Poster Design: Screen Print Poster Effect In Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction: Hello, and welcome to this poster design class. In this class, we are going to take a look at how we can create a screen print poster effect. Now, this effect can give your poster design a tactile human quality with plenty of color and creative flare. So here I am an illustrator, and these are some posters I created earlier. In this class, we will be looking at creating posters for a fictional zoo to promote some of the star wildlife on offer, where we will be using photography, typography, grid, and graphic images as part of the poster design. This class is divided into two parts. In the first part, we are going to learn how to create a eotone effect in Illustrator to help us craft the screen print effect. And then in the second part, we are going to learn how to use it as part of a complete poster design. After this class, you will be able to create a screen print poster effect like this in Adobe Illustrator super easy. So let's get into it. 2. Part 1 - Create a Duotone Effect In Adobe Illustrator: In this first video of this class, I'm going to show you how to create a really impactful 00 tone effect in Illustrator. This is going to be the effect we use later in the poster design. So before we get into that, it will help to understand how to generate this effect first. Now, this effect is usually done in photoshop, but guess what? It's actually super easy to pull off in Illustrator, too. And once you have this set up, it's even easier than photoshop to edit and explore color combinations. We're also going to add a half tone effect to give the overall effect a bold graphic look that's perfect for adding some creative flair. Whether you're a beginner or a pro, stick around because this tutorial is going to make your design game even stronger. So let's get into it. So here I am an illustrator, and these are some duotone image effects I have created earlier. Here you can see many color variations you can create. If I zoom in here and scroll across, you can see that in this instance, I have the effect applied to some wildlife imagery. Also, above my samples, I have an easy to access color palette with lots of high contrast samples, which makes it very easy to pick some combinations to use. Also, I have all these colors saved in the swatches panel ready to use. Here, I have a vast amount of colors and combinations I have placed together to make this easy to use and also save me a lot of time. In this video tutorial, we are going to look at how we can create six unique uotone color effects. We are going to use this image of a pug and convert it into a uotone effect in Illustrator. If you want to take a closer look at this illustrated document with all the samples and also get the Duotone Swatch library file and the pug image to follow along, you can acquire it in the project section of this class. Step one, document setup. To begin, I'm going to set up a document. I'll come up to file new, I'll hit print, then come over and set my Canvas size. For this tutorial, I'm going to set up a custom size document to demonstrate the effect. I'll set the units to pixels, I'll type in 1,000 for width and 1,000 for height. For R boards, I'm going to set this to six, I'm going to leave the color mode set to CMYK, and I'll explain why shortly. And with that set, I'll click Okay. Next, I'll come into my artboards panel, hit the menu, hit the rearrange all artboards, and I'll set this to three columns with a spacing of 200 pixels, and click Okay. Step two prep colors. So with my document set up, the first thing I'm going to do is source some colors. To make this easy, I can do one of two things. I can come into my previous document, which I prepared earlier. Select all the colors, copy them, come into my new document, and just paste them all in, and position them above my Canvas area, like so. Or I can open the Guo Tone Swatch palette. Once you have downloaded the swatch file, simply come up to swatches, click the menu, down to Open Swatch Library, click O. Navigate to the Guo Tone samples and click Okay, and you should see them in their own panel, like so. For now, I'm just going to drag this into my side menu. Step three, set the base layer. Once I have my colors ready, I'm going to come over to the Tools menu, grab the rectangle shape tool, come into the first Canvas area, and just draw a box to fill the canvas area like so. Next, I'll press eye on the keyboard to activate the eye dropper tool, and I'll come and select a color from one of my samples above, and here I'll start with this light yellow, or I'll come into my Duotone Swatch library and click on a light yellow. And that will create my base layer. So with my first shape selected with the selection tool, I'll press command plus x on MAC or control plus x on PC to cut, and then I'll press command plus Alt plus shift plus V on MAC or control plus t plus shift on V on PC, and that will then paste my layer back and also duplicate it across every artboard. Next, I'm going to select each new shape with the selection tool and press eye to activate the eye dropper and select a different base color from above. Or simply click each shape and select a base color from the uo Tone Swatch library. And just like that, I've set up six background tones super easy. Next, I'll jump into the layers panel. Double click on my new layer and call this base. So once I have a light color applied to each shape, it's time to source and prep the image. Step four prep the image. For this demonstration, I'm going to use this image of a happy little pug. Now, the only drawback about this effect is that to create it, you're going to need a black and white image of a subject and for it to be cut out. To create this effect properly, we're going to need to prepare a high contrast black and white image set on a white or transparent background. Now, this isn't easy to come by, so we're going to need to use photoshop. So let's see how we can do this. So here I am in Photoshop, and I have the image of the pug ready. What I can do here is come over to the rectangle Marquee tool. I'll draw a selection around it, and up in the Control panel, I'll click Select and Mask. With the Quick Selection tool active, up in the Control panel, again, I'll click Select Subject, and Photoshop will do its best to select the pug. In this case, because there is fur involved, I'll also hit the