How to Create an Instagram Carousel Template • Adobe Illustrator Tutorial

[Music] what's up guys welcome to graphic designer Pro in this video we'll show you how to create an Instagram carousel template in adobe illustrator you can also download a free premade template file for this lesson from the description below so now pass you over to Rory who will take you through the process thanks Ross so jumping straight into illustrator we have the template file that you are welcome to download from the link in the description below and this is what we are going to recreate from scratch today so to begin with I'm going to jump on to my web browser and we have a website up called social sizes dot IO and this is basically just a website that details all of the optimal image sizes for all the major social media platforms so you can see we have Instagram here I'm going to click on this and if we scroll down you can see that we get some size options here and as you can see for any kind of feed images they are recommending 1200 by 1200 pixels so that's what we're going to use for this template so jumping back into illustrator now I'm going to start by going up to file and new and we want to select the web preset from the top just to ensure that this is using pixels and is set up in the RGB color space which is what we want for any kind of digital output so over on the right hand side this is where I'm going to plug in our dimensions of 1200 by 1200 and I can go ahead and click create so we've got a single artboard set up so this is the equivalent of one slide of our carousel first thing I'm going to do is just turn off pixel grid snapping by clicking this icon in the top right hand corner and be sure to save your document as well okay so now that we've set up and saved the document we are going to start by creating some layers over on the right-hand side so the first thing I like to do is create a layer for my guides no guides come in very handy when we are doing something like this because they can help us achieve consistent spacing on each slide in this example next I'm going to add a background layer now I'm going to add a layer for the core content of the slide so I'm just going to call this text slash design and you can name these whatever you want but this is the format that works for me and lastly I'm going to add one more layer and name this slide elements so this is a layer specifically for elements that are going to feature on each slide I'm just going to slightly rearrange this and put the guides layer to the top and the first thing I'm going to do is create our guides so we're just dealing with one artboard at the moment but we'll show you how to easily apply things to multiple artboards in just a moment so the first thing i want to do is enable my rulers if you don't have them enabled already you can go up to view and then down to where we have rulers and then show rulers or the keyboard shortcut is command R or ctrl R on a PC and you can see we get some rulers appearing across the top and left hand side of our workspace so to add a guide all you need to do is click and drag from one of these rulers in this case it's going to be a horizontal guide from the top or we can drag out a vertical guide from the left hand side and with these dragged out I can click and drag to reposition them if you can't for any reason that's probably because they're locked we can unlock guides by going up to view down to guides and then there's an option to lock guides in my case or if there are locked for you this will say unlock guides so you can click that and then you should be able to move them around now to get some consistent spacing around the edges of this for slide or to add some margins in this case all I'm going to do is just grab my rectangle tool and from the top left hand corner making sure that my smart guides are snapping to that corner I'm just going to click and hold shift to drag out a perfect square and I'm just really eyeballing this I'm not going for anything too specific just so that we've got some consistent spacing around the edges of our slides and the next thing I'm going to do is holding option or Alt on a PC just click and drag a duplicate square out to the bottom right hand corner now what we can do with these guys is actually snap them to these squares so with this vertical slide here I'm just dragging along and waiting for my smart guides to snap to the right edge of this top left square and I'll do the same with the horizontal guide here and now I need to just drag out too or for the other side of the slide now when I first click and drag out a guide you can see my smart guides aren't going to snap to the square so I need to let go first and then click and drag again and now it is snapping so I'll do the same with our last guide here let go and wait for it to snap okay so we have our guides set up on this first slide here now what I'm going to do is create a few more slides now I'm just going to create four slides in this case but you can obviously create as many as you want so to do that I'm going to go over to the left hand side and select the artboard tool which is shift all on the keyboards you can see that's selecting our artboard here now one thing to pay attention to is the number in the top left hand corner of this artboard basically every time we duplicate this this number will go up and this will become relevant later on when we go to export these so I'm just again holding option or alt on a PC and clicking and dragging to create a duplicate artboard and hold shift as well to lock it to this horizontal plane and I want to snap this to the right edge of our original artboard so that they're sitting next to one another and I'll do this another two times again holding the same buttons until we've got four slides here and this is the basis of our carousel setup now the only issue here is that we only have vertical guides on our first artboard now luckily it's very easy to duplicate these across all I need to do is with my selection tool click and drag across both of these guides you'll see they change color to denote that they're