10 Essential Design Tips for Illustrator

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hello and welcome to the stream we should be live now gah you can always count on technology to let you down just when you need it most but thank you for your patience and apologies it took a little while to get the stream started as I say I think I'm gonna blame technology today so for anyone that doesn't know my name is Daniel white some of you know me as dan ski I'm an instructor with Umberto tuts plus and well first of all happy new year I hope you had a fantastic New Year and happy 2018 I hope it's going really well for you and you could probably tell I'm a little bit excited because tonight we're going to be jumping into Adobe Illustrator and whereas normally we focus on one thing and we kind of go quite in-depth we're going to be covering a variety of different topics in Illustrator so whether you've been using illustrator for a year or two if you're completely new to it if you've been using it most of your life hopefully there's going to be something for everyone here and some of the things that we're going to be covering are things that I'm personally a huge fan of the features I'm a huge fan of and they're things that I've really struggled to learn just throughout the course of my career so I'm really really excited to kind of share this with you and yeah we're going to get started so hello to everyone in the chat how are you doing if you have any questions please do drop them drop them drop them in the chat and I will answer as many as I can as we go through the stream and then we will do some more questions at the end and I'll try and be as helpful as possible cool right so you can see on screen I've jumped into Illustrator already and I've created a new document and at the moment I've got ten separate artboards and they're all a thousand pixels wide and a thousand pixels high so we'll go to the first one at the moment and the first thing that we're going to look at is how to draw a heart now this is something that I've done for many years incorrectly it's something I really struggled where they use the pen tool I use brush tools pencil tools I really really did struggle to use a hopper to draw a heart and there's a few different ways that we're going to be doing that that I'm going to demonstrate now so we've got our art board and we're going to grab the rectangle tool over here on the left and the first thing I'm going to do is just left-click and drag to draw a rectangle and then I can go to edit copy edit paste in place and then just rotate this 90 degrees and then just snap these in place like so if you want to check if they're exactly snapped on top of each other you can go into outline mode which is command or control Y and you can see that they're not so I like to zoom in several thousand percent with the zoom tool and we'll just we'll just shuffle these over so they're in exactly the right position and you can also use the align panel to do this as well now it's definitely worth switching your smart guides on and having snap to point on and turning off snap to pixel if it's snapping two points and pixels it Illustrated can sometimes get a little bit confused and it's not always sure what you're trying to snap it to so I like to go with point and it just snaps any shapes together really easily so we'll come out of outline mode command or control Y drag over everything and rotate this 90 degrees now this bit in the middle is going to be the dip in our heart and you can see that I've made this far too large so I'm just going to drag this down and make this rectangle a little bit shorter and we'll delete this one and again do that same process of edit copy edit paste in place hold shift to rotate and again just zoom in really really close just check they're lined up and just align those to each other like so and if we come back out we have something like this now what we can do is we can select one of these rectangles and you'll see just inside the edges we have these circular anchor points and we can actually select these with the direct selection tool and we can click on one and you'll see it changes and becomes selected we can hold shift and we can left-click on the one along from it so we've got these two selected now and at the top of the screen you can see we have this box here corners and we can enter a corner radius or we can use the arrow keys to adjust this and we're only going to adjust it just for these two so let's go ahead and increase this all to make this even quicker we can just grab these circular points and drag them towards the center and you'll see when it marks it in red this is the maximum radius that we can go to and we have effectively a semicircle on the end there now we can do the same with the other one so just select the shape select the direct selection tool left click and hold shift to select both of those anchor points and just drag towards the center now if we jump back into outline mode that's fine but we're going to tidy this shape up and we can do this in one of two ways we can drag over everything go to the Pathfinder panel on the right or at the top of the screen if you can't see it and just select unite which is the top left option and it will merge those into one complete shape or if you're not on a newer version of Illustrator so a cc version you'll have the shape builder tool over there and you can just go and left-click I don't know what that sounds just left-click and drag through those shapes and it will merge them into one shape so there we go we have one heart this is if you're going for kind of a straight edged heart but what if you want a heart that is a little bit more curved and this is my personal favorite if I had to pick one so we'll start by selecting the ellipse tool and just left-click and hold shift to draw a circle and then we can drag this circle to the right holding shift to keep it in line and holding alt and with alt held it will create a copy now this area here this is going to be the dip in our heart so the further you adjust the distance with the circles the lower or dip the closer you bring it together the shallow of the dip so it depends on the style of heart that you're going for and now we're going to grab the pencil and again go into outline mode which is command or control Y and you can also press the cap locks key on your keyboard and it will switch to a crosshairs which is sometimes a little bit easier than the pen icon and we're going to click right in the middle here like this and we'll hold shift to go straight down and we'll left-click somewhere around here next what we're going to do is go up here and you can see those smart guides now really really coming in handy and it's snapping to that path for now we're not going to go right here we're going to just hover a little bit up from that and then left-click and start to drag with the pen tool and the goal here is to follow the continuation of the left circle so if I let go and just go to select deselect the goal here is to make this transition with this new line we've drawn just run straight into the existing circle now if you don't get it right first time don't worry that's totally fine just grab at a direct selection tool click on that path and you'll see you get this handle here and you can bend this until you get the right angle so what we can do now is just with the direct selection tool select that new anchor point we created hold shift and select the starting Anchor Point and just go to object path and join and it will join that into a complete shape and then what we can do is select this shape I'm not sure what this type of shape is called but this is what we've created and what go to edit copy edit paste in place and just drag this over and then go object transform reflect make sure you reflect it along the vertical axes and click OK and now if we zoom in right the way on here just to check everything is perfectly lined up what we can do now is we're still in outline mode as you can see here what we can do is press command or control Y we can switch back out of outline mode and we can see that we have our heart and we can drag over this and you can give this a fill you can give it a stroke oh but if you try and give it a stroke at the moment is made up of tons of different shapes so again we can drag over everything and from the Pathfinder panel select the top left option voila we have one shape or we can use a shape builder tool and just run it through every segment and we've now got a heart and we could then go and apply a stroke to this if we wanted if you do get any strange little things like this in the middle so this strange triangle that's appeared we can jump back into outline mode and we can see there's a stray anchor point sometimes when creating shapes especially with the shape builder tool this is just something that happens if you get any stray anchor points just lying around like this just grab a direct selection tool drag over them and hit delete or backspace and then they are gone so we could have an outline heart or we could swap this around and have a fill and of course we can go and give these both a color so we can double click a swatch turn on preview and then it just adjust these until we get a color that we're happy with and there we go there's a couple of different ways that we can draw a heart right let's move on to artboard number two now in Illustrator you may already know that you can create a shape and you can round off the corners well in fact I hope you know this because that's what we just did a minute ago so you can quickly and easily round off the corners just by using the direct selection tool and grabbing these little circular points in from the edge so incredibly incredibly useful but we can also do this for lettering or if you've created a shape or if it's a logo or something and you think ah I'd love to just see how this looks with rounded corners in some of the later versions of illustrator CC you can do just