Make Digital Planner Stickers in Adobe Illustrator + Goodnotes

1. Introduction: Hi. I'm Sarah, I'm a surface designer, Illustrator and digital planner. In 2017, I decided to combine my design skills and love up organization to create and sell digital planners and stickers. Since then, I've learned the ins and outs of the many different programs to make digital planner stickers, and I've become an expert on streamlining the process to create beautiful stickers. In the world of planners, there are two types of stickers functional and decorative. In this class, we'll focus on learning about making functional stickers. Okay. For the class project, you'll create functional planner stickers using Adobe Illustrator. For a second class project, you'll use those planner stickers to create a sticker sheet in good notes. Whether you want to create custom stickers for your own use or dream of opening a plan or sticker shop, this class will show you how to create digital planner stickers with these using Adobe Illustrator. I'll see you in class. Okay. 2. Class Projects: For this class, there will be two student projects. The first project, you'll be working in Adobe Illustrator, and the second project, you'll be working in GoodNotes. If you don't already have Adobe Illustrator, you can get a free trial for seven days from the Adobe website. Good Notes has a free version for iPad and desktop that allows you to create up to three notebooks, which will work just fine for this class. For the first class project, you'll design various types of stickers using Adobe Illustrator. You'll learn how to create basic shapes, custom shapes, tech stickers, icon stickers, and then you'll learn how to combine techniques to create your own unique stickers. We'll go over each type of sticker in detail in the next lesson. For the second class project, you'll take the digital stickers that you created in Adobe Illustrator and format them into a pre cropped sticker sheet in good notes. This is the sticker sheet you will be able to use in digital planners in the Good notes app or to sell. Like I said earlier, the good notes app is available on the iPad as well as desktop. For this course, you'll see me deming on an iPad. But the steps would be the same on the desktop version. I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Types of Digital Planner Stickers: Before we jump into learning how to make stickers, let's learn about what types of stickers we can make first. All digital planner stickers are images that are meant to be used in digital planning apps, such as good notes and act in the same way you would use a physical sticker in real life. Functional stickers have the purpose of drawing attention to or organizing specific information in your planner. These stickers have an emphasis on function rather than being purely decorative. Compare it to highlighting your notes to draw attention to the main points. Functional stickers can also be visually pleasing while serving a purpose, which is what will be demonstrated in this course. Here are the types of functional planner stickers we'll be going over today. Box stickers, Notepad style stickers, text label stickers, appointment and bill stickers, flag stickers, heart and star stickers, icon stickers, outlined text stickers, what I like to call bubble box stickers. And checklist stickers. Now that you know what types of stickers you're going to learn how to make, let's get started setting up our document in Adobe Illustrator and reviewing the tools we'll be using in the program. I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Tools & Setting Up Your Workspace: Let's open up Illustrator and get started. In the class resources, I've provided an illustrator file that includes a reference sheet of the tools, keyboard shortcuts, and everything else will go over in this lesson. I highly recommend downloading that if you're not very familiar with Illustrator. It also has a sticker sheet artboard already set up for you to work with. Next, I'll show you the steps of how I set up that illustrator example file so you can learn how to set it up for yourself. When you first open up Illustrator, you're going to click new file in the top left corner and you'll see a screen that looks like this. On the right side where it says whip and height is where we can set the measurements of our artboard. The size that we're going to use today for our artboard is 7.25 " wide. By 9.75 " tall. The reason I use this size is because it's a size that's compatible with print and cut methods for stickers using machines such as cricket or so. This class is all about digital stickers, but you could easily use the same file for creating print and cut physical stickers. If you don't care about that, you can absolutely use any size that you want. Some common sizes are A five, eight by ten, 8.5 by 11 or seven by nine. And all of those sizes are in inches. Next on the screen, right here, we have the measurements for your artboards, so you can have any of these measurements selected. I typically use inches or pixels, and we can change that later on as well. I'm going to keep mine in inches today. We're going to keep the color mode in RGB because these are digital stickers and the RGB color space is what's used for screens. We're going to keep the PPI at 300, which is the pixels per inch, that'll be the highest resolution. Then you'll press create. Okay. So as soon as you open your new document, the artboard tool is going to be selected over here. So we're just going to come up here to the top left and click the arrow tool. Now, if your background is not white like mine and it's gray and you want to change it to white, you can go to the top left Illustrator settings and user interface. And then right here where it says Canvas color, you can select white. And press. Oh. Now we're going to set up your workspace so that all of your tools are in the same spot as mine, and it's easy to follow along with the lessons. In the top right hand corner, you'll see this button that when you cover over it says switch workspace. Click on that and then I want you to click Essentials Classic. This gets us most of the way there for setting up our tool bar, but we're going to make a few customizations to get all of the tools that we need. To get those tools, we're going to go to the top menu bar and press window. And press a line. You'll see a pop up box. You're going to click up here and drag it anywhere over to the side panel. You can move things around after you get them in place. Then we're going to go to window again and go all the way down to type and glyphs and drag that over into our toolbar. Okay. Okay, let's rearrange some things so that we have what we'll use most towards the top. I'd like to have my layers panel towards the top, click and drag that all the way to the top. Okay. Next, we can get rid of a few things so that we have a tidy tool bar that has only what we need. The fifth item down, you'll see a picture of some paint brushes. You can click and drag that out here and then exit out of that. Then right below that is symbols. Click and drag that out and exit out of that. Then next is our appearance panel, which is this circle with a dashed outline. Click and drag that out and it out. And graphic styles. And commons. We're pretty much done with arranging our tool bar on the right side. If you want to move anything around, you can do it now, and then we'll save it as a new workspace. That way, we can have this setup anytime we use Illustrator. To save this as a new workspace, you're going to go to Window, workspace, which is the fourth item down and new workspace, and you can call that whatever you want. And press. Then whenever you open illustrator in the future, you'll press this button on the top right for your workspace, and you can select that name to make sure that