Discover the essentials of layer organization and stroke addition in graphic design. Learn how to add, modify, and move strokes, as well as manipulate layers for optimal organization and visibility.
Key Insights
- Strokes are borders that can be added to shapes. They can be modified in terms of color, weight (thickness), and style (solid or dashed). Stroke selection and adjustments are performed via the options bar.
- Shapes in a design can be moved around the canvas with the move tool. The order of stacking, or which shapes appear in front of or behind others, is determined by the layer organization in the layers panel. This order can be manually adjusted by dragging layers to different positions.
- Layers also have a visibility feature, allowing designers to hide or show individual layers as needed. This is useful for examining specific elements without altering the established layer order.
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 discussing layer organization as well as strokes. With our shapes file open that we created in the last video, let's begin by adding strokes to our shapes.
Strokes are essentially borders around the shape. Let's do an example of a stroke. We'll make sure that we have our orange circle highlighted, showing that it's selected.
We can then navigate to our options bar and see that we have a stroke indicator here. If you don't see this arrangement in your options bar, you may have a different tool selected. Make sure that you have the ellipse tool selected for us to make this change.
Let's select the stroke indicator. Currently we can see that we have a white box with a red line through it. This indicates that there is currently no stroke set to our shape.
We can change this by selecting solid color. We now have a black stroke associated with this. However, I want to change it to a yellow stroke.
We can do this simply by picking a yellow from below. We'll then click enter to close the color window. As you can see looking at our circle, we have a very slight stroke around this circle.
We can change the weight of the stroke or how thick it is by changing it in our options bar. Let's click on 1px to change the weight, short for one pixel. We can change it to 15px and click enter.
We'll see that now the stroke is much larger around our circle. In addition, another way to change this is by clicking the drop down menu where we have a slider. I'll let you change the stroke to your desired weight.
For me, I will stick at 15 pixels by double clicking on the pixels and typing 15 and hitting enter. Let's add another stroke to a shape. We'll do this by first selecting the shape in our layers panel.
I'm going to select the blue square. Next, I'll go back to my options panel and select stroke, and let's change it to black. Then, let's change the weight of the stroke by clicking on 1px and changing it to 20.
I'll hit ENTER. For this square, I want to add a dashed stroke, so we can change this by navigating to our stroke type next to the weight. Clicking on this line, we'll see that we have a drop down that gives us different stroke options.
Let's click the dashed line and hit ENTER to close the window. As you can see, we now have a dashed stroke on our square. We can again change the weight of this using the stroke weight in our options bar.
I'll change it to 50 and hit ENTER. As you can see, when we change the weight of this by using the slider, the number of dashes will also change. Next, let's begin moving some of our shapes around the canvas.
We'll select the move tool in our tools bar, and we can begin moving shapes by simply clicking on them and dragging them to the desired location. As you can see, some shapes stack in front of others and others stack behind. This is because of the stacking order in the layers panel.
If we stack all of our shapes in the middle, we'll see that they stack on top of each other. In addition, I want to bring our attention to the auto select option. Auto select means that if you click on an object, it will automatically assume which object you're trying to select.
With it unchecked in the options bar, it will only move the object that is selected in the layers panel. If I try and move the red ellipse with the blue square selected, it will only move the blue square still. If I have the gray rectangle selected and try and move the blue square, it will only move the gray rectangle.
Depending on how you're trying to move objects, it can be helpful or harmful to have on. Let's move each of our objects into the center of the screen. Next, let's talk about stacking.
As you can see, our gray rectangles on the bottom followed by the blue square, the red ellipse, and finally the orange circle. As we can see, this is exactly like how they're stacked in the layers panel. In addition, we can change the order that they're stacked by clicking and dragging one of the layers to its desired location indicated by the blue line.
I'll move the gray rectangle to the top. In addition, we can drag others down or in between layers. I'll move the orange circle between the red ellipse and blue square.
Now, let's say I wanted to see the orange circle. Currently, the gray rectangle and red ellipse are covering the orange circle up. I don't necessarily want to move the orange circle to the top, but I do want to see it.
In this instance, what we'll do is we'll hide the gray rectangle and red ellipse. We can do this by selecting the layer visibility icon or the eye to the left of the layer. We'll click on each of the eyes of the first two layers, and now we can see our orange circle.
Depending on which of these layers is visible, it will also show on our canvas. Let's make all of our layers visible and using the move tool, drag them back to the four corners. One other note about moving objects is that if we begin moving an object and hold shift, we can direct how an object is moved in a straight line.
Therefore, if I click an object, hold shift, and begin moving left, it will move perfectly horizontally left and right. In the same instance, if I click on the object and move it down holding shift, it will move up and down. Finally, if I begin moving the object at a down left angle, it will maintain that angle by holding shift.
Another way to use the move tool is to use your keyboard. You can move objects simply by using the arrows on your keyboard. By holding the object to the left, it will move left to the right, right, up, and down.
In addition, if I hold shift, it will accelerate how far it moves. By holding shift and moving left, it will move very quickly left or very quickly right, up, and down. Let's save our shapes file by going to file, save.