The Power of Graphic Styles: Customize Editable Text with a Click of a Button

1. Intro: [MUSIC] Titles tell a story. It gives you a glimpse of what to expect from a movie, book, song, or even a skillshare class. Titles that have personality, catch the viewer's attention and draw them in. [MUSIC] Hey guys, My name is Kyle and in person, I' am a graphic designer and illustrator based in Edmonton, Canada. In today's class, we're going to do a deep dive into customizing editable titles using graphic styles. [MUSIC] Creating amazing titles has never been easier with the help of the Appearance panel in Adobe Illustrator. Not only can you get amazing results that look awesome, but by using this technique, you keep your titles completely editable so that you can use it now or in future projects. [MUSIC] Throughout this class, I'll walk you through the ins and outs of the Appearance panel and graphic styles in Adobe Illustrator. So that you can create editable texts that can be applied with the [NOISE] click of a button. I'm teaching this class not because I'm anything special, but because this is something I wish I knew when I first started with Adobe Illustrator. It's something that speeds up your workflow immensely. So I really look forward to teaching you this so that it'll help you along your creative journey. [MUSIC] So if you're ready to learn the power of graphic styles, I will see you in class. 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] Your project for this class is to create your own graphic style that can be applied to your own title or phrase. It could be a title of your favorite movie or book or just your name, just to have fun with it. In the end, I'll teach you how to save your graphic styles so that you can apply it in future projects. All you'll need for this class is Adobe Illustrator, a keyboard, and a mouse. Throughout this class, we'll go through the ins and outs of the graphic styles and appearance panel in Adobe Illustrator, as well as a few different effects that we can apply to our titles and texts. By the end of this class, you'll have a firm understanding of the appearance panel in Adobe Illustrator so that you can easily create graphic styles for any of your projects. I'll be going through many techniques in this class. Just take what you want and leave what you don't so that you can create your own unique custom graphic style. In the end, you'll have something that is unique to you. Let's just jump into the first class and understand what exactly is a graphic style. 3. What is a Graphic Style?: [MUSIC] Welcome to the first class where we'll talk about what is a graphic style. Let's jump right in here. We can see that on our board we have four different shapes. We have a square, we have a star, we have a circle, and we have a hexagon. Essentially a graphic style is the makeup of a shape in Adobe Illustrator. In Adobe Illustrator, a shape is made out of two main parts: The Stroke and the Fill. We can see that this square here, it has a graphic style of a blue stroke and an orange fill. The other shapes, they are made up of just a white fill and no stroke. Each has different graphic styles attached to it. However, what if I wanted to make all of them the same graphic style? What I can do is I can select my shape with the blue fill or blue stroke and orange fill. I can go into my Graphic Styles panel. I can click on the "Add" button to add a new graphic style. Now you can see an icon appears in the Graphic Styles menu. This save the appearance of that one shape, the orange fill, and a blue stroke. Now if I select all my other objects, I can select in my Graphic Styles panel, the graphic style with the blue stroke and orange fill and apply it to all my shapes. Now I can create a uniform design just with one click of a button. Then what we need to know is how can we further customize our graphic styles above just one fill and one stroke? That's where we have to jump into the Appearance panel, and that is what we'll learn next. 4. Understanding the Appearance Panel: Hey guys, welcome to the second part where we'll look at the most important part in building your graphic styles. That is the Appearance Panel. Jumping right in here, we can see that the Appearance Panel, it works like a Layers Panel but contained within your shape itself and it has the ability to control your strokes and your fills. How does the Appearance Panel work? Let's just jump into here. There's two components that you can use. You can use either a fill or a stroke, and then you can customize them as you want in the Appearance Panel. If we click on this circle that has just a pink fill, we can see in our Appearance Panel, it shows that we are selecting a path, which is the circle, and it has a fill of pink, and it has no stroke attached to it. But if we click on the blue stroke, we can see that in the Appearance Panel, we have a blue stroke and no fill. Pretty simple. If we look at the one with a blue stroke and a pink fill, we see that there is a stroke and a fill, blue stroke and a pink fill. What can we do in the Appearance Panel? Actually, in the Appearance Panel you can see down at the bottom, you have the ability to add a new stroke or add a new fill. Now you can build up your shape and add multiple fills and multiple strokes within it. Also, you have the ability to add effects, and this is something we'll go over in detail throughout the entire class. On each of this, you can either select the entire path and create an effect, like Stylize and give it a drop shadow or you can select a single one. Let's do the top stroke, and then you can add something, maybe like an outer glow just on the one stroke. You can see that you can customize your graphic style with the Appearance Panel. That's the cool part of the Appearance Panel. Not only that, you can actually rearrange the order in which you'll see your strokes and your fill. Let's say I wanted a stroke on top, but I want it to be maybe smaller. I can lower the point value of one of the strokes and change it to a different