the relief down here of the other part of this building. Down here on the runway, I've got the dominance of the stripes happening here. I've got this relief of this space in between. Your eye desires that relief. When I just flood everything with visual information, it gets to be hectic, it gets to be confusing. It's like a lot of people shouting at you all at once and your eye will want a break. So if you have something where you're building a composition, you might think about how to structure that dominance and relief. But even if you're drawing just a small icon, like maybe a pencil and piece of paper, you might think about what's darn. Is it the pencil or is it the paper? Is the pencil writing a line on the piece of paper and is that what's dominant? Is there negative space around it to provide relief for the eyes when you look over the whole thing? You'll want to have some structure inside whatever that you create in here. One more time, Gestalt principles that you can be thinking about as you're crafting these things are similarity, anomaly, continuation, closure, proximity, figure/ground, and idea of dominance and relief. I encourage you guys to think about this as much as possible as you start to translate your ideas from sketch to the computer form. Anything that you can add in here will make things slightly more interesting for your viewer. That's about it for this video. In the next one, I'll show you about choosing a color palette and we'll talk through how to pick a color palette that will help you keep things consistent but also intriguing across a whole series of icons.
6. Building A Color Palette: Hey everybody. Welcome to the last video of the second section of this course on color. Today I'm going to be talking about building a color palette for your series of icons or badges, a little bit about color theory and then I'll show you how I came up with the color palette for the series of badges that I created. So we hop into Illustrator here. First thing that I want to talk about is just real basic ideas of color theory, and this is something that you guys probably all remember from second or third grade. But the color wheel here with the brightest hue on top, the darkest hue on bottom, which are yellow and purple, got the primary colors of red, yellow and blue, secondary of green, purple and orange and then the tertiary colors in between all of those. I know this is a little bit remedial but it's still important to think about exactly how you're using this color wheel to build your color palette. For your series of icons, you might want something where the colors are all closely related. You might need a little bit more versatility like I did. So I needed colors from all over the color wheel. So as you think about building a color palette, you might explore some of the different color palettes that are out there. The first of which is analogous. An analogous color scheme just means that the colors you're choosing are close together on the color wheel. This can be used for some cool tone or tone effects and it can also help you keep your icons in a general feel, like if you have food icons, for example, you might think about keeping them warm or if you have icons about weather or something, you might think about keeping them cool and sky tones here or anything else in between. The second type of color scheme is a split-complementary color scheme. So we know that complimentary colors are across the color wheel from each other. So like yellow and purple or red and green or blue and orange. Complimentary colors also have the highest contrast in comparison to each other and oftentimes if we were to just use a straight complimentary color scheme, we'd end up with the colors being too contrasty and overpowering the icons or badges. So a split-complementary color scheme will actually neutralize some of that by instead of taking the purple from directly across, it'll take blue and red-purple, use those together to compliment the yellow, and that'll help dial things down a little bit. The third color scheme is a triad or a triadic color scheme and that's basically just taking the equilateral triangle from anywhere on the color wheel and using the colors that it points to. In this case, I'm pointing to all of the secondary colors, purple, orange and green. If I were to rotate this, it's slightly rotating off center here, but let's try this. I can easily point to the primary colors or any of the tertiary colors. So as you move forward, you should think about the idea that you need some color scheme across these icons. You should also think about the idea that color can have meaning. Red can mean love, green can mean envy, warm colors can make you hungry, cool colors can make you calm and everything in between here. All color has meaning associated with it and you should choose colors that have a meaning that lines up with what the idea behind your series of icons is. You should also have in mind the idea that color can have a historical significance in how you use it. Different time periods and art styles over the years have used color differently and that defines them. So I've got a few examples here, just three quick ones. The first one, this is an Art Nouveau image and you can see some real natural colors and natural shapes inside of here where they use really desaturated and neutral tones of this orange and brown, and even the green is a pretty natural green in here. When you intend to use this desaturated look, things tend to seem older. The second one I have is a stained glass window from the Art Deco period. During this period in art, artists used color to the extreme. I talked about having really bright complimentary colors here. We've got yellow and purple and then blue. These things have really high contrast and feels not as old as our Nouveau by any means but it can certainly start to feel a little bit dated in my opinion. Art Nouveau happened in the late 19th century. Art Deco is towards the middle or towards the beginning of the 20th century. Towards the middle of the century you have mid-century design. I've got some stamps pulled up here, a mid-century feel to them. Personally I'm inspired a lot by mid-century design and I think that they had the color theory right. When I say that, I mean, things are bright and fun, lively and interesting but they're not overpowering like Art Deco, truly about modern living and popular culture. So we've got split-complementary color scheme here between the pink and red and green happening, and a neutral of black and white inside of this. If you follow me on Pinterest, you'll see I keep a pretty good collection of just colored things. Things that I like, things that I appreciate how the color is used, and lot of times I'll use this as a sounding board for me to build ideas for color. So since we know a little bit about color theory and we have some inspiration for color, let's take a look at how I've built the color palette for my series of badges. When I decided on the idea to do local area attractions in Wichita, I had the idea to start with some of the branding for the City of Wichita