I'm going to see if I can show you 10 design hacks in less
than 10 minutes.
Let's go.
The first one is finding the best complementary colour.
The easiest way of doing that is to find your main colour.
Let's say we've got this lime green.
Now look at your hue section.
If it's below 180, then add 180.
If it is above 180, take it away.
So 76 plus 180 will give us 256.
Now if I go ahead and take this colour, take 256 and put it here,
it will give us the complementary colour for that base colour.
It gives you good contrast as well if you've chosen the bold colour.
Hack number 2 is to create the golden rectangle in the flash.
Create a perfect square by holding shift.
Doesn't matter how big it is.
Take that, duplicate it down, then duplicate it again to the
right and increase the one on the right to the size of both of them.
Select all of them, press unite, you have the golden rectangle.
Boom.
It's a great way of finding the golden rectangle quick and easy
for your proportions in your design work.
Hack number 3 is about making sure your type is
properly curved in a flash.
You see, I've got type here and it looks okay, but you can see
there's some discrepancies here.
There's kind of a weird thing happening here with the E and
the D and the S.
What do we do?
Well, the first thing you need to make sure you do is select your type.
Go over to the properties panel or go over to Window and then
down to character.
Make sure you've got your kerning selection here to optical.
And you'll see the slight change there that spaces out
your characters correctly in the optical fashion with all
the adjustments needed.
You may need to go in and fix it a bit more, but it's a good
hack just to have.
Hack number 4.
Can you be bothered to mask someone out or use the Pen tool
and spend like half an hour doing it?
No, I didn't think so.
We'll do it a different way.
Go to the Polygonal Lasso tool and we're just going to
create some cuts like so, some really rough ones.
If you can't be bothered to do it correctly, you might as well
add some style.
This will look just like a stylized version of cutting
someone out and it can actually add some creative flair to your work.
Boom.
It looks rough and ready, but it looks like it's intentional.
Hack number 5 is all about exporting your logos faster than light.
Technically not, but there you go.
Here's my logo here or my icon.
I have his app and it's a must have for any logo designer who
exports logos on the daily.
It's called the Logo Package Express 3. Set component,
it will generate all these different logos for us to have.
We can even set a logo mark from within this or any other
components that we want.
Press export, select print and web.
Export those.
It will export them exactly how you want them to be in all
these different file formats from PNG to SVG to Ai to JPEGs.
So now that when we look at our folder structure, if we go to Black,
we've got print and web folders with Ai, with PDF, CMYK.
This is for print.
And when we go to the web, it's on JPEG, PNG, Ai, SVG.
That has saved you at least an hour of your time.
The next tip is about creating amazing layouts quickly.
The grid is a fundamental tool to use for all designers to
make your typography look good, read easily, and to have order and hierarchy.
This was created with the grid and this was created with the grid.
Most of my design work is created within the grid,
if not nearly all of it.
The grid looks like this or this.
Now, to easily and quickly create that grid, all we do is
go to view, guides, new guide layout, and we can add our layouts here.
From seven we can go to eight, change our gutter, top margins, all here.
We can bring that in to 200 each.
Then we can set a preset, we can save this and boom.
We have got our grid in Photoshop.
Now, what if you wanted to do it in Illustrator?
Draw a box around your work.
Go to Object, down to Path.
And we're going to go to Offset Path.
And we're going to offset it just a little bit.
Turn on preview, offset it down.
I'll offset it to around here.
Press OK, then go to Object, Path.
Split into grid.
I'm going to choose five, four, turn on preview, make sure my
gutters are around 20, press OK.
And then when you've pressed OK, these will be shaped.
So press command 5 and it will turn them into guides to
where you can turn them on or off.
So that is how you quickly create guides in Illustrator and Photoshop.
The next hack are for those who struggle with the Pen tool.
Instead of the Pen tool, use the Curvature tool.
This is how you use it.
It's just next to the Pen tool on the right.
And simply all we're going to do is just click, click again
and follow the rubber banding effect until it fits the curve like so.
We're going to keep doing this until it fits and it will create the curve.
Now, whenever we get to a point where we don't want the curve,
hold alt or option and it will create one that you can just go
free form with, then repeat.
