Learning Adobe Illustrator for Beginners

1. Welcome!: Hey guys, this is Spencer from pixel and bracket. I created my first skill share course. It's called five illustrator essentials for beginners. In this course, I teach you the selection and navigation tools. I walk you through the shape tools, pin tool, shape builder, pathfinder, and art boards. And at the end of the project is to create a letter form. So I'm pretty excited about it. It's my first real structured course like this. I'll see over in the course, I'll see you here, and I'll see you next time. 2. Lesson 01: Selection & Navigation: In this first lesson, we're gonna talk about selection tools and navigation. So to begin with, I am in illustrators latest workspace and that is appear under window. Once you have an illustrator document open, you go to workspace and then essentials. So this is the new essentials Workspace. If you're familiar with illustrator, any version before CC 2018 you'll remember that everything is up here in the tool panel. However, everything has now been moved over to the right in this new properties panel, they also give you layers and then libraries. So we're gonna be looking at some of the things in this properties panel to the right. If you're not updated, this may look a little bit different for you, but all of the information is still going to remain the same in this in these tutorials in this course. So just bear with me and I would recommend updating to the latest illustrator Creative Cloud 2018 release. Now that we have the workspace figured out, let's talk about navigating a little bit. So illustrator is made up of a giant big old canvas, right? All this grey space out here and then this white space here is the art board that it gives us. And when you create a new document like I created in 1920 but 10 80 it made my first art board that size. Now we can have graphics on our art board. We have all these objects here. Um, we can also have objects off of the art board. No problem. It's just one big space to, ah to play around with create designs. And then the art boards were like windows into ah, your design that you can capture an export out. So let's go ahead and zoom in and out with command minus or control minus on a PC and then command plus or control plus on a PC. So command minus is going to zoom me out. And then if I start hitting, plus, I can zoom back in so you'll see when I zoom all the way out. We have a huge canvas toe work with, and we can create multiple art boards on this canvas. And ah, we can, uh, move around and play with our views and edit objects and modify shapes and do all sorts of things. So if I hold the space bar Notice my cursor here turns to a hand I'm holding space bar as long as I hold it The hands up when I let go goes back to the cursor So while I hold it, I can click And that hand's gonna grab and I can drag my window around Okay, these air some basic basic navigation things. Most people probably know how to do this, but I want to cover them really quick before we get into everything else. So we've got our workspace set up. We can zoom in and out with Commander Control plus and minus. We can hold space bar, click and drag to move around. Now let's talk about our selection tools. So the 1st 2 tools in our tool panel over here to the left is going to be the selection tool. Shortcut key is V. It will be the most common shortcut that you use and the direct selection tool. The short cut key for that is a let's start with the selection tool, So V is the short cut. And then if I have objects on my art art board or my canvas, I can select those objects by clicking on them. That's a left click on them, and I can do that with any of these and you'll notice that there's a little bounding box that appears outside of it, and we have lots of little dots and things and anchor points and stuff. So with this selection tool, the basic selection tool, it essentially selects the entire shape or the entire group of shapes. And I could have all these little handles. And if I hover over them, that tell me different things. For instance, this double ended arrow here click and drag I can rotate around, and one very, very important thing, probably one of the most important things in illustrator or in any of the programs the design programs. If I hold shift, it locks that into specific degrees so I can rotate 90 degrees or 45 degrees very easily. If I let go of shift, it's going to rotate, you know, by hundreds of a degree, and so we're gonna bring that back to zero. Now, I can also grab like this corner, and I can start to stretch and more for my shape, and this is actually the important part. If I hold shift, It keeps that shape in proportion. We're gonna be doing this Ah, whole lot in this tutorial. And if you want to use illustrator, make sure you know how to scale in proportion by holding shift. You don't want to skew any of your company's or clients logos by not holding shift. And suddenly you've got a squashed triangle logo that stretched out instead of there. Nice corporate branding. So let's undo that with Command Z or control Z on a PC. So those are Those are the basic sort of things that you can do. You can you know squash and stretch your shapes. Um, you can hold shift and it will, ah, scale proportionately. And then the other thing you can do is if, while you're holding shifty, also hold Ault or option, it'll scale proportionally from the center out. This is another important thing, depending on when you scale it, how you want your shape to sort of move and re adjust its location. So that'll go from the center out. And I use this one this little combo all the time. So it's shift and option on a Mac or shift and Ault on a PC now once again, if we