which is this logo, as well as the website and colors here. So I'd originally just pulled their logo and pulled these colors. It's got a very art deco feel. My personal opinion is the colors are pretty horrible at this point. The yellow is way too bright, this blue is way too dark. Everything feels like it's from 1992, and it's got way too much contrast in it. But I started here and moved forward to this color palette, we're still pulling their basic colors here. But I'm muting the colors back a little bit, I'm breathing a little more life into this blue, I'm darkening the yellow a little bit just so isn't so glaring and builds out these three colors. Then I knew I would need some additional colors throughout this thing and built out this orange and red and green to match along with these. So it ended up being a little bit, not far from where I ended but still there is a little bit too much range inside of these colors and there was too much variance between how it was being applied in some stuff. So I tried to dial that back a little bit. So I took that blue and this orange and then added a slightly darker red tone on that orange and pulled in purple as a dark color here, and then even added in this darker blue and I started experimenting a little bit with that. Let's add this darker blue to this color palette. If you saw my in-progress work on the sample project that I made, you've seen this already and the much worse version that came right before this. So after I figured out that I needed about five colors in here and I figured out sort to apply it, I wasn't feeling the overall colors that I had selected. The purple color and orange color felt pastel. It's almost a little too histories, too little kiddish, and so I ended up taking how this color was applied and trying to build out something a little bit more useful and a little bit less whimsical. So to do that I took still the ideas of this blue and yellow from the original Wichita logo to dark blue and yellow. Only I've made the yellow a yellow-orange, I've brought the blue into sky blue and added this darker blue, and then I've added this red in here also to build a basic primary color scheme that I could use across the whole series of badges. I always enjoyed primary colors but I thought it seemed applicable here because I'm showing primary information just about the City of Wichita. It also helps me keep it fun and interesting without being too whimsical like the last color palette. In addition to that, the reason why I'm picking these colors that have a range, have got a light and a dark, and then a light and a dark of two different colors here so that I can add these things as shadows and highlights inside of here. So if we take a look at this exploration place badge, you can see that I'm using the yellow-orange and the red as a way to shape this building structure, I'm also using the blue on the other side as a shadow to give these things some dimension, and I'm able to do that with these different light and dark tone colors. I've also got a pretty wide color palette which I knew I needed to be able to keep things interesting from badge to badge and to be able to vary them as I went along. Even though I had these four colors I knew I was going to need a few more, and by a few more I know what I'm looking for are some neutrals. Once you've built your basic color palette, you might think about how you can add some neutral colors to help round things out. In this case I'm adding a neutral of this dark blue-gray and this white. Until then I'm really adding highlights of white and then using this dark color as shadows even further to increase the contrast in here, and then also just to give me a few more colors and a little bit more range in there. Then lastly, I added this neutral background color just to let the badges sit back there so that the white would pop off of the background rather than blending in. So that's about it for this video. Hopefully it won't give you a basis of how to pick colors, how to build a color palette, how to pick something that is appropriate and maybe even historically correct, but also fun and interesting and lively enough to give you enough range to be able to apply it to a variety of different badges over your series. At this point you should have a pretty good start on the vector versions of your icons or badges. So go ahead and post those to your projects as you get them done to get feedback from other people and myself. I'll see you guys in the third section of this class.
7. Unity and Variety: Hey everyone. Welcome to the third section of videos for this class. In this final section, we're going to be talking about ways to finish off a series of icons or badges you've been working on. Before we get started, I just want to say that there is an insane amount of good quality work in all of your projects. I think we've got over 110 projects so far, which is great. It's impressive to me to see the range of different ideas that are happening as well as the different ways that people are visualizing the things that they're making. If you haven't been participating much, please dive in, check out other people's work, add comments, and be social about it, and keep working on your project as well. In this video, we're going to be talking about the idea of unity and also variety in your design. Things that we talk about in all types of design but they're especially important in this series that we're working on. I'm going to first of all talk about the elements of design and then talk about how to use the ideas of unity and variety with those elements inside of your design. I'll show you some examples with the badges that I've created. Let's dive into Illustrator here. The first thing that I'm going to go over are just what the elements of design are. They're slightly different opinions from people about how this breaks down but in general, when you take all the parts and pieces of two-dimensional design, they were talking about flat 2D design, we can simplify it into the elements that include line, shape, color, space, I've grouped texture and pattern together for our purposes here, and then form. Form is normally an element of three-dimensional design, but we can imply form with shading, or highlighting, or perspective, anyway to add dimension to the flat vectors and shapes that we have. Real quickly, I just want to give you a few examples and talk through a few of these things. I don't use a whole lot of line in very much of my work, although I've been pushing myself to use more recently. I definitely don't have very much in any of these badges that I have as examples. I primarily use just shape. I love shape and I just like to see how much I can do with it. But I do have this one example which is the keeper of the plains. I've got the lines that are making up the bridge here as well as line that I've used to create these bird shapes in the sky. When I've used those lines, I've kept them the same weight and by keeping the stroke weight the same on your line elements inside of each badge or icon, we can add to that idea of unity inside of the design. I've