Master the art of designing a postcard in Illustrator with this step-by-step guide that focuses on adding three address lines to the front of the card. The tutorial offers a detailed walkthrough of creating lines using the pen tool and adjusting their sizes to create a balanced layout.
Key Insights
- The tutorial focuses on adding address lines to a postcard design in Illustrator, emphasizing the importance of positioning guides correctly for a balanced layout.
- Instead of extending the lines from the middle to the edge of the artboard, the tutorial suggests resizing them. This process involves selecting all the lines, clicking on the outside bounding box, and dragging it towards the center while holding the 'alt' key.
- To keep the workspace organized, it's recommended to group all the lines together and rename them 'address lines'. This tip will be beneficial in the future when dealing with a canvas that has multiple elements.
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In this video, we'll continue working on our postcard, adding the three lines for our address on the front.
As we can see, we have a nice center guide for our middle line. However, let's add two additional guides so that we can add the top and bottom lines of our address.
If we open up our PDF example, we can see an example of this with the three center lines.
So, let's go into Illustrator and begin adding guides.
We'll want to make sure that we're in our 'Front Guides' layer, so we'll select 'Front Guides' to add elements to this layer. Then, we'll drag down, holding Shift, and release it right at one and a half inches.
Next, let's add one additional line, and we'll release this one right at two and a half inches.
We're now ready to create our lines.
Let's go into the 'Front Working' layer, and we'll lock our 'Front Guides' layer.
Let's now begin adding lines.
To do this, we can again either use the Line Segment Tool or the Pen Tool.
I prefer the Pen Tool.
Let's now start by drawing our first line at the top.
We'll go to the intersection of our center guide and the top guide, click and drag all the way over to the edge of the artboard where it intersects, click again, and remember to complete this line by hitting Escape on the keyboard.
From here, we can see that our line matches the same stroke as the one we've just created.
To change this back to our default line, we can use the shortcut D on the keyboard with it selected.
Next, let's add our two additional lines.
We'll click from one intersection at the edge to the other intersection in the middle, hit Escape, and complete our third line by clicking at the intersection, then the other intersection, and hit Escape again.
We now have our three lines; however, we need to reduce their size so they don't extend all the way from the middle to the edge.
To do this, let's use V on the keyboard, and holding Shift, we'll select all three lines.
Next, let's simply resize these lines so that they're not as wide.
To do this, we can click on the outside bounding box, click and drag over, and if we hold ALT, we'll see that it moves from both sides toward the center.
We'll release right at about half an inch, and we can see where we're releasing by looking at the top and seeing that there's a line showing us our position on the ruler.
As we move left and right, we'll see where we are, then release right at about half an inch, and we have our three lines centered.
Let's click outside to view the result, and this looks good.
Next, let's toggle the visibility of our front guides and make sure that we like the look of this.
This looks good, so let's now group all three of these lines by dragging the selection box over all three lines, right-clicking, and selecting 'Group.'
We'll then drag this group up into 'Front Final, ' and let's retitle the names of the elements we have thus far.
To do this, we'll click the drop-down of 'Front Final, ' and we'll retitle this group 'Address Lines' and hit ENTER. Let's also retitle our path 'Center Line' and hit ENTER.
While it may not seem important now to give these each specific names, it'll be helpful in the future when we have multiple pieces of art within our layers panel.
Let's now save our work by hitting CTRL + S on the keyboard to save, and in the next video, we'll begin working with text.
See you there!