Discover how to import icons and add text to your designs in a structured, professional and visually appealing way. This article provides a thorough step-by-step guide to help you ensure that your designs strike the perfect balance between aesthetics and functionality.
Key Insights
- The article provides a comprehensive guide on how to import icons into your design, emphasizing the need to adjust their size for a balanced layout.
- Use of guides is highly recommended to align elements such as icons and text, ensuring the overall design remains harmonious and visually appealing.
- There's a detailed explanation of text addition procedures including creating a text box, selecting the appropriate font, adjusting the size of the text frame, and aligning the text within the design layout.
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In this video, we'll be importing our icons as well as adding text. So let's begin first by importing our icons.
In order to do this, we'll go to File, Place, and let's place all four of these icons. We can do this by holding Shift and selecting all four icons. We'll then click Open, and from here we can again drag our icons out similar to the logo, or if we zoom out holding CTRL—(MINUS), we can simply click once and each icon will be imported.
Obviously, these icons are much too big right now, so let's use our new skill of resizing. We'll drag a selection box, making sure that we select a piece of each of the icons, and with all four icons selected, let's now resize holding CTRL and Shift together. We'll then drag in, and we'll see that the icons all adjust size together.
Let's make them a little bit smaller. We'll again hold CTRL and Shift, and release. Now we're ready to import these icons below.
Before doing so, let's zoom in and scroll up, and let's now add a guide. To do this, we'll drag from the left ruler, and let's add a guide right at one and seven-eighths inch, or 1.875 inches, and we'll release our guide right there. Next, we want to add each of these icons onto the right-hand side.
We'll leave the top yellow box open for the name, and so in our first box, we're going to drag our phone icon, and we'll line it up so it aligns to the left-hand side right against our guide. In addition, we can also see that when we have the green line in the center, we're centered within this rectangle. Next, below that, let's add our mail, and again we're going to drag it so it's on the left-hand side against the guide, and right in the center.
We'll add our location right below, dragging so it's on the green line, and finally our W icon for our web address. In this case, if we drag it to the green center, it'll center it on the rectangle. However, we want it to be centered within the rectangle that shows within our page, rather than the entire rectangle which extends into the bleed.
In this case, we can see that on the right-hand side, there are green arrows showing us that the distance between the top and the icon is the same as above where the mail icon is. This means that we're centered within the rectangle that I'll show here, and we're appropriately centered. Now, let's prepare to add text.
In order to do this, we'll utilize our type tool, shortcut T on the keyboard, and let's simply draw out a text box for our name. Feel free to type your name here, and with our Selection tool, shortcut V on the keyboard, let's drag our name down below into the yellow. From here, we'll select it and open up our properties panel to make sure that we're aligned with our paragraph to the left-hand side.
In addition, we'll make some changes to the font. We'll choose character, and let's type in Chivo, and let's choose Chivo Bold. Finally, depending on the size of your name or the length, you can increase the font so it extends most of the way across the business card.
In this case, I'll leave mine at 15 points. However, feel free to change yours as you'd prefer. Next, let's adjust the size of our text frame.
To do this, we can actually shrink the text frame by using a shortcut, CTRL + ALT + C. When we do this, we'll see that the text frame shrinks to the size of the text. From here now, we can take this text frame. We want to center it within the area of our rectangle shown.
To do this, we need to resize our top rectangle. So let's select our top rectangle and change the size so that the height is the size of our business card only. Next, we're going to select both the text and holding Shift, select the rectangle.
From here, we can actually align our text to the center of the rectangle by going to the top right and within our control bar, we're going to select how we want to align it and select align to key object. In this case, we want to identify the rectangle as our key object that we're aligning the text to. In order to do this, we'll select the rectangle, giving it a thick blue line, showing that it's the key object.
And now when we align, we'll be aligning our text to the key object of our rectangle. In this case, we want to align vertical centers within our control bar. When we click this, we'll make sure that it's aligned within our rectangle.
We can then click outside and readjust the height of our rectangle so that it extends to the bleed. We scroll over, we can see what this looks like. All we have left now is to add the text on the right side of each of these icons and to create the other side of our business card.
So from here, let's save our work, hitting CTRL + S on the keyboard to save. And in the next video, we'll be adding text to this business card. See you there.