you always have these tools in the exact same spot. There are a couple of other things that we're going to turn on to set up our workspace that will be helpful when we're making stickers. We're going to go to view and make sure that smart guides is check marked on. Then also under view, we're going to make sure that Snap to Pixel, Snap to Point and snap to glyph are check marked on. Those settings will be really helpful when we're trying to perfectly align our stickers. Okay. All right. Next, we'll do a brief overview of the tools panel on the left hand side of your screen. Starting from the top, we have our arrow tool, which is called the selection tool. You'll want to make sure that that's highlighted to be able to click around and move objects around. Then we have our direct selection tool, which is this white arrow here. That's good if you want to just select an anchor point or just one portion of a shape and move that around instead of the entire shape. Then hopping two down is the pen tool. You can use that to create lines and curves and custom shapes. And below that, we have the type tool, self explanatory. To the right of that, we have our line segment tool. Then next to that, we have our line segment tool, which is different than the pen tool because it's only used for drawing lines and not curves. The below the type tool, we have the shape tool. If you click on this, you'll see the selection of shapes that you can choose from. To below that, you'll see the rotate tool. To the right of the rotate tool is the scale tool. And right here is the eyedropper tool, which you can use to sample colors. Then down here, we have the artboard tool, which you'll use to edit your artboard, change the name of your artboard and add new ones. Below that, we have the hand tool, which you can use to pan around the screen. Then underneath that, we have our stroke and fill colors that are currently selected. The filled in box is for the fill color. And the outlined box is for the stripe color. You'll see this double ended arrow. If you click that, it allows you to switch the fill and stroke color. Below that, you'll see a square with a red diagonal line through it. If you click this, it'll change either your fill or your stroke to have no color. Those are all the basics of the toolbar. We'll learn how to use them more in depth as we go through the sticker creation lessons. For all of these tools that we just learned about, several of them have keyboard shortcuts. I love using keyboard shortcuts to optimize my workflow and Illustrator. Throughout the course, you can look to the bottom left of the screen to see which keyboard shortcuts I'm using. I'll try to call them out as well. Here is a list of my favorites. These are also written in the Illustrator demo file I've provided in the class resources for you to refer to later on. Okay. We're ready to get started working an illustrator. Let's get our artboard set up so we can stay organized. We have this artboard here that we can use as our sticker sheet, and we'll make another one right below it to use as a workspace. I'm going to zoom out so that I can see the screen a little bit better. And I'm going to go to my artboard tool over here. You can change the name of this artboard to sticker sheet. Then we can press the plus sign right here to create a new artboard. It'll automatically create a new one right next to it. But let's move it below our sticker sheet artboard. We'll call this one our workspace. Creating names for the art boards will really help when we're exporting the files later on. Next, we're going to make a color palette to refer to or the rest of the course. We want our functional stickers to enhance our planner, not distract. I recommend sticking to one or two colors and having a variation of a light and dark shade for each color. To make our color palette, we're going to go to the rectangle tool here and we're going to draw a rectangle. You can create this in any size that you want. By default, it's going to be a white fill color with a black stroke color that you can see here. So to change the color of this, we can change the color in several different areas. We can change the color by double clicking over here. We can change the color up here, or we can also come over to the right side toolbar and select a color from here. So I'm going to double click over here and I'm going to pick kind of a peachy pink color. Okay. I like that, and then we'll change our outline to be no color. So to do that, we'll press x on the keyboard. And now we know that the stroke color is selected because it's in front and we'll press, and then we'll switch back to our fill color here. Okay, so we have our primary color now. Let's create a lighter shade. So we're going to hold down the option key on the keyboard until we see the double headed arrow and click and drag and release all while holding the option key. Now to make this a lighter shade, we'll double click and over here, you can see an S that stands for saturation and a B, which will change the amount of brightness that's in the color. By manipulating those amounts, we can create a lighter shade, you can just edit that until you're happy with that. We have our color palette here. Now we want to move these colors into our swatches panel over here so that they'll be saved for us to use later on. So if we look at our swatches panel, the default has a lot of colors that aren't really my style, and I'm not going to be using. So I want to clear those out. So I'm going to leave this no fill color and the white and the block and I'll click on this red color and then hold down shift and click to the very end so that all of the colors I don't want are highlighted, and then I'll press this trash can to delete them. And then to add colors to the swatches panel, you can have an object selected. And press the plus sign to add it or you can highlight your colors and press the folder icon, so I'll create a folder. I want you to create a folder with your colors in it because we'll use it later when we use the recolor tool. Now that we've got our colors picked out, let's start making stickers. I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Basic Shapes: Okay. All right. Let's get started making stickers. I'm going to be using the demo file that I've provided in the class resources, so you can follow along with that, or you can use the file that recreated from scratch in the workspace setup video. First, we're going to learn how to make basic shape stickers. For most of these stickers, we're going to be using the shape tool. This tool over here on the left toolbar. Okay. We'll start out with circle stickers. Let's select a color for our circle sticker by going to the swatches panel, and I'm going to select this pink color. Then I'm going to toggle to the stroke color by pressing x and pressing none and then toggle back to the fill color. Then I'm going to come up to our toolbar and right click on the shape tool and select the Ellipse tool and click anywhere on the screen and you'll get a pop up box where you can enter in the dimensions. Let's say we're making a date circle sticker and we want to use this common sticker size. Let's put in 0.313 3 " by 0.313 3 ". If you make a sticker, that's too large, or small, and you want to change the dimensions of it. All you have to do is select it and you can come to the top tool bar in the Transform panel or your side tool bar to the Transform panel, and you can change the width and height right here. Next, we'll make star stickers. Star stickers work pretty similar to the circle stickers. We'll click over here and select the star tool and click once and enter in our dimensions. Okay. And if you notice, you can also specify the number of points that you want. And when this pop up box comes up, the radius one is the outer points of the