Discover the steps to create a professional and engaging ribbon cutting invitation. This article walks you through the process of creating the document, adding shapes, objects, text and images to your design.
Key Insights
- The document for the ribbon cutting invitation is set up with dimensions of 4 by 9 inches, two pages, 0.125 inches for margins and bleed, and no pages facing each other.
- The design process involves creating various shapes such as rectangles to highlight key information, adding text, and importing an image from a file. The fill and stroke colors of these shapes are manipulated to draw attention to specific areas.
- The layers feature is utilized to organize the elements of the design, with shapes and images on one layer and text elements on another. The layers are renamed for clarity, and a background is added to the design with reduced opacity.
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In this video, we're going to be creating our next document. So let's create our next document going to file, new, and we'll be selecting document.
And for this file we'll be creating the same dimensions as our last card. So let's change the title first and we'll be titling this ribbon cutting invitation. For our units we'll then select inches.
We'll maintain a width of 4 × 9 inches and we'll select two pages. In addition, rather than having facing pages checked, let's uncheck it and moving on to our margins, we'll have 0.125 inches and for our bleed again we'll have 0.125 inches. We'll then click create and let's start by saving our work going to file, save.
From here we'll maintain the same title and click save. In order to start off this card that we're creating for our invitation to the ribbon cutting event, let's first simply start a little more vague creating shapes and objects as well as adding some basic text. In the future, we'll get a little more specific with how we line up these elements, however for now we're going to simply start putting things down on our page.
So let's begin first with our rectangle tool. I think for this card we're going to have a large rectangle about two-thirds of the way down and this will hold our title. So for this rectangle, let's make it white.
We'll swap the fill and stroke and then double-click our fill, we'll double-click and drag up to the top making a white rectangle and clicking OK. Next, let's add a frame for our picture. We'll utilize our rectangle frame tool and let's draw from about halfway over down and to the right and for right now it's okay if it overlaps with our rectangle.
From here we can import our image selecting import file and from here we're going to select our ribbon cutting event jpeg. We'll click open and we'll then right-click and go down to fitting and fill frame proportionally. Again we can make adjustments to all of this in the future for now we're just going to place some objects on our page so we can see what we're working with.
Next, let's add a little more dimension. We'll utilize our rectangle tool and we want to highlight a couple of key points. The first point we want to highlight is our event date so it's going to be May 20th and let's put a rectangle right here so we can highlight May 20th in this section here.
We'll make the rectangle black so we'll swap our fill and stroke and here we have a black rectangle that'll really bring the reader's attention to this area. Let's do the same thing actually hitting V on the keyboard and we'll hold ALT key to copy this and add another one to the bottom-right-hand side. We'll put it right about here and let's drag down our large white rectangle.
We're going to just kind of resize this all. Remember that when we resize our image within the image frame we need to hold CTRL + Shift to resize it so that it resizes proportionally with both the frame and the image and I feel like this is looking good. For our last element, let's add a background.
We'll zoom out and again utilizing our rectangle tool let's simply drag a rectangle that's larger than the entire size of our bleed. For our fill, we're going to double-click the fill and we can really choose any color as we'll be changing it in the future. We'll then click OK and rather than it being a hundred percent opacity here, we want to change this so it doesn't show through quite as much.
We'll go to opacity on the right-hand side within properties and let's double-click and we'll just type 10 and hit ENTER. From here we also want to send this background all the way to the back of our layers so we're going to hit CTRL + Shift + Open Brackets to send it all the way to the back of Layer One. In addition, we can rename some of these elements within our layer clicking and then triple-clicking and we'll retitle this background and hit ENTER.
For this next element, we'll retitle this title bar and hit ENTER. We'll change this top rectangle to top black rectangle and finally this top one here we'll change to bottom black rectangle. As a final change, we'll change our Layer One and let's retitle this titling it shapes and images and hit ENTER.
In addition, let's also create another layer as we'll be recreating this layer for text elements. We'll double-click and type text and hit ENTER. Next, let's begin adding some of the text elements we'll need.
We'll utilize our type tool and we're going to just create a series of type that isn't necessarily stylized for this card and we can just drag it wherever we please. We'll start by dragging a text frame here and before doing this let's change the font to Chivo within our control bar and we'll select Chivo Black. For the top, then we'll type you're invited, we'll add an exclamation point and then we'll utilize our selection tool and drag it over on the top left corner.
Again, we'll be aligning everything in the future so don't be too worried about lining it up correctly. Holding ALT, let's drag the same text frame below and we'll triple-click and we'll type some new text. We'll type "Join us and celebrate our opening."
We'll then hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect, hit V on the keyboard as our shortcut for our selection tool. Again, holding ALT, we'll drag below and let's type in our main title "Ribbon Cutting Ceremony" and hit CTRL + Shift + A and then hitting V on the keyboard we'll hold ALT again and click and drag below copying the text frame and it's important to remember that we'll save a lot of time by using these keyboard shortcuts. However, you'd prefer you can still use the toolbar on the left-hand side.
We'll click and hit CTRL + A to select all text and here we're going to put our URL domus.url and hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect. Now we have two white text elements to add so hitting V on the keyboard for our selection tool, we'll hold ALT key and this time let's drag to the right-hand side. From here, we'll triple-click and let's type RSVP by May 5th. In addition, we'll hit CTRL + A to highlight all of this text since we need to change the fill color from black to white.
We'll double-click the fill color and we'll click Paper then going down to the bottom, we'll hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect and hitting V on the keyboard, we'll drag this over into our black box. Holding ALT on the keyboard now we'll drag it up to the top where we can triple-click and type May 20th. We'll then hit CTRL + Shift + A again and let's hit W to see that we now have all of the elements needed. However, we do need to start aligning these for our page.
Let's hit CTRL + S on the keyboard now to save our work and in the next video, we'll begin aligning all of these objects appropriately to the page. See you there!