don't hold shift on that, it's going to do the same thing from the center out, except that it's going to actually stretch and skew our shapes. And if we hold one of these corners, same thing, it's gonna stretch and skew from the center out if I'm holding option or alter on a PC, So that's the basic things you can do with the regular selection tool. Now let's take a look at the direct selection tool. If I have the direct selection tool and I click on my shape, it's gonna select the whole shape again. Same thing with this guy over here. But you'll notice that word that bounding box go well, we don't have it anymore. Instead, it's highlighted each of the anchor points, and this is where the direct part of the direct selection tool comes in because these anchor points air highlighted and we know that they're selected because they're filled in with the dark blue color. You can click on one with the direct selection tool and edit or modify that anchor point so I can actually click and drag on that anchor point to completely change its location, which in turn completely changes the shape that I have. And I can do that by selecting that anger point individually. Or I could click in Dragon, select multiple anchor points and then drag those together. And so I could select to anchor points and then modify the shape by those two anchor points . And once again, if you hold shift, you can lock it into, like only a vertical transformation. Or maybe an angular or horizontal transformation. Ah, shift just helps you keep things in proportion. And if you guys notice right now, in this moment, there's some pink lines showing up in a pink Intersect. Notification those their smart guides. Those are gonna help you out so much if you turn them on up in the view, drop down. Locate smart guides That's command or control you as a shortcut key. If these air check mark there turned on and they help you line things up. So if I switch over to my selection tool, I start moving this around it, saying, Oh, do you want to line it up to the top of that triangle? Do you want to land it up to the center of the triangle. How about the center of the circle? Maybe the bottom of the triangle? Things like that. So it's really helpful lining things up so you don't miss if you're trying to make these perfectly aligned across the bottom, same thing with that circle could bring it down to line up in the center of the square. So those little smart guides are very helpful. That's how to turn them on. Let's continue on, though, talking about our direct selection tool. Remember, the shortcut key for that is a If I have this shape selected, there's a couple other things that happened here. See this little points. Those are indicating that the corner which it is turned on, and if it's not gonna go to view down to hide or show corner widget. Currently, we're showing the corner widget. If I grab one of these, there's a little ah, little curve that pops up underneath my cursor. I can click and drag to round these corners. Super powerful option here very easy to round corners, and there live so I can move them back if I want to. Or I can just select this anchor point in just round that corner if if I wanted to. Pretty cool stuff there. Um, I can also duplicate things. So if I go back to my selection tool and click on this shape, hold option or all in my selection tool changes to sort of like a double cursor click and drag, it moves the outline of that shape I want to let go. It duplicates the shape. I use this all the time, and it's very helpful to if I want to keep this shape, let's say I want to keep it perfectly horizontally aligned. Gonna click on the shape, hold option click and drag and also hold shift to keep it aligned right there with it. Just like the smart guys helping us out. Lock it into aligning horizontal with this and vertical with this guy. So that is how to duplicate shapes. And really, that's how to duplicate anything. So just about anything you have when you have the selection tool, um, selected, you can hold option and duplicate around these shapes. Pretty nifty stuff. One last thing. So just just just so you guys kind of see how this works, we're gonna delete out thes I'm just clicking on these with the selection tool pressing the delete key. So let's go back to this shape. Just a square. We're going to scale him up from the center holding, shifting option. Boom. He's a little bit bigger now. We're gonna switch over there. Direct selection, tool, shortcut key a notice the cursor change. I'm gonna grab these two points here. Got him. I can click on this path here if I want to move around that path. And do you notice what it looks like we're creating when I pull this open? Kind of looks like a book. Now, now that I've pulled it open, I can actually press option or Ault and the double ended era shows up. And if I let go, it's duplicated that shape with also the modification at the same time. So what I can do from here is actually select is back shape here, come over to the fill appearance panel in the properties panel over here and click on the film. And maybe I'll just ah, well click Teoh the color mixer and will darken up this blue a little bit and I'm gonna click off here, Still get the selection tool selected. So we're just gonna click off of our shape and we're gonna click off one more time so that we can actually see the shape without Thea bounding box. Now you see very, very quickly. We created a little bit of like a book icon can. It looks like a book like an open book. By playing with and modifying these shapes with selection tools, you can begin to sort of see other shapes coming out of the basic shapes that you've created. And you can begin to transform and create shapes in your mind in