Discover the process of creating text bars and banners for the back of a postcard design using innovative Illustrator techniques. Learn how to efficiently use guides, layers, the rectangle tool, the eyedropper tool, the pen tool, and the shape builder to create your design.
Key Insights
- The article provides step-by-step instructions on how to use Illustrator to create text bars and banners for a postcard design, starting with creating guides on a new layer to outline the safe area within the artboard.
- Creating banners involves the use of the rectangle tool, the rotation of square shapes to form triangles, and the shape builder tool to merge shapes and form banners with a 90-degree edge.
- The pen tool is used to create bottom triangles under the banners, and color is added to the banners using the eyedropper tool, all while ensuring that designs are flush with the guides and saved periodically.
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In this video we'll be creating our text bars for the back of our postcard. Let's begin first by toggling the visibility of the guides from the front of our postcard.
We can do this by toggling the visibility for front guides and now we have a clear view of the background of our postcard. Let's zoom in using CTRL PLUS (+) (+) and using h on the keyboard. Use our hand tool to scroll over.
Next let's set a few guides for the back of our postcard. To do this let's start a new layer and we'll title this layer back guides and hit ENTER. From here we'll do the same thing we did on the front of our postcard and holding shift we'll add a guide 1 8th an inch inside of our artboard on each side.
In addition let's add guides to the center right at three inches and two inches down. For me this is always a good starting place because it shows where we can safely put things within our artboard as well as where the center is. So let's now get started creating our banners.
To do this we'll create another new layer and we'll title this layer front banners and hit ENTER. From here we'll use the rectangle tool and for our first banner we're going to start at the intersection of our guides and click and drag over all the way to the center of our artboard. Here we can see we have the start of our banner.
Let's now expand this banner on the left hand side all the way to the edge of our bleed. In addition let's change the color of this banner. To do this we'll hit i on the keyboard for our eyedropper tool and we can select any of the colors.
I'll select this color for mine however you can choose whatever color you'd prefer and we have the start of our first banner. If we look at our preview by double clicking the postcard preview pdf we'll see that this is pointed at the end. So let's go back into illustrator and create a triangle at the end.
We can do this a couple different ways. The first is by adding an anchor point to the end of our rectangle and dragging that anchor point out. The second is we'll use the rectangle tool and we'll create a square holding shift.
We'll then rotate that square holding shift until it's at 315 degrees or 135 degrees so that the point is coming out into the right and then hitting v on the keyboard we'll drag the square so it lines up with the top of our rectangle and we'll reduce the size holding shift so it lines up with the bottom of our rectangle. We now have a 90 degree angle at the end of our banner. Let's zoom in.
We scroll up. We'll see that it's not exactly flush with the top. We'll drag it up and hold shift.
Now we need to build this square within our banner. To do this we'll highlight both the square and holding shift on the keyboard. We'll also select the rectangle and from here we'll use the shape builder.
We'll then drag all three sections together and create one shape. If we zoom out we can see that we have our banner with a 90 degree edge. Next let's create our bottom banner.
To do this we'll go back to our rectangle tool and for this bottom rectangle banner we're going to simply click and drag from the bottom intersection and we'll create this banner to be roughly the same size however a little bit thinner and here we have our bottom banner. First we'll change the color using i on the keyboard and from here we can select whatever color you prefer. I'll select this color and next we need to add the bottom triangle under the banner.
If we look at our postcard preview we'll see an example of this. We have a triangle on the bottom left hand side. We'll go back into illustrator and we'll recreate this.
To do this we'll zoom in using CTRL PLUS (+) (+) on the keyboard and scrolling up with our mouse while holding CTRL. We'll then hit v on the keyboard to drag this rectangle so that it's flush with our guides. Next we need to create our triangle.
To do this we'll use the pen tool. Before using the pen tool we'll hit CTRL shift a to deselect all objects and then we'll select our pen tool. With the pen tool we'll select the intersection of the bottom of our artboard and then our first anchor point will be the anchor point of our banner and we'll simply drag over to the right creating our other anchor point and it's important to remember to close off this shape by clicking on the first anchor point.
We've now created our bottom triangle and we simply need to hit v on the keyboard selecting the shape and move it down so that we have a little bit of a gap. We'll then also hold shift and select the above part of the banner and we'll drag it up so that the bottom part and top banner are both above the guide. Let's zoom out and we can see that we have our top banner as well as our bottom banner.
Let's now save our work using CTRL S on the keyboard and in the next video we'll begin adding our text. See you there!