Explore the final steps of creating a business card in this article, discussing the process of finalizing the document's margin and bleed, adding styling elements, and making effective use of tools such as the ellipse tool for extra design touches. Learn the trick to changing the color of elements, aligning elements to the center of the page and the process of adding and manipulating shapes in your design.
Key Insights:
- The article guides readers on how to finalize the margin and bleed of a business card design, including the process of accessing and modifying these settings in the properties panel and the Document Setup.
- Several design elements, such as styling, color changing, and alignments, are discussed in this article. The readers learn how to add designs, copying and pasting elements, changing their color, and aligning them to the center of the page.
- The ellipse tool and its application are specifically covered, teaching readers how to add and manipulate shapes like circles in their design, providing a creative touch to the business card design.
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In this video, we'll be finalizing our business card. Let's begin first by reviewing the margin and bleed of our document.
If we open up our properties panel, we can see that we have a width and height for our overall document size. We're at 3.5 inches by 2 inches. If we determine we want to make changes such as to our margin within our properties panel.
If we want to change the bleed of our document, we can change the bleed by going to File, Document Setup, and within Document Setup, we can change the bleed and slug by making changes here. We'll click OK as we want to maintain these proportions. As the last two additions to our image, we're going to add some styling.
Let's start by adding a couple circles as a line from above. In order to do so, let's go back to page 1 by double-clicking it and let's select our line with our Japanese dots. We'll hit CTRL C to copy these dots and going into page 2, let's click on page 2 and hit CTRL V.
From here, we can't see our dots because they're the same color as the background. So to change the color instead, we need the hex code or the color of this right below. To do this, let's select the rectangle below and double-click the fill color to copy the hex code.
We'll then triple-click the hex code and hit CTRL C to copy. We'll hit OK and now as we drag a selection box to reselect our dots, we'll go to our stroke, clicking on it to edit it, and double-clicking the stroke, we'll double-click the hex code and hit CTRL V to paste the same color and we'll click OK. As a final step, we'll want to align it to our center, making sure that we're aligning to the center of our page.
And let's simply drag it down below holding Shift to drag only vertically and we'll align it so that it's centered with the text. If we hit W, we can see a preview and I like the look of this. As one final optional change, we can add stylized circles.
In order to add circles, we can utilize another shape other than our rectangle tool. If we look in the toolbar, we can't see the circle shape. This is because our shapes are actually grouped together with the rectangle tool.
You can see groups of tools by seeing the triangle on the right-hand bottom side of a tool. This indicates that there's a group of tools. In order to access these tools, we'll hold the left mouse button and the tool options will come up on the right.
To select one, simply release and we now have the ellipse tool. Additionally, you can see that there are groupings within a couple other tools such as our type tool. If we click and hold, we'll see that we also have type on a path tool here.
So let's now utilize our ellipse tool. With the ellipse tool selected, let's change the fill color from this color to the color of the rectangle in the center of page one. We'll double click page one and with the eyedropper tool shortcut I on the keyboard, let's select the center rectangle to change our fill color.
We'll then go back into page two, double clicking page two, and if we now select the ellipse tool, we'll draw an ellipse with the same fill color. From here, we can utilize this much like the rectangle tool where if we click and drag, we'll draw an ellipse. In order to draw a circle, we'll hold shift on the keyboard to draw a perfect circle.
In the case of mine, we're just going to add a couple minor circles on the edges to give it a little bit less white space. And if we want to move these circles, we'll utilize the selection tool. Drag mine right here and making sure that I fill all the way to the bleed.
Let's create one more circle on the right hand side. Holding ALT and dragging it to the right and I'll make this circle a little bit smaller. We'll drag from the edge and hold shift to drag it proportionally.
I'll go right about here and finally let's add one small one right above. Again, I'll hold shift and in this sense, we're just being a little creative and adding a little bit extra style. If we hit w on the keyboard, we can see a preview of this and we can make additional changes.
I'll hold shift to make this circle a bit bigger and feel free to modify yours however you'd prefer. And here we go, we've finalized our business card. Well done.
Let's hit w and make sure that all of our elements extend beyond into the bleed and we'll double check looking at page one. And all of this extends beyond our bleed. We'll hit w to preview and I like the look of this business card.
Well done. Let's now hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work. In the next video, we'll begin a new project.
See you there.