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 + (+) 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 1/8 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 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 of 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 to the right. 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.
If 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. 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 + (+) on the keyboard and scroll 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. 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 to create a small 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!