your head very quickly with the selection tools and all of our navigation options. One last thing you can dio. Obviously, if we click on the shape with selection tool, we can hit the delete key that lead that shape. We can also delete specific points, and we can use the selection tool to grab that point. Just one point. We had the Billy Key and have delete out that point. That's one way that you can start to create other shapes out, like we created a triangle just now out of the square shape. However, this whole shape is actually not connected anymore, which will cause a few issues and problems later on. So one thing that we do want to do is probably use the pin tool to Billy anchor points and add anchor points, and we're gonna cover that in a future lesson. So stick with me. This was all about the selection tools and the navigation options and illustrator Let's move on to lesson to. 3. Lesson 02: Creating Shapes: and listen to Let's talk about the shape tools. So now that we've covered the selection tools and the fact that I can select these shapes, how about creating thes shapes? Well, Illustrator offers a lot of awesome shape tool possibilities. For instance, over here, if I click and hold on this rectangle tool, the short cut key for that is him. While I click and hold, I can actually select from any one of these different tools rounded rectangle, the lips tool, polygon, tool and start tool. We're gonna look at the rectangle to a first, so the shortcut key once again is M. That's another pretty basic shortcut you wanna learn Now, Before I draw anything with this, check out the appearance panel over here to the right. Right now I have Phil selected and I have a color stroke currently is on none, and the opacity 100%. So that's what's gonna show up when I draw my shape. Is that color filled in without any stroke around the shape? So if I just click and drag with the rectangle tool, I can create a rectangle or square shape or any other sort of little rectangular shape, and when I let go, it's gonna create that shape. Now there's a couple of modifier keys that we can use, what we create our shapes. So back to that rectangle tool will come over here. If I hold shift while I create that rectangle, it's gonna keep it in proportion as a perfect square. So that's how we create perfect squares by holding shift while creating that shape, I'm gonna undo those commands. E. So if I want to create from the center out a perfect square, I can hold option and shift to create a perfect square from the center out. Notice how a drag and we're just scaling from the center. Same thing goes with if I want to create like a rectangle from the center and create all different types of shapes of a rectangle from the center out. If I just hold that option or Ault key, that's pretty much it with the rectangle tool. So we're gonna go ahead and select both of those with our selection tools, shortcut keys V and just hit the delete key to delete those out. Now let's move on to we're gonna skip the rounded rectangle to because I showed you in the last one how to round corners pretty much the same thing. Let's go to the Ellipse tool, the lips tool, for instance. Creating this circle is this works in the same way it's it's click and drag to create like oval shapes or click and drag was shift to create a perfect circle. Once again, click and drag to create it from the center out by holding shift and option or shift and Ault on a PC. Pretty simple to create those shapes will delete those out. Let's move on to something called the Polygon Tool. With this tool, we can create different types of polygons. Notice how we started on a triangle here Years is probably going to start with more sides to it. So to add sides while I create this polygon, I can actually press up and down on the arrow keys to add numbers of sides to our shape. And we can add tons and tons and tons. An infinite number of sides notice how is getting closer and closer to a circle, the more sides I add and that compress it down to decrease the number of sides so We're talking Pentagon's and hexagons octagon and then also easy. Easily. We can create squares and triangles, so that's actually how I like to prefer to create a triangle shape. But then, also, if I want to create a hexagon Pentagon type of shape, I can do that as well. Now one last thing with all the shape tools, I would say the easiest way to quickly create a triangle. I've got the polygon tool selected. If I click on my canvas, it pops up a little dialogue box. It asked me what my radius is that I want, how you know how big's let's say, 250 then how many sides? Well, let's say I want to create a triangle and have three sides. I can click. Okay, It's gonna create that shape very easy. Same thing happens with the rectangle tool. If I click on my canvas will go ahead and delete out some of these. If I click on my canvas and let's say I want a 500 by 500 point rectangle, it okay and there it ISS creates that which 505 100 is, of course, a square. Pretty cool ways that you can utilize this shape tools Another thing. Another shape till we have is the star tool, which is an interesting one. As we click and drag out from the center, we can press the up and down arrow keys to add points to our star. We can also hold command to sort of change. How those point, how pointing those points are eso that's control on a PC and command on a Mac. And I'm just dragging in and out with that star tool. If I let go, it's going to stay, and then I can edit the sides of it. If I used up and down arrow keys, it's going to edit how many of those points there are so just interesting modifier keys that you may not know right off the bat with the shape tools and that helps you create different types