selected I'm going to press command X to cut them away and then if I go up to edit we have an option in here that says paste on all artboards and you can see the shortcut there is shift option command + V or that will be shift control alt + V on a PC so I'm just going to press them now shift option command + V and you can see that's applying these guides to all four our boards now the reason I cut these first two away is because if I just copy them it would essentially be pasting another copy of these guides over the ones I already have so this is just to avoid creating duplicates in this case so what I can do now is go over to my guides layer and just lock this layer instead of going via view and guides and block guides by locking the lair I can no longer click and drag and move these guides around by accident the next thing I'm going to do is go to my background layer and just add in a background color now this is the beauty of setting up a template like this in Illustrator I can grab my rectangle tool for example and I'm just going to create a big rectangle from the top left of our first slide artboard all the way to the bottom right of our last artboard and I could do something like apply a gradient to this so I'll double-click on my gradient tool and we can create something a little bit more unique that's going to flow from one slide to another in this case I'm just going to keep this very black and white and this is because this is for you to go and customize to your liking so you can apply your own brand colors and styling to suit your needs but for this this is just going to be a basic template for you to customize we can also do things like place elements between slides so that we have some continuity going from one slide to another so I may just grab my ellipse tool in this case and I'm just going to apply a slightly lighter gray to this and we can be quite flexible with this I'm just going to drag out some circles that sit between the slides in this example and this can just be a nice technique to use to try and lead the audience from one slide to another so go or something like that and you don't have to worry that these circles are sitting outside of these artboards because when we go to export they are going to be cropped anyway so next I'm just going to walk that background layer and I'm going to move up to my slide elements layer and this is where we're just going to add some consistent details that are going to apply to each slide so next I'm just going to grab my type tool and just clicking within this first slide I'm going to first change the color to white so that it contrasts against the dark background we'll bump up the text size as well go with about 20 point for this example now I'm going to select a different typeface so I'm just going to use this typeface called blue highway now if you want to use this same typeface and it's the one that we've used in our template file you can download it for free from font spring and we'll have a link for this in the description below going back to our design now I'm just going to add a few details that we can use on each slide so this can be really any kind information relating to the company so in this case I'm going to put a copyright 2020 in the top left hand corner now for anyone that doesn't know how to add a copyright symbol we can do this easily in Illustrator by going up to type insert special character symbols and copyright symbol and you can see that's been added I'm just going to type 2020 after it and this is where our guides come in handy I can now simply position this in the top left hand corner using our guides to align it perfectly holding option I'm going to click and drag a duplicate out I'm going to right align this one and with our type tool this T on the keyboard to enable it I'm going to double click into here and on this top right hand corner I'm going to put a slide number in this case I'm going to do one with a forward slash and then afford to note that this is slide at 104 lastly again holding option I'm going to duplicate our 20/20 text and I'm just going to put the company name in this example so just graphic designer pro but again this is something that you can customize to your needs and lastly in the bottom right hand corner I'm just going to put an arrow and this again is just another graphic element that we can use to try and get the user to scroll and it's going to add some balance to this overall design we'll add a white stroke to this just to keep this consistent or maybe make this to point in this example if I click on the word stroke we'll get our stroke options and under arrowheads with the second drop down here I'm just going to choose one of these default arrowheads we have at our disposal in Illustrator and again just position this in the bottom right using our guides here and if I turn off my guides now you'll get a better idea of how this is working so because the other layers are locked I can just click and drag over these elements and I'm going to do the same thing that we did with the guides press command X or control X on a PC and then shift option command V to paste these on all of the slides so if I scroll across you can see these are being applied to all of them the only things I'll have to change in this example are the slide numbers so I'll just double click into here with my type tool and make sure that these are all corresponding to the slide they're on and then on this last slide instead of having an arrow we could put a message instead or just have nothing in this case I'm just going to copy this graphic designer Pro text again I'll make sure this is right aligned turn my guides layer back on and if i zoom in will just position this in that bottom right hand corner and you could say something like leave a light what I'll do is make this stand out a little bit more so I'll go into my character options and make sure this is slightly bigger so lastly with this layer I'm also going to add a line that just runs through each slide as well again just reinforcing that this is a carousel that we can swipe through so again just grabbing