Intro to Graphic Design: Poster Design #007

1. Intro to Graphic Design: Poster Design #007 - Trailer: [MUSIC] Hello everyone. My name is Marcos. I'm a senior designer and animator based in London. Today, in this class, I will share with you how to create this typography posters inside Adobe Illustrator. I will guide you through all the process, from where to find, to choose the right fonts, and how to design these aesthetic posters. Besides using great fonts, we will explore how to customize them, like using them as a raw material for our creativity. We will also use 3D effects to create incredible texts effects like isometric typography and gradients that will give color and life to our design. I've designed this class to any experiencing level. I will explain each step in detail. I want to make sure you don't miss anything. By taking this class besides the new technical skills that you will learn, you will also have two new posters to hide your geographic design portfolio. As a class project, I will invite you to design these posters with me. Great. I think this is it. Let's design, share, and inspire. I will see you all in the first lesson. 2. L01- Poster Design: “Live Simply”: [MUSIC] Hello everyone, and welcome to the first lesson, and thank you so much for being here, and let's start. The first thing we will need to do it's download our fonts for this exercise. For that, I just jump to the Internet. I'm going to be using the website, velvetyne.fr. This is like a French topography font website that is completely open-source. What that mean? It means you can use these for commercial, for personal projects, and you can also edit these fonts, make your own fonts with these fonts. You're free to be as creative as you want to. The warning rule there is in this community of open source type, and open source in general is you can't make a profit selling these fonts. You can give them for free anywhere you want, but you just can't sell them as yours. If you don't do that everything else is free. I will leave this link on the project description. We can just go there, click on the link, or you can just go to velvetyne.fr, whatever is easier for you. Let's jump back into Illustrator. Just a few seconds. Let's just delete this beautiful design I've made. Welcome. This is a new poster I'm working on. I'll just delete this one. Let's set up our document. I already have my document set it up. But I want to show you what was the resolution I use for this artboard. The resolution I'm using is a width of 1,700 and a height of 2,400 and a vertical orientation and RGB mode. Press just "Create". I'm going to press "Close" because mine is already ready. Next thing. For this exercise, one of the fonts we actually want to download, it's the font Outward. The next one you need to download, it's a Pilowlava. Just go back to velvetyne and download these fonts. It's easy, you just click there and they download automatically to your art drive. Great. Back into Illustrator. We're going to write the code we want to use. In this case, I leave this code which is live simple. I try to make these posters as connected to me as I can. Normally, I try to make them a little bit motivational because this is the type of posters I like to see on my feeds on social media. I like to see posters that are not only beautiful, but they have a message that I like, if I read them in the morning, that will give me something for that day. That's why I tend to make quite inspirational posters. Because they are mostly for myself, like me trying to set up rules for myself. We're going to write, live simple, I'm sorry. Let's go back to text tool and live simple. Let us go press the Selection tool here. While all the shift, let's just scale this up. I'm sorry if I feel a little bit anxious while I'm recording this because it's been more than a month since my last tutorial on Skillshare. I'm quite rusty and I get a little bit nervous and I start to speak a little bit too fast. I'm sorry for that. Right now, we are using a random font, which normally it's Myriad Pro that comes with your Illustrator, but on this case, I actually use a font I had selected before. I'm going to change this to the font we downloaded from the website which is Outward. I'm going to scale it again a little bit. Actually, I needed to show you something. I'm actually using workspace which is the essential workspace. In case you want to follow me perfectly, some people that are new to Illustrator, it's easier if me and you have the same workspace because then all the menus and the buttons will be in the same place. If you are new to Illustrator, just try to use the same workspace that I'm using because it makes your life simple. Live simple. The next thing where our font selected, I want you to choose a code. You can use the same code as I'm using, live simple if that resonates with you. If you have any other codes in your life that you actually really like, even from poets or from philosophers, please feel free. But remember, try to make it like two words maximum otherwise a poster will be a little bit too complicated and these styles doesn't work very well when there is a lot of text in the screen. Try to make something simple like that. I'll just stop talking a little bit and select this font again. Let's go to character. Let's just try