of shapes and things. Although I find myself using mostly these three shapes right here, squares, circles and triangles to create all kinds of different shapes and using the shape builder tools which will cover later, you can actually add and subtract shapes with each other, and also you can create custom shapes with the pin tool, which will cover in the next lesson 4. Lesson 03: Pen Tool: the pencil is a very versatile tool that allows you to create all sorts of custom shapes and modify your shapes in a very, very direct and customizable way. So to select a pencil, it's gonna be this little pinhead icon over here, and that's the pin toll shortcut key is P. Once I click that, I get this pin toll icon with a little star that's basically telling me I'm starting a new path now over here to the right. Once again, we have our appearance panel, Phil and Stroke. I'm gonna change this, Phil. We're gonna get rid of it just by selecting nuns. Gotta read, slash through it. I'm gonna add a stroke to this. Let's add, Let's make a red shape. Just seem like a bread is going to be very visible. And then the stroke size actually want this to be something like five points or pixels, depending on what your units are to use the pen tool. All I have to dio is click and it will add a point. And then it's going to show me the line that it's gonna create when I click and at another point. So if we just try to create like a little triangle here. I can add another point here. I can come down here to create the triangle, noticed my smart guides air helping line me up as's faras Ah, where the base of that triangle is going to create one. That's kind of Ah, not so symmetrical. So we'll click out here and then to close this shape, we're gonna click back here on the first anchor point noticed the oh symbol that appears below the pin tool. That means we're closing that path. Once I click on that, this becomes its own shape. Now, if I used the pen tal again, it's not going to continue on that shape. It's actually going to create another shape over here, so it's closed that path. That's what the oh symbol meant. Now what can we do with this shape? Well, there's a couple things Weaken Dio. Let's first start by how to modify these different anchor points. If I hold the option or Ault key, it changes to this sort of angle. Icahn angle, cursor and I can click and drag on this anchor point to create handles and notice. When I pull out those handles those handles are influencing the curve of our path. So if I let go now, we've got this curved path. And if I hold option or all again and select just this handle, I can edit these handles to be whatever different type of curb I want them to be. And wherever this handle is pointing, it's influencing the direction of our curve. And the longer the handle is, the more of an influence it has on that curve of the path. So if we let go those we've created, like a bit of a wave shape, I'll switch over the selection tool. Shortcut key is a V. For that, you create this sort of wave shape here. Pretty interesting way of editing are points. One other thing Weaken Dio is if we go back to the pin tool shortcut is P. We can add and subtract points to our shape. For instance, I could subtract this anchor point or add something on this path here. Now let's go ahead and select or shape here. Now that we have it selected, we can switch back over to that pin tool, and now you'll see a plus show up to add points to our path and a minus show up when we're over top of an anchor to actually subtract that point. So if we add a point, let's say down here. She at a point, added that little anchor to that path, and then we can maybe so, ah, switch over with the option or all turkey and add a little curve to that. And I think I'll add It may be this way like this. There you go. So now we've got this really weird curved shape going on here along the bottom of what was our wave shape. But let's say I don't like that and I want to get rid of that anchor point. All I have to do is click on the anchor point with the Pinto while that minus icon is showing up and it's gonna delete out that anchor point and just take whatever handles there are of the next to anchor points and create a path between those two. So, for instance, if we had this as a curved path over here and I had an anchor point here and we made that a curve and then we got rid of it instead of just being a flat path on the bottom, it's gonna look at the handles of this guy and handles of this guy and sort of create the path between. So that's how to use the pin tool to Adam. Subtract points. Another way is that you can actually build shapes with curves while you're creating them instead of editing them afterwards. So, for instance, if I click and drag with the pen tool, it's gonna create some handles, and I'm dragging them direction that I want my path to go. So let's say I want my path to kind of go up here. I want to create, like, a little sign curve, or like a wave when I let go. It's got that point created, and you can see the as a drag out here. It's already predicting the curve based on my next point, So let's that create another point here. Also, click and drag when create a curved path, and we could do the same back this way. Click and drag, creating that curved path in the direction that I want the handles to go the mawr that I pull them out, the more influence it has on that curve in the less less influence. So that's how we can sort of create these curved shapes as we're building our shape with the Pinto. And then we can close it up, sort of edit that final curve and then let go. We've got kind of this wonky little shape created. However, you can see the possibilities by using the pen tool to create shapes now