that so sometimes I might design a logo and it will be very very angular lots of straight edges and I just want to see how it looks so I can create a copy of that logo and then start adjusting the radius on some of the corners and just see how it looks with a little bit more kind of curviness to it so let's draw a letter first and I'll show you what I mean let's just change that color back to black so we'll grab the rectangle tool and we'll go with a letter T so I'm just going to draw a rectangle and go edit copy edit paste in place and just rotate from one of the corners and hold shift then we've got a letter T and of course just drag over these two segments and combine those into one shape in the Pathfinder panel now let's just scale this down so let's just say I've designed a letter as part of a font or a logo or just any shape and I want to try and preview this with a few more curves without having to actually go and redraw everything from scratch well again we can hold alt and shift and drag out just to quickly get that copy and with that shape selected with the main selection tool we can then select the direct selection tool and you'll see that you get these same little circles in these corners and we can left-click and drag and round those off so that's one way of doing it and it will apply this to absolutely everything but of course we can select individual corners and round those off fully if we want let's go back what we could do is hold shift and just left click on all six of these circular anchor points inside the shape ignoring these two here so we could go for something like this well we can leave everything very very kind of angular and with these straight edges and just select these two here and now these are on the outside as well so this will round off and you can see again with the red line it tells you exactly where that maximum radius is and I'd like to show you something I think is a little bit cool and a little bit off script not there is a script so what you could do is create a custom letter like this we can create that copy press command or control D to repeat that last action we could then select everything and copy it and paste it in place we'll rotate it holding shift move it up and select everything and again just copy paste in place rotate it 90 degrees drag over everything edit copy edit paste in place rotate 45 degrees and there we go we have a snowflake so you can use this to edit existing shapes or you can use this to design snowflakes it's entirely up to you but that's one way that you can use the direct selection tool to individually select certain points and round these off and I found this really useful personally when I was designing font recently I started doing a few letters and I just wanted to see how some of them would look if I added a few more curves in a few places so it makes it incredibly easy to do things like that or if you're kind of wanting to introduce some serifs into something this is one way that you can do it so we could take that letter we could rotate this around and there we go we've got a letter I with some rather large serifs but it depends what you're going for so having control over all of these anchor points some of the more recent versions of illustrator CC is incredibly useful and of course you can draw snowflakes if that's what you're into okay so we're going to jump on to our third artboard this is really really cool I love this this is um we're going to look at gradient logos now so sometimes you see logos and they have a gradient to them and they blend really nicely over different colors so a good example would be the Adobe MAX logo the the more abstract one that was made out of lots of different triangles very very minimal and it was all made up of gradients so when you lay a color or any image behind it doesn't matter what it is it just it looks fantastic and it works so let's start by creating a polygon so we'll left click anywhere on the artboard and of course we can specify the number of sides so we'll go for three now the radius does does determine the size but let's not worry about that because we can just click OK and just scale up from the corner holding shift now what we're going to do is click on the gradient panel on the right if you don't see that don't worry just go over to window and down to gradient and if you click anywhere on that slider you'll get the default black to white gradient and of course we can left-click on this shape hold alt and shift and drag out and we can repeat this last action with command or control D so you could keep doing this if you really wanted to and I think let's rotate this so we'll select everything and hold shift and rotate from one of the corners now if I drag over everything we can change the transparency blending mode from normal to multiply so if you use Photoshop these options will seem very familiar and there we go we've kind of got a W logo so let's pretend that this is a fictional company and the logo is a W we've gone for a really minimalist approach now what using multiply does is it just blends those together so they kind of overlap with each other and we can of course we'll bring these in a bit now if I manually start adjusting this the spacing of course you can see isn't equal on each so we'll just select everything and from the align panel go to the distribute objects section and select horizontal distribute Center and it will space these equally apart so now if I select this you can see this is still made up of black and white and we have the multiply blending mode so let's just go and add a background color with the rectangle tool and it's giving us a gradient so let's just go and pick a swatch we'll double click any swatch and we'll just adjust this like so and then go to object arrange send to back and there you go because we have the black and the white so we've not introduced any color whatever color you lay behind this it will blend in really really nicely so if we go back to the swatches panel and we change this global swatch you can see the this is background color proof essentially and we can do a whole bunch of different things with it and it looks really cool and we can of course go back into each shape and we can adjust the rotation we can reverse the gradients around so we've got lots of flexibility let's try changing the angle so something like that and then of course if you do want to you can double click on a swatch in the gradient and then go and add colors as well in fact what we can do is we can actually use the eyedropper tool so if we select one of our original shapes that have a black to white gradient we can actually eyedropper tool this and it will copy those same gradient settings and then of course we can go back and start reversing and rotating now of course we've introduced a specific color so if we do start changing the background color now we've got to be conscious about how these two colors blend together with the multiply blending mode so if we start changing this background now which I think I think looks really cool so you can see we're not working with just black and white anymore we've kind of got this it's really really dark blue swatch over here that we used to white instead and now we've we've kind of got this sort of Coralie color background in so those two colors are blending together yes I think this works really really well so it depends entirely what you're going for but is one way you can use gradients within your logo design to just make something that looks really really awesome and works with a variety of different bright ground backgrounds you can do this with circles as well in fact I mean you know there's some fantastic logos out there that use all manner of different shapes and just combine them in various ways with various colors and you can even use the same color and then with the shapes overlap you've got that multiply blending mode set obviously that's not the the most interesting logo in the world I'm sure what you create will be much better but anyway there's a few tricks and tips about how you can use gradients and the multiply blending mode to create logos that work against a whole different amount of backgrounds man that just looked really cool right let's move on to our next artboard rightio number 4 oh absolutely love this tool so if you've never used the width tool before in Illustrator prepare to have your mind blown this is amazing and I love this one so much so I'm gonna grab the pencil and just remove that fill and we've got a black stroke and I can left-click and left-click again and we'll just drag and we're just going to draw a nice wavy line and it wants to continue this line we can just go up to select and down to deselect or just press escape on the keyboard and from the stroke panel on the right we can increase the weight and yeah I mean it's a line it looks okay but we can also use the width tool to adjust the width of the line at different points so you can see this over here on the left and I believe you will need a copy of illustrator CC to have access to the width tool so let's click this and I can now hover along this path and you can see it has a plus symbol so I can click anywhere along this path and drag up or down and from that exact point it will become a bit thinner or a bit wider or what we can do is we can grab the existing anchor point so at the moment this shape is made up of three anchor points we've got one anchor point at either end and one in the middle to ever hover over this and click I can of course do the same thing so we could bring these anchor points of the end in so they become smaller and when you've once you've created an adjustment point as well you'll see you get these two points either end just grab either of those and bring it in and then we could hover over that middle anchor point let's just zoom in on there and we can then make this wider so you can see we've adjusted this middle anchor point so when we hover over it again we get this line here that