Make to Sell Printable Grids in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Lines and Grids in Illustrator - Introduction - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class: Make to Sell Printable Grids in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at creating some patterns in Illustrator. We're going to create vertical lines, we're going to create grids, and we're going to look at a very interesting isometric grid too. As you're working through these videos, you may see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you want to learn more about Illustrator. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started creating some patterns in Illustrator. 2. Lines and Grids - Part 1: The first illustrate a pattern we're going to create is going to be stripes. I'm going to choose File and then New. I'm going to start with a pretty small documents and it's going to be a 100 pixels by a 100 pixels, it doesn't really matter how big it is, but I'm using quite a small one. RGB color mode, disabling, align new objects to pixel grid and I'll click "Okay". I'm going to select the rectangle tool up here and I'm going to make sure that I have a filled shape, but it has no stroke. I'm going to make it half the size of this document. So I'm going to make its width 50 pixels and its height 100. I'm going to the selection tool and I'm going to align options which you can also get to by choosing window and then align. I'm going to open up the panel here. Show options, make sure that Align to Artboard is selected. So now I can select on my shape and I want to align it to the left side of the Artboard. Well, let's just select the shape and to the top. So note, it's perfectly in the left-hand side of the document. Now, my pattern is going to be a stripe and then a transparent area, so that I could color it two colors by placing a filled rectangle behind it. To this end, we're going to need to create another rectangle. So I'm going to the rectangle tool. This time I want a rectangle that has a 100 pixels by a 100 pixels in size. I'll click "Okay". It also needs to have no stroke and no fill. It needs to be aligned to the Artboards. I'm going back to my align options and I'm going to align it over the Artboard. I'm opening up the last panel here, and I'm going to drag this rectangle and place it behind the filled rectangle, so the no field no strike rectangle is underneath the filled rectangle here. Select both these shapes. I'm just going to open up the Swatches panel, and with the selection tool, I'm going to just drag and drop this into the top of the Swatches panel. There is no need in versions of Illustrator, say a six and later to actually open up the patent make tool for this particular pattern. It's so simple that you just don't need to make it with anything in particular. Now, I'm just going to drag out a second Artboard. Let's go and make a second Artboard. I'm going to add a rectangle to this Artboard that is, the size of the Artboard. The fill is that the for here? So I'm just going to click on my pattern to fill it with the pattern. Now lets choose Object, Transform, Scale, disable Transform Object. Just leave in transform pattern. Click on the "Preview", and I'm just going to bring the pattern scale down to something like 10 percent and click "Okay". You can see that we have a regular striped pattern. Now, the way that this pattern was designed means that it's also transparent in the background. So if I go and duplicate the rectangle I just created, just going to drag it onto the new icon here. Go to the back version of the rectangle, the one further down last pallet, and with the Fill option select it here, I'm just going to fill it with a color. So I'm just going to put an orange color behind it. So you can see that the black end transparent pattern allows us to make a multi-colored pattern by simply adding a field lab beneath it. Now if you want to create, for example, a horizontal stripes, all you'll do is go to this rectangle here and just rotate it. So I'm just going to rotate it through 180 degrees. I've just hold the Shift key as I rotated it and make sure that it's placed at the very bottom of this Artboard here. So let's go and get the Align options and make sure that it's aligned to the very bottom of the Artboard, and also it's left or right-hand side. It doesn't matter which because it is the full width of the Artboard anyway. Select over both this filled rectangle and the no fill, no stroke rectangle, that is the back here. Then just drag and drop all of this into the Swatches panel. Going back to select this rectangle here, the filled rectangle that has the pattern in it, and just going to click on my second pattern, and now we have horizontal stripes. We've also got that typical illustrate a problem where we've got airline fractures through our pattern. You can resolve this a number of ways and one of them is just to change the scaling of the pattern. So I am going back to scaling my pattern only, and I'm going to take it up to a 101 percent, that's not quite dealt with the fracturing, and a 104 percent I have dealt with the fracturing. The fracturing is only of concern really, if you see it in the same place all the time, that's telling you that your patter wasn't made correctly. In this case, our pattern is just fine. Let's look at this situation where we want a striped pattern that is not an even stripes. We have a smaller gap. Well, all we're going to do is come to our filled rectangle and make it smaller or larger as required. In this case, I'm actually going to fill it with a different color. So we'll just get a bit of color happening. What