Hi, I'm Will Paterson and in this video I'm going to show
you graphic design hacks in under ten minutes.
These hacks are super easy.
Anyone can do them if you have the right software.
Let's get into the first one.
First one is all about creating beautiful gradients.
These ones here, this is a 5k gradient and I'm making a
bunch of these to put on the website.
And you can download them by clicking the link in the description.
I'm going to show you how to make this in under a minute.
What we're going to do is bring up a new layer.
Go to your brush tool.
Just select a brush and just sort of start painting with
black just on that layer, like so.
Then I'm going to go ahead and change the colour to 50% gray
and just fill in on the corners here.
Just some down there, just randomly.
It doesn't have to look good right now because we're going
to make it look amazing.
Perfect.
What we're going to do is right click and we're going to press
Convert to Smart Object.
This means that it remains editable with it still highlighted.
We're going to go to Filter and we're going to go down to Liquefy.
This is going to bring the Liquefy panel up and
I'm going to zoom out so you can see now with this up, I'm going
to just move everything around in a certain direction and just
play around with it.
We're just trying to give it that melting feeling.
And the colours should just mix together really nicely.
I don't really care about the transparent backgrounds as such,
but you can be as detailed or as simple as you like.
But we're just moving things around like so. Press Okay and
it will apply here.
The next thing we want to do is add a gradient map.
We're going to go to image adjustments and then gradient map
and we're going to change this gradient map as well.
What we'll do is we'll click this part here and we'll get
this gradient editor.
Now, I've created a gradient already just for ease of use
and it looks like this, but you can do whatever you really want.
To further edit this, I'm going to go ahead to the original image.
I'm going to go to Filter and add some noise.
The noise is really important.
It makes it look a bit more blurry.
So when we zoom in, you get that cool noise. That looks good already.
But if you want to change the colour, we just go to the top layer.
Then add a hue and saturation adjustment layer and just mess
around with that hue and saturation till we get
something like this.
That is the first way to create psychedelic gradients that look just amazing.
Now the second way is a lot easier.
We're going to go to Pixels or Unsplash, just any royalty free website.
And we're just going to pick an image maybe with some colours,
but you can do any image at all.
We're going to download this one.
I kind of like this one.
I'm going to take that image and we're going to just shove
this into Photoshop here.
And we're just going to scale it up.
It really doesn't matter.
I just want it to fill the whole screen.
It's already a smart object.
So all we need to do is go up to filter and blur and we can
change the gaussian blur here to wherever we need it to be.
Press okay.
And then go to filter.
Add some noise
and there we go.
Now we've created just from one image this cool gradient.
It's a bit more of a softer gradient.
It's not as nice, I think, as the previous one, but
it's definitely got some nice tones to it.
The next one is all about gridding.
Now, creating grids can be difficult and hard, but
as designers, we need them.
I've got this 1920 x 1080 document here and I want it to
be graded in a certain way.
I'm going to go ahead and just draw a rectangle with whatever colour.
Make sure it just fits all the way around.
I'm going to change it from a filter stroke.
They can't see anything because it's on the outside.
So what we're going to go do is going to go to Object, Path and
split into grids.
And we use this quite a lot.
I've used this a lot for my old method of creating Instagram carousels.
But what we want to do is just start adding some grids.
So maybe we can do 20, 17 and we have a grid system there.
Or we can go like 30, boom. Press command five.
And we've got a grid laid out just like this for our composition.
So now we can start laying things out.
So if we wanted to, we can make this look...create like a
little landing page if we wanted to, or wire frame.
The title of the slide.
This could be the body.
This is how I do layout, by the way, guys.
It's a really easy way of doing it.
Just like that.
We've got a grid that we can use for any layout.
This next one is slightly similar to the first video that
I showed you, but we're going to add a 3D element.
Let's write Living in this funky type, which is called Retrocool.
In the process, we need them to be on like separate text layers there.
Create a circle and go to the Knife tool under the Scissors tool.
We're going to just create a couple of cuts here.
Then we're just going to move these slightly away from each other.
You might want to get rid of smart guides here for a second to do this.
Then we're going to highlight this, right click and
we're going to bring it to the front.
Then what we're going to do is we're going to highlight Living
and this top shape here.
We're going to go to Object, Envelope Distort and Make With Top Object.
We're going to repeat this all the way and you can see it sort
of does this thing.
Now that we've done this, we need to expand it because
it's not really a shape.