to see the menu, like click these three dots here, and let's make all caps like this. Perfect. Again, let's just select it. Let us drag to the corner and scale it a little bit more. Holding Shift, so it scales proportionally like this. Perfect. Now the next thing we need to select our font. Let's go to Object and Expand. Let's keep expand, object, and fill and press "OK". Perfect. What these does it converts your editable words into vector shapes. The problem with that is if you change your mind, you need to maybe Command Z or Control Z and go back to where it was, it will text because right now everything is transforming to vectors. As you can see, there's little dots. It means this is now shapes not editable text anymore. If you're happy with it, just do a whoa for it. Next thing we're going to do and because this is editable now we are going to select our Direct Selection Tool here. Let's make this a little bit more condensed. Let's select the top points here. Let's just zoom out a little bit and just drag it up like this and do the same for the bottom here. Like this. Perfect. Right now is looking really cool. I actually like this style. But I wanted to make the central bits where the letters are more defined. A little bit more in the middle, so it doesn't get so distorted like I see these right now. Just need to be careful. Maybe we need to do one by one actually, because some of the letters will drag other bits that we don't want to. Maybe I will leave like here, try to find the middle, I take it somewhere here, and I will do the same thing for E here. I'm just going to zoom in, select these points here just like this. Perfect. Now I just drag this down, try to match the best we can. This one here, you can press "Command R" and get the rulers or control R, and just drag a ruler here. We make sure that we are using the same line, which is perfect. Next, let's just do the same thing we do with the S, let's just select zoom in, I'm using Z for zoom in. Just going to select these points, the ones we need to, and we just drag something here that we don't need. Let's just deselect it. Perfect. Like here. Great. Because you are dragging this a little bit down, we have more definition of the letter. The shape of the letter feels better as if it was before. Because when it's so high up the definition and the form of the letter is quite a little bit lost. It's still a little bit difficult to read, but it's much easier than before. Let's do the same thing with the letter P, just like this, select these little ones here, so outward again. Am just going to drag onto here. Perfect. The same thing with letter L. Am just going to get the guides again, let's go to guides, and show guides. Holding shift so we don't snap into other places. Again, same thing for E just like this. Let's just zoom in a little bit, just to make sure. Yes. Perfect. Then let's go back. Perfect. Our initial design is done. This is very simple, although it looks really nice. The next thing we need to do is actually, let's just zoom in a little bit, it's created a new layer. That will be our background layer with our background color. For that, let's go to the create new layer here. Make new layer, drag it in the bottom, name it, BG for background. Let's go to our toolbar here, select our rectangle tool. From the corner of our art board to the other corner here, let's make a perfect rectangle in the same size of our art board. Let's just lock it for now. We're going to need to change it. Let's select our font, and let's go to object and ungroup. Great. Let's just select it again. Let's go in the tab here on the toolbar here let's click on the "Gradient." Cool. What this does it applies our automatic black and white, gray into the letters. Although we need to refine it a little bit more. But for that, let's just deselect this out. Let's select the letter L here, and let's go to our color here. The first thing I want to do is to match the color of the gradient as the same color of the background. They blend it together. Let's just click twice in the "Gradient" here, select the high drop tool, and just pick the color from the background just like this. Easy. Again, let's select the letter. Let's go to the angle definition here, and let's go and select 90 degrees. Perfect. Next thing, we just go select all the other letters here, and using the eyedrop tool, let's just color using some gradient. We are doing this because this new gradient has the background color in it. Instead of us doing for every letter, we're just going to speed up a little bit by copying the gradient before. Let's select letter E. Here on angles we actually going to change to minus 90, like this. The same thing for letter V, let's just select the angles here, 90 and this one will be minus 90, and then 90 again minus 90, 90 again minus 90, and 90 again minus 90. You probably are already tired of listening to me saying this. As you can see now, it's actually creating this very dynamic gradient happening here. On a part is like dark and weaker, this wave of color happening here, like every letter has a different direction on the gradient, creating this really cool effect. Let's just select these ones here. I think they share the same thing unless maybe just change a little bit of a gradient like this, I just keep one, let's just delete