refined hair button. With a refined selection, I can click in the bottom right corner, and a selection will be made around the pug. With the new selection, I can come over to the Layers panel, and at the bottom, I can click the Add layer mask button. Upon clicking, I have now added a layer mask and cut out the pug. Perfect. Next, I'm going to come to the bottom of the layers panel and hit the adjustment layer and select black and white. Back down to the adjustments layer, again, this time, I'm going to add a levels adjustment layer, and I'm going to tweak it to punch out some of the blacks. Now, keep in mind, you have to be really careful when you toggle the levels. You want to avoid oversaturating the blacks and whites. The goal here is to get as much contrast as possible, but at the same time, maintain as much detail as possible. The download folder that comes with the Duotone Swatch library and the pug image, you will also find a PSD with a contrast sample. If you open this, you can see a good example of the type of contrast you want to aim for. Try and get some solid blacks in certain details and maintain some gray shades. Try not to push the contrast so much that you get a lot of pure white and blacks as this will impact the effect that we will get later on. What I always try and do is get some rich blacks with some lighter tones and some nice grays. For example, here in the eyes, I have some solid blacks and I have maintained some of the detail in the face. If I push this up too much, there will be too much black and we will lose detail. On the left here is what you want to strike for. Once happy, I'll press command A on Mac or control A on PC, dislect all. Then I'll press command plus shift plus C on Mac or Control plus shift plus C on PC to copy everything. Then I'll hop back into Illustrator, come over to the lays panel, hit the plus icon off the bottom to create a new layer, and I'll name this image. I'll paste to bring in my pug image, and I'll scale down to place on my first Canvas area like so. Step five, apply uotone effect. Next, we want to turn this pug into a color. What we're going to do next is use this image as a mask. With the image selected, I'm going to come over to the image trace panel, click on the drop down and hit shades of gray. This is just going to take the raster image and convert it into vectors. Once this has been processed, I can come up to the control panel and click Expand. Then I'll select the direct selection tool, click and drag over one of the corner points and just press Delete to remove the white space from around it. Next, I'll just come to my base layer and select the base layer beneath my image. I'll copy this. Then I'll click back on my image layer and press Command plus Shift plus V on MAC to paste in place. And this will place the shape on top of my pug image. I'll right click, scroll down to arrange and set this to back. With the shape still selected, I'll press ei to activate the eye dropper and come and select a darker tone from my colors above, or select a color from the uo Tone Swatch library. Then I'll just come over to the layers panel, hit the lock icon on the base layer. With the selection tool, I'll click and drag over my two new layers to select them both, and then over in the transparency panel, I'll click M mask. And then I'll hit the invert mask button. This will then use the black and white vector image of the pug as a mask for the color layer, and now we can see the eotone effect has been applied. Now, with the mask layer selected, in the transparency panel, I'll then come up to effect, scroll down to Pixelate, then come and select color half tone. For the Max radius, I'll hit 15 and click k, and that will apply a nice half tone effect. Keep in mind, if we come to the appearance panel, we'll be able to click back into the half tone effect and change the Max radius to toggle the complexity of the half tone effect. For example, I'll just set this to 25, but for my case, this is a bit too much. I'll pop this back to 15, and in the transparency panel, I'll click on the left thumbnail and click off to D select, and that is our eotone effect applied. You may be wondering, why did I set this document to CMYK and not RGB. A quick note on this. What I have found is that when applying this half tone effect in RGB, the dot effects don't look as intended. For example, if I come over and change the color mode to RGB, we can see that the half tone effect appears quite different with a lot of overlapping dots. But if I come back and change it to CMYK, the half tone effect is applied there the way I would prefer. I have found that the best results when using this effect is to do it in the color mode of CMYK. Step six create color permutations. Now, applying color permutations is really easy and quick. Check this out. If we click back on the pug, this time press t to cut, then press command plus Alt plus shift plus V on MAC or Control plus Alt plus shift plus V on PC, we can then paste back and duplicate across each artboard. Then I can easily select the next pug. Make sure the left thumbnail is selected in the transparency panel, press e to activate the eye dropper tool, and simply select a new color from above or from the oton Swatch library, and that will change the color. I'll press V to activate the selection tool, select the next pug, press I to activate the eye dropper tool, and click another color from above, or choose another color from the eatone Swatch library, and I'll do this for each pug. And soon I have six different versions of the same pug, but with different eotone effects applied. If I want to change the combination, I can do one of two things. I can either click to unlock the base layer and click to lock the image layer. Select one of the squares on the base layer, press I to activate the eye dropper tool, and simply select a base layer color or choose a color from the Duotone Swatch library. Lock the base layer, select the image layer and choose another color. Or I can unlock the base layer and the image layer, and with the selection tool, I can select them both, come up to edit, come down to edit color, then across to recolor artwork. Upon click, a menu will appear, and we can then toggle the handles on the color wheel. As you do this, you will see the Guotone effect change. We can also come up to generative color, click on the prompts, and Illustrator will generate some additional color combinations we