runs across the width of the stroke and we can adjust it from there and we still got square kind of edges on the end so if we just drag over everything and then round off the cap you get a lovely round finish as well so this is a great way if you're kind of creating illustration or some floral decorations or you know really creative borders you can draw a lot of your lines just as normal strokes and then you can go in and really refine the width for example this would make a fantastic eyebrow if you were doing the illustration of someone's face for example well we could just hold alt and drag and we'll scale this down maybe move this up here and then of course still go in and adjust the stroke weight now if you've applied some changes with the width tool and then you go in and you adjust the stroke weight it will still remember all of the different proportions so even though we're adjusting the stroke weight now we're bringing it down and making the stroke thinner is still going to remember that the middle is a little bit wider than either end so we could bring this one down as well and do something like this and bring it this one down and we can even go a little bit wild as well if we grab that width tool and we can just select all manner of different points and you can really get quite quite creative with this actually I'm not entirely sure where this is going I have no idea what this is it looks very abstract but you can see that you can fully adjust the width of any stroke at various points along that line fantastic so that is the width tool I absolutely love that one and when I first learned that I was I was honestly blown away because it's a tool tucked over here that I hadn't actually ever used before rightio artboard number five so this is going to be a little bit similar we're going to be doing brushes so again if I draw let's draw a spiral so we'll left-click on the the line segment tool and we'll grab the spiral tool a bit more interesting so we can left-click to draw a spiral and we can increase the stroke weight and of course we've still got that round cap on just so it rounds off the ends and in fact I'm going to create a few different copies of this because what we're going to do next is going to get very creative so there we go we've got four different spirals and if I select the first one and go up to window at the top and down to brushes it will bring up this panel here and by default there's a couple listed but if you go up to the menu icon in the top right corner you can go down to open brush library and there's a ton of libraries that come with illustrator or you can go and open your own if you've downloaded one but for example we can start with artistic so we can have access to some calligraphy brushes here so we could click this and you can see it applies that effect to our stroke and I'm just going to have edit undo handy because we're going to try lots of different effects and just see how they look and once you've opened up one library so we're in the calligraphy panel at the moment we can use the arrows at the bottom just to cycle through all of the different panels so now we're in chalk charcoal pencil and this is where it starts to get really creative so we've clicked the first one there and we've got this awesome effect and we can even go and adjust the stroke weight so we could bring this all the way up and create something a little bit crazy if you were going for some kind of some kind of pattern or what you can get for something like this now you can do this with any shape with a stroke doesn't matter whether it's a logo you've drawn in fact if you have a logo and you'd like to give it a more pencil drawn look what you can do is go all the way to the bottom and we actually have some pencil brushes so we have pencil pencil feather thick and thin so let's click the thick one and you can see this does a pretty good job at simulating these strokes of a pencil now of course you may not get the same texture as you would in Photoshop because this is vector based software so if we zoom in really really far it's going to look very very clean but when you look from a distance it looks incredibly believable and we can again go and adjust that stroke weight now if you bring the pencil up too thick of course it's going to not look like a pencil anymore but we could bring that down and I think this works most effectively when it's really thin and if we change the color from black to a darker gray something like this and if you have an illustration or a logo or anything that you've designed you can literally drag over everything go and apply one of these pencil brushes adjust the width and the color and you can turn something that is incredibly clean and lovely and clearly a vector graphic into something that looks a little bit more hand-drawn okay we've got two more swirls at the bottom so we can try a few more of these effects here so you can see lots of variety and we can go along we've got some ink brushes we've got some at the top here so we have these spatter brushes so again similar to photoshop where you can use different brushes like this if you want to kind of get those those spatter ink brushes they are there we have fire ash that sounds pretty cool let's try that so there are tons of different brushes and these are just the ones that come with illustrator as well so you can go and you know download other ones online lots of different brushes and then we have things like scroll pen so I'm literally just clicking through these and you can see some of the effects are pretty crazy we have watercolor brushes so you could take an illustration or something that you've created in one format and then you could apply a watercolor brush to the whole thing and then we have things that are a little bit cleaner so we have dashed lines let's just increase the size of this there we go so we're getting a lot more colorful now yeah and you can even get things like borders so this is fantastic yeah we're definitely getting a lot more creative now and as I said we've got floral patterns and as I say this is just what comes with illustrator so there are going to be many many more brush libraries out there and you can go absolutely wild here we go we have wooden frames so I could I could continue doing this forever I could literally sit here and play with these forever so what if you add something like this and you think oh I actually want to go and edit this color at the moment we still have that black stroke applied and all we've done is apply an effect to that stroke so you can see it listed here geometric one which is this one and we can then go to object expand appearance and then go object expand hopefully it will let us select individual elements of this now with the direct selection tool and if I go into outline mode you can see that it's no longer just a line that we did by expanding that shape it effectively what you see on screen becomes the shape whereas before it was just a spiral line with a whole bunch of effects applied over it and you can see if I select this now there are no effects applied to this this is just a series of shapes with colors in Illustrator now and what we can do is we could we could manually go through and select all of these and change the color but that's very tedious I like to use the magic wand tool just click on the color you want and hopefully let's change it to a different color I will pick a different color here or you can pick a swatch from the swatch panel and we'll just magic one this again so it selects every instance of that color within your document and we'll go and pick at a pink and there we go that's a really quick way to change the color well we've got one more spiral so let's just go back let's go back to our brush panel and we'll do one more so remember we go to the menu icon open brush library and then pick a category and once you've loaded one category you then have access to all of the others just by navigating with the arrows at the bottom okay these are these are very out-there but we do have some more floral ones we have a flower that is excellent that is excellent so yeah lots of fun lots of playing to be had here so I really hope you enjoyed enjoyed that bit because when I first found out about these in this entire brush library that I didn't know was there I had a lot of fun messing around with that cool and we've now got blue hearts because we changed the color so less let's change those back to this color there we go okay right I'm just gonna jump to the chat let's do a little bit of Q&A okay Chris asks isn't there a heart shape not to my knowledge in Illustrator but if there is one please feel free to let me know but for me personally I like to have I like to learn how to create different types of hearts and as you saw in the the beginning of the stream we really had a lot of flexibility as well as to kind of you know we could control the angle here the curvature we could control the dip and how much this did dip or didn't dip so when you learn how to do it yourself and you need to draw a heart in future you you have a whole different bunch of hearts that you can create whether it's a straight edge one or a bit more curvy so there may well be a heart icon feature somewhere hidden away in Illustrator but but for me personally it's something I like to do myself from scratch Lilian asks if we have Adobe Illustrator cs6 could we follow this tutorial some of these yes some of these you would need illustrator CC so being able to select certain corners and round them off quickly like this you would need illustrator CC unfortunately but then some of the other ones like playing around with brushes and gradient logos all of that you can do in many of the previous versions of illustrator girt asks where can we download these start files please so what I'll do is at the end of the stream I will upload the files together with the course so once the course is all complete and everything I'll package up these files and we can get those