Discover how to create dynamic, visual interest in your digital designs by adding a frame and shapes to your artboard. Learn the art of utilizing guides, creating new layers, and adjusting shapes to enhance your layout and achieve a more polished, professional design.
Key Insights
- Using guides can help align your design elements accurately. By creating guides at specific measurements, such as at the top of the artboard, you can ensure your title, frames, and shapes are placed correctly and consistently.
- Creating new layers for different design elements, like the center, left, and right diamonds in this example, allows for more control and ease of adjustment in your design process.
- Rotating and resizing shapes while maintaining the correct ratio is crucial for a balanced design. The use of the move tool and maintaining a 45-degree rotation for diamond shapes are specific techniques explained in this tutorial.
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 adding a frame and shapes to our artboard. Let's begin by first creating a few guides. The first guide we'll want is right at the top.
We'll drag from the top ruler and we'll put it right at 8 inches. If we hold shift we'll release when we're at 8 inches. This top guide will be our guide for our title.
We'll want to inch up our title. We can select the title and move it up holding shift to make sure that it's centered. And we'll make sure that our title is somewhere within this top of our guide.
Next let's create another guide right at 10 inches. We'll hold shift and release it at 10 inches. This gives us a little space now between our top title and where our frame and shapes are going to be.
In the center here we'll have our worker adjusted photo as well as some shapes highlighting this. Let's give ourselves another guide to limit the bottom of this area. We'll drag it down and release it right at about 33.5 inches.
At 33.5 we'll release. And this will be the area that we'll be working with to create our frames and our shape. Let's hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work.
Now let's begin creating shapes and a frame for our center image where the construction photo will be going. For this we're going to be creating three diamonds with the middle diamond containing the construction photo. So let's begin.
The first thing we'll want to do is create a new layer. We'll retitle this layer center frame and hit ENTER. This center frame image will be our center square.
We'll go to the rectangle tool on the far left hand side. And we'll simply click and drag a square. While holding shift we'll see that the ratio maintains as a square rather than as a rectangle.
We'll drag a square and the size isn't that important since we'll be rotating it and adjusting it to our guides. We'll release and now we have the beginning of our diamond. Next we're going to be rotating this using the move tool.
We'll first select the move tool. And now we can rotate it as a shape. We'll hit CTRL T to rotate this and going to one of the corners we'll see that we have the two arrows and can begin rotating.
And we'll hold shift until we're at 45 degrees. We'll then hit ENTER and we can see that we have a diamond from our original square. Let's now center this diamond.
To do this we'll need another guide. We'll select artboard one. Dragging from the left hand side.
And we'll release it right at 18 inches halfway across our artboard. Next we're going to be moving our diamond to the center. We'll select center frame.
And we'll simply drag it over to the left. We'll then adjust the size using CTRL T. And dragging it to the bottom we'll hit shift to maintain the appropriate ratio. And dragging it to this guide we'll again hit shift.
So that our image is now centered and aligned with the top and bottom. We'll hit ENTER to commit this transformation. And let's zoom in.
We can see that our diamond is now centered within the artboard. And in addition it touches the top and bottom guides. Let's now create two additional diamonds.
One on the left hand side and one on the right. To do this we could create additional squares and rotate them. Or we can use our center frame.
Dragging it into new layer. We'll hit ENTER. We'll title this one left diamond.
And we'll create one more. And title this one right diamond. And hit ENTER.
With right diamond selected. We'll click and drag it to the right. Holding shift.
And with left diamond selected. We'll click and drag it to the left. Holding shift.
We'll drag it to the left. We can then zoom out. And we'll see that we have three diamonds.
Although they're currently not lined up. In order to do this. We'll create additional guides.
We'll want the top of our diamonds. To be four inches from the left. And four inches from the right.
To do this. We'll create two more guides. We'll drag a guide over.
And holding shift. Release it at four inches. And we'll do the same thing on the right hand side.
We'll release it at 32 inches. Now let's move our left and right diamonds over. So that they're flush with these guides.
We'll zoom in. And first select the left diamond. And drag it over.
Holding shift. Until it snaps to the guide. And we'll now drag the right diamond over.
Holding shift. Until it also snaps to the guide. And we'll release.