color, maybe a lighter blue, maybe a white. Let's change it to white. Now you can see in our stroke here, we have a blue stroke or a white stroke on top, and then we have a blue stroke, then we have a pink fill. Here's a visual example of how the layers stack on top of each other in your Appearance Panel and what they look like when they're all put together. We have the Appearance Panel opened here and we have our block text selected. We can see that it is built using many strokes and fills or at least many strokes and one fill. How does that work? Well, whatever is on top is seen first in your graphic style. Whatever is on the bottom will be seen last. Visually, you can see on the side here, we have the first stroke and then on the next one, the second stroke, and the third stroke. We can see in our Appearance Panel, if we turn on and off, we can see the top one is the the pure white, and then we have the gray, and then we have a shadow here, and then we have our fill. We can turn off and on the fill and we can see that it's hollow inside. Then, we have a stroke underneath, and then we have a stroke underneath that, and then finally we have our shadow stroke. This is how the fills and strokes build up on top of each other in the Appearance Panel and you can arrange it depending on what you want to see first in your graphic style. We'll continue to look into how we can develop our graphic styles and create more creative texts as we go through the class. We're going to use the Appearance Panel throughout the course, so it's definitely good to get familiar with it. In the next part we'll talk about why is it important to use graphic styles. 5. Why is This Useful: [MUSIC] In this class, we're going to talk about why is this so useful? When we think about working in Adobe Illustrator, we think of shapes, building on shapes. However, if you build them in a layers panel, what tends to happen is you have many different shapes built on top of each other and they all work separately. If you change one, it won't automatically affect the one underneath it and vice versa. You have to go and actually work on each of the shapes individually. However, if we work with Graphic Styles and the Appearance panel, we can build all our shapes in the Appearance panel. Then we only have one shape in our layers panel to work with. When we customize that single shape, it affects all the fills and strokes that we applied in our Appearance panel and our Graphic Style. Let us see about that using these two question marks. Here we have two question marks that look identical. However, they are built in to separate ways. One is built using the Layers panel and the other is used building Graphic Styles or using the Appearance panel. If we look at this stroke in the Appearance panel, we can see that it has just a single fill. Then we have one with a single blue film. If we look in the Layers panel, we can see that we have multiple layers built on top of each other to make our question mark. But for this one we only have one layer in the Layers panel, to make this question mark. All the features that are in the second question mark were built in the Appearance panel. You can see how complex you can actually make your Graphic Styles in Adobe Illustrator. The cool thing about this is this is completely editable. In the first one, I had to outline my text and then I had to offset it. I had to make a stroke, offset that and build it up one by one in the Layers panel. However, since I built this one in the Appearance panel, what I can do is I can easily change it to, let's say, an exclamation mark. Now you can see it is changed from a question mark or an exclamation mark. All those attributes, the drop shadow and the 3D text feel it all changed automatically with the Graphic Style or with the shape itself. Now what's really cool about this is when I look at it, this an Outline mode in Adobe Illustrator, you can see what is the makeup of the shapes. If we go "Control Y", we can see that this shape is built out of many different paths. When we look at the exclamation mark, although there is a lot of detail in the exclamation mark, with the 3D text and the drop shadow. Actually it is just one single letter. There's nothing too fancy about it. But when we go out of Outline mode, we can see that it is very complicated. This is why it is so useful to use Graphic Styles in Adobe Illustrator, because it allows you to make complex designs that are completely editable. Rather than building up your shapes in the Layers panel, let's learn how we can build up our shapes in the Appearance panel to keep the customizability of all your texts when you're building your titles for your project. All right guys, let's look at another reason why it is so useful to use Graphic Styles. The second reason is because you can easily make a coherent style. Let's say you have multiple icons that you want to give the same exact attributes to. What you can do is you can take one of your icons and you can build up the characteristics in the Appearance panel like this. Then what you can do is you can go to your Graphic Styles menu, add it to as a new Graphic Style. Then you can select all your other icons. With a click of a button, you can create a very coherent style for all your icons. Once you do the work once, you don't have to do it again. You save it as a Graphic Style and easily apply it to whatever you want. Another reason why it's so useful to use Graphic Styles is because you can update it so easily. Let's take a look at the numbers here. I was watching cars with my son the other day. I felt inspired to use this design, this race car theme text. This is the number of Lightning McQueen in cars. However, what if Lightning McQueen wanted to change his number? If I built this up in the Layers panel, actually it would be very difficult to change the number. However, since I built this up using the Appearance panel, what I can do is I can easily select the text and I can change it to number 1 or number 99, and then there you go. It is completely