my line tool here I'm going to go from the top left using the guide sitting just underneath the text we have here and I'm just going to click and drag across until we get to the last slide I'll hold shift to lock this to a horizontal plane and just align this with that right hand guide and now I can add some stroke to this so I'll just add a two-point white stroke again I can go into my stroke options and we could add some arrowheads in this case I'm just going to opt for a circular Arrowhead at each end and we could even do something like a dashed line if I check that again turning off my guides layer we'll get a better idea of how this is looking and I would say this is just about ready for some content now so again I can lock this slide elements layer and we can move down to our text and design layer turn my guides back on and this is where we can just start adding our content now this is obviously completely dependent on what you are going to be posting about but it's always a good idea to start with a large heading of some kind if you're going to be creating carousel content so I'm just going to put in some placeholder text so make sure this is formatted in a way that it really stands out so again we're going to use the bold variant of this typeface and I'm going to make this text much bigger I'll hold option and click out a duplicate and we can create some subheading text as well I'll go for the regular variant just to create some contrast and make this much smaller as well with my type tool I'm going to add a text box instead of just clicking once I'm actually going to click and drag using my guides again to align to if I let go that's going to automatically paste in some text but what we'll do is format this to be much smaller and what I can do in this text box is just delete this now and go up to type and fill with placeholder text and that's just going to fill this up again this is just a placeholder so it doesn't really matter that this is just dummy text IQD we go into paragraph and turn off - eat as well and that's going to stop any words breaking over multiple lanes and with this again I'm just going to copy this and we can paste this on to the other artboards here now if you want to paste the same content on another artboard in the exact same place we can also do that by clicking on the artboard itself you can go up to edit and you can see we have an option that just says paste in place and the shortcut for that is just shift command V or shift ctrl V on a PC and if I press those buttons it's going to just paste on this artboard the same content that we've copied so I'm just going to move this content down slightly we'll go over to our last slide click on that and just use the same shortcut and that's really it the last thing I would do is just make sure that things like these circles aren't sitting too close to the edges of anything so in this example we have this graphic designer Pro Tex down here and the circle isn't quite sitting well against that so all I'm doing in this case is just slightly enlarging this to create a slightly nicer look and we're ready to export this so because we've set up each of these slides on their own artboard this means that it's very easy to export them to individual images all we need to do is go up to file export and export as you can select your destination I'm just going to use these settings and I would recommend sticking with either a PNG format or you could go with jpg as long as you're keeping the quality to maximum you're going to get some good results you'll also notice we have an option down here that says use artboards now this is why I was telling you to pay attention to the numbers associated with each artboard if you have multiple sets of carousels within your file you can actually specify a range of artboards to export in this case though I'm just going to stick with all and then click export we can leave the resolution as 72 pixels per inch as that's the most commonly used resolution for digital output and click OK and now we're in the folder that we've exported these two if I preview these you can see that the circles have been cropped and were just left with our four images ready to upload to Instagram so it's very easy to set this template up and hopefully very easy to customize for your own posts so there you have it you'll hopefully now have a great base template that you can manipulate and customize for your own Instagram posts we'd love to see what you create with this tutorial so be sure to connect with us on Instagram and use the hashtag GD pro on the post you create with your own templates and if you want to learn more about graphic design we've created a free one-hour training where you'll discover the top 5 secrets of successful designers which saves you the hassle of having to figure it all out for yourself we'll be showing you how to immerse yourself in the sector you're designing for creative thinking and how to spark creativity what good composition is and how to achieve it in your designs how to pick the right colors for your designs and how to pick the right typefaces for your projects so if you are serious about leveling up your design skills then make sure to sign up for the next free webinar space is limited and these events always fill up fast because they're significantly better than the information others charge you for and ours is free the link is in the description you're not going to want to miss it I'll see you there

Channel: Graphic Designer PRO

Views: 48,775

Keywords: graphicdesignerpro, graphic design, graphic designer, illustration, branding, photoshop, illustrator, marketing, logo designer, logos, adobe illustrator, vector art, design education, instagram carousel, how to create instagram carousel post, instagram carousel canva, instagram tutorial, adobe illustrator tutorial, adobe illustrator tutorials, adobe illustrator tutorials for beginners, illustrator tutorial, illustrator tutorials, уроки adobe illustrator, instagram carousel illustrator

Id: IdXKoBs0-pM

Length: 16min 56sec (1016 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020