Organizing Artboard Layers and Adding Logo: Step-by-Step Guide

In this video we're going to do a little organization of our artboard as well as add the logo. So first, let's start organizing our Artboard 1 layers.

Essentially, we have our bottom frames, our center text area and box, and then we have this title on the bottom and a rectangle up top. We're going to group a couple of these items in different folders. First, let's select the bottom frame and the top frame and we're going to drag them into this folder here and double-click Group 1 and simply label these "frames."

Next, we're going to select the text "Building Cities on the Shoreline" as well as the bottom rectangle. We'll hold Shift and select the bottom rectangle as well, and we'll group these into another folder. We'll double-click and type "bottom title." Next, we'll take our center text right here and the center square, and we're going to drag these into another group.

We'll title this "center text, " and here we can see our artboard is a little more organized. This will be important as we continue to add different elements into our Layers panel. Let's drag the center text above the bottom title because that better reflects how they're layered in the artboard.

And now let's prepare to add the logo. To add our logo, we're going to open up the Phase 10 Construction logo PSD file. We'll go to File, Open, and here we'll open the Phase_10_Construction_Logo.psd file and click Open.

Here we can see the Phase 10 Construction logo. It's broken up into multiple layers, so we're going to grab all of these layers and bring them into the Banner 1 file. To do this, we can click on "Phase 10 Construction" at the top, and holding Shift, we'll click on the bottom layer so that we have all layers selected.

We'll then press CTRL+C to copy them, and going back to our PTC Banner 1 file, we'll click outside of the artboard and simply press CTRL+V. We can see that these are now all pasted in. Let's take all of them while they're still highlighted and drag these layers into a new group. We'll title this group "logo" and press ENTER. One reason we want to keep this very organized is that without grouping some of these items, it turns into a lot of different elements and they're hard to keep track of.

Groups help us minimize these and keep a much cleaner Layers panel so that we can see exactly what we're working with and where the elements we want are. Let's now take our logo, which we can open, and we'll select all of these items. We're simply going to move it to the top with the Move Tool. We'll click and drag, and let's zoom in a little bit. Essentially, we'll want our logo here on the top-left corner, but first let's add a couple of guides so we don't get too close to the edges.

Let's deselect these different layers, and let's add a guide half an inch in. We'll place guides at half an inch from the left and top edges. Now we can make sure that if we put the logo here, it won't be touching the edges. Let's zoom in a little bit closer and now let's readjust our logo.

We'll open up our logo group, and let's move the Phase 10 Construction text to the right so it's displayed to the right of the logo. We'll take the Phase 10 Construction text and simply click and drag it. One way that we might be able to adjust this text is by going to our Horizontal Type Tool and clicking on it, adjusting the bounding box as well as the font size of our text. In addition, by clicking the Move Tool, we can select the Phase 10 Construction layer and press CTRL+T on the keyboard to adjust the size.

As we drag it outward and release, we'll see that Phase 10 Construction scales proportionally as well. This is an easy way to maintain the size without having to adjust the font size individually for each letter. Let's drag this to the left, and we're simply going to center it to the right of our logo.

Let's drag it out just a little bit further so it's a little bit larger, and holding Shift, we'll move it to the left, keeping it in line, and then move it to the right a little more. Let's leave it there for now. We'll deselect this by clicking outside of the Layers panel and let's zoom out to see what it looks like.

This looks pretty good. We've got our logo in the top-left corner, our text with a box behind to separate it from the background, and we have a rectangle here with another title. We're starting to see what this is going to look like and how this will appeal to viewers of the banner.

Looking at this, let's make one more adjustment. Rather than having this rectangle going across, let's align this rectangle in the same direction as we've aligned the triangle. We'll select the bottom rectangle and press CTRL+T to transform it.

Let's simply drag it out a little bit, holding ALT while dragging from both sides. We'll drag it out so that it reaches each edge of the banner; when we see the rotate arrows in the corner, and holding Shift, we can rotate it at exactly 15 degrees as we drag up. Here we can see that this rectangle is the same angle as our triangle above, which is actually also a rectangle. We'll press ENTER to solidify these changes, and we're starting to see the banner come together. Let's remember to save using CTRL+S on the keyboard, and in the next video, we'll begin editing some of the photos that will be plugged into these frames.

See you there!