this one, see if it works, and let's do the same thing on the other ones. Here we are actually moving the gradient a little bit making it a little bit more darker in the corners there. Yeah, this is pretty much it. We're not a 100 percent finished, but we are really close to finish. The next thing we want to select these letters again, and let's go to object and group them together. We can actually scale them in one go just like this, and perfect. We want to leave a little bit of breathing space around the texts because we want to add our signature as well. The next thing, let's create a new layer where we're going to head our signature. Normally, I sign with my own name I put design by Marcos, probably will put a tag of for my Instagram or some other website. Because I'm already using a very specific type here, I'll always like to keep my signature, something more simple. Normally, I use Helvetica. Helvetica always works. Helvetica font, and just scale this down, maybe to 25. Let's see. Yes. It looks perfect. I'm sorry. Let's make it white like this. These are biomolecules. Maybe I actually want to make it light gray, so it doesn't take too much attention in a poster. You want it to be a detailed, not like something we're going to focus on. Let's just drag it while holding alt, so it makes a copy. Let's just drag it into the other corner, let's press "R" for rotation, let's rotate it like this, and like this. Let's just change here the copy, and I'm going to put the date of the year and the month. I'm making this poster of May 2022, I'm going to just drag this down here so it aligns there, I'm going to do the same thing here. Perfect. Actually, I would just rotate this so it faces other direction. Yeah, now we're almost there. The last thing we're going to do is a little bit of post-production. I always feel when I finish these posters inside Adobe Illustrator, they are very digital because they are made from wheat vectors. Yeah, they bring that digital feeling on it, which is okay, new phase is fair enough. But if we want to actually to add something extra on it, we should just let a little bit of a grain on it. The way I like to do it. It's just like create a shape layer, again, or a rectangle tool. Create a new layer let's just limit noise, and let's just drag and drop like this, and let's make it black. Then let's go to effects, texture and grain. Let's just leave it like 20, maybe 15 will be alright. Stippled grain press "Okay." Let's go back to our layer here, let's go to properties, and then find the opacity. Click on "Opacity" and change this to the screen. Right now is very strong. It's like it's so strong that we barely considered the visual. The only thing we need to do is just select it, and reduce the opacity to maybe 5 percent. Something like this. We don't want it to be very evident, but we want to be there. Maybe like 8 percent will be all right. Here we can actually control by your taste at 8 percent, it keeps like this really nice grain happening here. I'm quite really happy with it. Yeah, and if you want to export it, I just go to export and export as, and then here you can actually select what type of file do you want to use, from PNG to JPEGs, and yeah. Don't forget to make the exercise. Don't forget to upload to your poster from the first lesson into the class project. I really love to see it and I really want like everyone sharing their posters, and sharing their favorite codes and words. Yeah, I see you in the next lesson then. Thank you. Bye bye. 3. L02 - Poster Design: “Aesthetic”: [MUSIC] Hello everyone, and welcome to the Lesson 2. Let's start. The first thing we need to do is again, do it the same artboard resolution, 1,700, 2,400. I just press "Create". Not forgetting RGB. Perfect. Just going to drag from my other screen. There we go. Again, on this poster, what we going to do, it's getting a word on this case. Let's make something really cool with that word. On this exercise, I'm going to use the word aesthetic. It's such a beautiful word that means beautiful things. I've been fascinated with this word because even the letters that contains these word are so beautiful that designing with an E and with the T and the H is like they're so balanced letters. It always looks nice when you use them. Feel free to use the same words or choose something else you can use like your name, or the city you live in. Anything works on this exercise. Just feel free. With this word selected, let's go and use the same font we use in the first poster which was outwards from febrile tin. Let's again, scale this up selecting and pressing E, and then using Shift to scale it proportionally like this. Perfect. Aesthetic. Now, let's go select it again. Let's go to Object and Expand. Perfect. Let's expand the fill and the object. Press "Okay". Perfect. Now, let's go select it again. We're not actually going to distort this one. We're going to use a 3D effect. Let's select it. Let's go to Effects, 3D Materials, 3D Classic, and rotate like this. On rotate here, you can actually select, there's a preset of views. You can actually have isometric left, isometric rights. All the isometric views are here already. You don't know any magic for it. On this case, let's just use the isometric right and press "Okay". As you can see, it's already here perfectly aligned