that this shape is created, remember how I created it with a stroke? But we can switch that at of Phil if we wanted to. And if Phil is basically all the space in between the shape, it's just gonna fill it in with that solid color. And I could change the stroke size to be a lot bigger. Or I could get rid of the stroke completely. Now. One other thing with that stroke, if we add it back and we make it, let's say it was 50 points again. I can click on that stroke icon. It's gonna open up the stroke panel, and there's all sorts of options in the stroke panel, but one of them is a line stroke. I could align the stroke to the inside of the shape. Notice how there's are shaped path in the stroke, is inside of it or could lined the stroke to the outside. That allows you to create some different types of shapes and designs, and we'll look at that later in the project. We will utilize this by thought it show to you now anyway. So in the next lesson, I'm going to pretty much show you how I will make shapes and create letter forms and different objects without actually using the pin tool very much. We're going to use the shape builder in the Pathfinder tool that's coming up next. 5. Lesson 04: Shape Builder & Pathfinder: in this lesson. We're gonna look at the shape builder and Pathfinder tools, and I'll show you how you can use them to create all sorts of interesting and complex shapes. First, we need some shape. So let's go ahead and select that Ellipse tool. Shortcut key is l and I'm gonna create a circle on here by clicking, and we'll make it 400 by 400 and hit. OK, it's a pretty large circle. Now I'm gonna create another circle. Or actually, I'll just duplicate this circle and we'll bring him over here and then up in my transform panel in the upper right instead of 400 by 400. How about we do 200 by 200? Now I've got a little circle remembering this circle back to the center of this guy so I can select both of them. Click on this guy and use my arrangement or alignment tools, and we'll horizontal line and vertical line to make sure that he's right in the center of that. And if you have your smart guides turned on, you could also just drag him over, and it will tell you when you're locked into the center. It'll kind of clip in there so you can see right now that if I select both of these and I select my shape builder tool, which is over here, it's got, like, two circles and a cursor. This shortcut key for that is shift em gotta selected, and I've got both of these guys selected. As I hover over them, you can see how this shape build. It will actually sees shapes within your shapes, right? It's highlighting areas of your shapes that could potentially be knocked out of each other . So right now my icon has a little plus cursor next to it. But if I hold option, it's gonna give me a minus cursor. And if I hover over this and click in this highlighted area, it's going to subtract out that circle. And so now if I go back to my selection tool of shortcut keys, V actually have a shape that's like a doughnut. So that's a pretty interesting way using the shape, Buller told, just sort of knock shapes out of each other, and we're going to do that again. So let's select the rectangle tool. Short cookie is em. I'm gonna create just a random rectangle that aligns to the center of that circle just like that. So it's crossing over the top of it. And now with the selection key or the selection tool, I'm gonna select both of these. You shift em to select the shape builder tool. And now there's all these other different shapes that I can actually edit and select out of this with shape Builder Tool. I'm gonna hold option now or alter on a PC switch that minus. And this time I'm gonna click and draw through all these top shapes just like that. Make a slash through it and let go. It's gonna delete all of those out. Now we have half a donut shape, but you might be seeing the bottom of a J. So how about we create another rectangle here and I'm gonna let it just start on this anchor and we're gonna end by attaching it to that anchor point? We're gonna move that up, just let go. So we've created an extension of this anchor and we're gonna zoom in here and just make sure that these align pretty well. Looks like they dio they align pretty perfectly, but right now, that's That's two shapes, right? So I can actually move this and move this separately, so let's select both of them. We can use the shape pillar tool we can draw through these two. It's gonna merge those together pretty easy. We can also let me show you the Pathfinder options. And you actually see over here that we have these two selected with the selection tool. The Pathfinder option show up in our properties panel if you're not seeing those, You got a window? Pathfinder. Um, anytime you're missing a window, just go up to a window and then find it. They're all in here so we could select path under there. But we have some options over here. These are some basic options that are very standard that people use. And the biggest one I want to use here is unite, that's gonna unite those two shapes together and merge them together. So now we have just one J shape and same thing. If we wanted to add like the top of RJ here, we're gonna make the height of it. 100. The with will also do 200 hit, OK, and we could bring this in here, and we could then select everything once again use that Pathfinder option. Unite to merge that together. Now. Obviously, there's other options. So if I create another with the rectangle tool, another shape just that goes across this I can either use that shape, builder, tool and select everything Shape, builder, tool and minus out these pieces to create divisions in our shape. Or I can use thes Pathfinder options with