Learn to finalize a three-panel display by adding elements such as an appealing border and descriptive text. This article guides you through the process of creating and managing layers, adjusting strokes, and customizing borders to better enhance your display.
Key Insights
- The article provides a step-by-step guide on creating a three-panel display, beginning with hiding guides for better view of the artboard and ending with saving the work.
- It instructs on how to add a border to the display, manage its stroke, and customize its color and width profile to make it more appealing.
- The article highlights the importance of saving changes and preparing for the next steps in project development.
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In this video, we'll be finalizing our Three Panel Display. Let's begin by right-clicking and hiding our guides.
This way, we can see our Artboard. Next, let's close our Symbols Panel and get a better view of our entire Artboard. Here, we have our symbol up top, as well as some text describing it on a panel layered with the symbol.
In addition to this, let's also add a border. To do this, we can create a rectangle border around the edges. Let's create a new layer for this, double-click to title it “Border, ” and hit ENTER.
From here, we can simply drag a rectangle, and let's swap it from a black Fill to a black Stroke. In addition, let's change our Stroke from the current setting by double-clicking it, setting it to 0.125, and hitting ENTER. We now have a one-eighth-inch Stroke.
If we are creating this for an online image or something that doesn’t have a bleed, we might want to adjust our Stroke. Rather than extending off the edge, we would change our Align Stroke to Inside so it fills the entire area. However, we'll want it to extend one-eighth inch out as well. In order to do this, let's create a guide one-eighth inch out, and while holding Shift, we’ll release.
As we can see, this guide has disappeared because our guides are currently hidden. When we re-show our guides—by hitting V on the keyboard for the Selection Tool and right-clicking on the Artboard, then selecting Show Guides—we’ll see that we now have a guide there. Therefore, just because they were hidden doesn’t mean we’re not able to create them—it simply means we couldn’t see them.
Next, let's extend our border all the way to the edge of the bleed as well as to the first one-eighth inch within our Artboard. We'll go to Stroke, and rather than 0.125 inches, we'll simply multiply it by two and hit ENTER. We’ll also change our Stroke to Align to Center. This way, we have one-eighth inch outside and one-eighth inch inside.
From here, let's change the color of our Stroke to make it a little more appealing. We'll go to Adobe Color Themes, and making sure that we have our Stroke on top, we'll select the Stroke and change the color within Adobe Color Themes. Feel free to choose whatever color you'd prefer.
For me, I like the look of this blue. Next, let's make our Stroke a little more interesting. We can go to the top and vary our Width Profile by selecting various different profiles. As we can see, we get different visual changes based on the profiles we use. We can also use the Width Tool by selecting it and adjusting our Stroke by clicking and dragging.
I'll hit CTRL+Z and CTRL+Z. For this Width Profile, I'm simply going to select “Uniform.” For yours, feel free to make whatever custom profile you like using the Width Tool or by selecting any of the Variable Width Profiles. We've now completed our Three Panel Display, complete with our first panel featuring an icon and a text panel below.
Let's now save our work using CTRL+S on the keyboard. In the next video, we'll go over our Mid-Turb project. See you there!