So go to Object.
Expand.
Now that looks all cool and everything very hippy, very retro.
But let's say we wanted to make it 3D easily without knowing any 3D tools.
We're going to highlight this, group it together so it all fits together.
We're going to press Command C or CTRL C to copy it, and
we're going to press Command B to paste it in place but at the back of it.
Then we're going to scale this down by holding Shift and Option or Alt.
I'm going to change this colour to this darker one here.
Now all we need to do is go to Object, Blend, Blend Options and
we're going to go to Specified Steps and 50, then highlight
both of these.
Go to Object.
Blend, Make. What you'll see is we have this sort of gradient
in colour and in size, which makes it look 3D.
All we need to do now is press Command F to paste the original
back and front, but you'll notice that it's the same colour.
So to add some lightness to it, I'll just go to the swatch over
here and it will create lightness there.
You can see it's not perfect on mine, but you can change this
by increasing or decreasing the Specified Steps in the Blend mode options.
All you need to do now is highlight everything and press
Command G and you've got yourself a really nice piece of
work that looks 3D.
The next tip is one that I don't see many people showing
or even doing, and that is creating colour wheels or
creating a colour scheme very easily.
This is great for your client project.
For instance, we have got these colours here that we just use
for this back there.
What if I wanted to create a few different kind of colour
tones in between this visually?
What I'm going to do is I'm going to select this
colour and this colour.
And just like we did with the last one, we're going to
highlight both of these.
Go to Object, Blend, Make and you'll see that we have the
differences in colours all the way there.
All you need to do now is Object, Expand, and you can
literally pick out which colour you want because in each of
these is one square, and you can pick out which colors that
you like so you get the exact colour that you want in between
two colours, so
you get the different shades.
This doesn't just work for two of them.
This actually works across the board.
If I take all of these and do the blend, you'll see that it
blends them all together.
This is a really cool way of adjusting your colours very accurately.
The next one is the sponsor of this video, which is Envato Elements.
I know what you're thinking, but don't click away.
This is actually really good.
Instead of spending all your time creating assets, what if
you could just get the assets simply without having to worry
about the licensing and having to worry about the money it'll
cost to get those assets?
Well luckily, Envato Elements has over 50 million.
It's ridiculous.
50 million of these assets that you can use for your client work.
For your portfolio work, to make you look even better
and to save you even more time.
And time is what is costing most creatives. All the way from mock up.
So any mockup that you can think of, fonts, graphic assets,
icons, photography, audio, video files, logo reveals,
animation templates for your logos.
Imagine being able to save so much time and save so much
money as well, because with the link in the description.
You get 50% off the annual subscription.
And not only that, seven days completely free of Envato's free trial.
That means that you're getting over 50 million assets at any
time for less than $20 a month.
So that is one hack.
Thank you for sponsoring Envato Elements.
This next one is a must for any designer that works in UI.
Now you'll see on like YouTube here, you'll see a ton of videos
that I'm currently watching.
But there is a Chrome extension that will save your life.
Not literally, but it will save you a lot of time, which could
save your life.
It's called SVG Export.
Let's say I wanted to find this microphone asset and download it
as an SVG, which means vector, I don't have to go make it
or find it online.
Well, what you can do is press this button here and when
you've done that, it will open this new page and boom.
That is the actual microphone that was just right here.
And you can download this literally as a jpg, as an SVG, as whatever.
You can even copy it for figma.
Thank me later.
The next hack, which is more of a resource hack again, is free mock ups.
Everyone loves free things.
If you can't get enough places to find mockups like myself,
then this website is going to be for you.
It's called Mockups-design.com and it is full of free mockups
for you to use commercially, royalty free as well.
In fact, the dude that makes this does it for passion really.
I don't know how it works, but he'll explain here if you click
the link in the description below how he does this and why
he creates these mock ups.
But these mockups are actually unreal.
Look at how nice this mockup actually looks.
You can do this for free.
You can license this too, so obviously you are licensed to use it.
It's great.
But make sure you read the licensing before you do any
commercial work with it.
I hope you enjoyed learning about these new hacks.
If you did, make sure to share this video with your friends or
with your community groups and subscribe down below.
It's completely free.
We upload twice a week, every week, with the specific goal of
making sure that you become a better designer every time
you're watch these videos.
Thanks for watching, and I'll catch you guys in the next video.
See you soon.
Goodbye.