we're going to do is have a really big orange stripe and a very narrow transparent stripe against selecting either both these shapes, the no fill no stroke rectangle at the back and this rectangle here drag it into the pattern searches or into the swatches pallet. You do it in the top line, it just goes in as a pattern and let's go and hold the space bar. As I move to see this art board here, select this Filled Rectangle and add a new pattern to it. So you can say that it would be very easy to do things such as uneven stripes or even multiple stripes. Let's just take this shape and do edit, copy, edit paste in place. So I've got a duplicate on top of it. Let's go down here. Create a smaller rectangles. I've just dragged down on the top edge of it. I'm going to fill it with a different color. So much darker color. Again, select over all the shapes, put them in the Swatches panel, click on my rectangle, fill my rectangle with my now multicolor pattern. Two of these stripes that coming from the patent itself, and one of the stripes is coming from this filled rectangle behind it. Now briefly before we finish up this class, let's have a look and see how we would create a document of lines, that we could use for a salable printable. I'm just going to remove everything from this document here except one of these rectangles. I'm going to shrink this down really small, and I'm going to give it a color. So it's going to be a fill color and let's choose a pale blue for it. I'm going to do it probably a little bit darker than I would normally do it just so that we can say it. So I'm just going to put the line at the very bottom of the Artboard and I'm going to make sure it's aligned to the bottom of the Artboard and to the left or right just to double-check that it is in position, I'll select everything and we're going to make a pattern out of this. Now let's go to the working document and add it as a pattern. Now we've got a yellow color behind in this rectangle, but we don't have to, we could have nothing or we could have another color. Again, we can re-size this pattern just by scaling it. So we could have a smaller number of lines or a wider number of lines. This would be a pattern that we could create as a printable. One of the later videos, I'm actually going to mock up a printable for you, but just count this patent in as one that you could potentially use. 3. Lines and Grids - Part 2: Let's now look at the situation where you want to create a grid, a series of boxes. Again, I'm going to choose a new document. Again, 100 pixels by 100 pixels RGB Color mode. Again, I do not have "Align New Objects to Pixel Grid" selected. I'll click "OK". Again, I'm going back to my Rectangle tool. I'm going to make this a filled rectangle with no stroke. This time let's actually go and make it a blue grid. I'm going to go and get a blue color. What I'm going to do is to place a rectangle along two sides of this artboard. I'm just going to click once and let's talk about the size. Well, the size of the artboard is 100 pixels, so we're going to make this 100 pixels. The width is going to be the width of our line relative to the empty space in our grid. If we want a very narrow line and a big space, then we're going to use something like five or even 10 for the width of our line. I'm just going to use 10. So I'll click "OK". Here is my shape. I'm going to the Align options. Make sure I have "Align to Artboard" selected, which it is. I'm going to make sure that this object here is aligned to the left and either the top or the bottom of the artboard. Since it is the height of the artboard, it doesn't matter which of those two options I select. I want the second line across my art board, across either the bottom or the top, it does not matter which. I'm going to hold, drag, a duplicate of this shape. I'm going to hold the "Shift" key as I rotate it around so it's rotated in a perfect 180 degrees. I'm going to choose the top of the artboard, but it really doesn't matter whether it's a top or the bottom. I'm going to make sure that this is aligned perfectly. This part is critical that the alignment is perfect because we're going to ask Illustrator to be putting these shapes together in a minute. Now I'm going to create the place that I need to create my pattern. It's just a 100 pixel by 100 pixel, not-filled, no-stroke, rectangle, aligned to the artboard, and placed underneath the shapes that comprise my patterns. I'm going to the last palette. It's going to drag this no-fill, no-stroke, rectangle below everything else. I'm going to select everything, open up the swatches palette, go to the Selection tool, and drag and drop everything into the top of the swatches palette. Let's go back here and let's drag out a second artboard. Again, not being too fast about where it is or how big it is sized. But if I make it a fixed size, that is going to be a little bit easier to create my rectangle the size of the artboard because we know what size it is. I've now got my not-filled, no-stroke, rectangle over the top of the artboard. The fill color is at the front here, so I'm going to fill it with my grid. Let's go to "Object" "Transform" "Scale." I'm going to disable "Transform Objects." I don't want to transform my pattern, and I want to bring the size down a little bit. There we have it at 20 percent. That's how you would create a very simple grid in Illustrator. Of course you could make it a two-color grid if you want it to. Because this art board is 100 by 100, and because these edge paces are 10 pixels wide, that means that this box in here is 90 by 90. Well, let's fill it with a color. I'm going to the Rectangle