Wordy Wall Art: 4 Principles of Typographic Poster Design

1. Intro: Picture paints a thousand words. But what about the meaning painted by word itself, its shapes and lines on a printed page. Hi everyone. I'm Karen and I'm a graphic designer and illustrator based in Nelson, New Zealand. Iran moon dog design and illustration, which is a freelance business. And I've been doing that for the past 12 years. I have an advanced diploma or associate degree in graphic design and advertising. I do a little bit of everything, mostly digital art, graphic design, web design, and also pattern design. With my background in graphic design, I have a really good appreciation of typography and the way that it can make or break any design project. In this class, we'll be looking at typography specifically at texts posters, which you're going to end up as wall art. This class is for pretty much any level. If you're a beginner, will be covering some great points and this will come in handy in the future also with any other design projects. If you're more advanced, on the other hand, you might find it useful to go there. There's some other things you might have forgotten. You will need a computer, a notepad, and pen to take notes and to jot down ideas. And you'll have a choice between two different designs softwares. I'll be making a poster in both Adobe Illustrator and Inkscape. And the reason I'm doing this is that I realize for a lot of beginners, Adobe Illustrator is a little bit costly to keep using and the long term because they are on a subscription model. And Inkscape is actually completely free. So if you've never heard of it, I'll put a link in the project area and you can just download that and follow along with the video tells you go, as with every Skillshare class, there is a project for you to complete. I have designed the videos that you can follow along and do a stake in the project after each video. The project for this class is to create your own, pretty rarely takes poster. And I'll be detailing the steps that you need to take to do that in the next video. So in the meantime, get across the project area, download what you need, and let's get started. 2. Project: This class is all about typographic posters design. The project we'll be working on together. We'll go to create your own print ready typographic poster. I wanted to open the door for you to make something you can have printed and give to friends or family, or even hang up on your own wall. Topographies, such an important tool that's often overshadowed by the artistic content of a design. Like this, the project will help you see just how it can shine and be meaningful on its own. If you're a beginner, the principles we'll cover will be a great foundation for you to apply to any future projects, whether it's typographic or otherwise. I'll also be sharing some tips and shortcuts along the way to help you develop a streamlined process. In addition to the video lessons over in the projects and resources tab, you'll find a project guide you can download which breaks down the whole creative process into small, manageable steps. We'll be starting off with brainstorming to come up with the perfect idea for your poster. Before looking at some inspiration, daniel, choose a design software and start designing the four big typographic principles. We'll be jumping into a typeface, hierarchy, negative space, and alignment. You end up with a black and white version of your design, which you will then apply color to. Once your project is finished, click on Create project in the projects and resources tab and upload on low resolution JPEG or PDF file. I'd also love for you to explain your process. What do you think of your poster and what you learned along the way? Here's a few typographic posters I've made using the techniques we'll be learning in this class. As you can see, these are simple designs. You really don't need to do anything fancy or too involved to create something impactful and worthy of showing off. I encourage you to take your time with this project and to take a break if you're feeling stuck. Sometimes when you set aside the critical mind, that's when your intuitions steps in with new perspective. So now that you've learned all about the project, I really hope you're excited to get started. It across to the project area, download the guide, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Brainstorming: Before we jump into learning more about typography, we're going to be doing a bit of brainstorming. Personally, I like to do this before anything else. As I find that this allows me to come up with my most original ideas. Sometimes if you research or look for inspiration first, you can end up overlooking an idea that's waiting and your subconscious. We see so many incredible finished works of art that we can't help but be influenced by them thinking their way better than anything we could do. So I like to place a little trust in my own creative mind first and try to be as original as I can. I often start with a blank piece of paper or you can use an iPad or a tablet. I'm using my laptop and pen tablet here with Autodesk sketchbook, which is a fantastic program by the way. This allows me to write just like I do on paper. There are two things you need to brainstorm for the project, the audience or who your poster will be four, and the theme or subject of the poster will be. The only thing that matters here is keeping it loose and messy. We're not aiming for polished work yet, just getting every single thought down on paper. Even if you don't think it's a very good one. If you draw a complete blank, that's okay too. You could write down a list of things you love, places you've lived, or even characters from your favorite TV show. Or if you prefer, you can use a favorite quote or saying. Once you've decided on your audience and theme, brainstorm a list of related words. You might need to look online together your words and check spelling. There are some great typographic designs out there which only use a few words. But for this project you'll need to come up with a list of at least ten. You can come up with more than what you need and take something out later on. So get your thinking caps on. Use whichever method of brainstorming works best for you to get your ideas down on paper and will be continuing with some research in the next lesson. 