can choose from. Step seven, apply gradient effect. Now, this duotone effect doesn't just work on solid colors. It can also work really well with gradients, too. So now, if we come to the base layer and lock the image there, we can select a base layer and choose a gradient from above. And if we come and click on the gradient tool in the menu, we can click and drive to change the direction. And depending on which gradient we use, we will also need to come and click the image and change the tone. Step eight, export samples. So once you have your samples, you're going to want to export them. To do this, we can come up to file, down to Export, and choose export for screens. Upon click, a menu will appear, and from here, we can choose which artboards we would like to export. Here we can export all or choose a range. For the format, I like to push this up to get lots of detail, so I'll push this up to times four. I'll set the format to PNG, choose a destination to export, click Export, and there I'll have my images ready to use elsewhere. And if we look at these in photoshop, we can see that we have lots of detail in the half tone effect. Perfect. That is how you can create a otone half tone effect in Adobe Illustrator. Now we know how to create the effect. We can now move into the next video where we will look at how we can set up a poster design and use this effect to create a screen print effect in Adobe Illustrator. 3. Part 2 - Create a Screen Print Poster Effect In Adobe Illustrator : Hello, and welcome to the second video in this class. In this video, we are going to take a look at how we can create a screen print poster effect using the duotone effect. In this video, I'll demonstrate how to use the tools of Illustrator to create this poster design specifically, and later we will look how to make some variations. To create this poster in Illustrator, we are going to cover the following key steps. This is a methodical process that will ensure we create quality poster designs and not leave anything unchecked. This video, you will be able to create a screen pin poster effect like this in Adobe Illustrator, super easy. So let's get into it. So here I am an illustrator, and these are some dynamic posters I created earlier using the techniques I'm about to demonstrate. If I come up to view and hit trim view, we can clearly see each board. Down below, I have six unique poster designs focusing on one particular animal, and you could also see other options where I have explored other color permutations. If I come back up to view and hit trim view, we can see what's in the pasteboard area. Next to each poster design, you can see the color swatches applied to the design, and to the left, you can see the steps that I have taken to produce the screen print effect. So for these poster designs, I have used a simple stroke grid which divides the composition into modules where I have placed the contents. And for each poster composition, I have explored a different stroke arrangement. If I press command plus colon on MAC or control plus colon on PC, I can toggle on and off the guides, and you can see the grid system that I used to structure the stroke grid. The first step was to establish the grid for the design, then position all visual elements inside the grid, then prepare and process the image ready for the design, then incorporate it all into a poster design and apply color. With a complete poster setup, I then explored other color permutations. Working in steps like this will make the whole process easier and also true to the real screen printing process. Typically, in screen printing, each part of a design is prepared on its own mesh screen and applied to a canvas individually with their own paint color. Each color will be printed down onto a canvas one at a time in a particular order, which can create a simple yet bold graphic outcome. Also, when applying paint with a mesh screen, it's common to get subtle half tone effects. What's nice about screen printing is that it has a tactile effect to it, where there are certain imperfections which make it feel more organic and less digital. For our poster design, we are going to follow a similar process to screen printing, to prepare each layer separately, then apply them in order and use some simple effects to simulate a real screen print effect. We are going to look at how to create this poster design with the flamingo and then look at how we can easily create other versions. If you want to take a look at these poster designs, you can access the illustrated document in the class project folder. Link is in the project section of this class. Step one, research, and inspiration. When creating a poster design, it can really help to undertake some initial research. This can give you some inspiration if you're not sure what you want to create, and can also be good if you already have an idea in mind for a particular theme or style to research further. To gather research, I like to save found images or take pictures when I'm out and about. As of late, I have been gathering all my found research in Figma, where I can paste all my research and see it all in one huge board. I find this to be an amazing platform to save research, but that's a topic for another video. Another good source of inspiration is Pinterest. So here I am on Pinterest, and here I have a board I have created that contains a lot of screen print poster designs. Here we can see lots of examples of the kind of effects you can get with screen printing. Here, there's lots of bold compositions with bold typography and images with colors that overlap and blend together. Also, we can see the type of color choices that have been made. Here we have lots of vibrant contrasting colors. If you want to take a look at this board, you can find the link in the description, or you can take a closer look at some of these references. So when working with poster design, it can help to look for some inspiration to get you started. So let's now look at how we can develop a poster like this. Step two, document setter. In Illustrator, to begin, I'm going to set up a new document. I'll come up to file new and select document. Now, on this occasion, I'm going to use a standard print size document. So on the top tab, I'll click Print. I'll click view O presets. I'll select A three. Over on the right, I'll make sure my orientation is set to portrait. I'll set the units to millimeters. I'll set my bleed to 3 