Learn the importance of graphic design organization with this article explaining how to build and manage complex layers in a digital artboard. Discover the steps to refining and adjusting visuals such as triangles to create a cohesive, balanced design.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates the process of grouping together various shapes on a digital artboard to ensure a streamlined workflow and easy access to specific elements.
- Creating and managing a complex layer system is crucial when working with numerous elements in a design. This includes adding detailed elements like a triangle on the artboard and adjusting its position and opacity for aesthetic balance.
- The article emphasizes the importance of continuously updating the names of different layers for clear identification and avoiding confusion, especially when working with multiple artboards.
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In this video we're going to continue adding style to our artboard. Before we begin, let's work on organizing our layers panel as we're starting to get a lot of elements within our artboard.
So let's organize this middle section. We'll select triangle and then holding CTRL, we'll select the other shapes that make up our middle transition section. With each of these selected, let's now drag them down into a group and we'll retitle this as middle shapes and hit ENTER.
Now we're a little more organized within our layers panel and can quickly find what we need. In addition, we can actually expand this middle shapes group, add the bars, hold CTRL, and group them in an additional folder. We'll title this group middle bars and hit ENTER.
While it may not seem necessary with not too many layers, when you quickly start adding lots and lots of layers, it is important to stay organized or you might lose track of what's what or how to select a specific item you're looking for. Now that we've done this, let's continue styling our artboard. We're going to be adding a triangle on the bottom right-hand side of our image.
In order to do this, let's zoom in. We're going to create this triangle to be 11 inches out just like our previous triangle. To start, let's create some guides for our triangle.
We'll copy the same guides that this triangle has on the left-hand side, and it's currently 11 inches out from the left-hand side. We're going to subtract 11 inches from the right-hand side at 36 inches. We'll release our guide at 25 inches, holding shift, and we now have the left point for our triangle.
In addition, let's put a guide right at the right-hand side of our artboard. Drag from the left and place it right here, and now we're ready to add our triangle. To do this, let's select middle shapes and we'll create a new layer.
We'll name this one right triangle and hit ENTER and now we're ready to begin drawing it with the pen tool. To do this, we'll go to our pen tool, and with shape selected in our options bar, we'll begin clicking the three points of our triangle and we'll close it off when we see the circle to the right of the icon. Next, let's change up the color of our triangle.
We can go to our library and in this case, I'm going to select the PTC blue. However, you can select whatever color you'd prefer. I'll click outside of the layer and let's zoom in to make sure that all of our points are correct.
We'll scroll over, and this triangle looks like it's flush right along each of the guides. If the triangle isn't flush, remember that we can use the direct selection tool to change any of the points and drag them to their correct location. Let's zoom back out.
While I like the look of this triangle, it's not quite doing it for me, and so let's work on adjusting the opacity of this triangle. I'll select it, and in this case, I accidentally selected the triangle on the left simply labeled triangle. We're going to have to rename this so we don’t get confused.
We'll double-click and I'm going to rename it left triangle. Hit ENTER. Oftentimes when I'm working with different artboards and moving lots of objects around, right and left will change or I'll label it by the color as blue or green.
However, it is important to keep updating the names of the layers so that you don't get confused and you're on top of it. Let's select the right triangle now and adjust the opacity. You can simply drag it left and right to see what it looks like.
I like the look of this. We can still see some of the sidewalk. However, it's nice to get that line of the triangle.
I'll leave it at 60% and hit ENTER. Now clicking outside of the artboard, let's see what this looks like. I'll hit V for my move tool and I'll select outside the artboard.
I like the look of this. All of the angles are consistent. We have some elements only on the photo, some that are hovering over the white space, and it brings our image into a nice view that flows well.
If we want to see what it looked like before we made all these shape changes, we can toggle the visibility of our middle shapes. This looks like a good improvement. Nicely done.
Let's hit CTRL S to save our work, and in the next video we'll add a logo to our left triangle. See you there!