tool, I'm going to click once here. This is going to be a 90 pixel by 90 pixel rectangle. I'll click "OK". I don't want it to be filled with my grid, but I can just ignore that for a minute. What I do want to do, is make sure that I align it to the edges of the artboard. In this case, it must be aligned to the right edge and to the base of the artboard. Now let's go and fill it with a color. I've got my fill color at the fore here, so let's just fill it with a cream color. Now let's look at our Layers palette. We need to make sure that we select the places that we want, which is the no fill, no stroke rectangle at the back. Then there are the two lines around the edge of the artboard. Now the place on top, I'm going to the selection tool. I'm just going to drag and drop all of this into the very top of the swatches palette. Let's go back to this shape here and let's fill it with a new pattern. So this times a pattern brings with it a color. Now we've been able to create a grid that has not only lines but also a fill. You might also be aware that this is really quite a thick line grid. If we were to narrow down these lines to five, four, or even three pixels, we would get a much finer grid as a result. 4. Lines and Grids - Part 3: The final patent we're going to make, it's called an isometric grid. I'm going to start with a new document that is 100 pixels by 100 pixels in size RGB. We've turned off align new objects to pixel grid. I'll click Okay. Now, I want some lines so they're just going to be made as filled rectangle so I'm turning off the stroke and just giving them a black fill. We click on the rectangle tool and click once on my document. I want my line to be one pixel wide, but 100 pixels tall. It's just going to run down the left-hand side of this document. But what I want to do is to make sure that it's centered over the very edge of the document. I'm going to select it, going to the Transform options here, which you can also get to by choosing Window and then Transform, to open up this palette here. I just want to make sure that its center is at 0 and the y point for its center is 50 so it's right over this center the edge of this document. I'm going to Alt-drag a duplicate away and I want to put this in the center of the document. I'm going to Alt-drag another one away and put it in exactly the same place over here, right over the edge of the artboard. Going to double-check this, making sure its center is at 50, 50. I had to adjust that a little bit. Let's just click on this one and its center should be at 150, that's 100X, 50Y. It's perfect. Now I'm going to go and grab this shape here without moving it, I'm going to choose Object, Transform, Rotate. I want to rotate it through 60 degrees so I've actually just taught 60 degrees here, but I want to make a copy of it. I've got Preview turned on, I'm going to click to make a copy which is a duplicate. Still got my vertical line, but now I've got a 60-degree line. I'm going to drag the 60-degree line in here and I'm just going to grab the middle point on this end, and I'm just going to drag it out. I don't want to change the width of the line, I just want to make sure that it stretches across my document. I want to make sure that the midpoint of this shape here is at 50 and 50 so x is 50 y is 50. Just put that in manually. Just a very easy way of making sure that it's centered right on top of the middle of this document. Going to click on this shape again, and I'm going to rotate it once more. Object, Transform, Rotate. Again, I want to rotate this 60 degrees, so I want it to go in the exact different direction and I'll click Copy so I can make a duplicate as I do. This is the foundation of my shape. Now to make my pattern, I need a rectangle that's going to take out this part of the shape. I'm going to show you how to do it in a minute. I'm going to explain how I got the measurements. I'm just going to click on the Rectangle tool. Click once on the document. Now the width has to be 100 pixels because it has to stretch across this artboard but the height is going to be 57.735. I'll click, Okay. Now, this has to be a no fill, no stroke rectangle so I'm going to just turn its fill off. I'm going to make sure that it is aligned perfectly to the artboard. I'm going to the Align tools here, going to open up the Show options, make sure I have Align to Artboard selected, I'm going to center this in the middle of the artboard, which puts it directly on top of my pattern pace. Now I'm going to open my layers panel up because there's one thing I have to do before I finish that is to drag this no fill, no stroke rectangle underneath everything. If you don't do that, it's not going to work correctly. Now we're going to select everything here. I open up the Swatches palette, and I'm just going to drag and drop the whole lot into the Swatches palette. Now let's go and create another artboard. Just going to click on the Artboard Tool here. I'm going to start dragging it out and I'm just going to type my values in manually. I'm just going to make mine 100 by 100 for now and I'm going to click on the Rectangle tool at 100 pixel by 100 pixel rectangle over this artboard and center it because this is going to be where I test my pattern. I have the fill color to the front so I'm going to open up my swatches panel, click on my pattern, and let's just scale it down with Object, Transform, Scale. I don't want to transform my object, but I do want to transform my patent just to make sure it's working perfectly and click Okay, and it is working just perfectly. This is an isometric grid. Now, if, for example, you're in the market for creating printables, you