millimeters, and I'll do this because some printers like a three millimeter bleed when sending off to print, so I'll do this at the start. I'll set my color to CMYK and make sure my raster is set to 300 and click Create. And up will pop my new document. May be wondering why I set this to CMYK, well, I'll be touching on this shortly for a very good reason. So here we have our new document set up, and you can see around the outside, we have the bleed line. Now, for those of you that don't know what this is, this is where you extend your artwork off the Canvas area. So when a printer cuts the artwork, they can trim a little off so you don't get white edges. Again, if I press command plus colon on Mac or control plus colon on PC, I can toggle on and off the guides to toggle on and off the bleed line. Now, if you're following along, make sure you can see your control panel at the top of your UI. If not, come up to window and make sure there is a tick next to control. You're also going to need to have your swatches and layers panel visible, so make sure to come up to window and click these to activate and have them to hand. In this instance, I have a lot of panels down here on the side. That's our document set up, and before we continue, I'd like to save it. I'll come up to file, save as, and save this document to my computer. Okay. Let's take the first step in the process and set up the grid. Step three, base grid set up. For this poster design, we are going to use a modular stroke grid to compartmentalize the visual elements. To create this stroke grid, we are first going to need an underlying modular grid to base it on. The first step is to set up the base grid to help structure the stroke grid. To begin, I want to establish my margin space. I'll come over to the shape tool, grab the rectangle tool and draw a box to the full size of the Canvas area. Next, I'll come up to object, path, and click offset path. When the menu appears, I'll type in -15, set mita limit to zero, and click k, and this will reduce the size of the box by 15 mill. Now I know there is a 15 mill margin around my Canvas area. Now, keep in mind when you do this, you will also duplicate the shape layer. So with the selection tool, be careful to click the original shape behind and remove it, so we are only left with the smaller shape. Okay, now to set the grid. With my shape selected, I'll come up to object, down to path, come across and select split into grid. Upon click, a menu will appear. First, I'll click on preview, and up in the rows, I'll set this to 14. In the columns, I'll set this to five. In this instance, I'll leave the gutter set to zero. Notice now how the grid is set into the shape. Once happy, I'll click Okay. Now, this is where the magic happens. With the block still selected, I'll come up to view, scroll down to guides, come across and select make guides. Upon click, we will now transform the block into guides, which we can now use for our poster design. To finish, I'll come over to the layers panel. Double click on the top layer, name this to base grid. And if I press either command plus colon on Mac or Control plus colon on PC, we can toggle on and off the guides. Perfect. This is a simple modular grid, which I'm now going to use to construct the stroke grid. Step four, stroke grid setup. Next, I'm going to come into the layers panel, hit the plus icon at the bottom of the layers panel to create a new layer. I'll drag this below my base grid layer and name this stroke grid, and for now, I'll hit the lock icon on my base grid layer. Looking back at my poster compositions, we can see that I used a variety of stroke grid approaches. For this one, I'm going to use a grid where there's a relatively large module on the left and smaller modules for me to place content in on the right. Back into my document, I'll come over to the tools menu and grab the rectangle tool. In this instance, I want to be really precise, so I'll press command plus Y on Mac or control plus Y on PC. And this will put us into outline mode. I'll press command plus zero on Mac or Control plus zero on PC, which will fit my Canvas to my window height so I can get a better look. I'll come to the top left corner of my base grid, click and drag and come down across three modules and release at the bottom like Z. Next, I'll come to the top, right, click and drag down across two columns and down five rows like Z. I'll press V to activate the selection tool, then click and drag my new module down while pressing ult plus shift to drag it down in a straight line and duplicate. I'll be very careful to position this approximately on top of my previous module. Next, I'll zoom in here to be precise. I'll come over and grab the rectangle tool, and this time, I'll click on the bottom right and drag up across one column to draw a module. I'll press V to activate the selection tool. Then click and drag my new module up while pressing Alt plus shift to drag it up in a straight line and duplicate. And I'll be very careful to position this approximately on top of my previous module. I'll press V to activate the selection tool. Then I'll click and drag over my two new modules, and with them both selected, I'll click and drag them left while holding Alt plus shift to drag them across in a straight line and duplicate. And I'll be very careful to position this approximately on top of my previous modules. With my final modules in place, I can come over to the Layers panel and click the visibility off for the base grid. And now I should be able to see the outlines of my stroke grid. And in this instance, I'm going to make sure that all the lines are perfectly set on top of each other. I'll press command plus y to go back into normal mode, and with the selection tool, I'm going to click and drag over all my new modules. I'll come to the bottom of the tools menu, make sure the stroke is selected. I'll make sure in the Swatch panel, this is set to black and in my stroke panel, I'll set this to five. Over in the layers panel, I'll click back to see the visibility of the base grid, and here we can see how the stroke grid has been created on top of the base grid. Next, I want to look at how I'm going to bring in the type to include in this poster design. Now, for this particular process, I'm going to duplicate this grid. I'm going to leave a copy of this grid on its own artboard, because later on, when I create other variations, I'm going to want to focus on