also got a little bit of variety. I've got these line weights here. I'm using these as rectangles and shapes, the way that they're being modified like this, and it's more to give this transparent almost half tone line screen here. Those are slightly different, but I've still got other lines inside of here that add some variety in between these two things. The next element of design that we can talk about is shape and we've talked a lot about shape already. Just quickly going through everything here. I keep a pretty unified sense of shape by sticking to as much geometry as possible using rectangles, circles, squares, triangles to draw as much as I possibly can usually. Then even inside of each different one, I've got some recurring elements that are happening. I've got a circle in here, and a circle balloon shape, and this circle happening in this one, and a circle up here, and a circle for the sun and a circle for the basketball inside of this one, and then I got some clouds happening in the ones where I can see the blue sky, this jet stream that help create a consistent sense of shape throughout everything. Of course, I don't have this thing dwindled down to only be in circles or only be in squares or anything like that. I've got this variety of shapes inside of here too. All sorts of different types from how I create this trophy, to this telescope, to the bike, to the giraffe inside of here, and so that gives me a variety inside of this unified group of shapes that helps create interest but cohesiveness as well. The next element that we have is color. The way that I keep things unified across the series here is by using a set color palette. I talked about how I built and define that color palette in a video in section 2. But what I didn't talk about is how I've created variety through each of these by changing the way that I've applied the color. One of the main things here is that the badges are different colors. I've got blue, red, and yellow, and then the banners that go across the front are alternating blue, red, and yellow. Some of them, even where I've got like red and a blue banner across the front on this one I've got red and yellow. Here I've got blue and yellow, and then blue and red, yellow and red, yellow and blue, etc. Inside of the actual badges, I'm also editing exactly how here the ground is yellow, here the ground is red, here it's black, here the sky is blue, here it's black, here it's yellow. By me adding this variety into how I'm applying the color across this series adds again that interest that keeps people intrigued as they go across the whole series. The fourth element here is space. We talk about space as the canvas that holds the elements of design that we're working on and also as the negative space that's surrounding the shapes. One of the ways that I've created unity throughout this whole thing is to establish this horizon line through each one and this is the same throughout all of them. I've added one in here that has some variety to it. The Keeper of the Plains again. I've got the horizon line slightly higher and then I've got it broken on this side. I had originally planned to do a few more of these and I thought that maybe I could bring in some more of this breaking up of the horizon line to add a little bit more of that so that this one didn't feel quite as random, but I haven't quite had time to get that far yet. Then when I see all of them together, I don't really feel that this one sticks out too bad. Still got the horizon line that you're seeing and still got the split between the sky and the water in this case, and it seems to fit pretty well with the rest of them. Then of course, as I move forward with each of these, I'm adding variety by the way that I'm treating the space around them. I've got this frontal approach or I've got this negative space here and this ground here and it's similar to this but slightly different and maybe even similar to this, but slightly different here. Then I've got this one which is a little bit heavier on the negative space on this side, which is a little bit more similar to this one but different than those and some other variety in between these other ones like how the City Arts one is treated or the Keeper of the Plains or the Central County Zoo is a little bit heavier here on the left side. Again, I got the idea of unity with a unified horizon line and variety with the different ways that I'm treating this space created by that horizon line. The next one is texture and pattern. I don't really have any examples inside of this particular set of badges because I didn't use texture at all inside of here. But again, you would want to think about texture in a way that normally you would keep the application of texture the same but then vary exactly where you might be applying that texture. Usually I do this with a set of brushes or shapes inside of Illustrator that's defined and then repeating how I use those brushes or shapes to apply that texture, gives it the cohesive feel but it's still interesting to look at as it's applied in different places. I've got a little bit more about texture and also shading and the finishing touches video, which is after this one. I'll talk a little bit more about texture there. The final one here is form, and I've already talked about that a little bit, in that form is usually described as an element of three-dimensional design. But I'm also using it here in several ways. First of all, I'm treating everything flat and so I'm removing the form or the dimension from it and really flattening out those shapes. I've done that with everything and it's just the way that I like to work normally. But then I'm going back in and I'm adding some dimension by adding shadows like this building shadow or the armpit shadow on this monster, or the shadow underneath the building awning here or here. I'm also adding some additional highlights and shading around the bad shape and in the background, this two-tone application, and then also the way that I've got this perspective and shading on this banner. It gives it just a little bit of dimension but not too much. Then I've used it similarly across all of them. I've got this split in half with background, color is changing a little bit. I've got the highlight on all of the badges, and then I've got the same shading across all the banners on the badges. Those are the elements of design and how you can use them to keep everything unified especially as you build out this series. But also continue to add variety so that every time you've got a new badge, you're bringing something new to the game here and things are slightly different than the last badge and different from all the rest of them, but they still feel like they're in the same family. That's about it for this video. I will see you guys in the next one where I'll explain some more advanced drawing techniques, and then the last one where we talk about finishing touches. Looking forward to seeing how you guys start to build out your series of different icons and badges.