on isometric. I'll just drag this up like this. Just select it and make a copy actually first. Let's go to Edit, Copy, and Edit. Paste. We just drag and drop like this. Then let's go to our properties here. Let's click in 3D Rotate Classic. We're going to back to that editability of this effect. Here we are going to the position and we're going to use isometric top. Like this. Perfect. This case, the font is a little bit in the other direction that we don't need to. We're going to need to press "Okay". Now let's go back there. We're going to need to rotate this here. Let's just select this edge here. While holding Shift, let's just rotate the best we can so we don't move too much. Here, let's just make sure this is makes 30 and here makes 45. It's perfectly aligned and press "Okay", Just drag and drop these here. Perfect. This is the beginning of the poster. We don't need to do anything more inside of the 3D tool. Let's just select these fonts again. Let's go to Object. Let's go to Expand. Because we don't need to change it into 3D again, we can actually expand again. We had actually have more freedom using, and the 3D wireless is available to edit, it gets a little bit heavier on our computers. Doing this, we are free to distort it again if you need to. Let's select our words and lets just click and make ungroup. As you can see, there is a little box now around our letters here. What we need to do, is go into our direct selection tool here and click on the corner here and just press "Delete". It cleans up that box, we don't need it. Let's just zoom in again and do the same thing again, like this. Perfect. The next thing we need to do is just drag this a little bit on the center. Now, what we're going to do is select these letters here. Let's go to Edit, Copy, and Edit Paste in place. While holding Shift, lets just drag and drop it up one matrice here. Let's do the same thing. Let's just click this other one. Maybe let's change it to a different color just for now. We can actually look at it. Let's just moving forward. That's just making the same thing selected. Go to Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste in place. That's just holding Shift again. Let just try to match it perfectly there. Let's click on it, right-click, and Send to back. Perfect. Let's just make it all black again. It matches. Now before we actually do that, let us try to connect these letters together. Let's try to do the best we can to match them on the edges. Maybe we just change this color as well to something different so it can actually have a better look on them. Something like this. Right-click on this one, just send this one to the back. It actually can see them if they match there perfectly on the lines. Just like this. I'm going to zoom out. I'm going to do the same thing here again, zoom in here just to make sure we're matching the right edges together like this and do the same thing down here. Try to match perfectly the edges. Great. Now what we want to do is just select all of these letters. Again, by a gradient. Just like this. Perfect. With this gradient, we can actually select this back letter here and we're going to make it in a custom direction. If you click on the gradient tool bar here, you can just click it and then you can just decide which direction you want this gradient to go. On this case, I'm going to make it going a need a bit like this. Perfect. It's darker earlier bit on the bottom here and all this one, I'll go down the same thing, will be darker closer to the corner there. Something like this. Perfect. On this one, I actually going to make it a little bit brighter. Select all of them. Brighter in the corner here. Something like this. Perfect. We can actually have a nice readability here. I'm going to do the same thing here. Really dark. Here maybe I will leave it the brightness down here. Something like this. We actually have almost a defined edge here, where it actually help us to have a better grade of it and here too. Great. This is the first step which is created the main element. Next thing we're going to do is just select it. Let's go to Object. Let's group it like this. Perfect. Let's just go to Window and let's go to the outline so we can actually have the align tools here. Let's try to align it perfectly on the center, like this. Let's just close it for now. Select it again. Go to Edit, Copy, and Edit, Paste in place. Now let's move this one here on the top, just like this. Do the same thing again. Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste in place, and make it down here. Perfect. This way you're going to create these like a step composition, which is really cool, creates a very dynamic composition, which is diagonal lines. With it selected, let's just go create a new solid shape tool here, rectangle. Before that actually, let's just select this three elements here. Let's go to Object and group them together. Let's go to this rectangle tool here again. Just select it like this. Maybe this, let's remove the gradient. We don't need it right now. Make sure it's the same size as the artboard , 1,700, 2400. Perfect. Let's just make sure it's in the center. Perfect. Something like this. Select this new solid with this three elements. Let's just right-click and making clipping mask like this. Perfect. We actually using that solid