up so you guys can download what we've created here and start having a play Barry asks are you using a stylus or a mouse barry i'm using a stylus I do have a mouse on standby for me I used a mouse for a large part of my career and then once I started using a Wacom tablet this is a Wacom Intuos Pro I found it difficult to move back now the biggest thing that I love about a Wacom tablet is that you can control curves a lot better in Illustrator when drawing shapes and brushes and things so hard to grab the brush tool it's much easier for me to draw this I don't know what this is but to do it with a tablet it's just a much more natural movement kind of you know especially if you you're someone who likes to draw you have drawn a lot before and I think generally a lot of us you know we grow up using pencils and pens so having a tablet stylus feels very familiar as well and you get the control of something like pen pressure as well so you know you can set up your stylus and everything so when you're working in things like Photoshop and illustrator if you press a bit harder the the line or the the the brush that you're using will be more pronounced if your best lighter it will be smaller or perhaps fainter so you get much more artistic control over what you're creating now this tablet has a ton of features I don't use them I've got them all turned off literally those are the two reasons but I love using this and I find it difficult to go back to a mouse after using it hopefully that's helpful that's a very long answer to your question I could have just said yes do you prefer Adobe Illustrator or sketch for designing logos for me you know is Adobe Illustrator I'm not sure which version of sketch you mean if you're referring to sketch app which i think is a lot more for UI design or if there's another program called sketchbook for me personally I'm a I'm a fan of the Adobe Creative Cloud you know the Photoshop Illustrator InDesign I have used a lot of them for a number of years now and the thing that I like is they they all play nice together but all the tools are familiar as well so if I'm working in Photoshop I've got a pen tool I've got the add Anchor Point delete Anchor Point tools if I'm an illustrator I've got that as well if I'm in InDesign I've got it if I'm in XD I've got a pencil so there's a lot of shapes and icons that represent shapes like a lot of these shapes as well that you can find in other apps so if you're someone that uses lots of different apps there's a lot of familiarity between them if that makes sense but I mean I've been using illustrator for years and some of the the tools that they've added particularly things like the width tool that we demonstrated and the shape builder tool as well that just make the process of creating things like logos incredibly easy not incredibly easy but much easier much quicker so for me it's got to be Adobe Illustrator personally so kitten asks so is it better to use Photoshop for Illustrator to use Photoshop for illustration I'm confused it depends entirely what you're trying to create now the advantage the main difference between Photoshop and illustrator apart from the tools and other obvious things is that Photoshop is raster based software so it's pixel based if you create something at Photoshop at a certain size you can scale it down and it may change as you scale it down the image might become blurred because it's it's packing all of those pixels together into a smaller space conversely if you scale it up in Photoshop larger than its original size it was created at it's going to pixelate you're going to get a loss in quality whereas in Illustrator everything that you create in illustrator is vector based so what that means is that it's made up of all of these different anchor points so in Photoshop you can work with anchor points and you can work with vector shapes but most of what you create things like photos any kind of graphics that you put in there JPEGs pn G's they're not vector based because they're not made up of these anchor points because this is a shape that I've created with anchor points I could scale this up to any size and no matter how far i zoom in it's always going to be super super clean super crisp so it depends on the type of illustration that you're creating if it's going to be something you know that is gonna be a lot cleaner potentially and you're not going to use as much texture as you might in Photoshop I depend it depends what you what you're what you're trying to create yeah I think if your illustration is going to be much more like a like a painting or something that involves you know using loads of different brushes and different opacities then it's definitely worth working on a large canvas in Photoshop if you're going to be doing something like logo design or perhaps UI design or you know illustration then illustrator is a good bet it depends kind of what you what you want to use it for what you're looking to do with it hopefully that's helpful Teresa says this is fun I'm enjoying what you're demonstrating I look good me too I'm loving this fantastic okay so we've done the first five next we're going to move on to how to warp stuff let's just go to an art board number six so we're going to learn how to warp stuff let's grab our type tool left click anywhere on the artboard and we'll type some text let's type warped and we can go to the character panel at the top and we could pick a font let's go for Gotham bold and I'm going to go to the alignment options here and select align Center so this is in the middle now let's create a few copies again holding alt and shift and dragging so we'll select the first one and go to object envelope distort and make with warp and we've got the preview option checked now we can choose the style here as well so we've got lots of these presets so let's go for let's try bulge and see how that looks so at the moment we are bulging this text horizontally and we can adjust that slider so of course we can go up a few percent and you'll see it starts to bulge outwards what we can go ever so slightly into the negatives and it will go inwards you can of course go to the absolute extreme and it will go totally bonkers but we could do something subtle like this or you could bulge this vertically so it will behave slightly differently so it really does depend what you're going for but we can also distort this both horizontally and vertically as well using the sliders so if you wanted one side to appear larger like this so you really can distort these to the absolute extreme to be honest if we go for something like that and click OK you can see there we've warped the text and if we click this we still have all of these options along the top I just laid out slightly differently and we can click on that preset and we can go and change it to something else if we like now at the moment if I press command or control Y to go into outline mode you can see that it still got this this box around it these lines so I can't really change the color or anything at the moment it's just showing me this gray color which is clearly not so what I recommend is once you've done your warp and you're happy with your text go to object expand leave object and fill selected click OK and then we can switch into outline mode again and you'll be able to see your text now remember expanding anything in illustrator essentially what you see becomes the paths of the shape so this is now made up of all of these different anchor points and we can still going to adjust these if we really want to go and fine-tune that warp or make it slightly differently but also when we select this now it has a fill color and we can then go and pick a color and it will apply that color to the text so let's go and walk a couple of other things so we've got Ark so there we go we'll set the distortion back to zero and we can bend this up or we can bend this down and of course you can adjust this to vertical as well and you can really go to the extreme on this there we go that's pretty cool so of course remember once you've got your warp and you're happy with how you've walked your text you can go and fine tune it up here that's a pretty cool pattern like that but once you're happy with your warp and you'd like to start adding color to it possibly getting creative adding some strokes maybe some of those brushes we used in the last lesson we can get to object and expand it leave object and fill selected click OK and then we can now get creative with this so let's go and add some brushes so we'll swap that fill and the stroke so we now have an outline you know from the brush panel a little bit too thick let's go for one of the let's go for the pencil one of the pencil brushes and let's pick a different color for the pencil let's go for an orange perhaps and there we go so once you've walked your text remember object expand and then you can start doing whatever you like to it so there we go there's a few ways to warp text I'll leave you to go have a lot of fun there's a lot of different warp options and ways that you can do this but yeah that's how you walk text in Illustrator okay let's move along the next one gradients now this is gonna be really cool because I love creating things with gradients we looked at them briefly earlier so how you can apply gradients with black and white and using them multiply blending mode so let's just go and create a few squares with the rectangle tool in fact we're not going to create squares we're going to create a spiral because there's something else that I'd really like to show you that is it's a lot of fun once you know it so we will just double click the stroke from the bottom of the toolbar and we'll give this a black stroke now I'm just going to increase that weight slightly so you can see exactly what I'm doing and we'll round off that corner as well so if we click the gradient panel on the right and typically it would add that default black to white gradient now what you can do is you can go in double-click