4. Research: The next step in creating your typographic poster is to research and gather inspiration. Here we go, the idea you've come up with in your brainstorming and see what's out there. Look for examples that appeal to you or have a similar field to what you're hoping to create. I like to use Pinterest together everything into a board or even copy the images I find online and save them into a folder or paste them directly beside my app would try to narrow down what makes them stand out to you. Is it the color, the font, or something about the layout? Whatever it is, think about how you might use a similar method while also creating something unique. The most important thing to consider with any text design is readability. Something can be a really clever idea. But if I have to work hard to read it, if I'm confused at all, then the message is lost. Another thing to take note of while looking at inspiration is to see what emotion you feel first. Psychologically, we tend to interpret shape and form before anything else. The feeling inspired by the appearance of the text needs to fit the message of the words. Otherwise, it pretty quickly becomes obvious a bit like somebody wearing a clown suit to a funeral. Your next job is to go forth and research, gather your inspiration online or look through some design books. And in the next lesson, we'll look at setting up your workspace. 5. Workspace: As mentioned earlier, you've got a choice of two design softwares. Adobe Illustrator is the industry standard, and I use it for all one work. If you're in a position to get it, I highly recommend it. They offer a free seven-day trial. So you could also try it out if you've never used it before. I was going to make this class purely with Illustrator. But I know a lot of people starting out just kinda afford another subscription. So I thought I'd try out a free alternative tooth. I chose Inkscape as I was keen to try it and see just how it compares to illustrate. I'm sorry, if you've downloaded one of these, Let's open them up and start sitting up. But the workspace. 6. Illustrator Workspace: So first thing we need to do is open up Illustrator up to File, New and settings box will pop up. You can give your project a name. There are a few preloaded templates in there for size. Usually if I don't know the finished size, I'll just select A3. And you can see my units of measurement in millimeters. Down here in the blade section, I've already got five millimeter blade, which is usually enough to cover any printing requirements. Hit Okay, and you'll come up with your art board. That red line around the outside is the blade. So we just make sure that our artwork goes over the blade once we make it. And if you need to change this, just go up to file documents setup. And you should see all of those settings popup and you can change the bleed amount in there. Now, just check the color mode, go up to file document color mode, and make sure that it's set to CMYK. There are a few printers that do print in RGB. So it's probably best to check with your printer if you know where you're getting it printed. Otherwise, just leave it on CMYK. I'm just going to grab the type tool from the toolbar on the left and drag a box beside the artboard. Then I'm going to start typing in all my words. Don't stress if you've spotted my spelling mistake, but do keep in mind to take your own spelling closely. Once you've finished all that, you'll be ready to move on to the next lesson, where we'll be learning about typeface. 7. Inkscape Workspace: Now when you first open Inkscape, it will come up with this quick setup dialog. And I've just left it on default because I think this is all fine. And once you've finished setting up the software, just go across to the top right where there's a time to draw a button. This will come up with a Settings window, which has a few different file formats to choose from. I'm sitting it to print and it has a list of common documents sizes in there. I'm just selecting a three, but you can select the size that's best for your project. Hit New Document and resize the window. You mean if you're using a mouse, you can right-click and scroll. I'm using a MacBook, so for me it's controlled and using two fingers on the trackpad or down on the bottom right, there's a zoom window with a plus or minus where you can zoom in and out. In Inkscape, I couldn't find any blade settings anyway. What I'm gonna do is use the rulers to create some myself. If you don't see the rule is you can hit across to View, Show Hide, and you can turn them on and off in there. And just hit over to the ruler area, click and drag and a little guide will pop out to place them at a specific point exactly where you want them. You will need to just double-click on them. For top and bottom blade, I'm going to enter the amount into the horizontal y-axis box. And vertical x-axis for the left and the right. For the right and bottom blade, you'll need to add the amount to the total width and height respectively. Okay, That's my blade setup. I'm going to go down to the bottom left where you find the layer button. Click on that and the layer panel on the right side of the screen. You can click on the little plus icon to make a new layer or go up to Layer Add Layer. I'm going to name my new layer text. And I like to keep the first layer blank. I'm going to name it bleed guides and move across to the right and locking. There, we have it. Now we're going to grab the text tool on the left panel and click on our art board to start typing out a word list. It took me a bit of trial and error to work out this text panel. As it's not quite as intuitive as Illustrator. But I'm just going to select a typeface that's readable for now and type out my words. For whatever reason I typed everything inside the text panel. I just ended up cutting and pasting it back onto the art board. I'm going over to the font settings and increasing my font size so I can see everything. And when you're doing this, make sure to click apply. Otherwise, nothing will happen. Once you finished all that, you'll be ready to move on to the next lesson, where we'll be learning about typeface. 