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 recreate this. First, let's begin by creating our circles.

To do this, we'll go into our toolbar, 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 the 'New Layer' icon on the bottom right-hand side of our layers panel, click it, 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 holding ALT to duplicate the circle.

We'll then click and drag while holding ALT to create a second circle, and click and drag to create 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 and right sides of our circles, we can click and drag this circle to the right side of the guide.

As long as they meet the right and left sides of our guides, we can hold Shift, select all three circles, and work with alignment tools.

To align, we'll go to our top control bar, and in the past, we've selected 'Align to Artboard.'

From here, we can align to the left or center. Let's hit CTRL + Z, CTRL + Z.

However, in this case, rather than aligning to our artboard, we're going to click the drop-down and select 'Align to Selection.'

When we align to our selection, we'll be aligning to the area we've determined here.

We'll then align it horizontally to distribute to the center, meaning all three objects are horizontally aligned with appropriate space between them. Then, we'll vertically align the bottom, meaning all three objects will align to the furthest part of the bottom of our section.

We'll then simply drag our circle up to meet the bottom of our guide, and all three of our objects are now perfectly aligned to the bottom.

If we want to increase or decrease the size of our circles, we can click, hold Shift, and select all three, then increase their size. Now, we simply need to bring the left circle to the edge of the guide, and the right circle to the edge of the guide, ensuring they are 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 select 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 select 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 at 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 inside the circle and simply move it there. 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 'Horizontal Align' and 'Vertical Align.'

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 icon. 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 Align' and 'Vertical Align, ' and we'll see that our circle has moved a bit, with both still selected.

Let's click and drag it down so that it's now centered against these guides.

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 use our eyes 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!