as a mess for this entire same. Again, let us just sign our poster. Again, I'm going to just copy a signature I made before because I don't want you to waste your seconds on this one. I'm going to just paste it here. There, I think this is it. The last thing we cannot forget, it's to add the green layer. Let's just create the new layer. Let's just name it grain and let's make it the same size of our artboard. Let's go to Effect, Texture, Grain. Because we use this gradient before in the last class, it will be the same settings. Just press "Okay". Let us click on here, go to Properties, try to find the opacity again. Make it screen or is it screen? Let's change the opacity maybe to five percent this time. Something like this. Let's just zoom in to have a look on the grain effect. It's looking really nice. But maybe we can actually increase this to 10 and see how much current we actually get. I think I actually like it 10 as well because creates this nice grain in a white spaces here, which is cool. Let's just zoom out to have a general look of the design. It looks really nice. I think this was a very quick design poster. Visually, I think it's very minimalistic, which is cool. I really like the minimalistic designs. It's also very strong. We can actually feel we could actually involve a really strong message on this style. Again, don't forget to make the exercise and don't forget to share with me and your class colleagues. I see you in the next lesson. 4. L03 - Poster Design: “Love Pillow”: [MUSIC] Hello everyone and welcome to the last poster. Let's start. This one, it's a very simple poster, I will say, technical-wise, but the visual, when I achieved this visual I was so happy with it because the process was so simplistic. The effect, in the end, was so powerful that I was thinking maybe it's a very simple technique, but I think the process is very good and maybe there's people actually can explore their their way because it'll be a lot of open space for creativity with composition styles and stuff. I decided to include this poster on this class as well because I really think is a really good exercise to make our creativity work out a little bit. Let's start. To start again, let's just make our document. I'm going to use again, this 1,700 by 2,400. They're RGB, don't forget, and press "Create". Again, it went to my second screen. Sorry for that. Let's start. In this case, I already start creating the background layer. For that, let's just make a layer, call it BG. I'm going to use a rectangular tool here. I'm going to drag and drop it in the bottom here. Just try to make it perfectly. Yes. I'm going to make it black. Just going to rotate the colors here. Delete this one, and make it full black like this. I'm going to lock it for now and going to get my type tool here, going to make it white. I'm going to get my type tool again and try to actually create a new layer so I can write somewhere. I'm going to write love. I'm going to make it white a little to be able to see it. I'm going to scale it up using Shift and something like this. Perfect. The main thing about this poster was actually the font. The font was so dynamic and so organic that the font by itself was already a piece of art. For that, we're just going to use the font Pilowlava, for which we downloaded from the website, Velvetyne. Let's just get it here. Pilowlava. See. As you can see that this is such a unique font, so beautiful. I really love this the way it's curved, all these. You can see there was a lot of time involved while designing this font. Even if we just leave it like this, like a white font on a black background, it will be something very strong visual already just because of the uniqueness of this font, but well, we're not going to stop here. Well, trust me, we're going to make it. It is read a really cool poster. I'll select it again. Let's go to Object and let's go to Expand and expand Objects and Fill. Press "Okay". Perfect. Again, let's just apply our basic gradient. Something like this. Let's right-click and press "Ungroup". Then let's just select a font, a letter like this, and just scale it up. Let's scale it up as bigger as we can like something like this. Not too big, but try to make it in the same scale more or less, something like this. Perfect. Now let's just play a little bit with some composition. I'm going to just play around with this later L here. I'm going to overlay that O here, somewhere like this. You can also keep playing with the scales. I'm going to make the V go in that direction as well. Something like around here. Don't be afraid to get out of the artboard, which is actually cool. The letter E, I'm going to leave it somewhere here. Again, I want to select these letters, and I'm going to go to Edit, Copy and Edit and Paste. Actually, I have a new set of them. I'm going to make another composition with them like this. Just going to move this there, love. I'm going to love this here, and maybe I'm going to play this one like this. Perfect. As you can see, you can be very free in the composition you make because this font is so beautiful and work so well that any composition, which is all organic clients, will work really well. I'm really curious to see how you managed to make these compositions and how your composition looks like. After doing our composition