8. Typeface: And typography are all around us conveying meaning not only through the use of language itself, but in more subtle ways too, like the typeface. What's the difference between typeface? You ask? Font is the more widely used tune and you've definitely heard of it. But if you want to get technical about it, a font refers to variations of a typeface, like it's size and weight. While I type face is the overall style of the letter forms. Like how Palatino here is the typeface while Palatino, regular, italic, and bold are the font variations. To myself some points as a type nerd, I'm correctly using the term typeface in this class. I won't be going into the entire anatomy of type here, but to help choose and combine typefaces, you do need to know the basic type place categories, which can be divided into four classifications. These are Sarah, san serif, script and decorative. Now, let's choose our typeface. Chances are you probably don't have a huge selection of typefaces on your computer. So we'll be looking at downloading some. I actually find this easier sometimes than scrolling through the massive amount of fonts I've already got. So to get started, I'd like you to go back to your brainstorming and write down your mood or what emotion you want your audience to feel when they see your poster. Then go and google your mood along with the keyword, typeface or font. I like to go to Google Images and see which typefaces stand out to me. Then Google the name of the font to find it. As a side note, when you're downloading fonts, always be aware of suspicious redirections. If it comes up with a bob up window, then avoid it. At font download sites like font space, you can type in your mood or theme to look for typefaces. Google Fonts is also a great resource for free typefaces. And it lets you know which typefaces to pair together. Another great way to find typefaces is to take a screenshot of a typeface you like and go to Font Squirrel font identifier, upload the screenshot and it will match the letters to similar typefaces. My fonts also has a tool like this called what the font. It's okay if you only want to use one typeface for your poster. But if you want to use more than one, I'd recommend looking for typefaces from each of the categories, serifs, sans serif, script, and decorative. You'll be narrowing down which ones work best. In the next lesson. From your downloads, collect your typefaces into a folder so that you can find them easily. Then add them to your system. On a Mac, this is Font Book located in your applications folder. Open it up and go to File, Add fonts, or hit the plus button at the top. Navigate to the location of your fonts and import the OTF or t0 tf font file. Sometimes with free fonts, it might come up with an error message. So it's up to you whether or not you want to go ahead and install it. Also note that you may have to exit and reopen your design software for the new fonts to show up. Once you've collected a good amount of typefaces and installed them, join me in the next lesson where we'll be exploring the next principle, hierarchy. 9. Hierarchy: The next thing we need to do for our project is to determine the hierarchy of our word list. There are a few main ways to indicate hierarchy and topography. The most common is to alter the size of the text. The largest text is generally the most important word. And the part viewers say first, if all the words are the same size, then the design looks uncertain as if the message isn't all that important. A contrast in scale helps to add depth and a dynamic quality to help the message standout. As well as altering the size, you could choose one typeface and use the bold font variation for the most important word. Italic for the second most important, and regular for the wrist. My general rule is to use ideally three, but definitely no more than four variations. Otherwise, things look way too busy. Other ways to indicate hierarchy or through layout and color will be carrying more of this in the next few lessons. But the main thing to remember about hierarchy is contrast. So now let's start organizing our word list into a basic hierarchy. 10. Illustrator Hierarchy: So here we are inside Illustrator with our word list. And I'm just going to drag that off to the side. And what we'll be doing first is just looking at our word list and deciding which word is the most important. And sorting that from most important to least important. What you need to do. Very first thing is to separate out each word from the main texts body. So to do this, Double-click on your word which selects all of us. Hit Command X to cut it out of the textbook. And then press Escape on your keyboard and hit Command V to paste it right in the middle of your app board. Don't worry too much about pasting one on top of the other because we will be sorting that out very soon. Okay, so once you've done all that, grab a word from the pile, drag one to the top, and drag the other one to the bottom, select everything, and then move up to the right top, middle, hit a line. And you can see you can vertically distribute all of those words so they're readable and you can see easily what you've got. And now I'm going to decide which word is the most important. To me. Harry uses its belly out as so much. That has definitely got to be the most important word. From there. I'm just choosing the ones that I think are the most well-known. Once we've got our rough order. That's when we look at applying our typefaces. If you've already installed your fonts, there'll be up here in the character area along the top. And at this stage, I'm just applying it to the whole lot of them just to see how readable they are. If I liked the look of them and whether they fit the mood. Now you may need to zoom in and out, or maybe even moved back from your computer to look at readability. And I would suggest choosing or narrowing it down to one from each of the typeface categories. I'm looking here for Sarah. Sarah, a script typeface and one that's more decorative. I would suggest not doing any more than four fonts. Once I've narrowed down my favorites, I just apply them to the words that I think and go from there. Good tip is to zoom out and have a look how it looks all together. You can also stop looking at it for a few minutes. Come back, look at it for a split second and see which word stands out the most. And that's a good way to see which type faces most eye-catching. When you've got all that done, you're ready to move on to the next lesson, which is all about negative space. 