not only are you going to learn why illustrator swatches are so useful and
so powerful but you're going to learn about them in a real-life workflow
scenario because we're gonna design a retro poster in today's video so you're
going to need a color scheme that contains three or four different colors
and one resource to use his color hunts I do have a browse over the pallets on
show and then simply just click the image button to download your selected
color scheme we are going to utilize this image later in the tutorial to make
our swatches within Adobe Illustrator so now we finally arrived in Adobe
Illustrator and I've gone ahead and made an a3 print document and then by
pressing I on my keyboard I can utilize the eyedropper tool to sample this beige
color for my backgrounds and the rectangle tool can be used to make the
background I need to bring it up to the bleed edge and the shortcut for the
rectangle tool is M on your keyboard so then go ahead and press command or
control 2 to lock down the rectangle background in place and you can always
use white or any other color for your background it just depends on your
design and also your personal preference so what is the fuss about
illustrator swatches they are going to save us a whole lot of time in today's
poster design tutorial and so firstly go ahead and open up the swatches window
located in the top right fly down menu we can create an entire swatch group to
which I'm going to apply a relevant name for today's retro poster design project
how to add your chosen color palette to this swatch group use the eyedropper
tool to sample a color and then go ahead and make a new swatch you can then just
drag and drop your swatches into the newly created group and do this for your
entire color palettes you are seeing that I see just how handy
using swatches will be for this poster design project okay so now press L for
the ellipse tool and if you do not see these purple or magenta kind of lines on
your screen you might not have the smart guides activated now I want to make this
circle in a dead center of like Alice and so the smart guides are gonna be
useful here you can toggle them on or off by pressing command or control U but
yeah when you're ready just hold down both the alt/option key and shift at the
same time and then click and drag using the ellipse tool to generate a circle
exactly as I'm doing here the appearance panel is going to be absolutely crucial
in today's video and that is in combination with the swatches it is
really gonna perform wonders for us in our illustrator workflow so you can go
ahead and open up the appearance panel as well as the stroke panel too
now we need the circle to start off as a fill so if you only have a stroke around
it just press shift and X to flick over to a fill in the appearance panel add a
new stroke and this is where having the swatches is really really going to help
us out here today without the swatches we would have to copy the hex color
codes or perform some kind of other long work around to apply the exact colors to
each individual stroke but we can simply just do that within the appearance panel
accessing the swatch colors now bump up with the stroke weights and apply the
colors that you want to use however the crucial move that you do need to make is
the stroke needs to be orientated on the outside and you can adjust this by
clicking this stroke panel icon here
so now you can go ahead and add a second stroke and increase the stroke weights
even more than the first one it is important to remember to have the
largest stroke down below of the thinner one now add a third and a final stroke
and repeat the same process as before making sure all of the strokes have the
setting of being on the outside now you can see how and why the swatches that we
made earlier are saving us so much time today but let's go ahead and finish this
a retro poster design now at the moment this graphic is a single circle with
various different strokes added because we've been using the appearance panel
but you want to expand the design so we have differing vector shapes now hold
down the alt or the option key and then click and drag downwards to duplicate
the shape we want to make sure the last stroke layers overlap perfectly on the
two designs so things are looking very retro indeed and might I say also pretty
neat but now let's press M for the rectangle tool and generate a rectangle
that matches the exact thickness of the outer circle now it's important to use
the same color and you're going to do this for all three stroke layers for the
top circle
and when you've done that it's time to duplicate the three rectangles with the
alter the option key so with the new selection of shapes at the bottom hold
down shift and rotate them around by 180 degrees exactly holding our shift
ensures that they do fix into position exactly 180 degrees align it perfectly
below to mirror the top graphic but add a sense of uniqueness to the poster
design select the circles at the bottom and then bring them to the front of all
layers and so here's the final results that I used and mocked up using a free
mock-up you can find a link down below but today's tutorial was really about
the use of swatches and how they save you time in your graphic design workflow
but let me know if you use swatches on a regular basis and if you don't are you
going to be using them after today's video it should have subscribed to my
channel for weekly graphic design content if you wish to keep learning
essential skills about the wonderful world of graphic design but until next
time guys design your future today peace