Discover the essential steps and tools involved in crafting a digital design from scratch. This article provides a detailed walkthrough on how to create a digital design utilizing logos, texts, URLs, and icons, with careful attention to alignment, styling, and size adjustments.
Key Insights
- The article delves into a comprehensive process of creating a digital design, starting with the addition of a logo from the CC libraries, adjusting its size, and centering it on the page.
- Text is added and styled through a quick transformation trick using the eyedropper tool, and placeholder text is added to the text frame that extends beyond the frame's length for a better visual appeal.
- The article discusses the addition and styling of a URL, along with the placement of three icons from the CC libraries, which are then shrunk to an appropriate size, aligned, and distributed horizontally for a neat presentation.
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In this video, we'll be completing our digital design. So let's scroll down to Page 4 and adjust our view here.
For this page, it's going to be relatively simple—with our logo, some text, a URL, and three icons. So let's begin designing it. We're going to start within our CC Libraries, and let's find our logo and drag it in.
From here, we can create the logo about this size here, and we'll release. Let's center it within our page. We'll select it and go to the top.
We'll make sure that we have Align to Page selected, and we'll center it. We'll leave it right about there. Next, let's add our text.
We'll go over to our Type Tool and simply add some text from one side to the other of the page. We'll add some lorem ipsum as placeholder text. From here, let's highlight all of this text and use a quick trick to transform it to the styled text.
Utilize our Eyedropper Tool and click on the styled text while it’s highlighted. You'll see it now changes. Now utilizing our Selection Tool, we're going to click and hit CTRL + A to select all of this text that extends well beyond the text frame.
We'll hit the Delete key, and right-click, selecting Fill with Placeholder Text. We now have enough text to fill the space with the correct styling. Let's just edit this a little bit.
In this case, we're going to shrink down the size of our text frame using the Selection Tool. I'll hold ALT so it resizes from both sides to about this size. Feel free to add as much or as little placeholder text as you'd prefer.
Let's now move on to adding our URL. We'll use the Type Tool again, and from here, we're going to simply draw a box about this big.
We'll type "domus.url." To change our styling, let's hit CTRL + A to select all. Again, we're going to utilize our Eyedropper Tool. From here, scroll up and feel free to select a text styling that you prefer.
In this case, I kind of like the styling used for "Space." I'm going to click it. If we scroll down, we'll see that it now copied the styling.
However, the text is currently white in this styling. We'll go to the top and select black. Additionally, this is a little bit big for our font.
We'll decrease the size in the control bar. I think I'll leave it right about this size. Next, let's add our icons.
To do this, we'll go back to our CC Libraries, and we'll select all three icons—holding CTRL. With all three selected from our CC Libraries, let's just drag them in.
We're going to simply click to add each of them onto our page. Currently, these are a little bit big, so let's drag a selection box over all three with the Selection Tool. Then, holding Shift and CTRL, we'll shrink them down to a more appropriate size.
When you're happy with the size, we can now adjust the alignment. Click and drag them, and then highlight all three again. Let's go to our alignment options at the top, and we're going to Distribute Horizontally.
However, we'll first change from Align to Page to Align to Selection. This way, they will align within the selected group. We'll select Distribute Horizontal Centers and also make sure that we Align Edges just to be safe.
From here, let's set up a couple of guides so we have equal distance from the right and the bottom. Let's add some guides 50 pixels away from the right side, releasing at 1150 pixels.
We'll create one at the bottom, releasing it at 550 pixels, and then one on the left, releasing at 50 pixels.
From here, we can use our selection box with the Selection Tool, and we're simply going to drag these in so that they align right at the bottom-right of our guides. Additionally, we'll do the same thing with "domus.url."
Selecting it, and to shrink our text frame, we'll hold CTRL + ALT + C to shrink it. Let's simply drag it down below so it lines up with our guides. We may need to zoom in a little bit—holding CTRL + PLUS (+)—and just inch it over with the arrow keys. It's lined up with the left guide.
We hold CTRL and scroll down to change our view. Even though these icons are lined up with the guides, the actual icons inside of them are not perfectly aligned—so when we hit W on the keyboard, they don't appear properly aligned even though the image frame itself is. Let's select all three again, and we're just going to use the arrow keys to inch them down and to the right so that they're lined up with the guide.
While it may not be super important on this exact display, I always like to have things aligned properly for how the viewer will see it. From here, we've now completed the design of our Page 4. Let's save our work now by hitting CTRL + S on the keyboard to save. In the next video, we're going to begin adding hyperlinks to this page.
See you there!