updateable just with a click of a button. You don't have to go in and change too much. Once you build it up in the Appearance panel, you can update it anytime you want, to whatever you want. All right guys, here's another example of how you can use Graphic Styles to update something easily. Let's say for this class, instead of making a single class, I wanted to make a series, maybe episode 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. I can easily change this with Graphic Styles. Instead of re-creating the title each time, I can go into my Graphic Style and I can change this from episode 1 to episode 2 with ease. What if I wanted to change this from the power of Graphic Styles to the power of Graphic Design? I can easily change that just with a click of a button, and it's completely editable. Like this, you can use Graphic Styles to make your titles completely editable. When you're making your Graphic Styles for your project in this class, definitely think about what you're going to be applying it to. Maybe you just want to make something really creative, really out there and get to know the power of Graphic Styles. Or maybe you have a purpose for your Graphic Styles, whether it's for a YouTube video or a podcast, something like that. Or you want to recreate a movie poster or a music album, or a book cover. You can create whatever title you want, but try and make it using the Appearance panel so that if you need to, you can use it in future works or you can edit the text with ease and really dive in to understanding how to use Graphic Styles in Adobe Illustrator. In the next coming classes, we're going to look at each of the effects or some of the effects that I think are super important in creating your custom Graphic Styles in Adobe Illustrator. I look forward to seeing you in the next classes and seeing what you guys come up with. [MUSIC]. 6. Strokes and Offset Path: [MUSIC] Welcome to the first class where we will dive in to how to customize your graphic styles to fit your own personal style using the Appearance panel. First thing that we're going to look at is the stroke and an effect called offset path. Let's jump right into it. What we're going to do is first open up a few windows. We want to see the Graphic Styles panel, we want to see the Appearance panel, and we want to see the Stroke panel. To open these up, just go to Window and find the Appearance panel, find the Graphic Styles panel, and find the Stroke panel. If there is a Window that you see me using but it's not open on your document, you can always go to Window and select it here. The first thing that we're going to do is just going to look at what can we do with the Stroke menu and to customize our graphic style. If we select one of these white boxes, we can see that in the Appearance panel it has a stroke that is a black and a fill that is white. I want you to get rid of the fill color, so it's only a stroke, and then I want you to increase the stroke weight just a little bit so that it's more visible to us. Now having our stroke selected, we're going to open up the Strokes panel here. We're going to bring it over and see what all these things do. In the Stroke panel, we have a few different options. We can adjust the weight of the stroke, we can adjust the cap of the stroke and we'll get into that, and we can adjust the corner type of the stroke. So if we want to round corner or a beveled corner or a minor corner, you can select either of those. The next thing that we can do, if we're working with a shape specific, a path specifically, we can change it to align to the center of the path, the inside of the path, or the outside of the path. However, when you're working with text, it'll only default to the center of the path so you have to keep that in mind if you're building a graphic style specifically for titles or something like that. The next thing we can do is we can create a dashed line. A dashed line breaks up that line too small sections or dashes. We can change our dash to whatever point size we want, we can change it to a 50-point dash so it's a little bigger, a little more obvious. The next thing that we can do is we can go back to our caps and we can either keep it as a flat butt cap or we can change it to a round cap depending on the style you want for your design. You can also adjust the gap of it. By default, if you have a 50-dash, your gap will be 50 points as well. But if you wanted to have a larger gap, then you have a dash or a smaller vice versa and you can change that. Let's change that to 10-point gap. We have a big 50-point dash but 10-point gap. I'm going to get rid of this dashed line. The next thing that you can do is you can actually change the profile of your stroke. You can have a plain simple linear stroke or you can change the profile to having a more tapered stroke or a little wavy stroke that goes back and forth. Anyways, it's something that you can play around with and look into when you're building your design. The next thing that we're going to look at after we looked at the Stroke panel, we can actually use something called offset path to build up your graphic style. Let's jump back into the Appearance panel and let's select our stroke, and what we're going to do is we're going to duplicate selected stroke. Now that gives me an exact copy of the stroke that I had selected. Now with this top stroke, what I want to do is I want to go to Effects path and offset path. Now what I can do is I can take this path and I can expand it outside the current path by 10 points, let's go a little bigger. Let's go to 25 points. Preview that. So now you can see that the original path is here, this blue line, but the new path is actually offset the path by 25 points outside. The next thing that I can do is I can change from a miter, so meaning a sharp corner point. I can change it to a round corner. That's pretty cool. You have a little bit of customizability there. I'm going to hit ''Okay'' and I'm going to make this stroke just a little bit thinner. Now what I want to do is