so in today's video I'm gonna show you how to make this neat and it's
professional contract in Adobe Illustrator for your graphic design
career but quickly before the contract tutorial I want to show you PDF 11 Pro
but I sky soft just for two quick minutes so I'm gonna open up the
contracts that we're gonna design later in today's video and show you some quick
functions of this PDF editing software now the really cool thing about PDF 11
probe that you can edit the text on your PDF documents and it's really simple to
do by just using the text tool also however you can add new text into a PDF
document but a really cool feature that I love is adding an image onto your PDF
documents and you can add a signature PNG file as an example and this is a
quick and an easy way to digitally sign your contracts with PDF element Pro
PDF lemon pro is really useful and a really professional tool for editing and
making alterations to your PDF documents we can multi-select text boxes and then
change the font the size the color and so forth
so finally you can actually use a built-in digital signature within PDF
element Pro now if you come up to the mark up option
here on the left you can then choose the email signature icon at the very bottom
you then can control the color of the signature as well as the thickness of
the lines being used you simply just Drew out your signature and then place
it on to the document itself and this is a really neat and a really simple way to
sign a document and digitally speaking
so let's go ahead and design the contract now we're gonna hand out to our
clients in our graphic design career now we're going to be working in a debut
illustrator today and of course we need a new document and I'm gonna make a name
for a print document pull a contract design now a4 is a pretty standard
measurement for this kind of document and we're going to make sure the
document is portrait and we're gonna use two artboards and of course we need a
bleed as well which will ensure a perfect print job on the contract design
three millimeters is okay but I'm personally gonna go for 5 for this a4
size document and of course we need CMYK color and also a 300 PPI resolution so
we have the double-sided document one side is going to be the back of the
contract and the other side is gonna have the actually information content
and one thing we do need to do is we need to lay down a background which is
gonna lay over to the bleeds on a document so press M for the rectangle
tool and make sure you have white selected in the color palettes so
carefully click and drag the e rectangle tool over the entire our board right up
to the bleeds and then when you're ready press V for the selection tool hold down
the alt or the option key and then click and drag to duplicate it over and just a
quick tip but you can hold down shift whilst you're doing this to make sure it
stays perfectly in line with the original one
now when you have your two backgrounds select both of them and then press
command or control two to lock them down a place if you haven't got the rulers
open press command or control R and then drag a guide onto your artboard and
these guides are gonna help you keep the text content away from the print edge
and it needs an orderly manner and you can adjust the measurements of the
rulers by rights or control clicking them and I'm using millimeters here and
I'm actually going to use 20 millimeters or two centimeters for my margins so
we're nearly ready to actually make the neat and the really awesome contract
design but first we need to move the artboard so they're not too close
together and so the graphics are not going to interfere with each other you
could use the artboard tool here but also you can come into the artboard
preference settings and adjust the literal position of the artboard with
complete precise accuracy you of course are going to need to unlock your
backgrounds before you do this and you can do that by going up to object and
unlock everything and I just realized for the back of the contract we don't
need the guides because there's going to be no real text content here this is
where the graphics are going to be and it's gonna be the back side of the
contract now I'm going to make a quick color scheme and you can use swatches
for this but I prefer to make some squares and use a base sample color and
then utilize a debilitating color guide as you can see here there really are a
myriad of options open to you in this color guide so I do suggest that you do
make use of it
so now we're ready to make the actual graphics for the design of the contract
and so press M for the rectangle tool and make a rectangle or a shape like you
can see here we can use the eyedropper tool to sample the colors which is I on
your keyboard and then rotate the shape like so while holding down shift so you
can fix it to a 45 degree angle every component of my design on this backspace
here is going to be set a 45 degrees
when you have your first shape set down in place then use the out of the option
key to click and duplicate once more you can then adjust the size and also the
layout of this shape
but also of course you can use the colors off to the side here and also a
really really neat and handy function that we're gonna make use of is the
transparency window we can actually change the blend modes here so say for
example overlay building up your design in this way using different shapes
different colors and also different blend modes it's really going to create
an interesting and a very neat and tidy design just get creative and just use
these methods to build up for the back side of the contract so as you guys can
see here I've got a quite an interesting design that I'm pretty happy with to be
honest and what I can do is they can actually select everything and then use
the alter the option key to duplicate it over to the front side of the contract
when it's in position take the rectangle tool once more and then create a small
shape at the very top that's going to be the header of your contract design you
then select everything and then rights or control-click and then create a
clipping mask you can also do this by coming up to object and create the mask
as you can see there's a really neat header on the contract and I'm really
happy with but you can take the group selection tool which is found in the top
left of the toolbar and then you can actually move around the individual
shapes and whilst they're in a clipping mask
and you can repeat the same process on the backside by covering a rectangle
over the entire artboard this is just keeping things really neat
and in you can see how the final outcome is gonna look so finally you're ready to
add some text and I'm not going to go over the text content and what it means
in today's video because I did make a contract video a few months ago my
channel and I went through over the key components that you need to add into
your contract but has an offering for you guys today this very contract is
linked and down below for you to download
remember you want to keep the text content up to the margins and using a
text box means that you can adjust the size and the text will be automatically
spread up to the edge of the text box you can also change the paragraph
settings if that's to your liking but I'm personally not going to go with that
today so now it's just a case of going up to
file save as and then save your document as a PDF make sure to use the most
recent version of Acrobat and then just go ahead and print it out so yesterday's
video was sponsored by PDF element pro but I sky soft and you can check out the
website link down below where they do actually have giveaways and freebies on
their website that you can utilize and of course also you have the download
option as a free trial as well let me know we threw up today's video and of
course subscribe to my channel if you haven't already if you want to keep
boosting your skills as a graphic designer
until next time guys design your future today peace