Here are 10 genius Graphic Design Hacks in under 10 minutes.
You probably think that this is real.
This looks pretty real to me.
However, being as designers we're sceptical of things that look real,
because this has obviously been made in 3D software.
Well, you're wrong.
This is actually, if you can believe it, made it in Adobe Illustrator.
And it only takes a minute to make this out of any shape.
This was also created in Adobe Illustrator.
This is my logo here.
Looks pretty real.
All you need to do is get a shape.
It can be lettering that you've created.
It can be your logo.
Just select it, go up to Window, go down to 3D and Materials, and
you'll get this box that pops up.
It's quite long.
Highlight this and go to Object.
And we're going to press Extrude.
Now, it looks a bit strange.
It kind of just looks weird.
But don't worry about that.
From Extrude we're going to go to Bevel, and we're going to make it a bit more natural.
So we're going to create a rounded bevel on this.
We're also going to go ahead and increase the depth so
you can actually increase how large you want this to be.
Then I'm going to increase the size to make sure it works well.
The bigger it is, the slower it will take your computer to
render this out.
Okay, so from here we need to change the materials, which is
just to the right.
Keep on the base material.
But down here, take roughness all the way down so we get that
nice light and that shine on the material.
In Lighting, we're going to go ahead and click Shadows on and
then Below Object.
So the shadow is below.
And from here we're going to change the rotation so the
shadows are facing the right way and the light is there.
Then we've got this little nifty button up here.
This is called Render with Ray Tracing.
Click that and it'll start doing its magic.
You'll see that it's rendered it out and it looks really good.
But we can go a step further and click on this dialog box here.
Press High Render and it will increase the render quality for you.
And that is how you get this.
It looks ridiculously real, and it's all inside of Adobe Illustrator.
The second tip is expand with wireframes.
This is a really quick and nifty trick to create cool patterns
Create any old shape.
Let's create this one and go to revolve in the materials options.
And then we select this and expand as wireframes.
And it will expand it as wireframes.
We can even do it with this one, which looks super real.
If we expand as wireframes, you'll see how it's actually
made and it can give these really cool nifty effects.
Number three is logo testing.
A lot of the time when we're creating logos, it's difficult
to test whether it works or not.
Now, when you've got an icon such as this one and you want
to test if it works, there's a few things you can do.
Select the icon, go to Effect, and we're going to go to Blur
and we're going to just put a massive Gaussian Blur.
Not too big, but just enough.
Scale this down until it becomes barely visible.
Now, if you're able to scale in and out like this, so zooming in
and out and still get the core concept of the design,
then you've done a pretty good job in making this scalable and usable.
However, if you've got a logo type, that's a word mark or logo
that is a word, you need to do a few different things to
test whether it works and
if there's any errors in it. The first thing I do is I go
ahead and reflect it. Press O, hold or option Alt, and just click
and essentially reflect it vertically to create a copy of this.
This way now your brain looks at this as a shape and not as letters.
We're going to repeat the same thing.
We're going to actually change the colour to a sort of gray.
We're going to add a Gaussian Blur to this and we're going to
scale it down and we're going to zoom out.
Now this is where you can start to see some problems with your
design really easily.
This is just tricking your brain into seeing problems
better so you can fix them.
I don't see any problems with this one because I've already
done it years ago.
But that is how you test out logos and logo types.
Number four is the quality of life hack.
Let's say we've got this crazy artboard here.
This is just for a video that I've done recently for a logo design.
And I need to export some of the stuff either for a client
or for a video.
Let's say that you've gone ahead and made a new artboard
with the logo just sitting nicely on it in the center.
Well, instead of going ahead and copying this into Photoshop
and saving it, you can just press Command Options or CTRL
and Alt E and that will bring you to the export for screens
You can select which artboards you would like
to export quickly and easily.
Exactly where give them a suffix name and a prefix name.
Change the file format, the scalability, all in one document box.
This will save you time, a lot of time in exporting.
And you can also do this for assets as well.
The next one is instant colour palette.
On your iPhone, there is an app called Adobe Capture.
If you've seen something in the real world that you would love
to take a picture of and take colours or you need some
inspiration for colours, go ahead, grab your phone,
download the Adobe Capture app, and essentially just go ahead
and take a picture.
As you're taking a picture, you'll see that these dots fly
around the screen and they're capturing the colour of things around you.
When you capture it, it will create swatches where you can
change the harmonies and some of the values of those colours.
When you save it, you can save it to a library on Adobe so it
appears on Adobe Illustrator.
Mine hasn't saved because I didn't save it, but you can go
to Libraries, which is a window down to Libraries, and it will appear here.
Tip number five is one for those who are messy, like myself.
You've got Illustrator open.
You've been doing your work in it.
You've got artboards everywhere.
It looks like your bedroom when you were twelve years old.
It's messy.
Well, this is magical function.
Now, if you go to Object, down to Artboards, Rearrange Artboards
You can rearrange them exactly how you like.
Press okay and boom.
They look really nice and tidy.
And in order of those that you've created, which is pretty nice.
The next ones are for those who love the Eyedropper Tool.
The Eyedropper Tool allows you to grab a colour into your colour swatch here.
Or if you are on this one, you can grab it and bring it in.
But you also know that if you grab the colour, you can
actually force the colour onto another shape by holding Alt,
and it will switch the Eyedropper Tool.
So when you click on another shape, it will change it.
Isn't that pretty cool?
A really cool new feature inside of Adobe Illustrator is
the history feature that we've got.
Go to Window and then down to History and this box will show
up of all your history.
No longer do we have to press Command Z, loads of times to get
back to where we need to be.
We can actually just click and see where we went wrong or what
we want to change or move back to a certain point.
And also if we find that we don't like something that we've done.
Let's say I don't like this part over here where I created this ellipse.
Let's say I like it here.
We can create a new document from there and it will just
copy it over really quick and easy so we don't mess anything up.
Before I go any further, I just want to shout out Assets4D.
It is a new online store that I've created for amazing design
resources for a great price.
We have a few products up there, but I wanted to let you know
about the brand guidelines.
The branding guidelines template allows you to quickly
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without having to design it every time.
It is a template that is fully customizable, allowing you to
input your client's logo and information and saving you a
load of time before presenting the brand or creating the
guidelines at the end of the process.
This will save you hours and a lot of pressure that you
shouldn't have toward the end of a client project.
Click the link down below in the description to get a
discount on the branding guidelines template.
For those of you that bring a lot of work into Photoshop from
Adobe Illustrator, they've added this great feature that
you did not know about.
Go ahead and select your work.
It doesn't matter there's loads of layers, live text or not.
Select your work and command C to copy it.
Go into Photoshop and press Command V and you'll get this
dialogue box that you see normally.
But they've added a new one called Layers.
Now, when we select Layers and press OK, it will create a group.
What it's done is actually created these layers for us to
quickly change and edit.
And in fact, we can actually change the type here still.
So this means now that I can go into this shape here, we can
add a colour overlay if we wanted to.
We can convert things to smart objects and add blurs to the
background of these little shapes that we've brought in
without having to manually sort out all these layers.
That's a pretty good time saving tip for you.
Now, the next tip is a bit boring, but it will save time.
Again, go ahead and create a text layer, like so.
Let's increase this text size a little bit here.
Create some lists
is what we want to do.
Create some random lists.
Now, what we can actually do is, if we highlight all this, go to
the paragraph function, we can create a number list or a bulleted list now.
This is a really good time saving part of Adobe Illustrator
that they did not have before.
So there you go.
That was 10 graphic design tips that will change your life.
Or 10 genius design tips.
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