maybe I want to duplicate this stroke. Now those effects that I applied to the first stroke actually get duplicated as well. I can jump back into the offset path, I can increase that to maybe 35, and now I have that one going out a little further and then I can drop that one down. I have a stroke that goes out and then another stroke that goes a little further to give a little more depth to this design. Now if I wanted to change this one, I can go into the Stroke panel and I can change this outer one and give it a dashed line. First I have to select my object, go into my stroke, and then select it as a dashed line. Now you can see I have a dashed line on the outer stroke, but that dashed line doesn't affect any of the other strokes. That's really cool. What you can do is you can play around with a Strokes panel and the Appearance panel and the offset path effect to build up some of these designs. What I went ahead and did is I made a graphic style of each of these texts that I made here. So if I select my box, I can give it the graphic style of my stroke type, or if I select this one, I can give it the graphic style of my offset path type. Then you can go into the Appearance panel and you can check out exactly what's happening. You can open it up, see that there's an offset path applied to one, offset path applied to another one. How far is it? It's 10 points. Then play around with those and adjust them and see what you can create in your graphic style. For this class, play around with the Strokes panel, offset path effect, and create a few different versions of what we already have here and check out the ones that I created so that you can understand how it's working together to create this design. [MUSIC] 7. Transform and Blending Modes: [MUSIC] Welcome to the next class where we'll dive into the transform effect as well as how blending modes can help us create a little more depth in our design. Through this class, we'll come to understand how to make drop shadows and also simple 3D text. Here we have our simple block. I gave it a blue stroke and a white fill. Now what we're going to do is we're going to jump over here to the appearance panel and we're going to select the stroke. We're going to add a new effect and we're going to give it a distort and transform and transform. Now the transform effect menu pops up. Now, what we can do is we can select preview on the transform menu and then we can see exactly what's going to happen. What you can do with the transform effect is you can adjust the scale or the position of your shape or your specific stroke in relation to the original shape. We can scale this stroke outside horizontally and make it a little wider or narrower. So that's pretty cool. I'll change that to 100 percent again. Or we can make it bigger vertically or what we can do is we can do offset the vertical and the horizontal by the same amount to scale it evenly. That's sort of like our offset path effect, but it works a little different. When you scale it, the entire stroke will also increase in size. The point value will remain small, but yet this stroke will increase in size. When you offset the path, the point size will remain consistent no matter how far you push out the offset path, it'll stay at 10 points. But if you scale it, it will actually grow bigger, so just keep that in mind. The second thing that you can do after scaling it, let's just change those back to zero, lets reverse that, let's go back to our effect, distort and transform and let's see our horizontal movement. You can move it horizontally or you can move it vertically. So a positive value is down, a negative value is up as you can see. Or you can rotate it at a specific angle. The most important part of the transform effect I find is this little thing right over here. It is the copies. It means that when you create a transformation, you can create multiple copies of that transformation, one after another, repeating on top of itself. Let's see how that works. Let's go to zero for your rotation, let's go back to our vertical, lets just change that to zero for now. What I want to do is I want to create a simple drop shadow. It means that I want this line to trail off to the side over here. What can I do, is I can change this to maybe one point over and one point down. You can't really see anything really happening too much because it's just a single point but if we go into the copies and we changed that to 10 copies, what that'll do, it'll duplicate that transformation 10 times in a row. It'll actually move one point and then the next one will be two points, the next one will be three points and so on. Let's give it a little bit bigger, let's go to 50 copies. Now we're seeing sort of that drop shadow look, that drop shadow appearance. However, it doesn't look exactly right because the stroke is going over top of our fill. Let's hit okay and let's go to our fill. What we can do now is we can take our fill and we can put it on top of our stroke. Now it looks like we have some 3D text going on. The next thing we can do is we can give this a little bit of a shadow. First we got to select our object and then make our duplications and then go into transform and then give it 100. But now, I don't want that to be blue anymore, I want this to be black. Now we can jump into our blending modes. In this specific stroke, what we can do is we can go to opacity and we can open up the opacity menu. We can change our stroke to maybe 50 percent opacity. So it gives it a little more gray look and then you can go into the blending mode. You can change it from just the original to a different version. For this one, for a shadow, I like to use multiply because it takes the colors underneath it and multiplies it with that 50 percent black and it gives it a very organic shadow look. Now we can take this, go into our graphic style menu, add a new graphic style. If I wanted to create a different shape, let's go into our shape menu and create a star and now I give it some position like that and I apply our graphic style. Now we have a 3D star popping out simply like that. For this class, what I want you to do is I want you to try to create your own 3D text or a add drop shadow with the transform effect and then you can layer on layer on layer your transformations to create different results. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add each of these ones, select each of these items and add it to a graphic style. Now I can apply it to my blocks. Let's bring down the block size first, give it the graphic style and increase the size so you can see exactly what is happening to these shapes. You can see what's going on with these shapes over here by looking at these blocks. You can look at the appearance panel and you can see that I have multiple strokes and then I have one that is for a shadow stroke and then I have my fill, and then I have my bottom stroke and then I have my second stroke and I have my shadow stroke. These are only using the transform effects and blending modes to create those shadows looks. So play around with these and see what you can create with the transform effect. There are many different things you can create with it. You can scale it outwards to see what that looks like or scale it inwards to see what that looks like or you can move it down only or move it up only. Take a look at all these transformations and try to make your own custom 3D text using the transform effect in Adobe Illustrator. Save it as a graphic style so that you can use that in future projects just with a click of a button. 8. Gradients and Stripes: [MUSIC] All right guys, let's jump right into this. For this class, what I need you guys to have open is the Swatches panel as well as the Gradient panel. I'm going to pop out the Gradient panel. We'll look at what we can do with Gradients in the Gradient panel. You have a few different options with what you can do with Gradients in the Gradient panel. Number 1 thing, you select your Gradient, you apply it to your object. The next thing you can do is you can adjust the position of your Gradient in your shape. You can also change it from either a Linear Gradient or a Radial Gradient. Those are the two that I would use for Graphic Styles. I wouldn't go into the free form Gradient for this specific purpose, so we're not going to look at that. The next thing that you can do is you can either change the direction or angle of your Gradient. You can change it from 0 degrees or you can change it to 90 degrees and you can also swap the position of your Gradient. You can go black to white or white to black or if you have multiple colors, they'll reflect exactly. Another thing that you can do is you can actually set the opacity of each of the nodes. These little things are the nodes, and each node is given a specific color. You can say that you want this white to fade to black, but you want that white to be at 0 percent. Now you have a 0 percent white, so perfectly clear to a 100 percent black and it fades accordingly. Let's change that back to 100 percent. What you can do next to customize your Gradient is you can drag your color Swatches into your Gradient directly from your Swatch panel you can drag in your colors, so you can make some cool, funky designs. Another thing that you can do is you can double-click on each of the nodes and it'll open up the Color panel. You can switch in here, or you can change it using the sliders. We can make our own cool custom Gradients like that. What I have here is I made a Chrome design. How did I make that? I made a specific Swatch for this Chrome design. What I did was I selected specific colors based on something I found on the Internet. Online, you can find many different types of Chrome effects or Chrome designs and you can take the color palette from that. Then what you can do is you can organize it in your Gradient panel. Here I have it so that it starts with pink at the top and it fades darker and goes to black and then I wanted a high-contrast area of the reflection. What I can do is I can spread out this Gradient panel to work with it easier and I can bud up these two nodes: The black and the white, just like that, and then it fades out to a darker purple. The next thing that I did was I can apply this to the Stroke as well. If I go into my Appearance panel, I can select this Stroke and I can select my Swatch. But now for the Stroke, I want to increase the Stroke size so I can see it and I don't want to give it as harsh of a Gradient and I want to change that to maybe 90 degrees. In the Stroke panel now or the Gradient panel, you have an option for the Stroke. You can keep it, apply the Gradient within the Stroke, apply the Gradient along the Stroke might look cool, or apply the Gradient across the Stroke. Also, it might look pretty cool. For this one, I'll use apply the Gradient within the Stroke. Just like that. We made our Gradient and we made our little Chrome design. You can apply that to your own text. The next thing that I want to show you is with this Gradient panel open, we can make a Stripe design. How do we do that? Actually, I'm going to select my object and I'm going to select this fill and I'm going to save it as a Swatch and I'm going to apply it to my fill here. Then we'll get rid of this Stroke. Now we have our objects selected, selecting our fill, and we can see exactly what's happening here. With Stripes, what you can do is you can create a Stripe with a single color and then you can apply a 0 percent opacity. Let's bring it up here so you can see and then bud up the ends to create a straight line. Instead of having them fade from one to another, it's an immediate break to the next color. How did I set this up? I have a color here, it's 100 percent red and then I have a second node here that's a 0 percent red. Then I bud them up, right together and it makes a sharp line, it makes a Stripe, so that's really cool. Then I continue to do this process throughout the entire design. Now I can do this with multiple colors if I wanted to and it doesn't have to be a zero opacity. The reason why