Learn to finalize your digital card design by making adjustments to elements like text size, indent, alignment, and color. This tutorial will guide you through the process of refining your design, including resizing images and adding creative elements for depth and visual interest.
Key Insights
- The article discusses the importance of adjusting various elements in your digital card design, such as the size and alignment of the text, the sizing and positioning of images, and the overall color scheme.
- A key technique shown in the tutorial is to create balance and visual interest by making sure all lines and words line up appropriately, as well as adding creative elements like a triangle for extra depth.
- As a final step, the article guides users on how to export their completed card design as a high-quality print PDF, ensuring all the specifics of the design are properly maintained.
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In this video we're going to be finalizing our card. So let's start on page one and we'll just be looking at different elements that we want to make some adjustments to.
The first thing we want to change is within our title here. Let's select the second line "For real living" and let's simply reduce the size of this so it's a little bit smaller than the top text. In this case, I think we can go a little smaller still and let's drop it down to 20 points. We'll hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect and looking through different elements on our page, let's make this "Your lifestyle" all on one line. We'll hit ENTER to add "Your lifestyle" to one line and let's also drop "ends with" down.
I think this looks a little bit better. It's important to go through and make sure that all the lines and words line up appropriately. Looking at this image here, if we hit CTRL + Shift + A and W, it's pretty close to the edge here so let's simply resize this a little bit.
I'll hit A for our Direct Selection tool and with our Direct Selection tool, we can click on it. However, this layer is locked. So let's go into our Layers panel and we'll unlock our Images. From here, I can select him and I'll hit CTRL + Shift to reduce the size. I'll just nudge him over a little bit.
I think I like him right there, so we'll hit W and this looks good. I think this front page of our card looks good so now let's move on to our second page. We'll double-click page two and looking through different elements here, I think we want to add a little space between "home" and "pleasure."
So let's double-click and we'll highlight the word "home" and simply add a little space after. I think just a touch of space makes it look good. For this next section here, with the text, these bullet points feel a little far over to the right, so if we double-click to go inside the text frame, let's highlight all of our bullet points and from here we want to move them to the left-hand side. We're going to reduce the indent.
In this case, we'll go to Paragraph and go to our Indent options and we can see it's at 0.5 inches, so let's simply click down and let's reduce it all the way to 0.25 inches. I think this looks a lot better and more centered. We'll hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect and if we hit W we'll see what this looks like.
Next, let's make a change to this bottom text, "Becky Stafford" and if we highlight this name here, why don't we change it from black to the color of our logo? We'll utilize our Eyedropper tool and if we simply click the red on the logo, we'll see that our text changes colors as well. Let's hit CTRL + Shift + A to see how this looks and I like how this looks.
Let's also add a URL to the bottom-right-hand side. To do this, let's simply scroll up and copy the same URL text from below. I'll hit V on the keyboard to select this text and then hitting CTRL + C we'll copy it and go down to the bottom and within our Layers panel, make sure we're in Text.
We'll hit CTRL + V to paste. Let's drag it all the way to the bottom and zoom in using CTRL + PLUS (+) on the keyboard. It still feels a little bit big here, so let's triple-click the text, drop it down to 10-point font, and let's also use the Eyedropper tool to copy the same red.
Scrolling up and clicking the logo so the text changes to red. We'll then utilize our Selection tool and we'll just drag it to make sure that it's centered within our page right above the margin. We'll zoom out and hit W on the keyboard to see how this looks and as one final creative change, let's add a triangle just to the left of this square so that it looks like this text is coming straight from her.
Zoom in a little bit here and hit W on the keyboard and these are the kind of changes that we can make to just give it a little extra depth. From here, if we hold down the Rectangle tool using the left mouse button, we don't have a triangle tool, however, we do have a Polygon tool. If we click right here on the right-hand side, we'll determine that the number of sides is three for our triangle and for the width, let's double-click and we'll type in 0.5 inches and for our height, I'll hit TAB and hit 0.5 inches and click OK. We now have a triangle here. Let's change the color using I on the keyboard for our Eyedropper tool and we'll click the rectangle that's also yellow and next let's use our Selection tool and we're going to rotate it going to the edge right here until we see the two arrows. We'll click and hold as we rotate and if we hold shift, we'll snap right at 90 degrees.
Next, let's drag it over to the right-hand side and we'll line it up with the center of our photo here and remember that even though it's lined up with the center of our photo, it's not necessarily lined up because of our bleed. So to change this, let's actually resize our photo briefly, dragging the bottom of the frame to the bottom of our page, and now we'll click back on our triangle and realign it here within the center of the photo and then holding shift, we'll drag to the right. We can then change our photo so that it's back to the bleed again and with this triangle, let's simply stretch it a little to the right so it's a little flatter of a triangle and I like the look of that. As a final change, with our triangle selected, we can see we're still within our Text layer. Instead, we want to remove it. We want to move it to our Rectangles layer as that's where the rest of the shapes are. So let's unlock our Rectangles layer and opening up our Text layer, let's drag this polygon all the way down into Rectangles. From here, if we click outside and zoom out, let's hit W on the keyboard and we'll see that we can no longer see the triangle. This is because the images are actually above it, so instead, what we're going to need to do is either move it to the top of our Images layer or move it to the bottom of our Text layer. It doesn't really matter, so let's select our Polygon, we'll put it right above in Images and there we can see it again. With all of these changes now, we've finished up our card. As a final step, now let's export our cards for our midterm project. We'll go to File, Export, and from here we're going to maintain the same name, selecting PDF Print. We'll then hit Save and from here we'll simply go to the top preset and select High Quality Print. This will maintain all the specifics for our file and we'll click Export. With the PDF now within our folder, please upload this PDF to the portal, making sure that you double-check the rubric for all of the necessary steps. In the next videos, we'll begin our next card. See you there!