11. Inkscape Hierarchy: Here we are inside Inkscape with our word list. And what I wanna do is create a hierarchy with these words from most to least important. So to do that, I'm going to select the type tool. And I'm going to double-click on each word. Hit Command X on my keyboard to cut the word out of the main text block. And then drag a little box onto the art board and press Command V to paste it. Once I've got that done, I'm going to order the words starting with the most important, which I think is Earth. And then working down to the least important. For this particular poster, I'm going to make a copy by selecting everything. Hitting Command C to copy and Command V to paste on the art board. For this second list of words, I just want to order into how it will appear. Vertically down the page, which is in the order of the planets in the solar system. Once I've got my lists organized into hierarchies, that's when I can apply a typeface. Now you might want to experiment here, see what looks most readable and see which ones fit your mood best. I would suggest zooming in and out and looking at your lists from a distance to see how readable there. In the end, I decided to use just one typeface and one style for it. And just adjust the size to show hierarchy. Once you've applied your typeface, then you're ready to move on to the next lesson, which is all about negative space. 12. Negative Space: Now that you've got your words organized into a hierarchy and you've got your typeface applied, it's time to look at negative space. Negative space is also known as whitespace, which was a term used in the printing industry for the white, non printed part of a page. From a typographic perspective, this covers every part of your work area that contains empty space, including the space between letters and lines of text. Negative space can be used to subtly suggests and enhancer design. If there's not enough space, it looks crowded, overwhelming, and difficult to read. The first part you'll need to consider is your margin area. There is no rule for how much margin to have, but it does need to be at least one inch or around 25 millimeters around the page. If you want to get mathematical about it, you can take the width or the height of your outward and multiply that by a percentage. I'd suggest 20% is a good amount divided by two to give you the amount of one margin and use the rulers to create a guide. Notice that this method gives you margins but a bigger on the top and bottom because the height is more than the width. If you want to, you can use even amounts. But I think this creates a nice balance. For the right margin. Subtract the amount from the total width to give you your reference. And do the same with the bottom margin, subtracting the amount from the total height. If you really don't want to get into the math, you can also take a design that you like and copy the margin amount from that. Copy it and paste it directly onto your art board, change its size to match and drag your guides out, rounded to the nearest whole number to find your reference point. But you will have to do the right and bottom margin calculations to make sure they're the same as the left and the top. You might be tempted to do it by eye, but in the long run, it's much better to be precise. Now we're going to work on the spacing of our text. Let's have a quick look at this in our design software. 13. Illustrator Negative Space: Here inside Illustrator, I've just created a very simple text area with saying, that's not too long. So I can show you some of the tools that you can use with typography inside Illustrator. If you hit straight up, you find the character panel. Open that up and you can see we've got our font family, font style, font size. And this one here is the letting. The leading is the space between each line. Usually this has a reasonable auto setting. But if you're working with a larger font size, often you need to edit this. I'm going to put in 200 and show you what I mean. There we go. That's brought it down. And I think that's a lot more balanced. Now, the next thing I'm going to show you is the kerning. Kerning is the space between two characters or letters. Now this is usually set to auto, but Illustrator, if you hit this little drop-down, you'll see optical. And that just makes it more visually pleasing is also metrics, which spaces it out evenly. Beside the caning is the tracking. So that's where you can get in and select your individual tracking between characters. Or you can also do the overall trekking. I'll show you what I mean here is set to 200. Oh, and while I remember, let's go up to paragraph. And you can uncheck this little hyphenate. And that just takes the hyphen out back to character. And I'll tracking is set to 200 or I can set it less. And that's way too close, but we'll set it back to 0. And you can also individually go in and take, for instance, this gap. Go in and adjust that. And I might just make it minus d, which is a little bit nicer to my eye. Tracking in-between two letters is sometimes a little bit too much, depending on the litter is. A good example would be an eye. You might need to go in and just make them more visually pleasing. Above all else, remember the readability. So those are the main type of graphic tools you'll