star. Radius two is the inner points of the star. Again, you can resize these using a transform tool. Or we can also use our scale tool. For the scale tool, the keyboard shortcut is S, and all we have to do is click outside of the object and drag on a diagonal. This doesn't lock the proportions unless you hold down the shift key. Okay. Let's learn how to make a box sticker with an outline next. We're going to come to our shape tool and right click and select the rectangle tool. I want this box to be a white background with a yellow stroke. Let's double click on this. Press color swatches and select white and double click on the stroke color. Click color swatches and press yellow. And we'll toggle the fill color to be in front again. Let's click on the screen, and we're going to enter in the measurements for a quarter box from our common sticker sizes. And press. We can change the size of our stroke up here. A stroke is automatically applied to the outside of the shape. This is actually slightly larger than this measurement that we typed in. In order to keep the measurements exact when you're using a stroke, you want to press stroke up here and select a line stroke to inside. If we zoom in here, you can see that the stroke is inside of the shape versus before it was centered. For any of our shapes, you can also adjust the corners, and we can do that by coming up to shape up here. If you hover over this icon here, you'll see it says corner type, or you can come to the transform tool over here and you'll see the same. If we press the up bio, we'll see that it makes it more rounded. And you can also enter in your own measurements. Another way to adjust the corners is by clicking and dragging this symbol here. You can even just select one corner at a time with our direct selection arrow, press the keyboard shortcut A, and click on one of those dots to select your corner and click and drag that. Let's learn how to make this note pad style box sticker next. We'll start out by making the base rectangle, which is this size right here, a full box. So we'll select our shape tool and let's change our color. I'm going to click and enter in the measurements. Press Enter. Now we need to draw some lines on top. We'll use the line tool for that. We'll come over to our toolbar and select the line segment tool. Now, the difference between the line segment tool and the shaped tools is that the color of the line is based off of the stroke color, not the fill color. Let's come over here to our fill and stroke and switch those so that the fill has no color and the stroke is a color. I want to change the color to white. Okay. Let's draw our vertical line first. Don't worry too much about the placement of this because we can change this later on. We're going to click and drag and press the shift key and that will snap your line to be perfectly vertical, and then you can release your mouse. Now let's draw some horizontal lines. Let's use a keyboard shortcut to duplicate those lines, so we don't have to draw each one individually, and we can make sure that they're all the same size. So we're going to use the arrow tool and with this selected, hold down the option key until you see this double arrow head and click and drag and release your mouse. Now, to duplicate that action, we can use the keyboard shortcut Command D. Okay. Next, let's make sure that all of these horizontal lines are centered within this box and also lined up because I can see some of these edges are uneven. So you'll select all of your horizontal lines. First, let's line them up with each other. You can see immediately when I select several objects, all of these align tools pop up on the top toolbar. If they don't, for some reason, over in our tool bar on the right over here, we have the align tool, you can click that as well, and we're going to align the horizontal centers. Now all of the edges are even. Now, if for some reason you had one of these lines off, you can also use the align tools to evenly distribute the space between the lines. You can do that by vertically distributing the centers like that for you can also use the distribute spacing tool. Okay. The difference between these is this one distributes between the centers of the objects. If your lines were different sizes, it would be based on the center of the lines themselves, and for spacing, that would make sure there's an equal amount of space between each object. Now let's group all of these horizontal lines together. We'll use the keyboard shortcut command G to group them together. Then I want to center them within this rectangle background. Let's also select the rectangle background by holding down shift. And then we want to make this rectangle background a key object. That way when we use our align tools, it will align based on the position of this key object. To make a key object, hold down option and you'll see the double arrowhead and click on your object. We can see that this is now a key object because of the bold red outline. Now when we center these, it will center based on the rectangle. Okay. Let's click off that. Now I want to move the position of this vertical line because I want someone to be able to use these as a checklist and have room to check off items. I'm going to click on that, and I'm just going to nudge that over using my arrow keys on the keyboard. I like that location here. Let's make sure this vertical line is also centered within our box. Let's select our rectangle. Make it a key object by pressing option and clicking. And then we will align it. Perfect. Looks great. We want to click and drag to select everything and command G group it together. That way, this is one movable sticker. Now, let's say you want to go back and edit the width or color of these lines. We need to go into this group so that we can click on the lines and just edit those. So we'll double click, and now we've entered isolation mode within this group. So we can't edit anything else that's not in this group. If we go to our layers panel, we can see that as well. Everything in the layers panel is only what's in this group. So let's select all of our lines, hold down the Shift key to select multiple objects, and let's change the stroke color to a light paint. And you can change the stroke size as well. You can also make the ends of the lines rounded. And then to exit out of isolation mode, you'll double click anywhere away from the group. Let's review what we just learned in the basic shape stickers lesson. We learned how to make circles, rectangles, stars, and lines. We learned how to use the transform tool to change the size of an object. We learned to use the scale tool to change the size of an object. We learned how to adjust the stroke on an object and how to group objects together. We learned how to duplicate objects and also duplicate an action with the keyboard shortcut Command D. We learned how to work within an isolated group and we learned how to align objects based on a key object. I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll learn how to make unique and custom shapes. 