Upgrade the aesthetic of your artboards by learning how to incorporate transitional elements, such as colored bars and shapes. This article guides you through the steps of adding rectangles to an image and using them as separators, as well as creating a triangle using the pen tool.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates how to use rectangles as a separator to break up different sections of an artboard. This is achieved by adding two 1-inch bars right above the middle.
- The article guides you through creating a triangle with the pen tool. This involves setting guides for the shape and using these guides to draw the triangle on a new layer.
- The author touches on the importance of experimenting with color, explaining how different colors can change the feel of your artboard. It suggests trying different color combinations on the bars and shapes to achieve the desired effect.
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 begin stylizing our artboard with shapes. In order to do this, let's first start by assessing our artboard.
As we can see up top, we have a vibrant picture full of activity. However, below we just have a very plain and bare white space with text. So let's begin adding a transition element between the two to help break up the two different sections of our artboard.
To do this, we're going to be adding rectangles to our image to give the impression of colored bars as a separator. We'll do this by adding two 1-inch bars right above the middle. So let's begin by adding our guides first.
We'll select artboard 1 to assign the guides to artboard 1. And then, clicking from the top, we'll hold shift, and because our middle guide is at 50 inches and we want 1-inch bars, we'll drag up to 49 inches. And let's create one more, dragging it down to 48 inches. We now have the guides for our bars.
So let's zoom in and create two bars across that are this size. To do this, we'll go into our layers panel, we'll click a new layer, and we'll use the rectangle tool. Remember, the rectangle tool is found within the tools gallery with the other shapes.
We'll select the rectangle tool, and starting from the bottom, we'll drag from the top-left corner down to the bottom-right corner. And we now have a bar across that's the PTC logo color. Let's now rename this rectangle 1 by double-clicking on it, typing 'bottom bar, ' and hitting ENTER.
Next, we're going to recreate the same bar right above it within this guide space. To do this, we could either click the rectangle tool and draw another rectangle, or we can select bottom bar and drag it into a new layer. We'll name this one top bar, and hit ENTER.
And with the Move tool (shortcut V on the keyboard), we'll simply drag it up so that it fits the space of the top bar. Next, let's experiment with the colors of our bars. We'll first hit CTRL+S to save our work, and now let's start playing with the colors.
We'll select the top bar first, and we can choose different colors from our libraries to see the different effects. I'll leave mine at PTC blue for now, and now let's change the bottom bar color. We'll select the bottom bar, and we can go through different options.
Obviously, each of these colors changes the feel of our artboard. I'm going to leave this bottom bar as PTC dark. However, feel free to color your bars however you prefer.
Next, I'll select the top bar again, as I really like the PTC logo color best. So I'm going to leave my top one as the PTC logo color, and the bottom one as PTC dark. We'll hit CTRL+S to save our work, and next, let's zoom out using CTRL+MINUS (-) on the keyboard.
As an additional transitional element, I want to begin adding a triangle on the left-hand side to join the two sections together. In order to do so, let's create a guide for the top of our triangle. We'll drag it down, and I think I want the top of the triangle to be about this tall.
I'll hold shift, and let's leave it right at 39 inches. If the triangle is going to go 11 inches down to 50, we'll want it to come another 11 inches down, so we'll leave it at 61 now for the bottom guide of our triangle. Finally, since it's 11 inches up, 11 inches down, we'll want to create another guide to go 11 inches across.
We can drag a guide from the left, and leave it at 11 inches while holding shift. We now have the ability to create our triangle shape. So let's do this, rather than with the shapes tools, we're going to use the pen tool.
We'll go to the pen tool, and now clicking a new layer in our layers panel, we'll name this triangle, and hit ENTER. Next, we'll begin drawing our triangle. Let's zoom in, and we're going to choose the top guide.
We'll choose the point where 50, our bottom guide, and our 11-inch guide intersect. We'll hit the bottom-left guide, and close off our shape until we see the circle to the right of the icon. We've now closed it into a triangle.
Let's hit V on the keyboard, our move tool, and click outside our artboard to see our work. If we zoom out, I like the look of this triangle on the left-hand side with the bars in the middle. Now let's save our work by hitting CTRL+S on the keyboard, and in future videos, we'll continue stylizing as well as adjusting the text.
See you there!