8. Advanced Drawing Techniques: Hey everybody. Welcome to the second video in the third section, where I'm going to be talking about some more advanced drawing techniques; I've got a whole bunch of stuff to show you, I'm going to cover drawing with strokes, I'm going to cover different masking effects, I'm going to talk about using the offset path function, and then I'm going to talk about just creating some more complex shapes with geometric shapes as the starting points for those. I'm just going to jump right into Illustrator because we've got a lot to cover here. The first thing I actually want to show you, make it to the right file here is a technique that I use to mask things inside of stuff. I've gotten a couple of questions just asking about, how do I create a circular icon or an icon inside of a shape? Normally, as you start to draw things, you might end up with something like this, and there's always the possibility that you can create a mask and so what I've done is duplicated the center circle shape on top here, and I've just picked everything just to show you an example. Then if you come to object and somewhere in here, I think it's clipping mask, and then make, you'll see it makes a clipping mask with the top object and puts everything inside of there. This can be pretty handy, but I find it pretty difficult to work with because when I use the selection tool, the black arrow here, If I want to pick whole objects inside of here, it doesn't work. It only picks the clipping mask as one giant object. You can double-click on this to come inside of here to edit and move things around as normal if you want. But I find it's a pain to double-click in, double-click outside and things and it always ends up with these weird edges sometimes and clipping masks. What I prefer to do is actually to use just another layer and it's a whiteout layer, and so to show you an example here, my layer is palette. I've got this other layer on top of these two layers, and all that is on this layer is a white shape. If we take a look at this shape, you'll see it's got a hole punched through it. The way that I make this shape is simply by taking a copy of the outside of my map marker object here, and I'm going to paste that, and then I'm going to draw a big white rectangle and move it behind that shape, and then I'll use the pathfinder to use minus front to punch a hole in that shape. I use command X and command F to paste it onto a new layer, and we'll make it white. Then I walk that way. Now, I have complete freedom to come in here, move around, pick objects, work as normally, decide if I want it to be placed inside of the circle or outside of the circle, etc. That's got to be a little bit complex as I added the shading and the outer ring around here and then the banner across the front so I ended up ditching that. Most of them I just tried to draw inside of this outside shape, and luckily I had a big enough shape around the edge of my badge that I could hide a lot of stuff. Feel free to try either way as you work with this badge design. You can try clipping masks. You can try this white out thing or you can try any other method you can figure out to hide that stuff. The next thing that I want to talk about is just drawing with strokes, and usually a lot of people will use strokes as outlines for things. Every shape has a fill also has a stroke and then I can change the stroke weight around here, I'll add this blue stroke and make it a little bit thicker. Normally, I advise people against using these things at all. Because all that they really do is start to add contrast to shapes unnecessarily, and they'll also can change the way that shapes appear. I want to show you exactly what I mean here. I've got this flower shape. I'll make it a little bit bigger. It's got a certain proportion from the top to the bottom, to the width, to the height and this point comes through a point and a certain distance from the center. As I start to add a stroke to that, the stroke actually, let me pick a different color here, we'll go with green, the stroke actually creeps in and changes the proportion. Now, this looks a lot longer and thinner than it was before. I'm not thinking about the shape, I'm just using the stroke to add unnecessary details. Normally, I encourage people not to use strokes when they draw at all. But I can use a stroke as a shape. We've got a couple of examples here of how I've done that. The first one is this bike from the dueno badge that I made and this thing is made pretty much, this is a shape, this is a shape, the pedals are shapes and these smaller filled-in circles are shapes, but the rest of this stuff is a stroke. I've done this so that I can ensure consistency. The stroke weight stays the same on here and it's me just using the line segment tool and the rectangle tool. I come over to here and I make this bike shape. I use my eyedropper to pick that square juncture, and setup my parallelogram here. It needs to be just a little bit wider. Then I'm just using the line segment tool to add these other parts of the frame. Then eventually you add the tires and this circle shape to cover up the corners there, and go through and add the chain and the gears as well. All drawn just with strokes. But here I'm using the strokes not to add an outline around my shape, but I'm literally using them as rectangular shapes at different angles to build the different parts of this bike frame. In addition, there are some pretty handy stuff inside of strokes where you can use brushes around strokes, and you can create custom brushes to make patterns and different sorts of things. You can also just use the dashed line capabilities of strokes. I've done that here in this water from the botanical gardens badge that I made. Back here in the back, we've got this water fountain, and then I'm making the water with the dash line capabilities in the stroke panel. To show you a little bit more, I'll just go ahead and make a couple of these things. What I've done to create this arch effect is to just start with a circle, and I'm going to delete that bottom point by selecting that point only and deleting it, use the pen tool to connect and elongate the different sides here, and then switch this thing to a stroke by using shift X. Switch it from yellow to white, and then I've got this shape down here of this water that's coming up and over. Now, to make the dotted part of this line, I got to come into the stroke panel and I'll detach it so you can see it a little bit better here. If you can't quite see this, you can come up to Window and cue the Stroke panel right here. If you don't quite see the dash line right away, you might need to click the little drop-down to see show options. But then you should see this dashed line, and I can just check that and actually pull something that's pretty close here. Probably because I'd selected this before, and so it automatically puts in and I've got a two pixel dash here. I can edit the dashes to be shorter or longer, and then I can edit the space in between those dashes to give them either more space or less space in-between to change the appearance of how this thing is displaying this dotted pattern. You can also