everything selected, and I can actually use, for instance, minus front. That's gonna do the same thing. There's other options here, like Click to Intersect, and that's going to just leave us with what we are. Intersection of the two shapes. We got this shape in this shape. This squares where the Intersect so the Pathfinder option intersect, is going to leave us. Only that, and also opposite of that, would be excluded where it's going to exclude out the intersection. So the Pathfinder Tools Pathfinder options give you a few more adjustments. There's even more if you click this Ah, ellipses. Here. There's more shape modes and different options you can you can use. For instance, you can just divide that. So now, instead of actually modifying anything. It's just divided all of these shapes out and noticed. Everything is groups that we're gonna have to ungroomed pit. But it's divided all these shapes outs, and I have all these parts to play with instead of actually deleting pieces of it. So the Pathfinder options are very, very strong tools, as well as the shape builder tool and the shape builder tools. A pretty awesome one. So remember, all these are pieces now. But if I attach those back together and I switched to my shape builder tool that shift em can actually draw through all of these, anything I have selected to add those back in to each other s. So that's a pretty powerful thing that I can just add all those shapes up together. So it's a quick run down of the shape builder tools and the Pathfinder options. Next, we're gonna look at art boards, how to duplicate them and export them, and then we'll get into the project. So I'll see in the next lesson 6. Lesson 05: Artboards: in this final lesson, we're going to look at art boards how you can create and duplicate them and how you can export your images from them. So to start off with an art board is essentially a space that's like a window into your designs. So this white shape here is our art board that we're working on what I could do with this. You remember we have our shapes here. Second, zoom out a little bit and without anything selected. So if I just click into, like, a blank space area in my properties panel over here, I get some document properties like my units and then the art board that I currently have active. And also, I can click on this edit art boards to go into the art board editing mode. Right click on that, it's gonna show me. Okay, this is art board one right here, and I actually have it selected, and it gives me some options over here. As far as, like, presets and the name of that art board, you can transform the art board to change the size of it. You can actually do the same thing almost like it's a shape here, you can transform it and undo that. Ah, you can move the artwork with ER board, which is something we are going to dio, although it's nice toe have Theobald iti to check that honor off because sometimes it can be annoying when you don't actually want to move the artwork. Um, and then also there's more art board options. So we go in here and there's lots of different options constraining proportions. We can show different things like center marks and crosshairs and then other global options to we're gonna cancel out of that. What I really want to show you is if I just move over here just in the same way I can duplicate shapes by holding option or Ault. I can duplicate art boards, and I can hold my shift here to keep it aligned there, and we can move it right over here. So now we have a duplicate art board, you see, it's our board. One copy. It's actually our board to essentially, and we could rename that if we wanted to instead of our board. One copy with today are bored, too, And so with art board to weaken hit this exit or we can hit escape to exit out. But now we have to our board set up with a duplicate set of all the elements that were on that art board. So why is this important? Well, when you create multiple multiple our boards, you can actually create iterations of your designs or different pages of your design. For instance, we could select all of these shapes, and instead of having them fill, we could change them to a stroke. Let's do 10 points, and then we could delete out the Phil. And now we have a filled version of our shapes and a stroke version of our ships are outlined version of our shapes. And potentially we could do the same thing. Where and this is actually new In CC 1018 we can go after edit art boards. We can shift click on both our our boards, duplicate them by holding option, are salt and bring them down. And now we've got them down here. And let's say you wanted Teoh select these guys, and instead of blue, I'm going to them to be read and these guys over here instead of blue. I wanted to change them, their failed to be red. Now I have quickly different designs that are prepped for export. So if this was my these were my elements, I wanted to export. I'm ready because they're all lined up on these are boards ready for export? So how do I export them? Well, I can go up to file down to down to export and then export four screens. What I like about export for screens is that you can export either assets that you have selected independently of the art boards. Or you can select art boards. You can actually see all of the art board views now, and you can set all. Or you can select only a range of art boards of the full document so we can select all we can select a place to export them. For instance, let's go to our desktop, our little recording, and will do a new folder called Exports. We're gonna create that an inside of there. I'll choose that for that's where the exports are going. You can open the location after export, which would be nice. I'll show you