Designing a Title Bar: Adding Logo and Titles for Website Development

In this video, we'll continue working on our title bar. Looking at our website mock-up, the next thing we want to add is the titles.

However, before doing so, let's make some adjustments to our logo. As we can see, the logo ellipse stretches all the way to the edge, so let's shrink its size. To do this, we'll select the logo and ellipse, drag a selection box, and then, holding Shift and ALT, we'll drag in to reduce the size of our ellipse and text.

Next, let's select our text and reduce its size as well. We'll double-click the font size in our control bar, reduce it to size 34, and hit ENTER.

I like the size of this font a little more. However, now that we've changed it, we need to re-center it within the ellipse.

To do this, we'll select the logo, and, holding Shift, we'll also select the ellipse. We'll then go to Alignment in our control bar, select 'Align to Key Object, ' and select the ellipse as our key object. We'll then center it horizontally and vertically, and I like the look of it now.

Now, we're ready to add our titles. To do this, we'll copy the logo text we already have by holding ALT, clicking the logo, and dragging a duplicate copy to the right-hand side.

Instead of 'logo, ' we want the word 'title.' To change the text, we'll double-click 'logo, ' type 'title, ' and hit Escape when we're done typing.

To duplicate this title, we'll hold ALT, drag it to the right, and repeat this two more times to create four titles.

Next, we want all four of these titles to be aligned perfectly. To do this, we'll select all four by dragging the selection box with the Selection tool, and holding Shift, we'll deselect our guide.

We can then align them to the selection by going to our alignment options, selecting 'Align to Selection, ' and from here, let's align them vertically to the bottom and horizontally distribute them to the center.

This means that we'll have equal spacing between each title.

Additionally, if I want more space between each title, I can do so by dragging one on the left or right-hand side further to the right.

In this case, I'll drag the far-right title to the right, holding Shift so that it moves only horizontally, and release when it's about here.

I'll then hold Shift, select the other three titles, and again horizontally distribute them to the center.

These are now all horizontally distributed, and I like how this looks. Next, let's make sure that we have all of our elements aligned to the center of our top title bar.

While we could do this for each of them and center them based on a guide, we can simplify this by aligning to a key object. We'll create a rectangle over our title bar and align everything to its center.

To do this, we'll use the Rectangle tool and simply drag from the top-left intersection all the way to the bottom-right intersection of our title bar.

While our fill is currently set to black, we can swap the fill and stroke. Then, we want to select all of the elements within our title bar.

I'll hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect, and before we select all of our elements, let's right-click and select 'Lock Guides' so we don't select the guides.

We'll then hit V on the keyboard and select all of the items within our title bar.

Now, we want to align them to the key object, which is our rectangle. To do this, we'll go to our control bar, select the dropdown for alignment options, and select 'Align to Key Object.'

We'll make sure our rectangle is highlighted as the key object, indicated by a thick blue line, and then we'll go to the top and select 'Vertical Align Center.'

As we can see, everything is now vertically aligned to the center of our rectangle.

We can deselect and simply delete the rectangle by selecting it and using the Delete key on the keyboard.

Let's now save our work using CTRL + S on the keyboard, and in the next video, we'll begin distributing each of these elements into the appropriate layers.

See you there!