I made it zero opacity was this. If I go to the Appearance panel, I select my fill, I can create a new fill. I can place it underneath my Stroke and what I can do is I can give this instead of giving it a Gradient fill, I'll give it a solid fill of yellow. Now you can see that this design has a Stripe design that will be completely editable and remain consistent on any shape that I give this graphic style to. Let's see if I go to my Graphic Styles, I'll add a new graphic style, I'll create a new shape, make it a star, and then I'll apply my graphic style to it. You can see that it kept the Stripe design within it. For this class, I want you to play around with the Gradient panel, try to create some Chrome design or some Gradient design with the Fill and the Stroke. Also, try to make some Stripe design where you work in the Gradient panel to bud up the nodes, so it is a sharp line rather than a fade to create a cool design. [MUSIC] All right guys, so I'll see you in the next class. [MUSIC] 9. Basic Effects 1: [MUSIC] For the first effect that we're going to look at is the glow effect and how I might use that. When I use the glow effect, I don't always use it to create a glow, but sometimes I create a shadow with it, and I'll show you what I mean. If I select the fill in my object, in the Appearance panel, and I created an effect, and I go to Stylize and Inner Glow. What I can do is, normally, set the screen, and it's usually white. That doesn't really look like anything happened. But what I can do is I can set this to normal and I can change it to whatever color I want. I could give it a red glow. I can give it a black glow, something like that. You can change the opacity of your glow, and you can change how far it goes in. Maybe I don't want it as large, so I'll change that to 50, something like that. Now you can customize it to see how far inward your glow will appear. Again, if you wanted to have an actual glow, you can have a darker fill and use the original type. If I hit Okay, but I changed this to a darker fill, you'll see that it actually gives it that appearance of a glow itself. The next thing that I'll do is I'll apply the outer glow. The outer glow you can use for the stroke or the fill. I'll use it on the stroke and I will say Stylize, Outer Glow. Now you can see a similar effect happen, but on the outside of my stroke, you see this glow effect. What I can do then is I can double this effect if I wanted to, or if I duplicate this stroke, it'll duplicate the intensity. Now I have a really cool glow effect there. If I wanted to layer this glow, I can make the last one a little bit bigger. I can change the outer glow, change it to maybe 15 points. The first one, and then I'll layer the second one to 10 points, preview that, and then the third one to zero points. But I can also increase this to 90 percent glow. Now you can see it sort of fades a little better. It has a really cool glow effect there. Those are my glow effects. What about green? How can I apply green? What I'm going to do is I'm going to create a second object over here. The next thing that I'll do is I want to create a shadow on the inside, but a grainy shadow, grainy texture. One way I can create grainy texture is, I can duplicate or create a new fill, I can give it a gradient. Let's give it a black and white gradient, and then I'll open up the gradient panel or, or the gradient menu. I'll hit G, and I'll just adjust it so it's straight up and down. The next thing that I can do is I can apply a grain effect to this. If I go into my Effects and I go to Texture and Grain, I can go into the grain menu, and now I can apply this grain to this gradient. Most of the time sprinkles usually does a pretty good job of getting some nice fine grain. I like that. Now you can see it applied to this object. But I can go in if I wanted to adjust it, I can go out of it again and maybe change this back to stippled, and then intensity, bring that down a bit, bring down the contrast like that, and hit Okay. Now, how do I apply this to the color underneath? Remember, we can change the blending modes. I can go into the Blending Mode and I can change that to multiply. Now you can see that it is multiplied with the color underneath to give a little shadow effect. How can we combine the glow and the grain to create a rim around our object? Let's get rid of this fill with this gradient. Let's get rid of the grain, and let's change this to a solid white fill. It's already set to multiply, so that's good. But for the sake, I'm going to reset it to normal, and we're going to play around with it now. I'm going to go into my Effects, and go to Stylize, and go to the Inner Glow. I'm going to change the inner glow to normal and set it to black. Now you can see it has a rim of black on the outside going from the outer edge to the center. I'm going to hit Okay. Next, I'm going to go back to my Effects, go to Texture and Grain. I like that grain effect. Looks pretty good. Maybe I might play around with the contrast a bit and the intensity , and I'm going to hit Okay. The next thing that I can do here is I can change the blending mode to multiply. The grain has affected everything, that's why. The grain was put on everything. I got to place it inside my specific fill. So it only affects the specific fill. Now if I look at it, there we go, so inner glow then green. Now I have a cool grainy texture. If I wanted to adjust that, I can go into the Inner Glow and I can change it to maybe 75. There you go. You get a cool inner texture design. That's one way you can use grain and glow to customize your graphic styles to give it a little more grid, a little more texture, a little more personality. Let's move on to the next effect, which we'll look at. 10. Basic Effects 2: [MUSIC] For this section we're going to talk about the basic effect of Gaussian blur. When I use Gaussian blur, usually it's to create some cool neon effect and I want to show you how you can create that effect as well. We're going to start with a simple path with a stroke, just