Learn how to create and stylize a line for a postcard design in Adobe Illustrator. The article provides step-by-step instructions on how to draw a line, adjust its stroke, and customize it to match your design preferences.
Key Insights
- The article guides you through creating a line in Adobe Illustrator using either the pen tool or the rectangle tool.
- You can customize your line by adjusting the stroke, selecting different cap options, and playing with dashed line settings to create a unique look.
- The instructions also cover how to create a new layer for your line, align stroke within a shape, and save your work in Adobe Illustrator.
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In this video we'll be creating the line that separates the left and right side of our postcard. To do this let's first start by creating a new layer.
We'll click the create new layer icon on the bottom right hand side of our layers panel and we'll double click the layer titling it front working. We'll then hit ENTER. Next let's start by drawing our line.
To do this we can use either the pen tool to draw a segment from the top to bottom or we can click and hold the rectangle tool selecting the line segment tool. For this instance I'll use the pen tool. So I'll simply click the pen tool or p on the keyboard and I'll click at one intersect and drag down clicking at the next intersect.
As we'll see the pen tool now continues wanting to draw lines. To stop this from happening we'll simply hit escape on the keyboard and we've now completed our line. Next let's work on the stroke of this line.
In the past we've worked with the default of one pixel wide with black. However let's stylize this line a bit more. To stylize our line let's now go over to the stroke within our properties panel.
Typically it's been one point however let's increase our stroke a little bit more all the way up to three points. In addition let's hide our guides so that we can see the line in its full form. To do this we could use the selection tool hitting p on the keyboard and clicking on our artboard then right clicking and selecting hide guides.
Or since we've made an entire layer of front guides we can simply change the visibility of it. Now let's continue stylizing our line. We'll select it using the selection tool v on the keyboard and we'll go over to stroke.
If we click on stroke we can see that we have many options for our line. The first option is the cap. Our cap refers to the end point of our line and how it's capped off.
If we zoom in using CTRL PLUS (+) on the keyboard and scroll up we'll see this more clearly. We'll go to stroke and we can play with the different cap options to see the differences. In this case let's leave it at a round cap.
Corner refers to different ways that we can adjust our corners. However in this case we simply have a line so the corners isn't applicable. And finally align stroke refers to how the stroke is aligned within a shape.
Again this isn't applicable to the line however we will be using it in the future. Next let's check dashed line. Automatically we'll see our dashed line.
If we zoom out using CTRL MINUS (-) on the keyboard we'll see an example of this dashed line. We'll then click stroke again to see that we have a 12 point dash with gaps in between. We can adjust this line by filling in our own dash and gap.
Let's do this by typing a number in for gap. You can choose whatever number you prefer. I'll type in four and then click dash.
As we can see now we only have a four point gap between our 12 point dash. We can continue this trend by typing in different numbers for dashes and gap to create our own custom line. For example I'll now type 20 and 10 and 5 and 6. And we'll see that we have our own custom line.
We have many different ways to customize this. Let's go back to our default dashed line by double clicking the first dash and typing zero and simply deleting the remainder. We now don't have a dashed line.
However if we want to make circles for a line as shown in the pdf we can see that we have circles starting from the bottom and gradually growing to the middle and again decreasing towards the edges. In order to accomplish this we can go to stroke and we're going to want our dash to be as minimal as possible. So for our dash let's delete zero and we'll type point one for point one point.
We click outside we'll see that we don't have much of a change however we can now specify a gap between our point one dash. Let's type in 10 for our gap and see where this leaves us. We can now see that we have circles.
This is because the dash itself is so small that it appears to be a circle with a rounded cap and then we have a 10 point gap between them. In addition to our dashed line we can also adjust the width. Going into our profile we can select different profiles and this first profile where it's skinny on the end and wide in the middle matches that of our example.
While I'll stick to this example feel free to choose your own profile and adjust yours accordingly to what you prefer. I'll leave mine at the width profile one and click outside to see an example. Well done we've now created our center line.
Let's now move this line into a new layer clicking the new layer icon and we'll title this layer front final and hit ENTER. We can then select our line and rather than clicking from the drop down we can just simply click and drag the red square into front final. Let's hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work thus far and in the next video we'll be adding the address lines to the right.
See you there!