this grid separately. So I'll come into the Lays panel and click off the Lock icon. I'll come up to view down to guides and make sure that the guides are unlocked. I'll come over to the Tools panel, select the artboard tool, come across, click on my artboard and drag right while holding Alt plus shift to duplicate the artboard across in a straight line. And now I can begin to focus on working with type. Depending on your design, sometimes it can be easier to start with the image element of the poster and then build up from there. But for this poster design, the grid and type is going to create the main structure of the poster design. To begin, I'm going to start with the type elements first and then work with the image after. Step five, working with type. So looking back at my final poster designs, we can see how the type is composed. In the larger module of the stroke grid, we have the headline text along with some outline text. In the smaller stroke boxes, I have placed in the subhead, the paragraph text, and then in the smaller modules in the grid, I have placed in some footer elements, and below the grid, I have also included some further footer elements. Using the stroke grid creates a very straightforward but very clear visual hierarchy. From afar, the eye may be drawn to the colorful animal in the background, but then when the eye looks to view the type, the eye is first drawn to the biggest space in the stroke grid to view the main headline. And then naturally, the eyes will move across to the smaller boxes in order. The primary hook will be the big, colorful animal. The secondary hook will be the largest type in the largest module space, and then the supportive elements will work in the smaller modules. Let's start by bringing in the large type element into the first module space. To start, I'll come over into the layers panel. With the stroke grid layer selected, I'll click the plus icon at the bottom of the lays panel to add a new layer. I'll rename this layer to type, and I'll make sure to drag this one down to the bottom and hit the lock icon on the grid layer above as to not accidentally select anything. To begin, I'll start with the headline text. With my type layer selected, we can come to the tools menu, select a type tool and click and drag and then release on the poster. Upon release, this will create a paragraph of type. Right now, I have a default fontap, but that's okay. I'm not going to worry about that too much right now. For the content, I'm going to jump into the poster content doc I have created for this tutorial. To access this content doc, you can find the link in the class project description. On the page for the poster one content, I'll copy the headline type, the Flamingo, who's pretty in pink, then back into Illustrator, I'll select all the type in the paragraph, and I'll paste it in. And now we have our first bit of type. Now, depending on your default properties, here I'll push the type up to start working with it. On this occasion, I'll set the font to size 70 points, and click and drag the frame down and out to see my type. So with my first piece of type in the poster, I quickly want to change the typeface for this. At this point, I could use any typeface, but I already have an idea of what I want to work with. So these posters are for a zoo. The type of font I want to use for this poster design will need to have an earthy natural quality. At the same time, I'd like a font with a bit of character and flare. For this poster design, I'm going to use the font Bogista, which I think is a good example for a few reasons. I like the organic quality the typeface has. To me, it feels earthy and natural. With some creative flare. The font feels a little Bohemian and vintage, which I think would work well to give character to the design, and it also has a good weight to it, which will work well as part of my screen print effect. Now, this is a free font, which you can get your hands on right now. In the content dock, you will see a page with the link to this font with some other choices. If you want to explore some other natural fonts, you can also check out the GDS font book where I have a curated list of the best free Earthy fonts online. Back in Illustrator, I'll select the type and up in the font selector, I'll type in bookisa, and apply the font. On this occasion, I'll come into the character panel and hit the all caps button. Before I move on, I just want to correctly format my type and position it. For my headline, I want this to sit in the bottom left, so I'll drag it down. I'll come into the character panel and set the leading to 75, and I'll add my line breaking like so and place it in the bottom left. Now, on this occasion, I feel like the typeface tracking is a little tight, so I'll come into the character panel and set this to 20. Now, looking back at my final poster design, in the large module, I also included a piece of type just to add a bit more visual dynamic to the overall design. Each poster design is about a star animal. So there will be a piece of type to introduce the name. I'll copy the name, and then back into Illustrator, with a selection tool, I'll click on my head of type. And while pressing Alt, I'll click and drag up to the top of my module to quickly duplicate. I'll double click into the headline text, select all and paste. And with the selection tool, I'll click on my new text. I'll come into the character panel and set the font to 60. And over in the Tools menu, I'll hit the swap fill and stroke color to apply a stroke effect to the type and make sure the stroke size is set to one. Next, I'm going to place in the subheader. Back into the content doc, I'll copy the subhead. Then back into Illustrator with the selection tool, I'll click on my header text. And while pressing Alt, I'll click and drag up and across to quickly duplicate. I'll double click into the header text, select all and paste. So with the selection tool, I'll click on my new text paragraph. I'll come into the character panel and set the font to 35 points and set the leading to 40 points, and then click and drag on the Bower box to set the type ragging like so. Now, I'm going to want to position this text neatly inside the box. To do this is quite straightforward. So first with the selection tool, I'm going to grab my type element. I'm going to place the top left hand corner of the bounding box in the top left hand corner of the module space. Then