Learn advanced tips to design professional postcards using keyboard shortcuts and specific tools. This guide walks you through the process of color selection, text adjustments and layer locking to ensure precision and efficiency in your design.
Key Insights
- The guide teaches how to use keyboard shortcuts and tools such as the Hand Tool (H) and the Eyedropper Tool (I) to adjust perspective and capture color from the design, respectively.
- It provides detailed instructions on how to modify text elements - from changing the color of address lines and separators to adjusting character spacing and tracking for optimal legibility.
- The tutorial also highlights the importance of layer locking to prevent accidental selections when working on different parts of the design, and using the 'show/hide guides' function to preview the final look of the postcard.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video, we'll be finalizing the front of our postcard. So let's begin by using the hand tool shortcut H on the keyboard to drag our perspective, and then we'll use CTRL + (+) on the keyboard to zoom in.
Now, with a better view of the front of our postcard, let's observe what we have. On the left-hand side, we have our text and paragraphs and icons all in color, and on the right-hand side, we have our address lines and separator in black. Let's now change the color of our address lines and separator dots.
To do this, we'll first want to capture the color we want to add. In this case, let's add this purple or whatever our paragraph color is that you've selected. To do this, we'll use the eyedropper tool shortcut I on the keyboard, and with the eyedropper tool, if we simply click the text, we'll see that the color appears in our fill.
In addition, this also applies if we click any object that has a fill color. We'll click the text and we'll double-click the fill to observe the hex code. From here, we'll hit CTRL + C to copy the highlighted hex code and click OK.
Now we're ready to add this hex code to the stroke of our separator line as well as our address lines. We'll hit V on the keyboard for the selection tool, and we'll select both the group of lines and, holding down Shift, we'll select the separator stroke. From here, we'll double-click on the stroke, and we can now paste by hitting CTRL + V for our purple or whatever color the paragraph is.
We'll then hit OK, and we can see that our lines have now changed to the color of our paragraph. Let's continue making changes. The next change we'll be making is to our text.
Currently, if we look at our title Friday, we'll see that the A and the Y, based on the shape of the characters, seem to be separated. While some text will automatically change this, A and Y can often add a little bit of separation, so it looks like it says Frid A Y. We can fix this by changing the characters. To do this, we'll double-click and then we'll highlight by dragging over D and A. From here, we can go into our properties panel.
Scrolling down, we're going to be changing the tracking for our selected character. As we decrease the tracking, holding down the down arrow, we'll see that it limits the distance to the right of the character. This will then limit the distance between D and A and A and Y. When we click outside, we'll see that D and A have appropriate spacing.
Let's add a little bit less tracking to A by holding down and bringing it a little bit closer to Y. This now looks appropriate; however, we have to resize it now. To do this, we'll double-click and let's increase the font size slightly by clicking up and up again. However, now our text is gone because it doesn't fit.
So to fix this, let's hit Escape on the keyboard, and we'll drag up on our bounding box. Next, let's do the same thing with A and Y within May. To do this, we'll double-click and select A, and then we'll change the tracking by clicking down until it looks more appropriate and resembles one word.
We'll leave it right here, and this looks good. Again, we'll highlight all of the text and now increase the font size. However, we've lost the text because we don't have enough height to our bounding box.
We'll hit Escape, drag down on the bounding box, and again triple-click. Then click up on the size until we fit it within our guides. We'll hit Escape and click outside, and this looks good.
We've now matched up our titles within the guides and we've separated some of the distance and awkwardness within our words. Next, let's work on our paragraph below. Our paragraph bounding box stretches all the way to the bottom.
However, let's bring it up a little bit by dragging the bottom of it to right above our icons. Next, let's work on our paragraph. With our paragraph here, let's add a little bit more space or leading between our lines.
With it selected, we'll go to the right to our character, and from here, we can change the leading by clicking on the three dots for more options. And to change our leading, we'll see we have a symbol to the left to set the leading, and if we click up, we'll see it adds a little more space between our lines. Let's set it to 12 points, and this will give us a little bit cleaner of a look between each of our lines of our paragraph.
Finally, let's get a look at the front of our postcard without all the guides. To do this, we'll right-click, select Hide Guides, and we can see what this looks like. Looks pretty good in my opinion.
Let's now right-click and hit Show Guides as we'll be using them for the back side of our postcard. And finally, let's lock each of the layers that we've created. With these locked, we don't have to worry about accidentally selecting items within the front of our postcard or working on the back.
We'll zoom out using CTRL + (minus sign) on the keyboard and shift our perspective using H, and we can see that we've completed half of our postcard. Let's now hit CTRL + S on the keyboard, and in the next video, we'll be working on the back side of our postcard. See you there!