This content provides a comprehensive guide for creating a project team chart using various design tools. It covers the steps from duplicating boxes for staff members, adjusting the alignment, to adding lines that connect each individual within the chart.
Key Insights
- The tutorial discusses how to duplicate boxes to represent staff members in a project team chart, ensuring that they are aligned correctly using keyboard shortcuts and checking alignment properties.
- The content also details how to add lines connecting these boxes using the line tool, including various tips such as adding a paper fill to boxes for better line visibility, changing line colors, and adjusting line size.
- Lastly, it instructs how to replace placeholders with actual names and roles of team members, and how to adjust the text size to ensure all names and roles fit within the boxes.
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're going to continue working on our Project Team. So let's begin where we left off, working with this box right here, and we're going to use this box to replicate the other staff members.
So let's hit ALT on the keyboard, and holding Shift, we'll move it over to the left until it's aligned. And next, let's simply move it down, holding Shift, and we'll snap it right into this grid here. Again, we can double-check our alignment by hitting Properties.
We'll change our Y value to 4.5 and hit ENTER. And for our X value, we're going to change this to 4.25 and hit ENTER. Now that we're lined up, we can duplicate this again, since we'll have three staff members going across within the chart.
We'll hold ALT and Shift and move it over to the left. And selecting the center one again, we'll hold ALT and Shift and add our third one to the right. Next, we're going to duplicate this middle one again, and we'll add one below, holding Shift and releasing.
And we're going to go back and replace each of these names once we've added them all. For our next row here, we're actually going to have two individuals, so we'll hold ALT, and let's drag it to the right here. And now, holding Shift, we'll select both of these elements and drag them to the left until they're aligned to the center.
From here, we finally have two on the bottom right and two on the bottom left. So let's copy these two, since they're already arranged to the right alignment, and holding ALT, we'll simply drag below and release. And again, holding ALT, we'll drag to the left, and lining up with the left margin, we'll release.
Let's go back to make sure that these are aligned proportionally. And in this case, we'll change our Y to 7.5 and hit ENTER. And this Y should be at 8.5. While these don't always snap exactly perfectly, it is helpful to simply look at the values, and we can usually tell.
Change this to 1.5 and 7.5 and hit ENTER. And again, 1.5, and this won't be at 8.5, and hit ENTER. Both of these should be at 6.5. We'll hit ENTER, and we now have all of our boxes lined up with our Project Team.
This looks pretty good. However, we now need to add the actual lines that connect each of these individuals. So to do this, we're going to utilize our Line tool.
And with our Line tool now, we'll simply start out, and let's drag one long line from the top middle, right along the center here, all the way to the center of this box here. And we'll release. And if we hit W on the keyboard, we can see what this looks like.
We'll utilize our Selection tool to click outside, and we have a couple of changes we need to make. Selecting our line, the first thing we'll want to do is move it all the way to the back, holding CTRL+Shift+[. And while that looks good up here, we now have issues because these two boxes have no fill.
So to change this, we could simply add different line segments between each of these boxes so it connects at the edge. Or as a shortcut, we can simply select all of our boxes,
Deselect the line, and for a fill, rather than having no fill, we'll add a Paper fill. As we can see, the line simply runs behind them now.
With our line selected now, let's change the color from black, and we'll have a PD Color 1 for it, or feel free to choose whatever color you'd prefer. We'll swap the fill and stroke so that the red is the stroke color, and let's increase the size to three points. If we click outside, we can see what this looks like, and I like it at three points because it lines up with the same as the boxes.
Next, we need to add a couple more lines. Let's select our line and hit CTRL+C to copy, and let's hit CTRL+V to paste. We'll start by adding our vertical lines, and we're simply going to resize it, and we'll drag it right here so that it's centered between the two boxes, and we'll hit CTRL+Shift+[. Remember that it doesn't have to perfectly line up with the boxes, since it's covered by the white fill.
We'll copy this again, hitting CTRL+C and CTRL+V, and we'll drag it so it's lined up with the centers of our bottom boxes. Hitting ALT on the keyboard, we'll do the same thing, and holding Shift with both of these selected, we'll hit CTRL+Shift+[ to send it to the back. From here, we now need to add some horizontal lines, so let's select one of our lines and hit CTRL+C, and then hitting CTRL+V on the keyboard, we'll paste it again, and we're now going to rotate it. We'll come to the edge here and rotate, holding Shift until we've rotated exactly 90 degrees. Then again, we're going to go to the center of our boxes and drag it across, hitting CTRL+Shift+[ to send it to the back. We'll copy this step so that we have all of our appropriate lines.
I'll hold ALT and drag it to the center of these two boxes, and in this case, I'm going to have it extend beyond so it connects with these two lines. We'll do the same thing on this right side and release. Now with these two lines, I'm going to bring them up so they connect, and if we zoom in closely, we can adjust these so that they connect perfectly. If we zoom out, our last step here is to make sure that this line connects to the line below. As a final step, I've accidentally added a line in the wrong position here, so I'm just going to flip it, holding Shift, centering it, and having it connect the line appropriately.
Now that we've created all of our boxes for our staff, I'll leave you to replace the names and roles of each of these members, and I'll be back soon. As we can see here, I've replaced all of the names, and not all of the names and roles fit, so let's select all of the boxes, and if we go to our Type tool, we can decrease the size of our text. Let's simply drop it down to 14 points. If we click outside, we'll see that this has resolved all of our issues.
So from here, let's save our work, hitting CTRL+S on the keyboard to save, and in the next video, we'll begin working on page 7. See you there!