be using. Adjusting the leading, kerning and tracking these other ones below the vertical scale you probably won't use much. Basically, it just suggests the vertical space that the type takes up so you can squash it down or you can stretch it up. And the horizontal scale does much the same thing, but horizontally. This one here is a good one to know the baseline shift. So let's look at this word here. I'm going to decrease the size to 100 and then grab that baseline shift tool. And you can bring it up so that it's basically in the middle of the next word and the next one character rotation. And then you've got below that your basic type tools, such as. So, if you write something in lowercase, you can change it to capitals. This is titling small caps, but you probably won't need to use any of those. Okay, so what I want you to do now is go into your app board and your word list and just have a play around with all these settings. Letting probably won't matter unless you're using a quote, because we will adjust the spacing between words later on. But if you are using a quote, I would suggest just playing around with that until it looks visually, okay. Usually, if it's a smaller size, leading to 22 to four points larger than the font size. And the kerning. Just make sure to go in and click on optical. And once you're happy with the appearance of each individual words, you can move on to the next lesson, which is all about alignment. 14. Inkscape Negative Space: Alright, here we are inside Inkscape and I've created just a very basic text box with no hierarchy whatsoever. It's all the same typeface and the same size. And I just want to show you the tools that you can use to adjust your text inside Inkscape. So if you click on this text box, double-click and then it'll take you inside. You can press Command a to select everything. And then along the top here you can see all your texts settings. So we have the typeface, we have the font variations in here. We have the font size or the point size. And that is set two points. You can set it to something different, but I would just recommend working with points. Right here is something called the letting. Inkscape is calling it spacing between baselines, which is the same thing. It is the spacing between each word. If you move across beside this little box and set it to point. That way we have a little bit more control over the sizing. At the moment it's on 0. Absolutely no space between lines and they just stacked one on top of the other. I'm gonna go in there and I'm going to type in 200. And that looks a lot better. So particularly with a larger point size, you need less reading than you would a smaller point size. But just use your own judgment here. Move further back or zoom in and out, and you'll be able to see pretty quickly what looks better. Okay, beside this, you've got your text alignment, which is pretty self-explanatory. You can set it to left or right aligned or central text. I little superscript and subscript button. If you need to make, say if you're doing a squared symbol. And you need to make that a superscript or subscript is the ability to do that. Now the kerning is the space between the letters. So sometimes you do need to adjust this. In Illustrator, there's a great tool called optical kerning, and that just makes everything visually pleasing. But I haven't found a similar thing inside Inkscape. If I add a negative value here, you'll see that the space between letters will come in. And if I add positive value, it will come out. This one here is called spacing between words, but I wouldn't worry too much about that. If you're using the free version of Inkscape, a lot of the extra features are grayed out. You can't use them. But there are definitely workarounds to this, which I'll be showing you in the coming lessons. So what I want you to do now is go into your word list and just play with all those settings, particularly the kerning or the letter spacing, makes sure that you're visually happy with how each word looks. The canon you probably don't need to worry about unless you're using a saying or a quote like this. Because we're going to sort out the space between words further down the track. Once you're happy with how everything looks, then you're ready to move on to the next lesson, which is all about alignment. 15. Alignment: In this lesson, we're going to take what we've learned about typeface, hierarchy and negative space and create a balanced composition through the use of alignment. Alignment is more than just lines of text or images being on the left, right, or center in relation to the page. It applies to each element and how it relates to everything else in the composition. It takes some consideration, but the main thing to aim for is visual balance. With thoughtful placement, you can take advantage of the natural direction. Viewers scan a page, or even use intentional misalignment to draw attention to your most important elements. One thing to keep in mind is that mathematical alignment is not always the same as optical alignment. So you can align something using the tools inside your software, but it might need some extra work to get it looking just right. 