I'll click and drag the bottom right anchor point on the type box down to the bottom right of the module, essentially filling the paragraph bounding box to that module space. Next, I'll come up to the control panel and click on the drop down for the vertical type alignment and select center. Then down in the paragraph panel, I'll come into the indent and add 8 millimeters for left, and this will set my type nicely inside the module space. Easy. To be consistent with our spacing, I'm going to come back to the headline type. I'll click on my headline with the selection tool. I'll come up to the control panel and click on the Drop Down for vertical type alignment. And this time, select bottom. Down in the paragraph panel, I'll add eight millimeter indent to the left. I'll place my box against the edge of the module space. Now, unfortunately, in Illustrator, there isn't an indent for the bottom of the type frame. I'm just going to have to use my eye and place this at the bottom like so. For now. Again, I'll do the same for the top type. Down in the paragraph panel, I'll add a eight millimeter indent to the left. I'll place the box against the edge of the module space, and use my eye to position at the top like so. Next, I'm going to place in the paragraph text. Back into my content doc, I'll copy the paragraph. Then back into Illustrator with the selection tool. I'll click on my subhead text and my pressing Alt plus shift. I'll click and drag down and place neatly in the space below. I'll double click into the text, select all and paste. So the selection tool, I'll click on my new paragraph. I'll come into the character panel and set the font size to 20 points and set the leading to 25 points and click to deactivate all caps. And then click and drag on the bounding box to adjust the type dragging like so, and the paragraph is set perfectly into the module space. Easy. So now it's just a case of adding the extra elements into the bottom modules. Now this can be done using the same technique. With a selection tool, I'm going to click on my paragraph type. I'm going to click and drag down while holding Alt to duplicate and set the type box to fill the module space, back into the content dock, I'll copy the extra element one, then back into Illustrator, double click into the text, select all and paste. With the selection tool, I'll click on my new paragraph. I'll come into the character panel and set the font size to 15 points and set the leading to 19 points. Again, I'll click and drag across while holding Alt to duplicate, back into the content dock, I'll copy the second extra element, back into Illustrator, I'll double click into the next text. Select all and paste, click and drag the text box across, while holding all to duplicate, back into the content dock, I'll copy the third extra element, back into Illustrator, I'll double click into the text, select A and paste, and that will place the three extra elements into the module spaces. For the last module, in here, I'll place a logo. To do this, I'm going to open a file. I'll press command plus O on MAC or Control plus O on PC to open and navigate to the download folder, into the images folder, into the logo folder, and I'll open the zootopia logo black dot EPS. Since we are working Illustrator and working in vector, it's easy to paste in another vector element to give us the flexibility to change the color later on. With the selection tool, I'll select the logo, copy and jump back into my poster and paste. And the logo will now be placed into the document. I'll come to the far right, middle anchor point, press and hold both ult and shift, and click and drag inwards to scale the vector logo down like so, and I'll simply place it in the bottom right module space. Easy. So now for the last foota elements, looking back at my finished designs, we can see that I have put the web address and telephone number at the bottom of the poster outside of the modules. These are quite small though wide pieces of text, so won't fit comfortably in the modules. So it's best that I put them down here in the footer outside of the grid. However, I'll still align them. So with the selection tool, I'll click on one of my new paragraphs. I'll click and drag across while holding alt to duplicate and down to the bottom left. Into the paragraph text, I'll remove the left indent by selecting this and setting it to zero. Back into the content dock, I'll copy the footer element one, B into Illustrator, I'll double click into the text and select all and paste, and position the frame in the space correctly. I'll click and drag across while holding all to duplicate and align with the stroke grid. B into the content dock, I'll copy the Foota element two, back into Illustrator, I'll double click into the text, select all and paste. So this now creates one of the layers that I'm going to use in this screenprint effect. I was to do this in real life, I would use this black and white layer with the text and grid on its own screen print mesh. I would use this mesh to lay down one solid color. So with the layer complete, I can look at the next layer. Step six, working with image. Looking back at my final designs, we can see that for this poster, I want to include an image of a flamingo in the background. And if I zoom in here, we can see that it has a half tone effect applied, which gives that screen print look and feel. In my document, I'm going to come over to the artboard panel and click to add a blank artboard. With the artboard tool, I'll click and drag it across like so. Once we have our grid and type setup, the next step is to bring in an image and add the half tone effect. Now we are going to use the effect we learnt in the first video. If you want to know more about how to do this in Illustrator, then you can check back to the first video to watch a more in depth tutorial. So in the download folder, you will find a folder called images. In here are the original images we have been provided for the poster designs. If you want to learn more about how to prepare these images ready to bring into Illustrator to apply the duotone effect, you can find out more in the dedicated Duotone Illustrated tutorial. However, for the sake of this video, I'm going to use the images in the sample folder. In the sample folder, we will see images I have prepared earlier. And if we click on each one of these, we will see that they are black and white high contrast images. For now in