Learn how to effectively manage and manipulate layers in your workspace. Understand the tools and techniques to control visibility, aspect ratio, object selection, and layer organization.
Key Insights
- The article provides a comprehensive guide to working with layers including resetting workspace proportions, dragging and adjusting layers, renaming objects and layers, and moving objects within layers.
- The article also covers crucial functionalities such as locking objects, controlling visibility, and the use of shortcuts like Ctrl open brackets to move images up and down within layers, and Ctrl + Shift open brackets for moving objects to the top or bottom of a layer.
- Additionally, the write-up explains how to align objects within layers using the rectangle tool and align to key object setting, followed by updating the workspace to include layers and links for a more organized and efficient working environment.
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.
In this video we're going to be going over layers. Before we begin, let's reset our workspace under VDCI, and let's simply click reset VDCI.
From here we'll see that our workspace is now reset to the appropriate proportions and next let's discuss layers. In order to do so, let's go to Window and we'll be selecting Layers. We're going to be using both of these consistently so let's add them to our workspace.
In order to do so we'll grab the top Layers panel and let's just drag it to the right of CC Libraries until we see the blue box and we'll do the same thing with Links. Grabbing the title and bringing it to the right. Next let's open up our Layers panel.
Within our Layers panel we actually have all of the components that make up our page. We can see them if we click the drop-down arrow next to Layer 1. Here we have our image of Becky, our construction worker on phone, cordless drill, and if we select any of these objects we'll see that the object that we have selected has a blue square next to it and we'll see that that blue square corresponds to the object selected.
In addition, we can also select objects by clicking on the squares to the right. On the left-hand side of our Layers panel we have visibility, so if we toggle visibility we'll see that they're hidden from view, and to the right of this we also have the ability to lock by clicking in the space and we'll see that we have the lock icon and we're unable to select or move the object. Finally, if we select a certain object, in this case, we'll select this object showing us that we have the yellow rectangle on the bottom.
We can also rename our objects and this can be helpful when we're looking through our Layers panel. In order to rename the object, we'll triple-click the title and we can type a new name. I'll type in Yellow Rectangle and hit ENTER and for this bottom one I'll select it and triple-click and I'll type in Blue Rectangle.
Within our Layers panel we can think of all of these being stacked from the bottom to the top and so if we click and drag objects such as our Phase 10 Construction logo to the top above our construction worker on iPhone we'll see that this layer is on top. If we move it over now and move it above our drill and drag the cordless drill image on top we'll see that this layer is now on top. What we can also do is use a shortcut CTRL + Open Brackets on our keyboard to add images to the bottom and whatever image we have selected will move down or CTRL + Close Brackets to move the image up.
Additionally, the shortcut CTRL + Shift + Open Brackets moves the object all the way to the bottom and CTRL + Shift + Close Brackets moves the object all the way to the top. Within our Layers panel we can also add additional layers by going to the bottom right. We'll add our second layer and let's add one more layer.
From here we can rename our layers and let's create our bottom layer as our layers for our rectangles. We'll double-click the title and we'll type in Rectangles and hit ENTER. Let's rename Layer 2 and we'll double-click and let's put all of our images within this layer.
We'll type Images and hit ENTER and finally for Layer 3 let's put all of our text in this layer and type Text and hit ENTER and we're now a little more organized so that we can keep all of our contents organized within the Layers panel. Next, let's move objects into our Images layer. To do this, we're going to select our Phase 10 Construction logo and then holding Shift, let's also select Becky, Cordless Drill, and Construction Worker on iPhone.
With all four selected, we'll simply click and drag up right under Images where we see the gray line and we'll release. These objects are now all within Images however if we click the drop-down of Images we can see that our Phase 10 Construction logo is still on the bottom so we can either click and drag it to the top or use CTRL + Shift + Close Brackets to move it to the top. Additionally, let's move it over to the right-hand side as we're going to be putting it within this rectangle.
Next, let's go up to page one, we'll go to Pages and double-click page one, and from here let's also assign these objects to specific layers. We'll go back to our Layers panel and from here let's select Man Chop Saw and holding Shift we'll select Writing and Phase 10 Construction Logo and we'll move them up into Images. Finally, we'll rename our Rectangles, selecting it first and since I don't know which rectangle this is, I'll click the blue square on the right-hand side to see and we'll see that I have the Red Rectangle selected.
So I'll triple-click and type Red Rectangle and hit ENTER. I'll select the next one, clicking the blue square on the right-hand side and we'll see it's the Yellow Rectangle and finally the bottom one will be our Blue Rectangle. With all of our rectangles now assigned we can now lock our Rectangles layer and in the future we won't accidentally move these shapes.
Before doing the same with our Images layer, let's quickly align our logo to the center here. In order to do this, let's use the Rectangle tool and we're actually going to zoom in and draw a rectangle so we can align this object to the center of the rectangle. With our Rectangle tool, we'll click and drag from one corner snap into the guides which we'll see turn pink when we're aligned and release and from here we'll hit V on the keyboard and holding Shift with our rectangle still selected we'll also select our logo.
From here we want to align this logo within this rectangle so to do so we'll go to the top and rather than align to selection we're going to align to key object. From here we'll align horizontal centers and we'll align vertical centers and we'll see that our logo is now aligned within this rectangle. We can now select this rectangle on the outside as we just used it for an alignment tool and we'll delete it.
Going down to page 2, we'll double-click page 2 and let's do the same thing with our logo here. We'll first utilize our Rectangle tool, we'll drag a rectangle until we're in line with the guides and then we'll hit V on the keyboard for our Selection tool and holding Shift we'll make sure that we have our rectangle selected and also our logo. From here we'll again go to Selection and select Align to Key Object and we'll make sure that the rectangle on the outside is selected as our key object meaning that the logo inside will be aligned to it and we'll align it horizontally and vertically.
Finally we can delete our rectangle hitting the Delete key and let's go into our Layers panel and we'll lock our Images layer. As one final change, we now want to update our workspace so that we have Layers and Links within it as well. To do this we'll go to the top under VDCI and since there's no ability to update the workspace we'll go to New Workspace and simply type VDCI exactly as we had it before and click OK.
We'll see a warning sign that it already exists and so we'll replace it or update it. We'll click OK and we have an updated workspace. Let's now hit CTRL + S on the keyboard to save and in the next video we'll be adding text.
See you there!