16. Illustrator Alignment: You can keep working with the text tools to align everything, but I like to have a little more control. So my next step is to make a copy of my word lists, drag that off to the side and put it on a new Locked layer. Or you can simply hit your layers panel and drag the layer onto the New Layer button to copy it. Then turn off the visibility and lock it. Next, go up to type create outlines. This will convert all the letter shapes into vector paths. You can no longer use the text tools to change the text. So make sure to double-check your spelling. By double-clicking on your word group. You can go in and move the letters around as needed. I'm going to make all my words cover the same width on the poster, much like justified alignment. I find the width value by subtracting the left and right margin amounts from the total width. Then select your word and got to transform entering the width. Make sure to hit the button constrained proportions. If you make a mistake, just use the shortcut Command Z to undo. Once you have the right width, align the word with the margin by entering the margin value into the x axis. I'm going to move all my other words off to the side of my art board so I can concentrate on my main word. And I'm going to have it roughly 1 third of the way down the page where I want people to look first. After you click the word to move it, hold down Shift to keep it vertically aligned with the margin. Now I want to look at its visual alignment and allow for these thin serifs to go over the edge a little bit. I'm making small adjustments with the arrow keys, then adjusting the width by dragging a corner of the bounding box. And now that looks more visually aligned. Mu3, a word list distributing the important words to create balance. Here I've looked at the gap between these two words, double-clicking and selecting all the characters of the second word before adjusting the position using the arrow keys. Then make it the right width and adjust the alignment to accommodate any decorative areas of the characters. Depending on your typeface choice, you may have to experiment to avoid large areas of empty space. It's a bit like putting a puzzle together. If you want to change things around, that's okay. Here, I've realized that the main word expel Yannis should be in a bold font. So I've gone back a few steps to my typeface selection. Remember if you do this, we'll look again at the kerning and tracking. I was happy enough with the built-in kerning. This time I've placed my main where it just above halfway. You can see how it now stands out as the most important word. I also use the spell finite in kn Tatum at the bottom of the poster as a little nod to its meaning. You might need to stack a group of words in order to fit them better. To do this, double-click to enter the main group, drag the selection over each word and press Command G on your keyboard to group the letters together. Now you can move the entire word around inside the group. Continue filling the words together, allowing enough space around them to look balanced. A long list of words. Beware of placing the words of the same typeface directly beside each other. Because they'll look like part of a group. Unless you have enough contrast to signal that they're on their own. And you can break the rules. Notice here that I'm using five typefaces, which normally would be too many. Particularly if I was designing a poster with a quote or assaying. For this one though, I wanted to keep the unforgivable cursors standing out with their own typeface. And older I had three serif typefaces. They fit the theme so well and have enough contrast with each other that I think it works. But let me know what you think. Keep arranging your words and zooming in and out to check if there are any large areas of empty space, all areas where things look overcrowded. A good trick is to reverse the colors which changes how you see it. It's challenging with a lot of words, but just keep experimenting with focus on the problem areas. You can stack word groups, rotate or slightly offset letters or lines. And after I finished my layout, I found this typo completely intentional, of course. So now go and create your finished black and white poster. Once you're happy and you can't stand the side of it anymore. Join me in the next lesson for some color. 17. Inkscape Alignment: The text tools inside Inkscape will only take you so far. So what you can do next is to turn your texts into vector paths, which will allow you to have greater control over alignment. After re-checking your spelling, go up to Path and click object to path. It's also a good idea to duplicate your texts layer before doing this in case you need to make any ticks changes later on. But I've been reckless here and I haven't done that. You can position your words by dragging them into place and making sure they're aligned to the margins by typing in x and the y value. When adjusting the width or height, make sure you click the little padlock to constrain the proportions. And while moving words around, you can hold down the Shift key to keep them aligned to the x or y-axis. I'm going to position my most important word on the top part of the page because I'm using one uppercase typeface. This is much easier than working with mixed type faces where you have to work at fitting them together in a balanced way. With this typeface, I can position the words in a mathematical way with even space between words and lines, and then make small adjustments when looking at visual alignment. While arranging words, you can group lines together by using the shortcut command G. Like how I group Mercury and Venus here to make them the same height as the word son beside them. And then I group the three together and adjust the width back to fit inside the margin. You can also use the align tools off to the right. Keep zooming in and out to check how it looks. You want to keep the most important word, the most eye-catching and the biggest. You can rotate words as long as they're still legible. Experiment with different layouts, always making sure nothing's too crowded or spaced out. And everything is readable. If your words are not quite making it to the bottom margin, you can place the top and bottom word against the margins, select each group of lines, and use the Align Panel to vertically distribute. Another trip to check alignment is to reverse the colors using a black background. This changes the way we perceive shapes and will often bring attention to something we might have overlooked. Once you've arranged all your words and you're happy with how everything looks. Join me in the next lesson for some color. 18. Colour: Now we're going to take our black and white design and add some color. You can Google your mood or theme plus the word palate or color. Or if you have more space in mind where the postal end up, you could take colors from their own by taking a picture, placing it inside your design software, and using the eyedropper to make a palette. Of course, if you'd like the black and white version best, That's an option too. So let's have a look now at some ways we can use color in our designs. 