of course, change the stroke weight, to change the thickness of the dots. Let's even this thing out just a little bit more. Use a two pixel and a three pixel here. Then I've got this dash stroke affect that feels like water coming out of a fountain to me, and so then I can start to use other versions of this. I'm just copying and pasting and font a new one, and using the Reflect tool to flip it over and put one of these in the middle. I can group this together, and then pick all three of them and align them together, and then I can start to add more details as you go along and keep the same pattern that you've built already on all of these strokes. Let's add this little half circle up here, and then we'll feel okay about it. Now I've got this thing, and part of the problem is that down here, this thing leaves these parts and pieces of the dashes. There's a way you can correct that, and it's this option in the Stroke panel right here. This will either preserve the exact dash length or align the dashes to the end points. Once you do that it changes to be a little bit better, and we can still let C, still cutting this part off. Normally this just takes a little bit of manual adjustment. I switch back to the use exact stroke or exact dash length, and then I just pick one point and move it to where this thing is aligned as I want it to be, then you usually won't have that problem. A little manual adjustment, but not too big of a deal there. That's how I use Strokes to draw sometimes. One of the other things that I wanted to show you is just the Offset Path, and I don't really have a good example in here, but it's a pretty handy tool that comes in that I use quite often. What I've got here is my original bad shape, and what I want to do is start to create different colors as this thing radiates out. I could add a stroke and push it to the outside here. I can even come into the appearance palette there. If I drag and duplicate this, I can add another stroke effect that is bigger, and is a different color. If we position it below this one, you can start to see what I'm going for here. But the other way to do this that I actually prefer so that I'm not worried about working with Strokes, is to just make new shapes using the Offset Path function. This can be found under Object, Path, Offset Path. When I click this, I get a little dialogue box and you can preview what's going on here. You can see that it just pushes the path out in every direction, a certain amount of distance. I can control the amount of distance here in this panel. Let's try 0.25, click "Okay", and that gives me a new shape here. Let's make it a color that looks good. How about this blue? Then I can even do that again, Object, Path, Offset Path, 0.25, and add breadth around here. I just feel it can come in pretty handy when you're creating a sticker sort. Real quickly I'm going to borrow this plane and I'm going to show you some other drawing stuff on. If I just take this plane, I'll make a copy of everything, I'll paste it in front. I'm going to use the Pathfinder and unite all of these objects. I actually need to come in here and clean up a few points really quickly. Let's do that just to be on the safe side. Then if I take this and go to Object, Path, Offset Path, we are way too high for how big this thing is right now. Let's try 0.04 or 0.03 perhaps. Then I'll quickly hit the Pathfinder unite function again. I'll cut the top shape using command X, I'll delete this other shape, paste that shape back on the front here and send it to the back. Then I can change this to white, and I can start to create this sticker effect. I see I've got quite a few problems in here. I've got a little extra shape in here, and probably don't really need this extra space in here. It's pretty small and you got a whole lot of extra stuff happening up here but doesn't really mean to happen. Let's smooth that out just a little. Then a whole bunch of stuff back here in the tail fin because of all these extra rectangles that I have in here. This is going to take a little bit longer than necessary to show you, but you can get the idea that I still need to go through it and smooth this out. But I quickly have this sticker like effect by expanding the outside of this in every direction. That's the offset path function, and we've talked about drawing strokes. The next thing that I want to talk about is just drawing slightly more complex shapes, where you're starting from actual geometric shapes, and then also using photos as a reference to draw. What I've got here is the Kansas Aviation Museum badge that I created. We're going to look at just the airplane, and how I got to that. I actually drew sketches for a small little airplane like this, and tried a few different versions of this guy. You might have seen the sketches for this in my sketches, and I just scanned and imported the sketch, and then traced over that and then started adding some details here and there. But it just wasn't coming out the way that I wanted it to. What I ended up doing was I scraped this thing, and then I came in to Google image search here, and I just typed 1950s airplane, and started browsing around, looking at different planes and trying to figure out what I wasn't doing right, or what I wasn't liking. Many things I settled on was I didn't like the proportion, I didn't like this big space bubbly thing on the top, it felt all weird. Then I had a few things I just knew were off. After doing this quick search, I actually ended up finding one that I liked pretty well right at the top. By looking at this thing, you can see how I've adapted this and combine it with some of the elements here to become this. What I'll actually do sometimes is set this up so that I can see both things pretty easily. I've got my image here and I've got my original drawing, and I can see there are quite a few issues happening. As I start to go through and build this new airplane based on this reference image, and my old airplane, one thing that I like to keep in mind and then I do almost all the time is draw things at a 90 degree, or horizontal, or vertical angle. I can always rotate things later on in life, and you can see I've got the same kind of leaned back on this bottom wheel here. But the main thing is that I'm drawing this straight across initially, and I do this because it saves me a whole lot of time. I can use rectangles like this, and copies of those rectangles. I do not have to worry about them staying at the same angle. Let's take a look here and how I've created some of the shapes that are involved with this thing. Let's push this guy over just a little bit. There we go. It's fairly straightforward. I start with one big rectangle, and I'll switch to an outline here so you see what's going on. I'm adding a point to this rectangle. Let me actually go ahead and lock this shape down. Come back to this, get the pen tool, I'll add a point right here, I'll grab this and slide it along back to here, and then the tail fin here is one of the more complex shapes. The way that I'm creating this is starting with an ellipse, and got an ellipse, I'm just