a white stroke. We're going to build this up. We'll zoom into this stroke to see what exactly is happening. In our appearance panel, I want to create a stroke that's just plain white. The next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to actually duplicate this stroke. I'm going to give this one that's underneath some gradient. Give it a gradient like that and I'm going to increase that stroke size just a little bit like that. Now we have something happening. We have a gradient and then we have a solid stroke of white. I'm going to decrease that white stroke a little bit. Now what I can do is with this gradient stroke is I can apply the effect of Gaussian blur. I go Effect, Blur, Gaussian Blur. I have to have my shape selected then, go into Gaussian blur. Now you can see what's happening. It gives it a little bit of a blur. I give it a little bit of a blur and then I'm going to duplicate this shape and the one underneath, I'm going to increase the size a little bit and go into the blur and blur it a little bit more. Then I'm going to do this one more time, duplicate it and then the one underneath, I'll increase the stroke a little bit and go into the blur and blur it just a little bit more. Now if I go outside, you can really see what happened. You created a really cool neon effect in just a few simple steps using the Gaussian blur, building it up from a smaller blur, increasing the blur in size, and it gets a really cool neon effect. Before we finish this lesson, I want to show you one more technique to give your graphic style a little more character, and that's by using pattern swatches. Using our current neon effect, let's apply some inner pattern to it. We're going to make something similar to this pattern swatch up here, but I think we'll make it a little more creative. This is pretty flashy, so I think instead of doing a circle, I'm going to create a star. To create a pattern, you have to have the base of your pattern or your objects that you will tile together to make a pattern. What we're going to do is we're going to create a simple star here. I'm going to change the stroke to a fill. We have this cool star here. The next thing that I can do is I can go into Object, Pattern, and Make, the pattern editing tool pops up. What we can do now is we can go into our width and our height and space out our stars. We can go holding Shift and using the arrow keys, we can increase the space between our stars just like that. The next thing that I want to do is I want to change the type of pattern we're making. We can do a grid, we can do a brick by row, we can do a brick by column, or we can do a hex by column, or a hex by row. I think that's looking pretty cool right there using the hex by row, so I'm going to hit "Done". That creates a new pattern swatch in in our Swatches panel. Now, all we have to do is we can click on our current graphic style or our current square and we can go into the fill and we can find our new pattern swatch and apply it to our fill. That's really cool. The next thing that we can do, instead of having a pattern swatch that is transparent, we can layer our fills up on top of each other. We can add a new fill and underneath our pattern, we can add our own fill like this. We can make maybe a darker fill like that, something like that. That's pretty cool pattern. Another cool thing with patterns is you can make them more customizable by using blending modes. I'm going to take this pattern out of here. I'm going to switch the pattern up. Instead of using this pattern, I'm going to use my wavy line pattern here. It doesn't look too great right now, but what I can do is I can change the opacity or the blending mode to Multiply. That'll multiply the tone with the color underneath. Now you can see if I change the color underneath, the color on top or the wave is also affected. Maybe I don't want it to be too strong, so I'm lowering the opacity just a little bit. Let's change this one. Instead of having a solid fill, I can also use a gradient underneath like that. We can also play around with the blending modes. Instead of using multiply, we can try a different one like overlay. That one looks pretty good with this technique. For this class, what I want you to do is just try to make a simple neon effect using the Gaussian blur technique that I showed you. Layering up the Gaussian blur, starting with a larger on the base and then reducing the size up until a white stroke. Then try applying some pattern textures or creating your own pattern texture and applying them to your fills to give your graphic style a little more character. You can always use your blending modes to change the way that your pattern interacts with the fill underneath. Guys, I'll see you in the next class. 11. Saving Your Graphic Styles: [MUSIC] Throughout this class, you discovered many different ways to apply different effects to create a custom graphic style. The project for this class is for you to create your own custom graphic style to apply to your title. I definitely want to see whatever you guys create. Now in this class, I want to show you how to save your graphic styles, no matter how many you have designed so that you can apply them in future projects. Let's jump into the document here. What you can see here is I went ahead and I copy and pasted all my graphic styles from various documents. I had one from the Chrome one, a couple of dot patterns, the offset path, the stripes and neon effect, strokes, grit, wavy block texts, simple block texts that Gaussian blur. All of them, I copied and pasted them into one document. The next thing that I need to do is to go into my graphic styles menu. If we open it up here, I cleared it out. I got rid of all the default graphic styles and it just left with one. Now what I want to do is I want to select each of my objects or each of my designs one by one and add a new graphic style. I go through my entire document selecting each one and creating a new graphic style from each of the texts that I want to apply to my graphic style