Illustrator, I'm going to come over to the Layers panel and click the plus icon at the bottom to add a new layer, and I'll name this images and drag to the bottom. Then I'll press command plus shift plus P to place an image. I'll navigate to the download folder, and in this instance, I'm going to bring in the Flamingo image, and I'll just draw and place into my new board like so. So with the image selected, I'm going to come over into the image trace panel and click on the drop down and hit shades of gray. This is just going to take the rest of image and convert it into vectors. Once this has been processed, I'll come up to the control panel and click Expand. Then with the direct selection tool, I'll just click and drag over the corner anchor and press delete two times to remove the white area from around it. With my vector image selected, I'll come up to effect, scroll down to Pixelate, then come across and select color half tone. For Max radius, I'll type in eight and click, and that will apply a nice half tone effect. Now, keep in mind if we come up to the appearance panel, we will be able to click back into the half tone effect and change the Max radiance to toggle the complexity of the half tone. For example, I'll hit this to 25, but for my case, that's a bit much, so I'll pop this back to eight, and that is our duotone effect applied. Now, this brings me to why I set the document up to CMYK earlier. What I found is that when applying this half tone effect in RGB, the dot effect does not look as intended. For example, if I come over and change the color mode to RGB, we can see that the half tone effect appears quite different with a lot of overlapping dots. But if I come back and change this to CMYK, the half tone effect is applied the way I would prefer. So I have found that the best results when using this effect is to do it with the color mode set to CMYK. So this now creates the second layer that I'm going to use in this screen print effect. If I was to do this in real life, I would use this black and white image on its own screen print mesh, and I would use this mesh to lay down one solid color. So up to this point, we have been working to get all of our visual elements into the document to create our two layers. With my image prepared on its own artboard, I'll again come over to the poor panel and click to add a new blank artboard, and with the pod tool, I'll just click and drag it across. With the two layers complete, I can now look to bring them all together on this new artboard. Step seven, working with color. So for my poster design, I don't have any specific colors planned. What I'm going to do is start with an initial color approach, and later on we can toggle them to explore more color options. Back in my final poster design, we can see that above each design, I have a color palette for each poster, which I have prepared earlier. What I'll do here is just come and select my color palette on top of my first design, and I'll come into my new document, paste it and place it above for reference. Also, upon pasting my new pallete into my document, I'll see up in the Swatches panel, I have three new swatches. Nice. Now, as well as copied and paste in my color palette from my previous design, I can also open a swatch library I have prepared earlier. In the download folder, you will see a folder call Swatches. In there will be a swatches library file called uo Tone Swatch library. If we come into the Swatches panel, Click on the menu. We can come down to Open Swatch library, scroll down and click O. Here I'll navigate to the download folder and open my eo Tone Swatch library. And upon click, we will see a range of base light tones and darker top tones I can use for my color choices. Using this can save you a lot of time when selecting good color combination options. So to begin, I'm going to come into the Layers panel. Lock every layer apart from the stroke grid and type layer. I'll zoom out here so I can see my artboards. With the selection tool, I'll click and drag over my type and stroke grid, and this will select all the visual elements. I'll press Alt plus shift on Mac, Alt plus Shift on PC, and click and drag across into my new artboard, keeping the visual elements on their respective layer and position carefully like so. So I'm going to set my elements on this layer to monochrome. So I'll come into the layers panel and just hit the lock on every layer apart from the type layer. I'll click and drag with my selection tool to select all the type. In the bottom of the tools menu, I'll make sure the foreground color is selected, and in the swatches panel, I'll set this to blue. Or I could select a color for my Duotone swatch library. In the layers panel, I'll hit the lock on the type and release the lock on the stroke grid. I'll click and drag with my selection tool to select all of my grid. In the bottom of the tools menu, I'll make sure the stroke color is selected, and in the swatches panel, I'll set this to blue, and that's the first layer sorted. Next, I want to bring in the base layer. Right now it's set to white, but for a more vibrant authentic look and feel, I would like a more beige background paper effect. I'll come into the lays panel. With the image layer selected, I'll hit the plus icon at the bottom of the lays panel to add a new layer. I'll name this layer base and drag it to the bottom. I'll make sure all the layers above are locked, and with the base layer selected, I'll come into the menu and grab the rectangle tool. Carefully draw a rectangle from the top left corner of the bleed down to the bottom, right bleed line. The tools menu, I'll make sure the foreground color is selected, and the stroke is set to transparent, and come and click on my base swatch to set the color. So with the base layer in place, I can now bring in the image. So I'll come into the layers panel and apply a lock to each layer apart from the image layer. With the selection tool, I'll click on the image, press and hold alt plus shift and drag across and place it into my Canvas area and position and scale, like so. So the image I've chosen for this composition isn't just any image. As we can see, the large module is on the left hand side. So I've been careful to choose an image which leans into the module as a point of focus. For this composition, I have a side view of a flamingo. The body is down in the bottom right, but its head comes up and enters into the frame on the