picking a point. I'm drawing from the center, coming down and I'm snapping it to the point of the bottom of this rectangle, so they line up pretty well and I'll stretch it out a little bit. Now, anytime that I draw a shape, of course, anytime that you make points inside of illustrator, you can go back and edit those points. This is the part where I'm talking, about rather than trying to set a pinpoint and draw this path especially when I'm making curves, I like to start with an ellipse because it's got well-balanced curve proportions already, and it's got handles that are exactly perpendicular to each other, and along the path here. That's really what's going to help me make smoother curves. I start with just those and I'll just grab this point, you can edit any points of course at any time, and switch to the pen tool. Start to edit this shape a little bit, and maybe bring this out just a little bit further, and try and drag one more time until I get a shape that's smooth that I'm happy with. Then I use the trick that I showed you guys before by using a line, and this option inside of the pathfinder where we divide the different objects, and I get rid of that one. Then all I'm up against is the other side of this airplane, this tail fin here. When you look at this thing, it's fairly straightforward. Also, I'm actually just going to duplicate my shape here again. I'm going to pick this point from out here, drag it along, and then I'm just going to manipulate the handles too. We'll drag that one out, then I'll drag this shape back down, and I'm holding shift as I drag the handle with the pen tool. They snaps to 45-degree angles, and then I can start to manipulate the tail fin shape a little bit based on these few points. The rest of this is fairly straightforward. Come in here and draw a rectangle for the front end, we'll use Apple C, Apple F to make a copy of that. We'll shrink this thing down, use Apple C and Apple F again, and drag up this rectangle, and then I'm going to drag this guy down to be aligned with the middle of this rectangle. Then we come in here and move this point a little bit. Then this is a trick I use a lot. If I actually pick the other point and hit return on a keyboard, I'm going to pop up the move dialog box, and it automatically fills in the last movement, so you can see I moved that point 0.0098 inches. I'll just come in here and delete the negative aspect, and it will move in the opposite direction. If it were positive, you make it a negative, if it's a negative, you make it a positive, and that moves these points in the same amount. Then I'll just take this, make a new copy of it, use the Reflect tool, grab both the shapes, use the Pathfinder, back this thing, stretch it out just a little bit, so it connects over this, and then I'll draw from the center point again with a circle, come out here, and then I'll take this point and nudge him out just a little bit further to make that nudge. Pretty much the same things happening here. Just make a rectangle, pick the bottom two points, drag it over. We'll grab a circle here, paste it in front, make a smaller circle. I'm showing you guys this by tracing it, just to save time here. Well, what I was actually doing was going back and looking at this and comparing this. So when you look at the size here, I can see I've got quite a bigger wheel in the front than I do in the back, and so that was one of the big differences on this weird-looking one, because it didn't quite have the wheel portion right at the distance of the leg here for the wheel, and so I went back in and I'm just eyeballing the view here and then trying to match the proportion. A lot of times I don't trace directly from a photo or anything, just because I don't want to feel like I'm copying too much. You definitely don't want to trace anybody else's design or anybody else's elements or anything like that, but you can see how I'm using this as a reference to build a proportion for this thing. Then I'm just going back in and adding my own flavor to this thing. You've seen how I'm drawing everything with rectangles. Even we'll make this triangle shape with a rectangle, we are drawing it out and just removing a point. I'll make this shape with a rectangle by dragging that point down and then using the pen tool to get a handle to give this a slight curve. Then I'll use that shape and use the minus front to cut out the little door here. So you can see mine is way bigger than his, it messes me making the decision to add a little bit more negative space in here so things don't get way too crazy. By now I've got almost the whole plane drawn, except for the wings. To do that, I'm just drawing an ellipse and cutting it in half and then duplicating it, bringing it down to here, and then making a thinner rectangle, dragging it over, then I will duplicate that and snap it to the front of this guy. Then I've got two elements left. You can see I'm borrowing this striped pattern. I just really enjoy the way that this thing looked, and so I wanted to add that striped pattern in there. Then I added my own star and you can see that the proportion on the stripped pattern is totally different. Let's go ahead and add the star and expand that, I will make it white. Now I've got pretty much all of the basic shapes that I need here. Quickly I'm going to come back in and just add the color, make the wings red, and I'll make this part red, and this part of red. Then to add the stripes in here, since we already got the shape, it's relatively easy. I'm just going to draw out a rectangle, I'm going to make it white. Then holding option, I'll make one copy of it. Then I'll drag out the second copy and then I'll use the command D or edit Duplicate function. Somewhere in here it should say Duplicate. Then I'll just take this thing and make another copy using that first copy as my spacing, and then I'll just use the command D or Object, Transform, Transform Again, I don't know why they call it Transform Again. I think it used to be called Duplicate, which is where that command D came from, makes a lot more sense to me to just duplicate that copy along here. Then I'll take all of these and I'll make them a compound path with command 8. I'll make a copy of that first shape, then I'll use the intersect Pathfinder that I've showed you before to make the stripes on the tail fin here. You can see I need a little more adjustment to get the spacing issues right. This is a little too small down here and I don't like how the white is coming out over there. The last things to do, I'll start to add a few of the smaller details. These are pretty straightforward, and the fact that I'm adding some shading in here by just making copies of shapes. I'll paste a new one in front or remove this one and then I'll make that black to add that shade in there. Then I'll actually make a copy of the main body here and drag out the line again, use the divide Pathfinder, delete the top portion, we'll make this black as well. Then I'm just going to bring my wings to the front. We've got one more shape in here, it needs to be black. We need to add a little shadows under here