6. Custom Shapes: Okay. Hey, welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to learn how to make more unique shapes that aren't available in the shape tool. Let's get started with this flag sticker. This one's really easy. We can just build off of a rectangle to make it. Get your rectangle tool and draw a rectangle. Let's change our color to something in our color palette. I'll pick light pink and no stroke. Then we can use our pen tool. We're going to add a point to this line segment here, if you hover over this line towards the center, you should see a pink line that snaps it directly to the center and click and then we'll grab our direct selection tool and click this point and drag up. And there you have it. Next, we'll learn how to make a heart. The easiest way I've found to make a heart shape is by combining two rectangles and rounding the corners on one side. Let's come to our rectangle tool and drag a rectangle. At this big, then we're going to get our direct selection tool, which is the white arrow. We'll press keyboard A and hold down the Shift key to select two corners. And drag those towards the center to round them. Now, if your rectangle is really long, it's going to end up looking funny. You can see that doesn't really look like a heart. It needs to be on the shorter side. Let's duplicate that by holding option and clicking and dragging. And then we need to rotate it by pressing R, click and rotate and hold on shift so that I'll snap into perfect alignment and release. Now, let's make sure these edges are perfectly aligned. We'll highlight everything align the right sides of the object. And the bottom. To make this one solid object, we'll highlight everything and we'll come to our pathfinder tool, and we'll press Unite. Now you can see when I click on this, it's just one solid object versus this example over here, that's still two separate objects laid on top of each other. We can rotate that to be right side up. I'm holding down the Shift key for it to snap to 45 degrees. As you can see for these custom shapes, we can make most of them by manipulating our basic shapes. And this, what I'm going to call a bubble block is no different. This is comprised of six circles, and these just have a straight edge. They're cut in half. Let's come to our ellipse tool. Click and drag and hold down shift to make a perfect circle. Don't worry too much about the size of this right now. Then we're going to option, click and drag until they're intersected about halfway. Okay. And press command D until you have six of those. Okay. Now to get these cut in half, we are going to use another one of our path finder tools, which is called divide, and that will separate objects that are laid on top of each other. We're going to draw rectangle, but before you start drawing it, I want you to hover over this end circle until it snaps to the center and then click and drag from there, and we'll lengthen this so that it covers the entire circle. Repeat this process on the other side. Now, we're going to highlight all of the circles and unite them as one object just like we did for the heart, and then we're going to highlight our two rectangles and our bubbles and press divide. What this does is out everywhere they're overlapping and it automatically groups all of the objects together. So we'll double click on them to go into isolation mode. Okay. Click on all of the areas that you want to delete. And just press the delete key. Then we'll double click to exit isolation mode. Let's go over what we just learned. You learned how to use the Pen tool to add an anchor point when you were making a flag. You learned how to move anchor points and round corners with the direct selection tool. You learned how to rotate objects. You learned how to use the pathfinder tool to unite objects and also use the pathfinder tool to divide objects. You're making great progress. I'll see you in the next lesson to learn how to make tech stickers. 7. Text Stickers: Okay? I'm going to show you how to make three different types of text stickers, label sticker, a date sticker and a simple text sticker with an outline. First for our label sticker, this is just comprised of a rectangle and a text box. Pretty simple. Let's draw a rectangle for our label sticker. I'm going to make it similar to a quarter box size, but a little bit smaller because I want it to be more of a label. Then next, we need to add our text. We'll come to the type tool. I like to make my text box outside of my shape first. We'll type a reminder. Let's make some adjustments. If you come up to the top toolbar, I want the text to align to the center of the toolbox vertically. So we've changed that. Let's come to paragraph and center our text horizontally. Then I want to make it all caps. So we can come to character and press all caps. I want to add some more spacing in between. We'll set the tracking. Let's try 200 and then make it a little bit smaller. I also want to change the font to one that I have a commercial license for since I plan on selling these stickers. All of the fonts that I use are from Adobe Fonts, which is super easy because all of them are available for commercial use and they're free with your Adobe subscription. The font that I'm going to be using for this sticker is called IV mode, and I'm going to use the semi bold, and this is an Adobe font. Let's start arranging this over our label sticker. I'm going to make this text box a bit smaller. I want to change the font color to white. Then I want to center these. We'll highlight both of them, if you come up to the top toolbar, you can see that this is set to align to selection. This is very important because if this is set to anything else like align to artboard, it's going to align it to the artboard int of in regards to the selected objects. We'll align the horizontal centers and the vertical centers. I'm pretty happy with that, and then we'll just highlight them and group them together. Next, we'll make our date circle stickers, which is the exact same method that we just used for our label sticker. We'll go to the Ellipse tool. I'm going to use this size. I'm going to make that pink. Text box type in four, make that a lot smaller align those. Then let's say you've already made a text sticker and your next text sticker, you want it to have the exact same font settings. You can have your text box highlighted and press the keyboard shortcut or come to your eye dropper tool and select the texts that you want to copy. Okay. And this doesn't look perfectly centered because we didn't change our text to be centered in the text box yet. There we go. And we'll group that together. Now, the nice thing for text boxes is that even when they're grouped together, you can still edit the text without going into isolation mode for the group. Let's say we want to make another label sticker that says, don't forget. We'll hold down the option key, click and drag to duplicate. Now, without even going into isolation mode, we can click T on our keyboard or click the text type tool and click. That way that you can edit the text pretty quickly and create several different stickers. Those are great for basic text stickers. Now let's make something a little bit more unique. To make something like this, don't forget sticker. We're going to start out with our type tool again and type out what we want our sticker to say. I'm going to write out appointment Let's center the text within our text box. Change your font if you want to. Again, I'm only using font that I have the commercial license to Let's zoom in a little bit. Once you're sure that you're happy with how your text looks. We're going to turn this text into an object. We're going to come to object expand and press. Now if we really zoom in here, you'll see that each of these letters are separate objects because I can see the outlines where they overlap. Let's come to our pathfinder tool and join them together to create one seamless object. Okay. Now we're going to select our text object. Press the keyboard shortcut Command C to copy and command B to paste behind. We'll come to our layers panel, so you can see what that looks like. We have one behind and one directly in front. We want to make sure the one behind is selected. Let's change the color of the object behind. You'll see y in a minute. And still with that object selected, which you can tell by this red square in this double circle here, to object path, offset path. What this does is it will offset the path by a certain measurement. You'll have to figure out which measurement looks best for your sticker. I think that looks nice. We'll