Learn to strategize and design the front of a postcard using guides, frames, and text in graphic design software. This article provides a step-by-step process to creating an appealing postcard layout, including the placement of images and text.
Key Insights
- The design process begins by creating guides for the placement of images and text. This includes the use of rulers for precise measurements, producing a more accurate and polished output.
- Text is added using the type tool, with options to customize the font and alignment. This allows the designer to further enhance the postcard's visual appeal and readability.
- The article emphasizes the importance of saving work frequently and aligning elements correctly to ensure a professional and well-designed final product.
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In this video, we're going to strategize the remainder of the front of our postcard. So let's begin by first adding some guides.
If we look at our sample, we'll see that we have an image right here in the middle that stretches across and then three images below. Finally, we have some text and a line on the left-hand side. So let's create some guides so we can create frames to put these images in.
The first guide we'll create, we'll start by dragging from the ruler up top and releasing it right at one inch. Remember to hold Shift to snap right to one inch. In addition, if you don't see that you have the rulers here, simply go to Properties and, by clicking outside, you can select Rulers or go to View and select Show Rulers or Hide Rulers.
Next, let's add another guide for the bottom. We'll again drag from the ruler, and in this case, let's leave it right at three and a half inches, holding Shift. Finally, we'll have our left-hand side guide, and we'll put that one right at half an inch and release.
Great, we're now ready to add the frames for our images. First, we'll start by utilizing our Rectangle Frame Tool and let's drag this from the top left-hand side all the way to the right, snapping to the right-hand margin, and we'll leave it about there. And now we're ready to create our three frames below.
Again, let's start at the intersection here and drag up, and I'll create it about this size. It doesn't have to be perfect, and we can make some changes to it. In order to recreate this exact frame here, we can hit V on the keyboard for our Selection Tool, and with it selected, let's hold ALT and drag to the right, releasing right on that bottom guide. And again, holding ALT, let's release to the right as well.
In this case, I've made them a little too wide, so I'll simply select all three, holding Shift on the keyboard and selecting all three, and I'm going to drag it in to the right-hand side of the margin until it snaps. In addition, just to make sure that they're perfectly spaced, let's go up to the top to our alignment options, and we're going to be selecting Distribute Horizontal Centers. With these now aligned, we can start to see what this postcard is going to look like.
From here, we're also going to be adding text, so let's utilize our Type Tool. For our Type Tool, I'm just going to simply drag a square from one corner all the way to the other corner of the margin. We'll release, and now we're ready to add our tagline. In this case, we'll type out "Passionate—Practical—Performance Oriented, " and let's capitalize the "O" in "Performance Oriented."
From here, we can now highlight our text, and let's change the character. To do this, we'll go to Chivo, one of our downloaded fonts, and let's select Chivo Black. In addition, we're going to align this text.
Let's align the paragraph to the right, and we can leave it like this for now. We'll hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect, and then if we hit V on the keyboard for our Selection Tool, let's now select the entire text frame. From here, we can align the text within the text frame by going to our top control bar and selecting Align Bottom.
If we hit W on the keyboard to preview the work, we'll see what this looks like. Before we add these images, let's also add our line. To do this, let's create one more guide.
We'll go to our left-hand ruler and let's create a guide right at three-eighths of an inch or 0.375 inches. From here, we're going to create a line utilizing our Line Tool. We'll start right at the top intersection and drag down below so it intersects, and from here, we can see that we have a black stroke and it's one point.
Let's increase that to three points, and let's also change the color of our line. We can do this by clicking the right arrow, and let's change it to Paper. We'll then utilize our Selection Tool, click outside, and hit W on the keyboard, and our postcard is now starting to come together.
Let's now save our work by hitting CTRL + S on the keyboard to save, and in the next video, we're going to begin importing our photos. See you there!