left, which is going to make for a nice balanced composition, which is easy to comprehend and has synergy with the stroke grid. This image is going with the flow of the composition and not fighting against the top layer. Once my image is in place, it's now time to apply the color effect. To do this, I'll come over to the tools menu. I'll grab the rectangle tool and just drag from the top left corner down to the bottom right corner of my poster design covering the image. And in the tools menu, with the fill color selected, I'll come into the Swatches panel and set my pink color. Right now, this color layer is on top of the image. I'm going to need to get this below the image. So I'll right click, come to arrange and sent it back, and the color layer will go behind the image. With the selection tool, I'll click and drag over the new color shape and my image. With them both selected, I'll come into the transparency panel and click make mask. Once applied, I'll click the invert mask button in the transparency panel, and what we have done there is essentially use our black and white half tone image to create a mask on top of the colored shape. Now, to enhance the true screen print effect, I'll come to the layers panel. I'll apply the lock to each layer apart from the stroke grid and the type. With the selection tool, I'll click and drag over all the grid and type to select it all. Down in the transparency panel, I'll click the drop down for blending mode and hit multiply, and this will then fuse the colors below, creating an overall effect where the paint is blending with the paint above. Easy. Step eight, add print imperfections. Now, one of the charming qualities about screen printing is its imperfections. When screen printing in real life, the print is pressed by a human, and there is a lot of spontaneity and subtle mistakes that can occur. When laying paint down through a mesh, there can sometimes be instances where there are paint splotches around the edge of a canvas. This adds subtle imperfections, which again adds to the human authentic tactile quality. When we design posters on the computer, everything can tend to look a bit flat and perfect. So one thing we can consider to add an extra level of authenticity to our screen print is to add some subtle imperfections. And to do this is really easy. In the download folder, you will see a folder called textures, and in this folder, there will be a file call textures. If we open this, we can see there are a few artboards with some very subtle ink splotch texture vectors. These are some samples I have prepared earlier. Some vary from really subtle to a bit more busy. So I'll select one of the textures and jump back into my illustrated document. I'll come into the layers panel, click the image layer and hit the plus icon at the bottom of the layers panel and name this textures. With all my other layers locked, I'll paste in my texture, place it over my poster design, and in this instance, I'll choose the same color as the animal print. And now we have some subtle paint blotches around the edge of the poster. So now it looks like paint was applied for the background animal image, and there were some slight imperfections and mistakes around the side. Now, if this is too much, you can simply grab the direct selection tool and drag over some of these splotches to select them, and if you wish, you can remove some. So that's a very flexible way of adding some subtle imperfections to your screen print poster designs. Now, that's the color applied to the first poster design, and that's looking pretty cool. Now, once you have one poster setup, creating new poster permutations is going to be really easy. So let's have a look at how we can do this. Step nine, create color permutations. So first, let's look to duplicate the design. First, I'll make sure that all the layers are unlocked, and up in view, I'll come down to guides and make sure that guides are unlocked. Then in the Tools menu, click the artboard tool, click on the Canvas area, press and hold Alt and drag to the right and upon release, you will create a new artboard effectively duplicating your poster design. Easy. So with the second poster in place, we can now make some color modifications. So back into my final poster design. For this one, I'm going to try a more vibrant background with an alternative color scheme on top. So I'll come down and copy this color swatch, back into my illustrated document, paste, and place it above my poster design, and the colors will also appear in my swatches panel. So I'll come into the layers panel and hit the lock icon on every layer apart from the base layer. With the selection tool, I'll select the base color on my poster design. In the tools menu, I'll make sure the foreground color is selected. Then I'll come and click my light pink shade in the swatches panel. Back in the layers panel, unlock the base layer and unlock the image layer. With the selection tool, I'll click on my image. Now, I'll carefully look in the transparency panel. I'll click on the thumbnail to the left, select the colored object, and make sure the fill color is selected in the tools menu. And in the Swatches panel, I'll hit a green color. Back in the lays panel, I'll hit a lock icon on the images layer and unlock the type layer. With my selection tool, I'll click and drag to select the type. Make sure the fill is active in the tools menu, 4. Final Thoughts: That's how you can create a screen print poster effect in Illustrator. By using the same techniques as seen in this class, you can create a variety of screen print poster designs with vibrant color effects. This brings us to the end of this poster design journey. I hope you have enjoyed this class, and most importantly, you have gained some valuable knowledge to harness your creativity, and you have something to show for it. Setting up a poster in this way in Illustrator offers so much flexibility to change your colors quickly. I hope that this process has inspired you to explore the stroke grid and experiment with color combinations. Using this screen print technique, you can get some really interesting results. So next time you create a poster design, maybe explore this technique and see if it's appropriate for your design. Well, I hope this class helps you, and I look forward to seeing all your poster designs in the project section. So until next time, unleash your creativity, and I'll see you in the next class.