press. Just like our text, this is separate objects and we want to unite them to be one. We'll come to our pathfinder tool and press unite and we want to group these together, and then you can change the size if you want to Okay. Let's say you made a bunch of stickers and you want to change everything that's one color to another color. We can do that really easily with the recolor tool. Let's highlight all of our stickers that we want to change the color of and come up to the top toolbar and you'll see this circle with Pi cutouts. We'll click that and click Advanced Options. Now, this is going to show us all of the colors that are in all of these selected objects. These are your end results over here, and this is what the starting colors are. We can change these in several ways. We can click on a starting color and drag it over to an n color. That has changed everything that's yellow to be the dark pink color. If you see black and white, don't have an end color. Just click and it will say, do you want to add a new color to the current harmony? Click? Yes. I'll do that again. Then let's change everything that's black to white clicking and dragging. You can also click on an end color and just use these sliders down here. Or you can use our swatches that we made earlier. Press this arrow here and you'll see your folders all right here under color groups. That's why it was really important that we put our swatches into a folder. You can click one of these and it will apply that whole folder and you can click this button to randomly cycle through them. Or you can click and drag them to where you want them to be. You can also double click and press color swatches to directly select one that you want. You can have a lot of fun with the recolor tool. We're going to press and then press now. Now that you've finished this lesson, let's review what we learned. We learned what kind of fonts to use for selling stickers. We learned how to center text within a text box. We learned how to adjust spacing between letters with tracking. We learned how to use the eyedropper tool to copy a font style. We learned how to turn text into an object by expanding. We learned how to offset the path of an object to create an outline and we learned all about using the recolor tool. I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll learn how to make icon stickers. 8. Icon Stickers: Let's learn how to make icon Stickers. Now, they are pretty similar to making text Stickers. The main thing to talk about is where to get icons from. You can make your own icons by drawing in Illustrator with the Pen tool, but this can be time-consuming. You can find commercial use icon, SVG images for sale and purchase those. Or my personal favorite is to find an icon font. These will usually be called Ding bats fonts. And you can find them for free or for purchase. The most important thing is to make sure they allow for commercial use. I prefer to use icon fonts because it's so much easier to change between icons and add new ones instead of importing different icon images into your program. Okay, Let's get started learning how to make this circle icon sticker. We're going to make this the exact same way we made a date sticker will make a circle with the same measurements. Draw a textbox outside of the circle. The icon font I'm using today is called icon works. And then we'll come over to our side toolbar to the glyph icon. The glyphs panel allows us to see every icon in the font. To select one, we just have to double-click. We can start aligning our circle and icon using the align tools. I'm going to zoom in here to refine the positioning of this icon a little bit more. Okay, that looks about centered. I'll change the color of the icon to white. Highlight and group these together and you're done to make this label sticker will start out with a rectangle. I'm going to do 1.5 " by 0.33 ". Then I'll create my textbox and open the glyphs panel. Double-click on the icon I want. I'm going to zoom in so that I can better align these. I'll drag the icon where I want it. And I'm going to create another rectangle, which will create the space for you to write up to do tasks. I'll drag that on top of the pink rectangle and make it bigger by dragging out the sides. I'll change my icon color to white by clicking on it and using the eyedropper tool to select white. I like to double-check the sticker by zooming out. I can tell that the white rectangle is not quite centered within the pink one. So I'll select the white and pink rectangles and hold down Option and click the pink rectangle to make it a key object. Then I'll use the align panel tools to center it vertically. That looks better. Let's review what we've learned. We learned how to find icons to use for our planner stickers. We learned how to search for an icon sticker font. And we learned how to use the glyphs panel to view all of the characters of a font. I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll learn to combine all of the skills you've learned in the previous 9. Combining Techniques: There are so many ways you can get creative and combine all of the techniques that you've learned in the previous lessons. Let's combine our knowledge of shapes, text, and icons to create an appointment sticker. I'm going to start out with a half box size rectangle. That's 1.5 " wide by 0.95 " tall. Okay. Next, I'm going to select the type tool and choose an icon. I'm going to pick this bell. Then I'm going to make another text box and type out the word appointment. I'll click out and select the text box with the arrow tool, and then I'm going to use the dropper tool to change the font so that you can actually read it. Now I'll start dragging my text and icon sticker to the top of the box. I want to make this icon a little smaller, so I'll do that using the scale tool. Next, I want to make two white rectangles. These can be used for areas to write where the appointment is and what time it is. I'm duplicating this rectangle by using option, click and drag. Then I'm going to adjust the size of these rectangles a bit and I want to center them horizontally. I'll select all three rectangles and use option click to make the pink rectangle a key object. Then I'll center the white rectangles. Let's zoom in to move things around a little bit more. I'm going to move the white rectangles down and the text and icon down as well so that there's less space on the bottom of the sticker. Then I'll highlight everything and group it together. Next, we can use our knowledge of shapes to make this flag checklist sticker. We'll start out by creating a tall rectangle. I'm going to do 1.9 " tall by 0.33 " wide. Okay. Then we'll use the pen tool to line up with the center and add a point to the bottom line of our rectangle. I'll use the direct selection white arrow tool to click and drag this point up to create the V shape of the flag. Instead of circles for the checklist, I'm going to make stars. I'll select the star tool and draw a star. Then I'll use the ye dropper tool to change the color to white. I'll drag that over to the top of the checklist. I'm going to duplicate the star by holding down option, clicking and dragging. After you've done that once, you can use the shortcut Command D to duplicate the action. I'm going to make seven stars. Next, I'll highlight everything and hold shift to deselect the yellow background. I'm going to make sure all of the stars are centered and evenly spaced out using the align panel. Then I'm going to group all of the stars together. Now that they're grouped, I can align them to the center of the flag by selecting everything and using the align panel. I'm going to move the group of stars up just a tad by using the up arrow key on my keyboard. Okay, that looks great. Let's make another fun checklist. I'm going to go to my shapes tool and select