and here. Then lastly, I'll add this last shadow by making a copy and pasting it in this front wing. Then I'll come up and I'll show you the trick that I just showed you. We go to Object, Path, Offset Path. Let's go to 0.25 inches, looks just fine. So I have a slightly bigger path. Then I'm going to copy and paste these two rectangles or command 8 them into a compound path. Then I'll pick my larger one, I'll use the intersect Pathfinder. I'll make those black, then I'll bring my original red shape up there, and that gets me this shadow effect underneath here. Now I've got my airplane. The last little piece in here that are surely some of this stuff before is with the rotate tool, and so I'll just give you a reference here, it's like a big gold field here. The last thing I do is grab the rotate tool, tell it to rotate on this anchor point and settle down on the ground. It's usually good to keep a copy of these things because once I make this rotation, it's hard for me to rotate it back and it gets more difficult for me to make edits easily. You can see how when I draw on this 90 degree or flat angle, it's quick and pretty painless. I'm going to try and draw that thing at this angle, it's a lot harder and takes more time. That's quickly, a little bit more advanced shape modification, a little bit more about the Pathfinder and you can see how I'm making some of these more complex shapes, starting with those basic geometric shapes and using this picture as my reference. That's about it for the advanced drawing topics. I've got one more video to share with you guys, it's about finishing touches. We'll talk a little bit about shading and lighting and texture, and then just building things and outputting them for their final destinations. I'll see you guys in the last video.
9. Finishing Touches: Welcome to what is sadly the last instructional video of this course. I hope you guys have learned a lot along the way. Got a few final things that I want to show you. Just some finishing techniques or touches that you can do and then also how to prep your artwork to export it for its final destination. Into the computer we go. The first thing that I want to talk about is just the simple, little shading techniques that I've added to give this thing just a little bit more dimension. You can see I've got this inner shadow happening inside of this circle. This full shading to push the center forward, and then a highlight around the badge, and then some shadowing on this ribbon also. Before I talk about that, I just wanted to quickly touch on again the fact that I built a color palette that had some shading capabilities inside of it already. I could use things like this blue and the almost black color without having to do any additional shading. I'm just using those on my color palette, which then helps me build the shape relationships because that color is the same as this color. I'm not just shading things randomly. Same thing with the red being a shadow of yellow and like I showed you before, there's even some more capabilities in there with like the blue being the shadow for the red or the yellow, etc. Outside of those though, you can see I'm also adding these other touches. These are some pretty simple things that you can think about. The way that I'm doing this is just with different shapes that are either black, and see that this is a bluish green black or white. Then I'm using the transparency palette to either screen if this is white or multiply if these are black, and I'm dropping them back about eight percent. The screen on the highlights at 10 percent. All of the shadows then are multiplied with black at 15 percent. Then I'm just using different shapes on top of those other shapes. Real quickly here. If I just take my very inner circle and I'll copy and paste two copies in front, and then move the top copy over a little bit, and scale it up just slightly, and then pick both of them, and we'll use the minus front. Then make this my dark black, set it to multiply, and set this down 15 percent, I get that inner shadow appearance here. Then on the highlight here on the outside, I delete that. I'll pick my bad shape, I'll make a copy of it. You can see I'm using this trick to split everything in half. Take my original one, and then I've actually grabbed this. We use the scale tool from the center. Scale it down just slightly. Copy that, undo it, paste those. Use the intersect filter to get that slightly smaller shape. Then got to get into the right spot, in this case I'm just going to do that and bring the ribbon to the top. Then I'll make this thing white, set the transparency mode, the screen, and drop this back to like a 10 percent. Then I've got a couple of those, one in the background happening and then those shapes down here in the ribbon also. Whenever you shade things keep in mind that it's the highlight and the shadow that are added in the dimension, so you can think about how to add either the highlight, or the shadow, or usually both of them. That's that. Second thing that I wanted to talk about is using texture. I've been asked this a couple of times, and so I wanted to make sure that I show it in here. I didn't have any examples from the series of badges that I made, but I did have these other examples for these little spot illustration icons that are in the info section of the class. I've got this textural work happening and I just wanted to quickly talk about how I work with that texture as shape to apply that shading. What I've got here is a untextured version of this thing drawn with just the basic shapes. Then I've got this big behemoth of a shape here. It's something that I created just using a stipple brush and ink, and then live tracing it. I've got this gigantic figure here and I'm going to use this to apply this textural work in here. The first thing that I'm going to do, and this is something that you're going to want to keep in mind on whenever applying this textures to use compound paths. We've talked about them in several of the other videos, you can come to Object, Compound Path, and Make or Release in here. But right now this thing after I live trace it is a group, and what I want this to be is a compound path. I'm going to use Command 8 to make it a compound path. First of all I'll go ahead and drop in the one in the back. This is real simple, it's something I've made already, we'll send these to the back. I'll pick this. I'll select the orange color, and in this case rather than screen, or white, or shade of black, all I'm going to do is actually set this color to be just a little bit wider. We need just a hair lighter than that. There's the main textural shading back there. I'll just walk those. Then the only other textural work I have is around the edges of this object. I'm going to pick that, hold Shift, click and drag everything so that I unselect that shape and pick everything else, and then walk those. I don't have to worry about them. These things can get pretty hectic to look at pretty quick, and so if I can walk down some of those shapes that I don't need we'll be better off. Then all I need to do, we'll go