that it will open the folder right up. You'll also create sub folders, depending on what you have selected in here and then from there, you can select your format and your scales. For instance, we could save it two times, or we can add a different scale, and we can save it at, ah, a certain width height resolution so we can adjust. And I believe it creates sub folders based on your different scales. So we're gonna go ahead and ex out of that will keep it in this format instead of two times . We'll just create it at one times the scale. I'm gonna say now, I don't need a Suffolk's on that cell. Just delete that out, and then my format. I want to be J. Peg 100 just the highest quality J peg. And there's other little options here that you can select. It's gonna talk to you about the options of J. Peg 100 how that exports out. If you need to change any of that, you can add prefixes. You can change your thumbnail views if you want, um, but that's most of the options that you'll need to know Basically, which are boards. Are you exporting? Where do you want them to go. How many? What's your range? What's your type in the export. So if we create those and then we hit export, it's gonna export those out. Just gonna open up this window. Remember our little exports folder we created and this one it created a sub folder called One X. So if we created different scales, it's gonna create all the sub folders of that scale, which is very nice. I believe that's a new future. Drop this down. You can see we have all these J picks created now animal hit space bar to preview these and I'm just gonna hit the down, up and down arrow keys. We have all of these art boards exported out each of our assets. So that's a really, really easy way to export multiple pages or designs or elements or iterations of whatever is your working on that ends the five essential lessons in the next video. We're gonna actually get into the project and create some letter forms based on everything we've learned in this course 7. Project: Create a Letterform: the project of this course is to create a letter form. Whether that's upper case, lower case, a symbol or even a number. Any of those things can be created with all of the different essentials the five essentials that we learned over the process of taking this course. So I'm gonna walk you through that. What we have created is a new document. We could go to file new to create a new document, illustrator. And to set that up on a look at the right side. Here, I created a 10 80 by 10 80 pixels. Document the color mode is RGB. You can drop that down with the advanced options if you want to, but you really don't need to. Um and we don't need to worry about any of the bleeder anything. And make sure just one art board for this guy someone hit, create, and that's gonna create this document here, which is just a 10 80 by 10. 80 art board. So we're gonna utilize all of the things we learned. We're gonna start with shape, tool. I'm gonna create an ellipse. We're gonna create it from the center out to remember my smart guides air turned on. You can turn those on in view down the smart guides. But I'm gonna find the center of my art board right here. Hold shift and option or Ault on a PC. I'm gonna create a circle out of this once I have that circle created on a switch on my selection tool that shortcut key V. Just select that shape and we're gonna make it maybe 400 by 400. And if this guy is selected, it's gonna maintain those width and height proportions. Next. I want to give this fill of How about just a blue color? We've been using blue most of the way through this course, so we'll just stick with that. I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of the stroke. The shape we're going to create is the letter in. And so to do that, I'm gonna need sort of that arc shape as well as the stem on the left and the stem to finish it out here at the bottom. Right. Let's create those to switch over to the rectangle tool. The shortcut key is am I just gonna click on my canvas this time and create a width of 100 the height. I don't care. I'll adjust that here in a second. So we've got this little rectangle. The width is correct, but the height might need to be adjusted. I'm gonna arrange or align him to the left and top of this circle by clicking on both of them left clicking on the circle. Now it's extra highlighted and then the alignment panel pops up over here and there's a key inside of this guy because you can align the selection, art or, in our case, key object. I'm gonna line him to the left using the horizontal line left. It's gonna move that shape over, and I'm gonna let him to the top, and that's aligning to the circle. Now that we've got that created, we want this letter in to come all the way down to the bottom of the circle. So just click and drag the bottom until it reaches that bottom point. So now we've got sort of this, and it's gonna arc over this way. But we need to finish that out to the bottom here. So let's duplicate this shape by holding option and shift to keep him aligned. We're gonna move him over until he snaps to the right side of that circle. Okay, great. So the last thing we need is, you know, we've got this circle and remember, we're just building this thing out of basic shapes. But we need that sort of art here to be cut out. So let's duplicate this circle by using command, see, and then paste in place on top by using command F. That's control C and control F on a PC. We've got two shapes now, and they're right on top of each other. Also in the edit menu, you can do copy and then paste in front. You see the shortcut keys, command or control. See Commander Control F. So that's just what we did there. And so now that I have that pasted