19. Illustrator Colour: To narrow down some colors, you can spend some time thinking about your audience and what they like. For my Harry Potter Spells poster, my audience would definitely have the books. I went looking for the book colors. You can right-click on the images you find and copy them, then paste them into a new layer inside Illustrator cannot with a few alternative pellets to try out. Here I've googled the word magical color palette. The first thing I'm deciding on is a background color. I'm trying out a dark purple as purple is a pretty common color with any magical themed artwork. I liked the book designs directly above the art board because of how vibrant the colors are. I'm pulling colors from there. Select each word first, then use the eyedropper to pick colors directly from your image. I'm looking at creating a visual balance with the colors. So on applying the same color in three parts of the composition in a roughly triangular shape. Pay particular attention to your most important word in which color makes it stand out the most. For mine, I've given it a purple color of its own. Zoom in and out to see how it looks and adjust colors, either by selecting a different part of the image or adding the colors to the color panel. Select everything. Click on the drop-down at the top right of the color panel and click Add Selected Colors. Then you can select the color and adjust it as needed. A good way to check if the colors work is to turn off the background or change it to white. Once you're happy with the colors, you might want to add some texture. One of my favorite tools to do this is in Illustrators Effect menu under texture and grain. I usually have the intensity around 50 and the contrast around 75. And you can also change the style of the grain. It's important before doing this to make a copy of your text implies that beneath your working layer, then use the layer blend mode to make the effect more subtle. I usually set it to multiply and change the opacity to around 50 that you can play around with these settings to figure out what works best for you. I think for this poster it's better without any texture. So I'm turning it off. In addition to the methods I've used for this poster, you could also experiment with gradients and image masks. For gradients, select the gradient tool from your toolbox. This opens the settings box for the gradient tool in Type choose from linear, radial, or freeform gradients. Double-click the circles at either end of the gradient bar to select the colors you wish to graduate between. Alternatively, draw our line with the Gradient tool to define the length and angle of the gradient. You can also pull the gradient panel off the toolbar at right. Then open the color panel and drag colors into the gradient panel. For image masks, use a site like Unsplash to find high resolution images suitable for printing. Place the image inside Illustrator with File Place. And make sure it's on the same layer as end behind your text shapes. Then position it where you need it. With your text selected. Go to object, compound path, make to create the mask shape. Then holding Shift to keep the text selected, click on the image behind it, go to Object, Clipping Mask Make. You can also use an image for the background of your poster. Here's my finished full-color poster. Let me know what you think of it. If you think I've made a terrible job, but you can tell me that to you last night. Your task is to apply color to black and white poster. And in the next lesson, we'll go over how to get it print ready. 20. Inkscape Colour: You have a few options when it comes to color in your poster, you could use solid colors, gradients, textures, or a combination. For this poster. I was keen to explore the idea of using stock images of space. My favorite royalty-free stock photo site is Unsplash. You can search for high resolution photos that you can download for free. In Inkscape, go to File, Import to place the photo into your app board. It's always a good idea to put all your pictures into the project file folder. But it's also okay to keep them in the downloads while you're experimenting. It will import at full size. So go up to the width and make it the same as your art board. Then change the x and y values to align it with the edges. I kind of like this with that circular shape drawing the eye so the middle of the poster. But I'm going to experiment some more with an idea to have an image fill the letters of each word. So to do this, I need to separate the words into their own layers. Here I've created a layer named Sun, and I've dragged the sun text up to the top of the stack in the layer panel. Then I've imported a photo of the sun, resize it and drag it behind the text. From here I position it by dragging it around. This might cause some lag with Inkscape. So you can switch off the visibility of other layers to help with the word sun selected, you need to make a combined path group. Go up to path and select combined hold down Shift to keep the word selected and click on the image behind. Then go up to Object, mask, sit mask. You can turn the background on again to see how things look together. You could also find a texture online and use the same masking technique to apply it to your words. So after all that, my poster is still not quite right. I need to go in and make a copy of the white text so I can adjust colors using layer blending. To do this, I'm going back and releasing the layer mask, copying the white text and pasting it in front, resetting the mask. Let this be a lesson that you should always create a copy of your plain text to save yourself extra work. In the window on the right, you'll see a panel called Fill and Stroke. Here you can change settings like hue and saturation and also adjust the blend mode. I'm working with a Greenfield here and blending it with the mask image behind it. If you do something similar