the polygon tool. I'm going to make the checkboxes for this list hexagons and have them with a pink stroke and white fill color. Okay, I'm going to duplicate that. I'm eying my other checklist to make sure they are about evenly spaced and I have around the same number of checkboxes. The hexagons are a little bit bigger, so I ended up creating six of those. Let's select all of those and use the align panel to make sure they're centered and evenly space. And we'll group those together. I think it would be fun to make this sticker a little bit more interesting and combine it with the notepad style sticker that we learned in the basic shapes lesson. I'm going to make a full box size rectangle that's 1.5 " wide by 1.9 " tall, and I'll drag my check boxes over onto the rectangle. Let's select those and align them vertically. Now, let's add some lines using the line tool. I'm drawing my line and holding down shift so that it snaps to be perfectly level. And I'll duplicate that using option, click and drag, and then command D. Okay. Let's zoom in and adjust the location of these lines. Instead of individually selecting every line, I have a faster method. I'm going to select everything, hold down shift, and click the rectangle to deselect it. That way, only the lines are selected. Then I'm going to drag those up a little bit and use the align panel to center those. Let's select the lines and check boxes by selecting everything, holding shift, and clicking the rectangle to deselect it, and then grouping the lines and check boxes together. Then we can select everything, make the rectangle a key object and center everything. Okay, I like where this is going, but I want to make all of those checkboxes a little bit smaller. I have a shortcut to keep all of them in the same location and just change the size. We're going to double click to enter the line and checkbox group. Then right click on the checkboxes in Ungroup. Then we'll select them all and go to object, transform each. You can do a lot of fun things here. I'm decreasing the horizontal and vertical size to 75% each. Then I'm going to exit out of isolation mode and center the rectangle in group of check boxes of lines. Perfect. I'll select everything and group it and then you're done. That was our last lesson on learning how to make stickers. I encourage you to get creative and make any types of stickers you might want to put on your sticker sheet. In the next lesson, we'll prepare to export our files by arranging everything onto a sticker sheet and more. 10. Preparing to Export: Okay. Now that you've made some beautiful stickers, let's make your first class project and learn how to put them together onto a sticker sheet. I'm going to be working in the Illustrator demo file I've provided for you in the resources of the class. I've added a header and footer to my sticker sheet for a place to put your branding and sticker sheet name, which is very important if you're going to be selling these. But even if they're just for personal use, it's nice to have a name for your sticker sheet to stay organized. In the demo file, the sticker sheet branding is locked, before making any edits, you'll need to go to the layers panel and unlock it. You can do that by pressing the lock icon right here. Once you have your sticker sheet header and footer, the way that you want it, we can start organizing the stickers onto it. I'm going to organize my stickers from largest to smallest and keep similarly shaped stickers group together. I'm also going to be making two of every sticker type using the option plus click and drag shortcut. That way I can have two different color options for each type of sticker. Don't worry too much about getting them perfectly spaced right now. We'll use the align tools in a minute to make sure everything is perfectly aligned. Okay, now that we have all of our stickers laid out, I'm going to use the align tools to line things up and even rows and columns, and I'll use the key object to help align things when necessary. Now that everything looks nicely spaced and organized, we are going to select all of the stickers and group them together. Then we can align them as a group to the center of the art board using the aligned tools. And then we can group. Next, we can have some fun changing colors. I'm going to make my stickers pink and yellow, so I'll be selecting one column at a time and using the recolor tool to change the color of several stickers all at once. Remember that for the recolor tool, the input is on the left side and the output color is the small rectangle on the right side. When I select one column of stickers that are all different colors and open up the recolor tool, I'll select one from this drop down to make them all the same color, but it will exclude white automatically. Then you can easily change the color of every sticker. It's also important to open up this drop down menu and select. Otherwise, your colors will be scaled as tints. Okay. Yes. Some of these smaller stickers that are just one shape, I can select and click the color in the swatches panel to change. Now you have successfully created a sticker sheet in Adobe Illustrator. There are a couple of other things we want to make that will help us create a pre crapped digital sticker sheet in good notes. We're going to make a template of our sticker sheet that will help us to perfectly line up our stickers when we're working in good notes because good notes doesn't have any of the align tools that Illustrator does. Let's go to our layers panel and just double check that our branding on our sticker sheet is unlocked. Okay. Okay. Now we're going to duplicate our artboard. Select the artboard tool, hold down option and click the name of the artboard and drag to duplicate. Then highlight all of the stickers and we'll change the color to black using the recolor tool. Under the drop down, select one, then I'll use the color sliders to change the color to black. Then I'll click this drop down and select act so that it's pure black instead of using tints. I decided to simplify this even more and drag the white onto the color bar so that everything is completely black. So this will be the template that we'll use in good notes to drag and drop our stickers onto. I'm going to make one more copy of this artboard and delete all of the stickers off of it so that it just has our sticker sheet branding. We'll save this as a PDF in the next lesson to be the background of our good notes sticker sheet. Next, we're going to put all of our individual stickers into the asset export panel to get ready to export. You want to make sure that all of your stickers are in groups if they are comprised of more than one object. Let's open up our asset export panel, highlight all of our stickers, and then over here on our asset export panel, you'll see this box with a plus sign and multiple boxes with a plus sign. One is for adding multiple objects as separate assets, and the other is for adding a single asset. You want to click the button to generate multiple assets. Okay. Now you'll want to scroll through the asset panel and make sure that everything looks correct. If a sticker wasn't grouped correctly, you'll be able to tell because the components will be separate assets instead of a single sticker. Okay, everything looks good. We're ready to get started exporting. I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. Exporting Your Files: Okay. Before we get started exporting our files, let's talk about where you should save your files. You'll want to be saving everything in a location that is easy to open up on the iPad if you're using good notes for iPad. I'm going to be saving everything to an iCloud folder, but you can use another type of cloud system such as Dropbox or Google Drive that you can easily access on your iPad as well. Let's get ready to