Discover how to create intricate shapes and designs using grids, guides, and various tools in your graphic design project. This article provides a step-by-step walkthrough on designing the second page of a ribbon cutting invitation.
Key Insights
- The article provides a detailed guide on creating shapes that match grids and guides, ensuring perfect alignment and proportions. This includes creating rectangles and adjusting their sizes using the properties panel.
- It also emphasizes the importance of adjusting designs based on whether a stroke or fill is used, demonstrating how to swap between the two and adjust the dimensions accordingly.
- The usage of tools like the eyedropper is explained in the context of color selection, suggesting how to achieve consistency across a design by selecting colors from within the same image.
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In this video, we'll be working on page two of our ribbon cutting invitation. So let's begin by hitting W on the keyboard, and within page two, let's make sure that within our layers panel, we're within shapes and images.
Unlike the front page of our invitation, we'll actually be creating shapes matching our grids and guides. So just like on page one, let's create a guide first, dragging from the left-hand side, and we'll release right at 2.25 inches. We'll then create our rectangles, and for our first rectangle, we're going to drag from the top left corner of our bleed all the way down to our guide, right here, two inches down.
To confirm that we have the right measurements, we should have 2.375 inches width, and we should have 2.125 inches height. If we don't see that within our properties panel, zoom in, and using V for our selection tool, we'll simply make sure that these are lined up to the top of our bleed and to our guide. Here we can see we have the correct measurements, and next, let's swap the fill and stroke so that we have a fill and no stroke, and double-clicking, we'll see that we can go up to the top right to fill it with white.
We'll click OK. If we look now at our properties panel, we will, however, see that our width and our height have been changed. This is because it no longer factors in the stroke that we had, so we need to make adjustments.
It's important to remember that when we're creating shapes and changing from a stroke to a fill, that we resize based on whether we have the stroke or don't. We'll hit V on the keyboard, and we'll simply stretch it out so it's in line with the edge of our bleed, and stretch it out and back in and back so it's in line with our guide and our grid. Let's next zoom out, and we're going to create a secondary rectangle to the right-hand side.
Rather than creating a brand new rectangle, we'll hold ALT and drag to the right until we see that the smart guides turn, and we'll adjust our view, dragging to the right until we're extended with the bleed. For this rectangle, let's change the color of this fill to a color found within our sunset above. We'll zoom out, and using the eyedropper tool, shortcut I on the keyboard, let's pick one of these top purple colors from within our image.
Once we have the fill here, let's look down below, and we'll see that our eyedropper tool is filled, so we'll simply click the rectangle, and we now have our rectangle filled with the same color. We'll next hit V on the keyboard for our selection tool, and let's add two more rectangles. The first rectangle, we're going to simply copy from the top, and again holding ALT, let's drag it so it's in line with the left-hand side of the bleed, and our grid here, right at eight inches, and we're only going to make this a one-inch rectangle, dragging to the right-hand side.
If we zoom in, we can go to our stroke, and we'll select no stroke, and readjust our rectangle so it's in line with our grid and our guide. Sometimes it takes a little finessing to get it to snap directly to the grid. However, I found that grids don't snap quite as well as guides, so it is one important distinction when you're determining whether to create a grid or create a guide.
Here we have 4.25 inches by one inch, and let's now create one more rectangle right below, holding ALT and dragging below until we're in line. Finally, we'll drag out to the left-hand bleed, and right to the right-hand bleed. We're going to change the fill of this rectangle now, zooming out.
We'll double-click our fill now, and we want to create a black bottom, so we'll click OK. Zooming out now. All that we're missing is now our background.
In order to create our background, let's first go to the front image, and rather than having the placeholder background, let's select a background that's within our image. So with this, we'll first remove our stroke, selecting the stroke, and going to the control bar to select None, and now with our fill, we'll go to the toolbar, select Fill so that it's on top, and we want to change our opacity back from 10% to 100%, and hit ENTER. In order to select the color, we're going to use the eyedropper tool, shortcut I on the keyboard, to select color from within our image.
This will provide consistency across the entire card. If you're not happy with the first color that you select, simply hit I again, so you have a clean eyedropper tool, and select the color you'd prefer. Again, sampling different colors to determine the color that you want.
In this case, let's see what the lights right above look like. I'll select that, and I think I like this color the best. So moving back down now, let's hit V on the keyboard to select this entire background here, and hit CTRL C to copy it, so that as we drag down below, we can hit CTRL V to paste it right on top of our second page.
We need to now move it to the bottom, so let's hit CTRL + Shift + Open Brackets to move to the bottom, or drag it down to the bottom of Shapes and Images. From here, let's rename some of our elements, selecting this rectangle, and we'll title this one Top-Left Rectangle. We'll title this one Top-Right Rectangle.
We'll title this one Bottom-Top Rectangle, and finally, Bottom-Bottom Rectangle. Adding a hyphen between, and now we have all of our elements labeled and consistent. If we hit CTRL + S on the keyboard, we'll save our work, and in the next video, we'll begin adding text elements to the back of our cart.
See you there!