like this, let's just select our letters and let's go and add a blending mode to them. Let's go to opacity here. Blending mode is here. Let's select "Screen". What you see now, the screen is actually multiplying letters over each other, creating this feel almost a transparent glass over it, which is really cool. We can actually play a little bit more with this and just play with the composition, try to intersect as much as we can [inaudible] to create these really cool effects like this. I think if visually, it's a very dynamic composition. With this topography which is very organic, it creates this very interesting poster. Well, this is partially done actually. The next thing I want to just copy and paste my signature again. I don't going to spend your time see me do it again. I was just going to put it here and just going to leave it there. Before we actually finish it, let's just make a clipping mask again. Let's just make a solid the same size of our artboard. Let's let all of our graphics, right-click and make clipping mask. It's actually well clipped there. It's not going out of the artboard. Before we go again, a new layer for the noise layer. Let's go create a new solid again. Let's make it black. Let's just go to Effect, Texture, Grain, and stippled. Press "Okay". Properties again, opacity. Let's make this five percent on screen again. See it looks like this grain again, gives so much more detail to this poster. Let maybe even increase the opacity to eight, something closer to 10. Actually, it's more present in the visual. This was basically it. Was a really quick poster as I told you, but I really liked the effects it created with this composition and also this topography. You can keep playing with bending modes in the fonts as well. You can just try other ones like color dodge and see what they create. Some of them will probably disappear in the background, but some of them will be okay. Like this one works really well. Keep just playing a little bit more with these bending modes and try to see which one creates a better visual and a more interesting, how do I say, this one just disappeared, not supposed to, a more interesting art direction to the poster. Hope you enjoy it. I couldn't really wait to see your next creations. Please make these exercises and post them on a class project section because I really love to see what you guys create. Every time a student posts a poster, it inspires other students to make the poster as well so creating these little community around this class which is really amazing in the end. This is it for this poster and I'll see you in a conclusion class. Thank you. 5. L04 - Class Conclusion : [MUSIC] Hello everyone. First thank you so much for taking this class. I'm really happy that you took your time to learn these new techniques and to spend this time with me. I love doing this Skillshare exercises. I learn so much when I'm doing this because one thing it's when you design for yourself. You do it almost in a flow, you don't know what you're doing. You're just pressing buttons and you're not making much sense what you're doing. Because mostly is on a state of flow, which I'm just like almost like surfing the wave and I don't know what I'm doing, I'm just doing it. But when I actually need to stop like I finished the poster and then actually need to prepare a class where I need to more or less create bullet points and explain what I've done and why, I learn a lot about what I'm doing in the end. When I'm trying to teach, I'm actually teaching myself what I'm doing, if that makes sense. Thank you so much for being on this journey with me as well, for taking this class. Today we made these three amazing posters. Normally, I feel like my first poster when I make it it's like I really like it. But then when I tried to recreate it again, for some reason, I never feel that same feeling. I think maybe because it's not original anymore. Maybe it's because I've already done it I'm just doing it again for the exercise. But on this case actually, I think I've liked more of the exercise one than the one I have made in the beginning. Because I was more involved with it. I was more involved with the process because I needed to share the process with you. I think these three posters are pretty cool. I'm really happy. I definitely could imagine seeing them on a magazine or somewhere in the streets or a band poster. I think these techniques are actually very useful. I want you to see these posters. As a way to practice, I'll get a little bit out of the rules of design. Normally when we actually are designing for a client we have so many rules. We can do this, we can do that. I want these poster classes to be somewhere where actually we learned and have fun and share it and inspire other people. Yeah, thank you so much again for being here. I really appreciate your time. Before we go, if you want to check my other Skillshare classes, I have another classes on poster design and some really quick ones on typography and some ones in 3D typography which is really cool if you're into 3D. Yes, some many others I'm pretty sure you're going to enjoy. Please don't forget to follow me on Skillshare so we can see by email every time I publish a new class. Thank you so much for being here today. I'll see you in my next class then. Thank you. Bye-bye.