export our files. Okay. The files that we're going to be exporting are a transparent P&G of our sticker sheet, a PDF of our sticker template, a PDF of our sticker backing page, and individual PNG files of each sticker. Let's export a transparent PNG of our sticker sheet first. There are several ways to export an illustrator, as you'll see in this lesson, and one way is by artboard. To export an entire artboard, you'll need to know the artboard number. By clicking on the artboard tool, you can see the artboard names and numbers. Our sticker sheet is on artboard seven. Now, we'll go to File, Export as. Then you can checkmark US artboards and change the range to your artboard number, which in my case is seven. You can also checkmark suffix if you named your artboard, as this will add the name of your artboard to the end of the file name. I'm going to change the file name so I can keep track of what sticker sheet this is in case I create different versions in the future. And make sure your format selected as PNG and press okay. You'll see a pop up box with some options for saving as a PNG. We're going to have the resolution at 300 PPI. Make sure optimized is selected, and that the background color is transparent. Then press okay. Let's export our PDFs next. You don't need to take note of the artboard numbers because on the PDF export screen, it will allow you to see them. We'll go to File, Export, Export for Screens. Make sure the word artboards is selected at the top center, and then you'll be able to check mark the artboards that you want to export. Make sure that your destination folder is correct under port two. We'll change the format to PDF, and that will allow us to select the option Export PDFs as multiple files to create two separate single page PDF documents. Then you can click Export Rs. Here you can see the file saved as the names of the artboards. This is why it's great to name all of your artboards in your illustrator document. We're almost done exporting. Now we just have to export our individual stickers. Let's open up our export panel, and we'll need to make sure all of our stickers are selected. You can tell if they're highlighted because they'll be outlined in blue. If they aren't, you can select them all by clicking on the first sticker, then scrolling down, hold down shift and click on the last sticker. Next, we'll change our export settings to 300 PPI and P and G. You can change the suffix to whatever you want or just leave it blank. I've experimented with several different sizes and resolutions of stickers, but 300 PPI yields the best results for having digital stickers that aren't blurry. Feel free to try out your own settings and see what you like best. Next, let's press port and choose our destination folder. I like to create a new folder just for the sticker PNGs to live in because it's a lot of little files. Then press choose and you'll get a green pop up that the export was successful. There you can see our sticker folder with our four types of files in it. You've now completed the first class project. Yeah. I would love to see the sticker sheet that you've created an illustrator. Upload a screenshot or save an extra file of your sticker sheet with a white background instead of transparent to upload to the class projects. Let me know if you have any questions or if you'd like some feedback. I love to help. In the next lesson, we'll get started on our second class project. I'll show you how to take these stickers into good notes and create a pre cropped good notes sticker sheet for use in digital planners. I'll see you there. 12. Create a Sticker Sheet in Goodnotes: Hey, welcome back. Let's dive into good notes and learn how to make a pre cropped sticker sheet file. If you don't already have the app, go to the app store and download it. The free version is good for up to three notebooks. I already have good notes open here. Good notes is a PDF reader app and is comprised of PDF files or notebooks. We're going to make a new notebook that will hold all of your sticker sheet files. I'm going to tap this plus sign here and press notebook. You can change the cover if you want, but only you will see the cover. It won't be something you're sending to customers. Keep the paper style as blank, and we'll change the name to sticker book. Next, we'll import our sticker backing and sticker template PDF pages. We'll click the four squares in the top left corner. This will show us all of the pages in our notebook. You can click the plus sign to add a new page or import a page. We're going to press Import. Locate your sticker backing and template PDFs. I saved mine in iCloud Drive, but if you're using Dropbox or Google Drive, you would go to that folder instead. Select both PDFs and press open. Okay. Now we can delete this blank page or move it towards the end. Let's open up our sticker template page. Next, we're going to start adding our sticker PNGs on top of this template page. The easiest way to do this is to use the split screen view with good notes on one side and the files app on the other. To enter split screen mode, swipe up from the bottom of your screen, click and drag on the files app and pull it over to the side. You can press the three dots at the top and drag it around the screen. Then you'll want to adjust the corners of your windows so that the apps are not overlapping but right next to each other. Now we can open our PNG folder and let all of our stickers load. And then we're just going to start dragging them over onto our good notes template page. To resize the stickers, you'll select the lasso tool in good notes. Draw a circle around them and tap, select resize, and drag with the arrow in the bottom right corner of the image. This ensures the size ratio is locked. Okay. You can use your finger or an apple pencil. I find I can get a little bit more precise with my pencil. My method is dragging all of the stickers of the same type over at the same time and then using the lasso tool to resize them all together. Sometimes good notes is a little funny and the exact same sticker will import onto the good notes page at a different size. But that's why we have our handy template page. I'm just getting everything into their general position and not worrying too much about being precise with the sizing yet. For these smaller stickers, I like to zoom in. Okay. Okay, now that we have all of our stickers down in their general location, I'm going to be more precise about resizing them and positioning them as close as possible to the template. Here I have the image tool selected, so I can just tap on each sticker and that double ended arrow in the bottom right corner comes up. Sometimes you have to be careful with this because it's easy to accidentally rotate a sticker. If you do this, the easiest way to straighten it out is to enlarge the sticker and then shrink it back down. If you somehow really distort your sticker, just delete it and insert a new one. The reason that we're making this pre crop sticker sheet is because it allows you or the customer to have all of your stickers readily available to copy and paste in good notes, rather than spending a ton of time importing and resizing them. This step is a little time consuming, but it can actually be relaxing. I like to arrange stickers onto the templates in the evenings while I'm watching TV. Okay, I'm happy with that. Don't over analyze and get everything too precise. If it's not exact down to the pixel, it's okay. Okay. So remember that we put our sticker backing page in right next to this template page in our notebook. Now we're going to move all of these stickers onto that template page. We're going to use our lasso tool and draw a big circle around all of our stickers on our template page. Tap and press cut. Swipe over to your sticker backing page and press paste, and try to just eyeball