on a swatch on this slider and just pick two different colors now I'm doing this on one shape if you have a complex illustration or a graphic of some description that has or if you had multiple shapes like in the logos we looked at earlier and they all use the same or a similar gradient and do you think and you know what I want to change this orange to like a blue color you've got to double click this go and find your blue color that's not the right blue color okay I'll go into the swatch panel okay I've got to fine-tune my blue then I've got to go back into the gradient panel go back here and click the newer version oh that's not right back into the swatch panel you see it sits back and forth you have to go into the swatch edit the swatch go back into the gradient panel so what I would recommend is when you're starting to create a gradient and you know that you're gonna have two colors in it in this case it's going to be a green in blue just create two swatches and make sure you check the box that marked global now what Global means is that any instance of this color in your document if you ever go back into this swatch just by double clicking it in the swatch panel and you change this global color it will update every instance of that color in your document and you can see that it's a global swatch because it adds this little white tag in the corner so let's go and create a square and we'll go and create a star as well and we're also going to go into our gradient panel double click on this green and we're going to add our new green with our global swatch that we created and I'm also going to double click and turn this blue swatch in tweak global swatch as well now I'm going to go back into the gradient panel and just click that gradient swatch so now what happens is I can go back to the swatch panel and if I think I just want to change the green color I can simply load that swatch turn on preview and as I change this you can see updates every instance of this in real time there we go and I quite like purple so I'm going to keep that but if I want to change the blue as well I simply just load up that swatch turn on preview and I can start adjusting it all in real time so that's cool that is gradients with swatches and global swatches so for me personally most things I do in Illustrator I just make global swatches because it's just so much easier if I do something if I'm working on a logo or something and I get so far down the line and I think I just want to change the color I just simply change the swatch I don't have to manually go back in and update every instance of green and change it to purple for example now if I select this funky-looking spiral that I've created at the moment we can go to the gradient panel and see that the gradient runs from blue to purple so let's adjust this we'll bring the blue into the middle and we'll click on our purple swatch and hold alt and it will create a copy and we'll drag that to the other end so the gradient stroke at the moment is set to the one on the left apply gradient within stroke and this is the default option and it goes from literally from left to right on your shape as we're looking at it so purple to blue to purple if we change this to the middle option apply the gradient along the stroke it will go from one end to the other and follow the path of the stroke so it now runs from purple which is a swatch on the left and this runs into blue which then runs into purple at the end so super super useful but then you can also change this one at the end to apply a gradient across the stroke and instead of following the path of the stroke what it will do is it will run across the width of the stroke so we have purple going to blue going to purple again and of course we can go back in here in the gradient slider and we can adjust how much purple and how much blue there is by adjusting these little midpoints here if you wanted a thinner glow down the middle what we could double click that blue and add a different color so those are a few different ways that you can control the stroke of the gradient so we can have it running from left to right following the path of the stroke or running across the width of the stroke okay so that's gradients gradients and strokes and global swatches rightio next we're on to 3d letters and text so first of all we're going to grab the type tool now you can do this with shapes as well it doesn't have to be text in fact let's go and type some text and just scale this up holding shift and I'll grab a shape as well let's go for a square so we've got some text and we have a square and we'll go and give these some color as well so we'll just pick let's pick a different color I'll go for something like this I can check that global swatch button and where this selected we can go to effect at the top of the screen and down to 3d and set select extrude and bevel and it will bring up this dialog box here we can turn on the preview button and it will show us how our text looks now it's already got these different values in degrees here so we have our our y axis which is vertical we have our x axis nope sorry we have our x axis at the top followed by the y axis followed by the z axis which is rotation I believe there we go so you can rotate this around so lots of different presets if you'd like to preview it from different angles or you can have a custom rotation and you can drag these sliders and with the preview box checked in real time you can see exactly how it's going to rotate now if you get a bit lost with these sliders don't worry you can always just set this back to zero and then just start adjusting them one at a time very very slowly just to get familiar with how they work or you can hover over the actual shape we have over here on the left and a grab B different one so we could rotate it like this so it depends if you prefer entering numbers or dragging dials or just grabbing the shape and manually moving it around now when it comes to 3d you've got the extrude depth as well so if we increase this you can see it adjusts how much depth there is to our 3d effect so you can have it very very shallow Oh a bit thicker and we'll go back and I think I'm just going to increase so got something like this and you can choose the cap type as well so typically when I'm creating something 3d I'll leave this set at the default option but you can also add a bevel as well so you can see this adds a bevel to your text and you can of course adjust the bevel height now if you do go a little bit too far with this you will see an error pop up and it'll say something like bevel self-intersection has occurred and that's where you've battled it so much with all the other settings that it kind of goes inside itself and comes out the other side and doesn't really work so it may just be a case of just dialing it back a little bit if you do see anything come up like that so lots of different ways that you can a bevel a 3d shape or you can just leave it at none and we've got plastic shading selected here so you can choose various types of shading whether you just like to have a wireframe view but you can also select more options and you'll see this extends here as well so we can even adjust things like the light source so we can control exactly where the light is coming from and see this update in real time now we can adjust the light intensity so we'll keep this nice and bright the ambient light as well and if you don't know what these sliders do specifically or this feels a little bit overwhelming don't worry just change one at a time and see how it affects your specific graphic so you can see some of these aren't really changing too much but I always like to have the blend steps really nice and high just because you get a much smoother gradient and much smoother 3d finish so I just whack the blend steps up really nice and you can choose a custom color for the shading as well so black is the default but we could change this to something like this let's go a little bit darker now of course the color that we're seeing here doesn't match that but the reason is because this is the color we're picking but of course it has all of these different effects applied so we have different lighting and highlights so that's how it looks without any shading whatsoever so if we go and pick something like a a blue so you can see it it's adding the blue but then you've also got all of these different factors that are affecting this blue that we're picking and then we can click OK and you'll see in the appearance panel on the right we then have a 3d extrude and bevel listed and we can turn this effect on and off so we haven't actually changed the paths of our text and if I go into outline mode remember that's command or control Y it still looks exactly the same it's just letters the only difference is it has a 3d extrude and bevel effect applied on top of it and in fact that applies to pretty much most of these effects that you can see up here if you add them it will list them in the appearance panel you can turn them on and off you can click back to go into these settings and edit them further or you can just grab this and drag it to the trash and it will remove the effect altogether so what if you created your 3d text and you want to go and edit it or you want to do something else with it and at the moment is just showing this it's just showing it with the text as it was and then a 3d effect just lay it over the top of it where you just simply go to object spand appearance and you'll see there it snaps the path to the shapes of the letters and then objects and expand and now what we can do is use a direct selection tool to select individual surfaces and we can go in and change the color or we could go in and we could start adding gradients so we could add some gradients here we could go in on these edges and add a really dark color you could add of course this one already has a gradient here so selecting all of these can be quite problematic and quite time-consuming