library. Now that I have all of them in my graphic styles menu, what I want to do is I want to go into my library here. Next thing that I want to do is I want to go into Save Graphic Styles. It'll open up a document where all your graphic styles are saved. What I want to do is I want to give it a name. I'll give mine Tidal Effects. Now I have a document or a graphic style library of all my title effects. I'll hit "Save." Now if I File New and create a new document, it doesn't matter what it is, hit "Create," now what I can do in my graphic styles menu, it defaults back to the default. But if I go into my library, I go to user-defined and I will find my tidal effects there. Now you can see a menu pops up, a library pops up with all your graphic styles, excluding any of the defaults. Now if I create some text here, if I create a title text., let's make it big and bold and now I can apply any of my graphic styles to my title text. Just with a click of a button, I was able to customize my title very easily and very efficiently. Now, whatever I create here, it remains completely editable. Gradient. This is what you can do with your graphic styles. You can create your own library of your custom Graphic Styles and apply it to future works. All I want to say to you guys is, great work. You guys did awesome today during this class. I hope that you've learned something in how you can create amazing titles that will remain completely editable. Once you create them, you could apply them to anything with just a click of a button. [MUSIC] 12. Preparing Your Project: [MUSIC] Hey, guys. Welcome to the last class, where we will prepare our project. The first thing you need to do is, in the project resources, I created the document called Class Project Template. Go ahead and download that, and we'll jump right in. In the document, you can see that there are a few instructions. The first thing that you need to do is type in your title. The next thing you can pick your font, and next you can apply your graphic style, export your project. Finally, what should we all do? Upload the project to Skillshare. Let's first type in our title. What I'm going to type in is Skillshare, and then I'm going to have two words, I'm going to create a second one, and it'll be [NOISE] Project. The next thing that I want to do is, I want to pick a font that I think will fit my graphic styles pretty well. I'm going to go into the character panel, and I'm going to change my font to something. I really like this font, so I'm going to use that. I'll pick a different one that complements a little bit different. I'm going to pick this one. The next thing that I want to do is since we saved our graphic styles as a library, we can go into our Graphic Styles panel, we can go into our libraries, and go into Users Defined and Title Effects, that'll open up our Title Effects in a new panel. Now what I can do is I can click on my subject or my title, and with a click of a button, I can apply my graphic styles. Now I can go through all the graphic styles that I created and pick the one that I want to use in my project. When we use our graphic style, sometimes you have to take into consideration that they are built at a certain scale. So if some of the effects aren't too apparent, sometimes you need to shrink down your object a bit, and then reapply your graphic style, that'll change it a little bit as you expand it larger. So now you can see a lot of that detail was brought back, so that looks pretty cool. Let's work on the project next. Let's see what we can do. I really liked the stripe design, it really looks cool with this script text. That looks pretty cool. I'm going to go with this stripe design for this one, but I think I'll shrink it down first, reapply it, and then it'll give a little more of the characters that I want to display. Skillshare project, so that's looking really cool. The next thing that we want to do is we want to change our background color. We can click on our gradient in the background. We can go up to this little menu here, it's Recolor Artwork. We can open that up, and we can go to Advanced Options, you might see this menu if it pops up, and I'm just going to edit colors. Now I'm going to link my colors here, make sure they're linked, and then I can play around with the hue sliders, and I can change the hue of my background colors. Not only that, I can change the saturation. If I wanted to, I can unlink them and pull this around and only affect this one color. I think I'm going to bring this one, lighten the middle up, darken that one up a bit, and bring it over. That's looking better, I really liked that orange against the blue. That's looking really cool. Now the next thing when we export it, we want to make sure that all our artwork is contained within the art board. So it's all contained within the art board, the next thing we'll do is go "File", "Export", and "Export As". I'm saving it to my desktop and I can give it a title, Skillshare Project. So since we're showing it on a screen, we don't have to choose CMYK, we can switch it to RGB, and 72 ppi is plenty big for viewing on the screen, and then we can hit Okay. Guys, so we just exported our project, now what's the next step? Let's go and upload it to Skillshare so that we can all enjoy your amazing work. Guys, I can't wait to see all your projects, and I'll see you in the next class. [MUSIC] 13. Thank You!: Hey guys. We made it to the end of the class. I just want to thank you so much for taking the class. It really means a lot to me. I really look forward to seeing what everybody has created. When you have finished your graphic styles, apply it to your own title or text or it can be even your name and submit it in the project panel. Graphic styles are really fun to play with. If you make multiple options, I want to see them all. Remember, if you liked the class or you learned something, please consider leaving a short review. It really helps the class grow in the future. Thanks again for taking this class and just remember, stay creative. [MUSIC]