could create this as a printable grid. Let's see quickly how we might do that. I'm going again to the Artboard tool. I'm just going to click here to start an artboard. I'm going to click on Artboard 3 and double-click on the Artboard tool because I want to change the dimensions of Artboard 3. I want its orientation to be portrait. I want it to be a letter-size artboard. You can see already that the placement at minus 263.67 pixels or whatever it happens to be for this top corner is plenty adequate. It's placed well away from the other artboards. I'm just going to click Okay. This is now given me a letter-size artboard. I'm just going to click on the selection tool with the artboard in front of me, I'm going to press Control or Command 0. This is a potential letter-size document on which we could create an isometric grid. Well, let's do it in an attractive way. I'm going to select the rounded rectangle tool, click once. I know that the dimensions of a letter sheet of paper are 8.5 inches by 11 inches. To leave a border around the edge, I might say that I want the width here of this rectangle to be eight inches and the height to be 10.5 inches. In other words, that's giving me a quarter-inch margin all around the page and the corner radius of 12 pixels that's going to be pretty nice, so I'll click Okay. It's already come in filled with my isometric grid, but I'm going to select on this rectangle and I already know that I've got Align to Artboard selected because it was before, it's going to be still selected. I'm just going to align this shape to the artboard. Now I have a quarter-inch space all the way around my isometric grid. If I wanted to, I could give the rectangle itself an outline. I'm going to click here and just give it a black line around the edge. If we wanted to move the grid or place it in a different position inside this rectangle we can do so. It's going to zoom into the top of this document here so we can see how it's placed. Select on the rectangle that is filled with my isometric grid, Object, Transform, Move. I don't want to move the object, I've got Transform Objects turned off and it's easier for me to start with everything here zeroed out. Now, look at the document here. You can see that we're pretty even down the side, so probably don't want to move in a horizontal direction, but vertically I could knock it up, maybe a pixel or two upwards just to make it overlap here so that the place where the lines overlap, it intersects with the top of the rectangle so I get a nice edge at the top. I'll just click Okay. Command 0 to zoom back out and here is potentially something that I could save as a PDF or a JPEG or TIFF and sell this online as an isometric grid. Now with saying some lines through this, they don't actually exist in the patent. That's just the illustrators having trouble showing the grid at this size. Of course, you could just use the Object, Transform, Scale option here to make the grid bigger if you wanted to. Let's make it 120. We're starting to enlarge the grid. You might want one to enlarge the rectangle, but you may want to enlarge the grid. Once you've enlarged it, you may want to go back and move it into a pleasing position inside the rectangle because this is going to be your printable. You want it to look as good as it can. I'll click Okay. Now before we go, I promised you that we would have a look and see how I got the dimensions of this rectangle that we used as the no fill, no stroke rectangle behind this shape. Well, what I did was I looked at this. I'm just going to draw a line across here. What I saw was that what this shape is, is an isosceles triangle. A triangle that has two sides that are equal in length. It has a base that is different. But also I know that this angle in here is 30 degrees because you can see when it's used in the grid pattern here, that each of these angles is going to be 60 degrees because there's six lines that bisect a single point. They have to, because there are 360 degrees in a circle, by default, these angles all have to be 60 degrees. Well, if this angle is 60 degrees, then this bit has to be 30 degrees. It's half of that angle. What I did was I said, I've got a triangle here, its base is of 100 because I know that's the width of the artboard and I know that this angle is 30 degrees. I need to go and do the math to calculate the height here. What I did was I went to the Web and I found an isosceles triangle calculator. What you do here is you tell it what you've got, and I had the base and I had an angle. From this drop-down list, I selected base and base angle. I know that my base, the width of the bottom of my isosceles triangle was 100 and I know that the base angle was 30 degrees. All I did was type those values in here and click Execute. What this site does is it gives me the height of this triangle as this number here. It's 28.8675 and a whole lot of other numbers. But really all I'm interested in is about the first three or four of those numbers. Let's go back to shape though. What we've got now is this height here. Well, the height of our rectangle just has to be double the height that we got from that calculator. By the way, I'm going to give you that calculator's link in the class project area. All I had to do was multiply it by two. I got out my calculator and I put in 28.8675, multiplied it by 2 and I got 57.735. That told me how big my little rectangle needed to be so I made a rectangle, 100 wide by 57.735 tall. Now, for some people, the math of that is going to be quite complex and probably not something that you would really want to do. You're quite easily able to make an isometric grid now from the dimensions I've given you. But for other people who want the grid to look a little bit different then that's how I did it. How I made the calculations to work out exactly how tall this rectangle had to be for it to work for my grid. Your project for this class is going to be to create one or more of the grids that I've shown you in the class, the lines or the grids, and to post a image of your grid in the class project area. If you want to create printables, then you may want to go ahead and do something similar to what I've done here and create a printable sheet so that you could then, for example, sell these printable grids on Etsy or some other website. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and you've learned something about creating lines and grids in Illustrator as well as how to put things together to create printables. If you did enjoy this class and when you say a prompt to recommend this class to others, please give it a thumbs up. This is really important for me. It helps other people who are interested in Illustrator to say that this is a class that they might want to view. Just a single click is all I ask. Please do it. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read all of your comments and I respond to all of them. I also look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon. 5. Extra Video - Save Pattern Swatches: This isn't an additional video to show you how if you create patterns like this, you can actually put them in a file that you can then distribute to others. I have a series of patterns in this file from this class. I also have an isometric grid and some stripes. I'm going to create a brand new file here, just file new, and I'm just going to make it whatever size appears here, it doesn't really matter what size it is. Now, I'm going to take things like the stripes pattern with me. So I'm going to select this shack that's in it. I'm going to choose edit copy, and I'm going to start building these patterns up in this new document, so I'll choose Edit, Paste. Now the reason why I'm doing this is not because I want this shape in the document, it's because I want this pattern here in the document. As soon as I've got the shape in here, the pattern gets added to the Swatches palette and I can actually delete this shape because I don't need it any longer and you can see that the pattern stays there. I'm going to go and get all these additional patterns with me. Here's a striped pattern. Again, edit copy. I'm going to paste it in here. I'm just using the paste shortcut. The patterns being added here so I can get rid of it. I'm going to do that with the other files that I have open here. Once I'm done with this, I have a new document with nothing in it, but I do have some action over here in the Swatches palette. I've actually got the pattern paces that I want to use and I'm just going to make the list a little bit large. I'm going to enlarge some now view so we can see what's going on here. What I want to do is to remove everything that is not these patterns. I'm going to grab this color group and I'm going to drag and drop it onto the trash can here, and then this one too because I don't need the color groups. I also don't need any of this. I'm going to select the last pattern that was illustrators. I'm going to Shift click on this first color here. I need to leave in the none and the registration because you can't actually remove those, but you can remove everything else. I'm going to click on the trash can and say yes to deleting that Swatch selection. Now I have left behind only my pattern swatches. That's all I've got left here. I'm going to click the flyout menu and choose Save Swatch Library as AI, and I can save it now. I'm going to call this grids. Now that's saved as an AI file in the location that illustrator expects it to be in. So when we create a new document, we're able to go and get those patterns. Let's just create a new document. I can get those patterns to add to the swatch by clicking the flyout menu. Use Open Swatch Library user-defined, and then I'll go and get my grids pattern. Here are my grids pattern. All I need to do is to click on each of these in turn, and as I click on each of them, they are being added to the Swatches palette. As soon as they're all in there, they now accessible to this document. Now the other way that you can approach this is to provide an AI file to somebody they will have access to these patterns from. All you need to do is to save this file here, and you could save this to just any folder and then distributed. The beauty of doing it this way is that the swatches are available to this new document. Nothing else is here, nothing that you don't want to be providing someone with. It also allows you access to saving this file a the location of your choice. You just go into file save and just save it as an AI file and then you can distribute it. The fact that there's nothing in the document is a material, the patterns are all stored in it. The only thing that you might want to do if you're actually distributing this as a pattern swatch file to someone, is perhaps putting here a little textual note explaining what it is that you've done and say, open up the swatches panel and you'll say the patterns because otherwise it might be unclear to somebody when they open the document and they say that there's nothing here, that there is in fact something here. It's just that it's in the swatches panel and not an object on the art board. I hope that that's helped you understand how you can package patterns up either to save them for your own use or package them up for distribution to others.