Discover the process of organizing an artboard and adding text elements, including techniques for grouping objects, positioning icons, and adding descriptive text boxes. Learn how to arrange the elements effectively and make your artboard look visually appealing.
Key Insights
- The article provides a step-by-step guide on how to organize an artboard, including how to group objects such as diamonds into a single unit and position them on the artboard.
- Adding text elements to the artboard involves creating text boxes, drafting engaging text descriptions for icons, and aligning the text to the center guides.
- Further, the article discusses how to add different elements to the artboard with a focus on positioning and potential adjustments, emphasizing the importance of not spending too much time adjusting elements until the final design is confirmed.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Welcome back! In this video, we're going to be organizing our artboard as well as adding text elements. First, let's begin by giving ourselves a little more room in our Layers panel. To do this, we can go to the top bar of our Layers panel and simply drag it up.
Next, let's select the four center diamonds and we can group all of these into one grouping, dragging it to the folder icon on the bottom right-hand side. We'll retitle this group by double-clicking on it and we'll title it Center Diamonds and hit ENTER. Now, let's talk about how we're going to organize our artboard.
Currently on top, we have our title and our Center Diamonds along with a frame where we'll be adding our picture. Below this, we're going to have our icons as well as some text that the Marketing Director is going to be sending us. In addition to this, we're going to want our title or logo on the bottom.
So, let's start adding elements to our artboard. The first thing we'll add, since we already have them, is our icons. To do this, we can individually select them.
We could individually drag each of these icons into the artboard or we can simply select them and holding CTRL, we'll select both of them and drag them into the artboard. We don't want to forget our grouping folder so we'll drag that into our artboard as well. Finally, we'll drop all three icons into the icon folder and our icons are now on our artboard.
We'll be resizing some of our icons as well as adding some shapes around them in future videos. However, for now, let's simply straighten them out. To do this, we'll drag them each to about the middle and when we can see that all three are in line like this with the pink lines, we can select all three of them holding CTRL and let's just move them to about the center.
We'll be adjusting them in the future and making sure they're really centered and sized appropriately. However, for now, we can leave them about here. While it's important to have things appropriately sized and aligned, a lot of times when I'm strategizing an artboard like this or a marketing piece, I'll often drag different elements in but not spend too much time adjusting them until I know they're going to be there yet.
So in this case, it's not important these are perfectly lined up as I haven't quite solidified where they're going to be on the artboard and how they're going to be presented. In this case, they're kind of a placeholder so that I know that they're to be about here. Next, let's add a couple text boxes.
The first one that we'll want to add is describing that we have these icons below. We're going to type up some copy that will allow us to describe what these are. Let's add a text box in our Layers panel first by adding a new layer.
We'll title this layer Icon Description and hit ENTER. Next, we'll use our Horizontal Type tool found in the Tools bar and we'll simply click and drag from one edge of the artboard to the other and we'll see we have some Lorem Ipsum displayed. We'll then align our text box to our center guides that we've already created and here we have some text right above our images.
For this text, we want to type up something that will describe the icons that we have below. Looking holistically at this artboard, it says Our Brand Is Our Benefit. We'll have an image of a construction worker and below that we essentially want to bring the audience from the image to these icons with a description.
So in this case, we're going to type Phase 10 Construction is built on the foundation of three core values. Copy like this will allow us to move throughout our banner and be introduced to these icons below.
While we will want to do a little bit of editing and stylizing of this text, we can leave it as this for now. Next, let's add another text box and here will be the text where we get the copy from our marketer. In this case, we could create a new layer or we can simply grab the Horizontal Type tool and create another box.
We'll drag from one end to the other and here we have some Lorem Ipsum displayed. Again, let's resize this to fit our guides by dragging it to the left and the same thing on the other side and now all of our text is displayed within these guides. Let's shrink this text down a little bit more as they plan to send us a few sentences.
We'll go above to our Options bar, we'll double-click, let's just drop it down to 100 and hit ENTER. Now we can see what this will look like with a couple sentences of copy. While we'll have to make a few adjustments based on the real copy, this will give us the general idea of what it's going to look like.
Let's click outside our artboard in the Layers panel and we can see what this looks like. Finally, let's add one more element and on the bottom, we're going to be adding a rectangle for our logo. To do this, we'll choose the Rectangle tool and we'll click and drag from the bottom corner to the other side of our artboard.
We'll leave it right about there. Let's then rename this Rectangle Bottom Logo Box and hit ENTER. Finally, let's adjust the color of this to PTC Dark since it will be nice to have a dark image on top and on bottom.
We'll double-click PTC Dark and hit OK. Let's make one more change adjusting the title of our Lorem Ipsum and we'll double-click and we'll type in Main Copy and hit ENTER. We now have all the elements for our artboard and we're going to be changing these and stylizing these throughout, but for now, we have the general idea of what our artboard is going to look like.
Let's hit CTRL+S to save our work and in the next video, we'll begin working on our icons. See you there!