Adding Icons and Circles to Your Postcard Design

In this video we'll be adding our icons as well as our circles. To see a preview of this we can open up our postcard preview and we'll see that we have three circles with icons inside.

Let's go back into illustrator and let's recreate this. First let's begin by creating our circles. To do this we'll go into our toolbar and we'll select the ellipse tool and before we click and drag our ellipse let's create a new layer for our icons.

To do this we'll go to a new layer icon on the bottom right hand side of our layers panel and we'll click and retitle this layer front icons and hit ENTER. Next we'll create our first circle. To do this we'll click and drag holding shift to make sure we create a circle and we'll create a circle about this size.

Rather than creating two additional circles we'll just copy this one hitting v on the keyboard and hitting ALT to duplicate the circle. We'll then click and drag while holding ALT and we can create a second circle and click and drag creating a third circle. Now we need to align all three circles.

To do this we could click and drag them along the guides or if we determine where we need the left side and right side of our circles clicking and dragging this circle to the right side of the guide. As long as they meet right and left side of our guides we can hold shift and select all three circles and work with alignment tools. To align we'll then go to our top control bar and in the past we've selected align to artboard.

From here we can align to the left to our center we'll hit CTRL Z CTRL Z. However in this case rather than aligning to our artboard we're going to click the drop down and align to selection. When we align to our selection we'll be aligning to the area that we've determined here. We'll then align it horizontally to distribute to the center meaning that all three objects are horizontally aligned with appropriate space between them and we'll then vertical align bottom meaning that all three objects will align to the furthest part of the bottom of our section.

We'll then simply drag our circle up that meets the bottom of our guide and all three of our objects are now perfectly aligned to the bottom. If we want to increase the size of our circles or decrease we can click holding shift and highlighting all three and we'll increase to this size and now we simply need to bring this left circle to the edge of the guide this right circle to the edge of the guide and they're still appropriately spaced. Next let's add our icons within these circles.

To do this we can open up our original icons file we'll go to file open and from here we'll be selecting our construction icons illustrator file. We'll click open and if we zoom out we can see each of the icons that we've created. From here we're going to be selecting our eco icon our wrenches icon and our helmet and glasses icon.

So let's click on one and then holding shift we'll click on the other two icons with all three of these icons selected as we can see in our layers panel we'll hit CTRL C to copy these icons and then going back into our postcard file tabbed on the top left we can now paste these within

Our front icons layer by hitting CTRL V. We now have our icons let's drag them below and we can scale them up holding shift and dragging to the side to increase the scale of all of our icons. We'll test it using the wrenches icon to make sure that it fits with inside the circle and simply move it there and I think this will be a good fit. You can then drag it off to the side and we'll add these one by one.

First we'll start with our wrenches icon if we click and drag it into our circle we'll see that it intersects with the middle of the circle. Additionally if we need to center it we can highlight both the wrenches icon as well as the circle and we can select horizontally aligned and vertically aligned. Next let's add our eco icon we'll click and drag it to the center and here we can see we have our eco icon centered within the circle.

Finally let's add our helmet and glasses. Because there are many different elements within our helmet and glasses as well as two additional icons we'll see lots of different pink lines. It can sometimes be difficult to see what's lining up with what so we'll simply release it within our circle and let's zoom in using CTRL PLUS (+) (+) on the keyboard.

From here we can release our helmet more centered and then holding shift we'll select the circle as well. We'll then click horizontal aligned and vertical aligned and we'll see that our circle's moved a bit with both still selected. Let's click and drag it down so that it's now centered against these guys.

However looking at our icon we can see that while the helmet overall is centered it still looks a little bottom heavy. So in this case we're going to actually not make it technically centered but move it up with the arrows on our keyboard so that it looks centered. Sometimes things that are actually centered don't look centered and therefore it's best to sometimes use our eyes to be able to make things that are most attractive to the viewer.

Let's zoom out and here we can see that we have our icons. Well done. Let's hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work and in the next video we'll be working with colors.

See you there!