ahead and set the color that I want using the eyedropper and my other shape. Then I'll just come in here and round the edges, and duplicate this thing a couple of times. Until I feel I've gotten about the right amount of texture on that shape. Occasionally, I'll use the "Rotate" tool just to help avoid any repeating patterns. We can nudge this guy up to get a little bit more, and maybe a little bit more in this corner would be nice. What you can do from here is create a clipping mask like I've talked about before. But one of the things that happens is when I work with these really complex shapes, illustrator will start to get bogged down and start to run a little bit slower, and so I'd like to try and keep this as clean as possible. I do that by adding all of these, come into the Pathfinder, I'll unite them, to get rid of all the millions of little points where they overlap. It will take a second here, maybe two seconds, and that'll help get rid of a few of the points. But then the big thing is I take copy of this, we paste it in front. I'll make it the same color as these because when I pick both of these objects, and I use the intersect filter and the Pathfinder, it'll use the color of the top shape. What should happen is, I'll get this error. I actually planned this, says the intersecting pass haven't produced any results based on this Pathfinder filter. The reason for that is because when I use the unite function, it makes this compound path a group again. That's a problem for some of the Pathfinder modes especially the intersect function. I need to make this a compound path by hitting "Command eight" again, pick that top shape one more time. We'll use the intersect filter, and we'll cut out that excess million or two million points and be left with just this shape. There's a textural shading inside of this other shape. It's harder to go back and edit this, but it'll save you more time in the long run to have illustrator running quicker on the front end. Then say, if I need to come back in here and add more shading, I'll just come back in and add more. If you need to remove some, I can come in here and delete some or you can just flat out start over. Because it'll take me less time to reshape this than for me to sit here and wait two or three seconds every time I'm trying and do something inside of illustrator. So that's shading and texturing, which are two, in my opinion, final touches to design things. I'd like to start and build shape, and shape relationships and composition, and design all of those things first and then add lighting or shading or texturing. You don't have to save it till the end, but for me it's easier and then I can make sure that I spend more time actually designing the badge, or icon, or element first. The last thing I want to show you is prepping this thing to get ready to export. For our purposes here, what I'm going to show you is using this thing on screen. I think a lot of you guys are probably designing badges for websites or blogs, or anything like that. I'm going to show you a few little tricks here to get this thing ready to export as a PNG file. People who are going to print, don't have to worry about this as much. But sometimes it can come in pretty handy just to make sure that everything in it is in its right place before you go to production. Right now, normally, what I want to do is "File" and "Export" and we'll make a PNG. I'll go ahead and use the art board here and save it to my Desktop. We'll export this PNG. Screen resolution is fine. Normally, I drop this down to Art Optimized Supersampling, instead of Type Optimized. I haven't seen really a whole lot of difference between the two, especially working in this smaller icon sort. But I go ahead and do it anyways most of the time, so that'll make that PNG file. Then I can come into Photoshop and I'll take a look at this. There is my final PNG. Now, unfortunately, there's a few problems with this thing and a lot of the lines are fuzzy. You can see when I really zoom in to like this shape, it's like a little fuzzy around here. Some of the anti-aliasing that's happening when it generates that PNG file is starting to make everything not look that great. There's two ways to combat this. The first way is if you watch or read through the pixel perfect tutorial that are posted in the second section, you can see how you can set up a pixel grid and snap everything to that pixel grid, and that should eliminate most of these problems. However, as some of you have experienced, that can sometimes make drawing things, a pain. The other ways I do is to just draw this thing out first. Then if you come up to the "View" menu in illustrator, at the top, there's this Pixel Preview option. We've got a shortcut of option "Command Y". When I do that it will give you this Pixel Preview view. When I'm zoom in, I can start to see some of those anti-aliasing problems. Even though this looks like pixels, I've still got all of my paths that I can select here. I can fix most of the issues by picking these paths and snapping them to the pixel. When I'm in the Pixel Preview and we've got Snap to pixel checked, also in the View menu, you can actually just pick these things and quickly move them, either the whole shape which you can see. Fix the issue I was having with the top or remove the bottom, only the bottom part. When you move it, it will snap to a pixel. Sometimes you have to go out and then back, and then we'll snap that down. Same thing here, just out in this case, just out in there. We'll go up one there, up one, and then down one over all. I'll bring this one back and forth once there, come to this guy and bring him up. This one down, look at our blue shape which is a pretty big problem. Go up and down, and then you can look at our street lamp even, and the shapes that are built in that. Then very bottom of this blue one, it's a problem. A street sign on this side is a problem also. As our these details in here. Using that Pixel Preview and just moving them, one pixel up or one pixel down, snap these things, should give you a much crisper, sharper preview inside of illustrator. Then we can go ahead and export a PNG file again. Let me do that once more and use the art board. I'll overwrite my old one, choose "Art Optimize", replace that, and then open it up again. We can see now things are a lot sharper inside of Photoshop. Things are going to look a lot better on screen. That's it for these videos. Like I said, I hope you guys have learned quite a bit. Hopefully, these finishing techniques and the things covered in the third section of the class will help you finish out your series in a unique and interesting way and get it prepped for the real world. If you guys have any questions, please continue to post them in the Q&A section, and I'll answer them just as quickly as I possibly can. Then I'll be going through and commenting on your projects as much as I can also. I'm really looking forward to seeing how things turn out. I'll probably do a wrap-up video at the end of class as well, so I'll see you guys there. Thanks.
Dominic Flask, Independent Designer and Illustrator
