Learn how to create and modify shapes to enhance the design of your artboard. This article provides a detailed step-by-step guide to making triangles of different sizes, adjusting their placement and rotation, and changing their color to produce an appealing contrast.
Key Insights
- The article details how to create triangles by measuring and drawing rectangles, rotating them, and aligning them with guides to ensure precision.
- Various tools are employed to adjust the size, placement and rotation of the shapes, including the move tool to drag the shapes, the control T function to transform them, and the direct selection tool to adjust specific points.
- The article also places emphasis on the importance of color selection in enhancing the visual appeal of the design. It explains how to change the fill color of shapes and choose colors that harmonize with the overall color scheme of the artboard.
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In this video we'll be creating triangles on the opposite sides to help soften the edges a little bit into the border of our artboard. To do this, let's zoom in closer. Essentially, what we're going to do is create a triangle similar to this one, except on the far right side and about two-thirds the size of this triangle. In order to do this, let's first take some measurements.
To do this, we'll grab a guide from the top and drag it down to roughly measure this triangle. If we hold Shift, we'll see that this triangle is roughly 9.75 inches. If we want our opposing triangle to be roughly two-thirds the size, that will give us a triangle that's 6.5 inches.
We'll leave our guide right up here at 6.5 inches. Next, we'll create a rectangle similar to this one. Scroll up a little bit, and we'll create a new layer.
We'll then go over to our Tools panel and select the Rectangle Tool, and we'll simply draw a rectangle and release. Even though this isn't the color we'll be using, we can use it for now as a sample. We'll then use the Move Tool since we need to rotate this shape, so we'll select it and press CTRL+T to transform it.
We'll then go to the corner and rotate it, clicking outside the edge and holding Shift until we're at 15 degrees, and release. Finally, we'll drag this over to the corner. Next, we want to line this up with our guide, but unfortunately we can't see the guide anymore. Once we've clicked inside of the artboard, the guides will reappear.
To move this rectangle up to the top of our guide, we'll simply click and drag it. Let's zoom in a little bit closer and confirm that it's right in line. Often, I tend to nudge it using the arrow keys to fine-tune positioning. Let's zoom back out.
Currently, our rectangle (serving as a triangle) is in front of the other triangle. We want it to be behind the other triangle. To do this, let's first rename this Top Right Triangle and press ENTER. Next, we'll drop this layer below Top Rectangle by dragging it down in the Layers panel until we see a blue bar. Now we have our blue triangle underneath. Let's change the color of this triangle.
To do so, we'll go back to the Rectangle Tool and select Fill. Let's change this to a darker black. While that could work for showing contrast, let's go the opposite route and switch to white. I like the look of this a bit better. We'll close our Fill options, click an empty space in the Layers panel, and zoom out. This looks pretty good.
Now let's create another triangle right below our bottom title. Rather than doing this with another rectangle, we'll now make a triangle using this one as a sample. To do this, let's scroll up and zoom in. Now we're going to use the Pen Tool to replicate this triangle.
We'll create a new layer, and with this new layer, we'll select the Pen Tool found in the Tools panel about halfway down. We'll make sure in our Options bar that we have Shape selected since we'll be creating a shape. Next, let's zoom in close to our triangle and begin creating the points.
Place one point in the corner, another on the opposite corner, and when we see the circle next to our pen cursor, it means we'll be completing the shape—so click there as the final point. We've now created a triangle. If we need to adjust any of the points, we can go to our Tools panel and select the Direct Selection Tool.
The Direct Selection Tool allows us to select specific points. If we need to adjust any, we can simply click a point and drag it to its appropriate location. In this case, the triangle looks good and all the points are in the correct place.
Next, let's move the top triangle we created down below our title bar. We'll use the Move Tool and zoom out. Since it's already flush with the right-hand side, all we need to do is hold Shift as we move it down. We'll drag it down, and holding Shift will ensure it stays aligned.
If we keep scrolling down while holding Shift, we’ll see that it aligns with the top of the baseline. Let's zoom in. If we zoom in really close, we can see it's not exactly flush with all the lines, but we can take care of this using the arrow keys on our keyboard.
I'll nudge it one pixel to the right and two pixels up—and there we go. We zoom back out, and we can observe that these triangles do a good job of separating the edges from the borders of our artboard. Finally, let's change the color of our shape and rename it in the Layers panel.
We'll double-click Shape 1 and rename it Bottom Triangle, then press ENTER. To change the Fill color, we'll go back to our Rectangle Tool and select Fill. Here, we can play around with a couple of different colors and observe how it affects the overall banner—or, in my opinion, it may look nice to use the same color as the sky.
So let's go into our Color Picker, and with the Eyedropper Tool, we'll sample a color from the sky. I like the look of this color right here. A9D70F is the hex code, and we'll simply click OK. Our shape has now changed to that blue, and we'll click outside the Layers panel and zoom out.
As one last step, let's adjust the photo on the bottom. Currently, it's getting cut off by the triangle and not filling the entire space, so I think we can proportion this better. Let's use our Move Tool from the Tools panel and select the bottom image from our Frames group. We'll select the image thumbnail.
We can move it over a little bit; however, since we want it to fill more space on the left as well, let's press CTRL+T on the keyboard to transform the image. Let's stretch it out a little. As we bring it up, we can even go a bit further so it's really maximizing the bottom space. I like the look of this right here. Let’s make it slightly taller, and when we press ENTER, we’ll confirm the changes.
I think this gives us a quick glimpse of what the apartment complex looks like. It doesn’t attract too much attention, and I like the angles on the right. Let's save our work using CTRL+S, and clicking outside of the artboard, we can get a good sense of how our banner is coming together. Nicely done! In the next video, we'll be exporting our artboard for our banner.
See you there!