So create a guide.
There we go.
Boom.
And just like that, we are creating essentially perfect curves here.
See that?
It looks indistinguishable and it's so quick and easy.
Before I go to the next tip, I just want to thank Squarespace
for sponsoring this video. As designers, it's super important
that we all have an amazing portfolio to show off our skills.
That's how we land and work.
But not only does Squarespace give you the opportunity to
create a portfolio, you can actually sell your own design
assets on there.
You can make your own web shop easily.
You don't have to do any coding.
But if you're a designer, you can make a sick looking design of a website.
The next hack is if you click the link down below in the
description, you can design your website with Squarespace
before even paying for it.
If you're a graphic designer, it's very important to have
your own portfolio to showcase your skills to the world.
And you don't want to be spending loads of time on the
back end of websites.
So if you use Squarespace, it makes it so much easier because
they have a visual builder, which is what we use every day
as graphic designers.
So for 10% off and a free trial, click the link down below.
The next tip is for creating unlimited radiant gradients for free.
Go to Unsplash and get an image.
I've got this one here.
All we're going to do is turn this into a smart object.
So right click convert to smart object, go to Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur.
And we're going to make this so blurry.
So go to Filter, Liquify, get a big brush and start warping this
around ever so slightly.
Make sure it's a big brush so it looks like it's melting everywhere.
Press OK.
And then all we're going to do is go to Filter, go to Noise,
add noise, and we're going to just go ahead and add some
noise until it looks cool.
What about 15? Monochromatic and uniform.
Press OK.
We can go ahead and add a hue saturation adjustment layer on
top of this to change the hue and the saturation to make it
pop out more.
And we can choose whatever colour we want.
And just like that, we've got a radiant gradient for free.
The next tip is getting free assets for your work using AI.
Whatever your opinion is about AI, what we can do, we can go
to Discord, go to Midjourney Bot.
And I've typed in a minimalistic 8K photorealistic
3D glowing sphere on a black background because that's what I wanted.
I go ahead, I download that.
Now I'm going to bring it into my artwork here.
And it looks a bit strange right now.
But what I'm going to do is with this, I'm going to go to
the blending options up here.
I'm going to go down to Color Dodge.
I'm going to increase the size of this.
Then I'm going to go to Levels, create a levels adjustment,
make sure it's clicked, adjust some of those levels to get
that contrast going.
And right there, we've got our own asset straight from AI.
Another cool way to use AI like Midjourney is to ask it to
create compositional layouts for different things.
I asked AI here to go ahead and create some posters or a
minimalistic typographic poster for me.
Obviously it's not in English, but it gives you an idea of
what you can do.
I created this poster and yes, it spelled wrong, but we've got
some cool blur effects here with some liquidated effects.
This is how you do it.
First of all, get your typography in there and we're
going to go ahead and convert that to a smart object.
Secondly, I'm going to Filter, Liquify and we're just going to
mess around with the words here a little bit.
I'm going to take some parts of this way out, make it a bit jumbly.
That looks pretty cool.
But to create some more dimension and 3D nest to it,
we need to create a blur.
So we're going to use Field Blur.
Select your work, go to Filter, go to Blur Gallery, Field Blur.
The way that this works is that we get these different points
and we can select how much blur we want.
So at this point here, I want a lot.
But then if I go here and say I don't want any blur here,
it will take the blur away.
So I'm going to increase the blur to this point. Over here
I'm going to increase the blur again of all these outer edges.
I don't want any blur here.
Once you're happy, press OK and you'll have this amazing and
editable blur filter that you have so much control over that
you can create some amazing 3D realistic artwork.
The next tip is for anyone who is struggling to find good
design assets to use in their projects.
Envato Elements is a website where you can get over 50
million design assets from presentation templates to
typography posters.
Go over there.
If you use the link below, you'll actually get it for cheaper.
You'll get access to 50 million design assets with a cool
license which you should check out.
Which means that you can use it for client work for less than
$20 a month with the annual subscription.
That's ridiculous.
Go and check them out.
If you've enjoyed this tips video, go click this one here.
You will not be disappointed.
Remember, subscribe for the next one.
See you soon.
Goodbye.