in front actually need to resize, it will make it 200 by 200 make sure that those air locked linked together So 200 by 200 height and width we're starting to create all the different sections and pieces that we need. So let's select everything now got that all selected and we will select are shaped builder tool. Remember this Tools super powerful Because it can recognize where all of our shapes overlap . And now, by just holding the option or alter key, notice the plus switches to a minus. I can draw through what I don't want any more. And if I let go, it's gonna cut that out. You see, we're really close to that in shape. All I need to do now is either draw through this or click on it to delete out that section . We've officially created the letter in. So congratulations. However, this thing is still made up of all these little different pieces, right? So how about we just select it all and take a look at our Pathfinder options down here? Look, we can just click this unite button and watch how all those shaped pieces turn into one. So now we have one solid shape. Okay, That's cool. Ah. Well, what if I want to create a different letter based on this? Well, you don't have to completely create that letter. Knew. How about we go to our art boards, edit art boards? We're going to duplicate this art board by holding option or Ault hold shift. That kind of keep it aligned. We're gonna move it over here. Let's say I want to create the letter H. Well, how about I just move this guy down with the selection tool? Shortcut Keeper? That is V moving down to about here. And all I need to do to create a church is like, extend this piece. But I'm not going to do that. But creating another shape? No, it's just grab direct selection tool. Select those top two points. It's kind of finicky. Just make sure you get those two points. Okay, Now let's just grab this path, hold shift, because if you don't hold shift, it's gonna get all funky on you. So hold shift. Just drag it straight up until I don't know. It looks like the H shape that you want. Maybe right in here. So now we've got the letter H so you can see how quickly we can create different letter forms and shapes. Let's say we want this guy to be rounded. Let's create another art board So selection tool. Don't select anything. Edit. Art boards, Hold option or Ault drag this over. We got another art bored with the letter H but this one I want him to be a rounded age. Press a and select these top two points. Just pull in the corners to the very center until it even gives us a warning that that's a far as it can go See how we rounded the end of that. Now there's something weird down here. We're gonna need to switch over to the pinto. I'm gonna zoom in with command. Plus, there, you see, I've got these two points, but also have an extra point. Sometimes that happens when you, uh when you merge, shapes together to get extra little points. So I want to grab the pin tool. And I'm just gonna delete that point by hovering over until I see the minus clicking on it . Same thing with this guy over here. Just click on that. Delete that point. We don't need it. It's just an extra point. Let's go back to the direct selection tool and select all of these bottom shapes and pull in their corners until we reached the limit. So that is how you can round the endpoints of your shapes and create like a rounded letter . Let's do one more thing Let's edit those art boards again and duplicate. We'll bring it down this time. And how about we create an outline shape? Let's go back to the selection tool to kind of turn off that at a dartboard mode. I'm going to select this H. Let's go ahead and bring him to the center here. And instead of a Phil, let's get rid of the Phil without a stroke. Same blue color this time. Oh, how about 10 points? We'll see what that looks like. How about we do, like 20 make that a little bit more dramatic? So now we have a rounded or outline shape outlined letter. We can select this guy again and we can click on stroke. We can actually align the stroke to the inside of our path to the outside of our path or to the center of our path. But how about this little pointy part here that I don't like? How that looks, especially with this release rounded edges. But we can actually take the corners, and we can make them miter or around it or beveled. How about we do around it joint and see how that corner just rounds off So now this rounded shape actually looks pretty decent, I would say. And once again, you can still edit those corners because they are live. So we could bring those corners back to be in square corners, and they've got a little bit of around nous to them because we rounded. Remember, we rounded on our in our stroke panel. We rounded all the corners just not quite as dramatic, Aziz. Bottom ones. So you guys, that's how you can quickly create all sorts of different letter forms and edit their shapes and their corners how rounded they are and if they're outlined, if they're filled in. So I really challenge you to create some different shapes than these. Maybe the letter, I don't know, like the letter p or the letter R, you know, some some unique shapes, maybe the number two, or even like a question mark symbol and post those as your project. So maybe to follow along and do these, but then work on your own. You know, try to think outside the box and create different letter forms and then post them for the class to see if you guys run into any issues or problems or have any questions. Don't hesitate to ask in the discussion forums or email me at picks on bracket at gmail dot com. Anything like that and I can help you out. Thanks for taking this course. This was really awesome. I can't wait to see the projects you guys create.