these to be centered. Now take a moment to admire your beautiful and professional looking good notes sticker page. Now you or your customer can simply use the lasso tool to circle the sticker they want to use and copy and paste it into their planner. Don't forget about the free planner pages I've included in the class resources for you to test out your new stickers in. If you haven't already uploaded your stickers to the class project page, you can also take a screenshot of your good notes sticker sheet and upload that. Okay, so we've made this awesome pre cropped sticker sheet in good notes. How do we share it with our customer? Good notes makes it super easy by allowing exports with their native file type. There are a couple of ways to get to the export screen. You can open up all of your pages. Press the little arrow next to the page you want to export and press port. Or you can press the share button. This is great if you want to export multiple pages as one good notes document. For this, I'm going to export this page. Select good notes, so this will be a good notes file. Name your file. I like to put my brand name somewhere in the file name. And then press port. Scroll down and select where you want to save it. I'm going to save mine to file so I can save it to Cloud. Next, I'll show you how to import a good notes file. We're going to tap the four squares to show all of the notebook pages. Press the plus sign and tap just like we did to import our PDF pages. Then you'll locate your good notes file and press open. You can see, there it is with movable stickers. In the next lesson, we'll go over how to use our digital stickers in other digital planning apps, and I'll demo using the notability app. I'll see you there. 13. Stickers For Other Planning Apps: Okay. You just saw in the previous lesson that Good notes has a native file type that allows you to export a sticker sheet and share with other good notes users. There are some other digital planning apps that have this feature to notability and note shelf. However, it would be time consuming to create a pre CO sticker sheet in multiple apps and export in their native file system. My approach is to create a pre crop sticker sheet in the native file system of the most popular digital planning app, which is good notes, and then provide a simple alternate method for customers that are using another digital planning app. The alternate way for customers to use our stickers in another planning app is easy. We already have it saved. They can easily use the transparent PNG of our full sticker sheet. This allows the customer to import just one image. It keeps your branding on the page versus providing individual sticker PNGs where your branding can get lost. The customer will be able to easily duplicate and crop the sticker sheet as needed to use the stickers. I'm going to demo this in notability for you so that you can see just how easy it is. Here I have notability open to a blank page. I'm going to use the same method of import that I used in good notes. I'll make a split screen window with the files app and navigate to the folder that has our transparent PNG sticker sheet. I'll click and drag the sticker sheet over. Then I can easily crop or copy and paste the stickers that I want to use onto my planner page. You've learned so much today. I'll see you next for our final lesson on how to package your stickers for sale. 14. Package Files for Sale: Okay. Now that we've made our beautiful sticker sheets and exported all of our files, how do we actually get these files to the customer, and what do they need in order to use our stickers? We're going to give them at least three files, at good notes sticker sheet file, which is the pre cropped sticker sheet for good notes users. Dot PNG sticker sheet file, which is for other app users, a PDF guide on how to use the stickers and a PDF with the link to download. The link to download can be on the PDF user guide or it can be on a separate PDF. It's up to you. Why do we need to provide the customer with a link to download their files? Some seller market places like EtS have a file size limit for what you can upload for digital products. If your files are bigger than the upload limit, you can get around this by uploading your sticker files to a cloud system. Then you can get a sharable link to that cloud system folder and put it into a PDF. The PDF with the link to download the files is what you would upload to EtS. Okay. I recommend using Dropbox or Google Drive to upload your files to if they're too big to directly upload to wherever you're selling. Both of these options will allow you to create a sharable link to your sticker folder that no one can access unless they have the link. You'll take this URL, and that is where the link to download the stickers will go to. After you've uploaded your sticker files to the Cloud and have your sharable link URL, we need to actually make the PDF user guide with the link to download. I'm going to show you an example of a combined PDF that is a user guide and link to download in one. You're going to need to use a program that can create a hyperlinked PDF file. My favorites are Canva, Adobe Express, and Adobe in Design. My example was made using Adobe Express. Okay. So what does your user guide need to include. I'd like to start out by thanking the customer for their purchase. Then I'd like to have the link to download their stickers towards the top in a larger standout font because that's where the customer is most excited to go. Next, it's a good idea to list what files are included in their purchase. Then I'd like to include brief instructions on how to actually open their files. I'll include one set for good notes users and one for other apps. Adding in some brief instructions on how to use your product is helpful as well. I also like to add in a terms of use to let the customer know that the purchase of these files is for their personal use only, and commercial use is not permitted. It might seem obvious, but it's better to have it in writing so that it's clear. I'll close out the PDF with a personal message to the customer, letting them know I'm open to answering any questions they have about their purchase. If you make any video tutorials on how to use your products, this would be a great place to link them. Always make sure your name and links to your shop and social medias are on the PDF guide as well so that the customer can easily know where they bought the stickers from and return for another purchase. This example, PDF user guide is attached to the class resources so that you can refer to it when making your own. You have everything you need to make and sell digital stickers now. I'll see you in the next video for some closing thoughts. 15. Closing Thoughts: You did it. You officially know how to make digital planner stickers in Adobe Illustrator. Thank you so much for joining me during this class. I hope you had as much fun as I do making digital stickers and that you learned some great tips along the way to make the process faster and easier. You learn how to make various shape stickers, text stickers and icon stickers in this course. Next, I encourage you to use your new skills to get creative. Take what you learned and create unique stickers that would be helpful for specific events in your life and your daily plans. Chances are there's someone else out there that would benefit from them as well. If you have it already, don't forget to upload a picture of your sticker sheet to the class projects. I can't wait to see what you've created. Be sure to follow me on Skillshare to see when I create more courses on digital planning in the future. I would love it if you left a review and a comment of what you would like to learn next. Thanks so much for joining me today. I'll see you next time. Until then, stay creative.