but you can of course make that selection use the eyedropper tool to sample any existing colors or you can add a gradient so again down here you can use that direct selection tool to drag over everything and then sample a different color so this is just the way illustrator handles something like gradients but then you can of course take your time go in there and just you know really work on that 3d effect well once you've done this with your text of course you can't go and edit it in the same way from the appearance panel that you could before but you get a lot more control over it and you can select all of those individual surfaces and apply whatever you like whether it's patterns or colors in fact let's just try something if I go back a few steps so if I go into outline mode you can see it's made up of loads and loads of lines this is just how illustrates our handles gradients when you go object and expand but if we select everything you can see it's all grouped at the moment we can just ungroup it a few different times from the object menu and then if we drag over all of these so you can see we've got all of these selected now we can try and unite them from the Pathfinder panel and it will unite them into one shape and then we could go and apply a gradient to that one shape so even though expanding them in Illustrator does something completely bananas like this and makes lots and lots of horizontal lines you can still select all of those lines unite them together from the Pathfinder panel and it will merge them into one shape and once you've got them in one shape like this here it becomes considerably easier to then apply patterns gradients to that shape as a whole so of course you could spend a lot more time going through this and just fine-tuning everything uniting it all together and often you can see here it often is a case of sometimes zooming in really really far I'm just seeing where the issue is if there's anything that just didn't quite work and just making sure that you can make that selection and this is going to be very very tedious to go through and select this so sometimes it is just the case if there isn't an easy way to make the selection without selecting other elements what I'm doing is just manually going through holding shift with the direct selection tool and then using the eyedropper tool just to sample this other color now I'm not gonna do this now because as you can see this one will take me quite a long time because there's so many different colors in there but I have to do this manually but the best thing is if we go back to global swatches once I've done this once if I then set if I set this color this purple that I'm using here has a global swatch by clicking the new swatch icon here if I do that first and make it as a global swatch when I go through and painstakingly apply this manually once I've done that and I've applied it manually so let's just make sure I select it so once I've done that for this whole bit of 3d lettering I don't have to go back and do it again I can simply just adjust the sliders in the swatches panel and I haven't got to manually go through and select every single pixel if I want to change it at a later day so again that's just me championing global swatches as a huge time-saver now we did draw a square down here but I'm just going to draw an ellipse and show you one more 3d tool before you move on so at the moment we have a circle if we grab the direct selection tool and just drag over this Anchor Point on the right hit delete or backspace and we are left with a semicircle and I can drag over these two anchor points and go to object path and join so it just joins this together into a complete semicircle and if I drag over this and go to effect 3d and now we try revolve we can turn on preview now this is a similar screen and we can of course adjust all of this if we like or we can leave this all set at 0 that's maybe just drag this down there you go so you can choose which edge you revolve it around whether it's the left edge or the right edge so of course if we go around the right edge we've actually created a sphere so it takes that flat half of a circle that we've created and it revolves it around the right edge which is this line here or the left edge which is this curve here so I'm just going to show you something really quickly now and this is going to be very very rough but if you took the time to draw yourself a bottle now please don't judge me this is going to be here another terrible terrible bottle so of course if you took the time to properly draw yourself a bottle that actually looks like a bottle when you select it you just draw half of it you do a 3d revolve and you revolve it around that right edge turn on preview and you can create shapes like bottles now this doesn't look like a bottle or maybe it's a a small bottle of I really I really fine whiskey or something but of course we can go back in and we can increase those blend steps and you can see there it changes it's super super smooth now and of course we can adjust the light source if it'll let me there we go so just click and drag to adjust the light source of course depending on your computer you're using as you introduce more blend steps and have a more complex 3d render that you're trying to create you may need a bit more horsepower in your computer so we can move this around adjust all of these settings with the blend steps nice and low and when I'm happy with what I've created we can just we can just bump that up then and then click OK and of course we can select this and from the appearance panel we've got that there on the right and I'm just going to go back and create that circle again so there we go we've got 3d text and I will finish that later we've got a 3d sort of bottle but we also have a 3d sphere so there we go that's a little bit of an introduction into how you can create 3d effects in Illustrator ok second to last one stars now this is definitely something worth learning if you left-click and hold over the basic shape tools you can go down to the bottom and you have the star tool and I'm just going to pick a color from the color picker in fact we should probably pick yellow I think because you know stars a yellow and if we left click and drag we get the default five pointed star the illustrator creates so we'll create this one and of course you can hold shift if you'd like it to snap to being upright and we have a standard five pointed star but we could also do is left-click and you can do this with most of these shape tools and you get the dialog box pop-up and you can adjust radius one radius two in the points now radius one is the outermost point on the star so this is a radius one this is a radius one as well and this is a radius one radius two are the inner points so this is radius two here here and here so the further the distance between these two now if I increase this and then decrease this the bigger the distance the more pointy your star will be and if we increase the number of points to 15 you can see that we can create lots of different star shaped them doesn't have to just be stars it can be those kind of star burst things we can bring this really close together now so there's only 20 points difference between these two radius or radii and then you can create something like this or if you'd like a slightly different shape of star something a bit more similar to a pentagram you could use these specific values sixty five point five twenty five five points these exact values and then just scale it up and you get something a bit more similar to a pentagram so you get that Pentagon in the middle where we can change that color or a little well so lots of different ways you can create stars and starbursts in Illustrator that one got a bit crazy then didn't you've got loads and loads of stars I will organize those together but hopefully you enjoyed that one and we're going to move on to the last one the last one let's just let's just get this out the way let's get all these stars under control I think come on down let's scale them down stay within your art border okay right number 10 this is a stitched effect now I love this I love this I've used this on projects it's really cool and you can do this for text you can do it for again you can do for anything created in Illustrator so why not let's go with the star so we're going to do that same pentagram style star we've got sixty five point five twenty five and five and we'll create the star but also going to do it with some text soar type the words stitched and of course you can use any font for this it doesn't have to be this this uppercase text as well you can change this from the character panel if you like let's go for a slightly different fun I'll go for good old good old Arial stiched there we go and let's scale this up so first of all we're going to select the star and swap that fill on the stroke now I'm going to make this a darker color just so you can see the stitch effect in a bit more detail and I'm going to increase that stroke weight as well now the way we enable this is from the stroke panel now if you don't have all of these options here just go to the menu at the top and just go show options and conversely you can hide options if you'd like to kind of keep this panel a lot more streamlined and we're going to check the box saying dashed line and you can see of course this does give us just that a dashed or dotted line and you can adjust how it preserves the dash and gap lengths around corners so you can see here on the right all of these corners coiners these corners now have a point to them and this one here just ignores the corners and just runs the dashed line around the entire star shape regardless but the trick with this and this is a really clever little trick is to change the dash and the gap values so let's set the dash of course we could change this to 100 and you can see it makes it a lot longer we could change it to two and it makes it a lot of shorter we can also