Master the skills of arranging elements within a banner and making necessary adjustments for a professional look. This comprehensive guide explains the step-by-step process of adding guides, setting parameters, and working on layout and design elements to create a perfect title bar and logo for your banner.
Key Insights
- The article explains how to add guides to an artboard by changing the measurement unit from pixels to inches. For example, for an artboard 72 inches long, a guide is added at 36 inches (halfway) for better alignment of elements.
- Creating a title bar involves setting guides at specific points, creating a new layer, using the rectangle tool, and adjusting properties like fill color and opacity. The text layer is also adjusted for optimal visibility and impact.
- For logo adjustment, the guide recommends transforming all layers into one smart object to maintain shape and gradients. After converting to a smart object, the logo is then resized and repositioned to be centered and above a specific guide.
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'll be making adjustments to our banner and starting to arrange some of the different elements within our banner. First, let's start by adding some guides.
We'll select Artboard 1*, and now let's begin adding guides. If we hover over to our guides, we'll see that it's currently set in pixels. We want to change this to inches, so we'll right-click on the ruler and select Inches*.
Next, let's start setting some guides for Artboard 1*. The first guide we want is one halfway across our artboard. Because our artboard is 72 inches long, halfway is 36 inches. We'll grab this and, holding Shift, we'll add it and release it at 36 inches.
Next, let's do the same for our guide from top to bottom. Halfway between 4 feet, or 48 inches, is 24 inches. In addition, let's set the parameters for our title bar.
If we zoom in and scroll up, we're going to have a title bar between 2 inches and 8 inches from top to bottom. We'll set one guide at 2 inches and another at 8 inches.
Our title bar will then run from one side to the other, filling the entire area. Finally, we'll add one more guide. For the base of our logo, we want the base to be above 45 inches.
We'll drag a guide and set it at 45 inches so that we know our logo has to be above this guide. We can zoom out and begin working on organizing the layout for our banner. Let's start the layout process by creating our title bar.
To do this, let's first start a new group titled Title Bar and move this group into Artboard 1*. Within this group, we'll have Phase 10 Construction*.
We'll drag it into Title Bar*, and we'll also create a new layer so that we can add our actual title bar made out of a rectangle. We'll retitle this layer Bar*.
We can now use the Rectangle Tool from our Tools Bar. With the Rectangle Tool selected, we'll simply drag from one corner of our guides to the other and release.
As we can see, I dragged the title bar a little too far left, so I'll hit CTRL+T to transform it, and I'll simply snap it to the end of the artboard, making sure that it is also snapped to the edge. I can hit ENTER to solidify this, and we now have our title bar.
Looking at the rest of our banner, it's all relatively light, so this black title bar doesn't quite work for me. Let's go into Properties and change the fill color.
Let's change it to white. We'll go to our Color Picker and choose white, then click OK. Next, let's drag the Phase 10 Construction layer with our text above the bar so we can see what it looks like on top.
Currently, I feel like the bar holds a little bit too much weight, so let's change the opacity down to about 50%. This way, it doesn't attract too much attention, but it still distinguishes that there's a title there.
Next, let's change Phase 10 Construction so it's all on one line. We'll highlight Phase 10 Construction*, and then with the Horizontal Type Tool selected, we'll click and remove the space using the Backspace key between Phase 10 and Construction*.
As we can see, it has now disappeared. This is an easy fix because it simply ran out of room in the bounding box.
We'll give it more room by dragging to the left, and if we hold ALT, we'll see that it drags on both sides. In addition, let's resize our bounding box so that the left side lines up with this corner of the artboard, and the right side lines up with the other side.
Finally, we have some text size differences. So let's click and hit CTRL+A to highlight all of our text. Let's now change the text size to a standard 48-point font. Currently, this is far too small.
So let's change it again to 72. It seems we're going to have to type in our own value, so let's type 150.
Let's bump it up a little more to 190. Finally, we'll add a space between Phase 10 and Construction*, and here we can see that Phase 10 Construction is centered.
Let's increase the size a little more using CTRL+A to highlight all, and double-clicking on 190, let's bump it up to 230. We'll click outside, see that it's perfectly centered, and that it looks an appropriate size.
Next, let's transform our logo so that it's appropriately sized within this banner. Let's save our work using CTRL+S on the keyboard. For our next step, we'll be adjusting the logo to be centered on the line at 36 inches across, and above 45 inches.
Typically, the way you might think to do this is to hit CTRL+T on the keyboard with the logo selected and begin dragging it and resizing it.
However, if we notice, as we click and drag, the gradient changes, as well as our stroke border. While this could be okay for transforming another image, in this case, we want everything to keep its appropriate weight and size, as well as the gradients.
Therefore, we're going to have to convert all of these layers into one Smart Object. We can do this by clicking on all four layers, and with them highlighted, we'll right-click and click Convert to Smart Object*.
Let's rename this Smart Object from Ellipse 2 and rename it Logo*. Now, if we hit CTRL+T to transform it and begin dragging, we'll see that it maintains its shape and gradients. Let's drag it to be a little bit bigger and center it.
We'll simply drag it to a size that's appropriate for our banner. You can adjust it to whatever size you prefer, as long as it's above 45 inches and below the title bar. I think this is the size I prefer, as it's not taking up the entire banner, but it is prominently displayed in the middle.
Let's hit CTRL+S on the keyboard to save our work. We've now aligned all of the elements within our Artboard and our banner.
In the next video, we'll begin stylizing our banner and exporting. See you there.