with your poster, experiment with the different blend modes to see what looks best. I've also added a dark rectangle for the background and blended it with the background image behind it to adjust the colors and give it more contrast. You might want to export a version of your poster to check how it looks by going up to File Export. The poster definitely needed more work. I typed planet color palette into Google to experiment with colors. I could blend over the masks, right-click the color images you find online and copy them. Then paste them into Inkscape using Edit Paste or the shortcut Command V. While I liked the general idea of this poster, I hated that result. I think it's way too complicated and confusing to look at. So I went back to the drawing board looking for new color palettes. I tried creating a group from all the words in masking the background image, which didn't look too bad. Then I tried out some different color combinations. The lesson here is, if it's not working, keep experimenting. Go back to the mood you want to capture and think about ways you can do that. I really wanted to capture the wonder and the grand jury of our solar system. And the colors just weren't doing. So I needed an image to match. I tried an image mask, but in the end, it was better with the image taking up the negative space around the words. As well as the methods I've used in my poster. You could also try using gradients. To apply a gradient, select an object, then click and drag over the object with the gradient tool. There'll be two new handles connected by a blue line. The square represents the beginning of the gradient and the circle its end. You can change the gradients direction and position by moving the handles. Select one handle with the gradient tool, and select a color in the pallet to apply it. To add a third color, Double-click with the gradient tool on the blue line and a new diamond shaped handle will appear. You can then apply to add color. Once you've applied color to your poster, join me in the next lesson where we'll go over how to get everything ready for printing. 21. Illustrator Exporting: The last thing you need to do is get your file ready to print, Create a copy of the Illustrator file and name it print file. Then go in and clean up the layers, leaving only what you need to get printed. Make sure to use the shortcut command is to save your work. To know exactly what to export. It's good to firstly find some way to get your design printed and check the requirements. There are plenty of places where you can upload designs online and get them printed and shipped to you. I just have a good look and compare the most common file formats for printing JPEG and PDFs. To export a JPEG, go to File Export to bring up a dialog box. Select JPEG in the format area, and make sure to select Use Artboards before hitting export. Make sure your JPEG is CMYK, maximum quality and high resolution 300 pixels per inch. Select Optimized anti-aliasing. Remember that your CMYK print colors might look different on a screen. To export a PDF, go to File, Save As, select PDF from the presets, and choose a version down from general settings on the left into marks and bleeds and tick use document bleed settings before hitting the export PDF button. To say the low resolution version you can upload to the project area, go to File, Export, rename your file if you need to. Choose JPEG from the Format drop-down, select, Use Artboards and hit export. From there, select RGB color mode, which is best for screens. You can set the quality too low. Take the other settings at high resolution, 300 ppi and anti-aliasing on art optimized. If you choose to export a PDF, select the smallest file size from the preset drop-down. And you can uncheck, use document bleed settings. And that's it. You've done the hard work and you've now got your own print ready typographic poster. 22. Inkscape Exporting: The last thing you need to do is get your file ready to print a copy of your Inkscape file and name it print file. Then go in and clean up the light is leaving only what you need to get printed in. Make sure to use the keyboard shortcut Command S to save your work. Tonight exactly what to export. It's good to firstly find some way to get your design printed and check the requirements. There are plenty of places where you can upload designs online and get them printed and shipped to. I just have a good look and compare the most common file formats for printing JPEG and PDF. You can go to File Export first time you do this, which will bring up a shortcut in the tool panel. To export a JPEG, select J peg in the format area, you can add the blade in the width and height boxes. Go down to the DPI and type in 300. Do the same thing to export a PDF except select portable document format from the Format drop-down. If you aren't sure whether you've exported CMYK or not, then you can check inside acrobat by clicking on tools, print production, and ink manager. They should say the CMYK colors pop up. For a project version that you can upload Skillshare, leave your settings on the default. And that's it. You've done all the hard work and you've now got your own print ready typographic poster. 23. Conclusion: You've reached the final video. Congratulations on all your hard work and for sticking with it this far. We've covered a lot of ground. We've led full principles of typography, typeface hierarchy, negative space, and alignment. And we've also covered the steps to take to create a typographic poster and prepare it for print. I really hope you've come away with a new appreciation for typography. And then you can put the skills you've learned into practice alone with your own intuition to take your creativity to the next level. I can't wait to see what you've designed. So make sure to upload your project into the project gallery so that we can all take a look and cheer feedback. If you've enjoyed this class, please consider leaving a review for me. And you can also follow my teacher profile here on Skillshare. So thanks again for being here and until next time, happy creating.