change it to zero and we can change the gap to 40 and select this option on the right so it preserves the exact - gap and gap and - lengths so these are the specific settings that you want it at the moment it looks like that even though the dash is zero point you can still see a line or a path but and this is the magic bit if you select your shape and change the cap type to round cap it will become dots so at the moment for each of these we have these lines that are effectively not point in width and then if you change the cap to round it takes that note point it rounds off one side and it rounds off other the other side which effectively just gives us a circle now if you increase this it becomes something like this got it more of an oval shape or a rounded rectangle and then all you do is adjust the gap distance and you can choose how many dots there are then you can adjust the size so you can control the size of the dot and the space or the gap between each of the dots now this is pretty cool if you want to create dots if you'd like to create a stitching effect which is what we were actually going to do you just simply increase the dash length so let's zoom in and we'll adjust this again and maybe increase that gap so this is a case of just kind of playing around a little bit and seeing what kind of stitching effect you're going for but then of course you can change that cap so you can have this kind of effect or something a little bit closer to real-life stitching with that round cap but you can also apply its exact same effect to lettering so let's change these both to ten zoom in nice and close and round these off and of course you can add more than a single dash in a gap if you just add these two here it will only use those two and just repeat those two values we can of course add lots more and it will cycle through this entire list which just gives a little bit more randomness so let's go and change this change this up a little bit just kind of make these numbers feel a little bit more random make sure you cut the text selected before you do that so I'm just varying them ever so slightly so you can see there as this runs around the text it first uses the ten point - the ten point gap and then it jumps to the eight point - the twelve point gap it goes all the way to the end and then it repeats this over and over again so rather than just having everything a consistent - and gap length you can use this to create a much more believable stitching effect because it just adds an element of randomness to it and of course like everything we can go and add colors to this and let's have a look and see if it will let us add brush effects ah sadly not sadly not but there we go regardless we've already had our fun playing with brushes and we've added a stitch effect to some text and a star and the best thing about this is this text is all still editable it's still editable so we have that flexibility and this effect you can just turn it off and on from the stroke panel and as with a lot of the other things we've created when you're happy with your text you've got your stitching effect exactly how you want it you can go to object expand and leave object to fill checked click ok and sometimes it's a case of just doing it twice so that's for the stitch effect do it again for the fill on the stroke and this is no longer editable but these shapes are now exactly what you see on-screen so if you wanted to integrate some other shapes within them somehow when you start trying to combine things together if it's for a logo or whatever it is you can fully combine all of these shapes so generally as a rule of thumb if you're happy with an effect or anything that you've applied in the appearance panel or whether it's a dashed line if you're happy with it and you don't want to change it keep a copy maybe just in case you would like to but you can go to object expand or expand appearance just keep using those expand options until you can't go any further and then when you come to use this composition what you've created with other tools like the Pathfinder tools and maybe the align tools as well some of the complications you might get they just won't happen it because illustrator is just seeing what you've created not just as a path with an effect on it but we're as a just a standard shape and it will treat it as such so if you do get any problems with Pathfinder shapes not combining or subtracting or anything like that just check out back those expand options first try those and just see if that fixes the problem rightio oh wow that looks creative so there we go that's an overview of the the madness that has ensued today I'm particularly proud of that snowflake over there I'm just gonna check the chat we'll do a few more questions before jumping off matt burton asks what's the best practice for adding textures to an illustrator file oh wow okay so if you want to add texture to illustrator something i like to to do is grab images of texture online whether it's something on google for practice or stock imagery you can grab things with wood texture metal texture any kind of texture and you can drop it into illustrator and then there's an option called live trace image trace there we go image trace in the later versions and you can trace it and it will trace that that photo of a texture into black and white and then you can simply select it go object expand and then you will have that texture in there and if you have a shape for example you just set the texture to white in fact I can try and do this with another tool so we have the symbol sprayer tool I did this the other day let's have a look so if we go to the symbols panel click the menu icon we can open a symbol library artistic textures here we go here we go I've opened up another can of worms so we can click this one here and you can use that symbol sprayer to spray loads of texture and can go on for as long as you like and then go object expand so again whether you do image trace or you use this symbol sprayer tool you just expand it expand it again and this make tomato take a fair bit of computing power just go over everything and just group it all together if it is already grouped fine fantastic and just change that color there we go so we have a blue texture let's bring our star down and we can apply the blue texture over the red star and of course we're going to change this to white now so our texture matches the background so it's texturising that star of course if we did try and add a colored background behind it that'd be no good because we can we can see the texture on the on the background so if we just select that texture for me I like to go to pathfinder unite and then object this may take a moment depending on your computer's power I think my poor laptop is is going to not like me very much after this so it may take a moment and then we can go objects compound paths and make what that does is it will take all of these individual little speckles of texture that we've created and just groups them together so illustrator will then treat all of this as one shape and the reason that that's really good is because if we select our star and we then hold shift and select our white texture we can now go to the Pathfinder panel and select subtract that's this option here and it should subtract that white texture from the red star effectively just knocking through the star and it will allow this green background to show through either that or my computer will die there we go so we can see the background through and we now have a complete textured star so if I drag this over here you can see that we've done it correctly we have white showing through here and green showing through here so there we go there's a couple of ways you can add texture in Illustrator image trace or using the symbol sprayer tool and then grabbing the symbols panel up here from the window menu hopefully that was helpful okay let's do a few more I'm not sure of the name but someone asks why not use CorelDraw I've not used coral draw in quite a few years now I did use it at the beginning of my career there's nothing wrong with cold draw I say what they've added since then but for me I started learning Photoshop when I was what 16 something like that Oh such a long time ago I started learning Photoshop and because I became familiar with Photoshop again it's what I talked about earlier with that familiarity you know I then moved into illustrator there were some similarities so for me it wasn't like learning a completely new bit of software so I did use coral draw for one of my my second job when I worked at a a small design and print studio but when I moved on from that job you know I went I went back to Adobe and I still did use Adobe because you know I just used all of their different pieces of graphic software for different things they all integrate really easily with each other and yeah it just had that familiarity about it but I'm sure I'm sure coral draw nowadays I'm sure it's had a bunch of features added to it so there's no reason why you couldn't use coral draw I mean at the end of the day you know if you if you have an idea in your mind and a bit of software lets you create it then you know whatever whatever you prefer to use again so yeah what's the difference between coral draw in Illustrator it just depends on the tools to my knowledge coral draw allows you to create vector shapes and draw all sorts of things in it as well it just depends different pieces of software different companies making them different tools like they've both got pen tools they've both got shape tools and text tools so there's a lot of similarities but things like mesh tools and perspective tools and maybe shape builder tools I don't know if coral drawer does or doesn't have those but again it's just it's just different pieces of software and different features coming from them kitten asks what's the difference between expand and expand appearance so if I draw a square and this square has a stroke and I draw another square and that's going to store this so will distort it using free distort so the main difference between these is that expand appearance refers to the appearance panel so at the moment you can see I've got a free distort effect listed if I go into outline mode command or control Y it's still the same square it just has this distort effect masked over it's just like showing that effect if we actually want our shape to be the shape that we're seeing and then edit the anchor points from that we do need to go object expand now you can see there we can grab all these points the shape is the shape is exactly what we see even in outline mode but it's expanded that appearance so whereas before it was listed here now it's no longer listed so we can't go and edit that free distort anymore but it does mean that we can do other things like combine these two shapes together if you try and do these kind of Pathfinder shape combinations with shapes that haven't been expanded it doesn't always work very well so for me I like to go and expand any appearances or anything just before I start combining one shape with another now if you have a stroke on your shape like this one here you will get the expand option so sometimes if you have a shape with an effect and a stroke you'll have to go expand appearance then go expand so we just click expand and we want to expand our fill and our stroke so now this just looks like this now of course this shape didn't actually have a fill but if it did it would be expanded and it would be a color that we could then go and select but the the best advice I can give is if you've created something and it's got strokes and it's got effects whatever it's got on it what I often do is just go object and I just keep selecting whichever one is available just object expand expand expand appearance expand until it's fully expanded and then I can just go okay I can't expand it anymore now I'm ready to move forward that's probably the best advice I can give because I mean the difference between these I didn't actually realize that until sometime last year I just I didn't connect appearance the word appearance here with the appearance panel I just didn't connect it and it was never an issue for me I just usually go and pick whichever one I could and just expand it over and over again until it wouldn't let me do it anymore so hopefully that's helpful - - asks which color mode should we use CMYK or RGB for logo designer and illustrator so for me it depends where your logos going to be used what I like to do personally is I like to always work in RGB to begin with just because the RGB spectrum has many more colors than CMYK dissolves the RGB is red green blue it relates to the colors that make up your screen display and CMYK stands for cyan magenta yellow and black and those are the four different inks that I used if you're doing like a full color print run and the CMYK or the colors that B can be generated on a computer screen there are many millions more I believe than than what CMYK ink can reproduce so oftentimes if you create a logo with your document set to RGB if you use something let's try this now so we use something like a crazy bright green now unless it's a specialist ink or maybe like a I don't know a Pantone or something CMYK we just wouldn't be out of print this is too bright and crazy so if I change my document color mode you can see it finds the closest match and it dulls it down and of course if I I drop of this or the color picker you can see there that it can recreate this so we have 46% cyan and 100% yellow and it read can recreate that if we change the document mode back to RGB and I try and I drop of this again if it'll let me eyedropper it okay in this instance it's saying that those are the values there and it can create that but this kind of green just can't be printed with CMYK ink so sometimes in there or whether you kind of go into let's go into the swatch panel see I have like my RGB values here if I change it to CMYK you get this you get a sixty two point six six now if you get a decimal point in your CMYK it just is it can't be printed so if we change that to 62 again you can see we've got that dulled down or similar color to that dull dark color that we got before so if you create your logo in RGB and you've got all your swatches and you want it to be CMYK firstly change your document color mode type but then load up your swatches go to CMYK and just find the closest match so maybe 0.66 if I bring that up rounded up to 63 so I then know that this can be printed because if you send something to print with this kind of crazy bright green it's going to print very differently the other end there's always good to just check any design work or artwork before you send it off to print now back to your question for logo design I like to design full RGB so I get maximum maximum creativity of course if the logo is going to be printed somewhere then this is something that I do tend to consider if I know it's going to be printed on the side of a van or signage or a poster or business card then it's honestly easier to work in CMYK from the start so you're not picking all these bright colors showing the client the bright colors and then going sorry we have to doll this down now for these reasons so just start in CMYK if that's where it's going to be used if it's going to be like an app or on a website on on screen display predominantly just or for just personal work and you want access to more colors more vibrant colors stick with RGB or you could stick with RGB but just find something that works within the CMYK spectrum so the RGB spectrum has all the CMYK colors and then some it has many many more so if you're working in RGB and it needs to be printed just try not to create a color that cannot be printed just to limitations of science it's probably my best advice Ellis Owens haha I remember you hey Jansky love your videos man thank you so much Ellis I appreciate it okay a few more questions Ken asks when should you use symbols instead of regular shapes it's entirely up to you to be honest you have the symbols panel from window at the top again with the brushes you can open the symbol library and you've got lots and lots of stuff here and you can of course go other library and install some more so it depends if if you want to create it from scratch you're going create it from scratch if you want to kind of throw in some of these shapes here and use this to go and create a frame I'm just going to do this really quickly so just select black as the color and bump up that stroke wait so I'm just reflecting this and rotating it around of course I'm sure what you create will be infinitely better than this but you could use this to create a frame so if you find a symbol that you like or you have a symbols library specifically that you like using then that's awesome if you want to work from a symbol again we're just going to do the whole expanding thing and now this is just a shape in Illustrator it's not a symbol anymore I've expanded that symbol and I can then go in and let's see I know we can't use the width tool because it's not a stroke but we can go in and we can edit these anchor points or we can go in and adjust color so again if you do get anything like this if you try and apply color to a shape I'm picking a green and it's just looking gray don't worry just go to the color guide panel or the swatches panel pick something that has color and once you've done that illustrator will recognize that it's got color and then you can go and change it I don't know why this happens but if you ever get that you're picking a color it comes out gray just use either the color guide or the swatches panel give it a color and then you can go and pick one from the color picker but this is a great way that you can use symbols as a starting point and then just expand them and then go and customize them build on them whatever you like as you as you like hey Pratt Eber I recognized you as well thank you so much oh you're welcome Teresa I'm glad you enjoyed it yeah I find that as well I find that as well I've been using this software for ages for years like it kind up twelve years this year and I still learn things everyday I mean definitely like like being an educator I'm constantly looking to improve myself so I can kind of share that experience and I'm always learning new things you know the symbol sprayer tool hadn't really used that much until quite recently and then you know use that to create texture so yeah just honestly honestly everyone never stop learning I mean I know yeah I just never stopped learning I love learning I love teaching and on that note that wraps up the end of this stream so I just thank you so much to everyone for joining I really hope you enjoyed it as I say nice bit of variety here today something a little bit different than what we normally do thank you so much to the moderators as well in the chat and and for everyone for asking so many good questions so this has been absolutely fantastic and what I'm gonna do is when the course goes live on tux Plus this will all be packaged up with it as well and yeah thank you so much so as always I hope you have a fantastic 2018 it's been a pleasure to be here my name is Daniel white ok danske thank you very much and have a fantastic day and I will see you soon [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Envato Tuts+

Views: 287,087

Keywords: Adobe Illustrator, Graphic Design, tutorial, adobe illustrator tutorial, vector, adobe, illustrator tutorials, graphic design, illustrator tutorial, illustrator, illustration, how to, graphic design tutorials, logo design tutorial, design, illustrator cc, type, logo design illustrator, logo, illustrator cc tutorial, design a logo, logo design, learn adobe illustrator, adobe illustrator, step by step adobe illustrator tutorials, dansky, dan white, adobe illustrator cc

Id: kp5ApIObAo4

Length: 111min 28sec (6688 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 23 2018