Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you
how to design an Instagram carousel template in Adobe Illustrator. An Instagram carousel is
actually like up to 10 images, it's quite a few images, that you can scroll through on Instagram,
and they all look like they're just one big image. So it's pretty cool. I also plan to make
a full course on Skillshare on a few different ways to design an Instagram carousel template.
So check that out, be on the lookout for it. Once it's published, I'll leave a comment below that
will give you the link. Alright, let's get started. First, let's take a look at a few
examples. So you can see how some different brands use these. So I'm going to come out here to Google
Chrome and I've got one loaded right here. Now some of these are seamless, but then other ones,
you can tell where each image starts and stops. This one's for Kylie Cosmetics. And if we scroll
to the right, you can see the theme here. These images each have the same background,
so you can see a seam right there. But they all have the same look and feel.
So that's one way of doing it. Here's one from Later Media, and they've decided to
have kind of a gradient background. And they added this arrow so that you know to scroll,
I think that can be a pretty nice thing to do. But you can definitely see the seams between these.
Here's another one from Later Media. And this one is seamless. So as you scroll, you can't
see the edges between them...and I really like this way of doing it. They also have an arrow.
Now this one has animations - we aren't going to make any like this today, but I wanted to share
it with you so you can see the potential. This is also a seamless one. With this one, the designer
kind of made a cover page for it. And then as you scroll, each image has the same look and feel.
This carousel by Fenty Beauty is really nice, because although they change the color scheme
from slide to slide, each image has the same visuals and look and feel. Okay, so let's make
our own Instagram carousel. And we're going to do a seamless one also. So I'm going to come over
here to Illustrator, I'll go to Create New, we'll come up here to Web, because this is Instagram, so
it'll be on the web. And we're going to make this 1080 by 1080, which is a standard Instagram size.
I'm going to make 5 artboards. And by the way, you can have up to 10 images per
carousel. So if you wanted to put 10 here, you could do that. Then we'll scroll down
all the way to the bottom and choose More Settings. Let's change our spacing to 0,
and we want it to be arranged by the row. So I'm just going to choose this third button here,
and then we can go ahead and Create Document. So the way this is laid out now, if we put one image
across this whole thing, it's going to appear seamless when we export it, and that's what
we want. So for this design, I think it would be nice to put a panoramic photo behind everything,
and then add text and photos on top of that. So I went out to Pexels.com, and I found a panorama
image. Here's the one that I decided to use. I wanted something kind of simple without a whole
lot going on in the background. So I'm just going to click this and drag it right into my document.
I'll get on my Selection tool and just click and drag it and position it in the upper right corner
of the far left artboard. I'm going to zoom out with CMD minus or CTRL minus. I'm going to hold
SHIFT and get right on this corner and just resize it. So it fills all five artboards. And I'll just
position it where I want on the five artboards. Now I don't really want to select this again,
so I'm going to lock it, I'll hit F7 to bring up my Layers panel, you can also go to Window layers.
And all these other panels you see here are going to be available in Window too. Now I do want to
mention, if you plan on using a lot of photos in Illustrator, that is going to make you end up with
a pretty big file in Illustrator. And one way to reduce the size of your file is to make all your
images the exact size that they need to be. So I'm going to go ahead and do that with this background
image, just so you can see what I mean. I'll go up to our Transform in the Control panel. If you
don't see your Control panel that's also under Window and it's right here - Control. So I'll
click Transform. We want our width of our photo to be 5488. But our height can be just a little over
1080. Let's...let's see. Yes, our height will be 1157. So I'm going to come out here to Photoshop
and I'll Create New here. I'm going to make my width 5488. And the height will be 1157.
We'll want our resolution to be 72 because that's good for web. And we'll want our Color Mode to be
RGB, which is also good for web. Then we'll Create. Now we can pull our photo in here.
It'll automatically resize proportionally to fit the canvas. So we can hold OPTION and grab
a corner and just resize it so that it fills the artboard. And we can position this however
we want. Now hit Enter or Return to lock in the changes. Now we'll go to File > Export > Export
As. I'm going to choose PNG, we'll uncheck the transparency. And then everything else should be
set up correctly. We'll say Export. And I'll just save this in the same folder as v2. Then we'll
come back to Illustrator, I'll get rid of this huge image by selecting it and then just deleting.
I'll place our new image in, here it is, and we'll place again, just click once and it should come in
at exactly the size we saved in Photoshop. And I'll get rid of that other rectangle.
Now by doing this, we're really reducing the size of our file.
So I wanted to show you that because if you're doing a lot of these Instagram carousels,
your file sizes are going to be really huge. So if you do this for every photo that you add in,
it'll reduce your file size in Illustrator. I'm going to hit Z on my keyboard to get to my Zoom
tool. And then I'm just going to draw a box around my first artboard. And I'm going to go ahead and
Save As, so we'll come over here to File > Save As, and I'm just going to save this. It's always
a good idea to save your work very often. Okay, now I'm going to hit T once to get my Text tool.
And I'm just going to click once here, I'm going to turn on Caps Lock and just type 'discover,'
then I'll get on my Selection tool, get on a corner and hold SHIFT and make this quite a
bit bigger. I like the font Boson Book. So I'm going to change my font to that,
and I'll make it white. So I'll come up here to Color and just choose the white one. Now,
I think it'd be pretty cool to have a line that flows across all of our five panels, I'm going
to hit P on my keyboard, and I'll just start right about here. And I click and drag to get a little
bit of a curve. And then I'll come back up to here. And I want it to be a white dotted line,
I'm going to get on my Zoom tool. I'll hit Z on my keyboard, and zoom in here, then I'll get back
on my Selection tool. I've got a white fill, so I'm going to switch these, so I just have no fill
and a white stroke. I'll get my stroke panel up by hitting Window > Stroke. And then I'm going to
increase the weight by quite a bit. I want this to be a dashed line, and this looks pretty good with
a 12 point dash, and then leaving all the rest of these blank. Yeah, I think that'll look nice.
Now I'll hit L on my keyboard, and I'm going to just draw a couple circles here. I'll click out
here, so I don't accidentally select something, and I'll hold SHIFT and get a small circle.
Then I'm going to copy with CMD C or CTRL C, Paste Behind with CMD B or CTRL B, and then grab
a corner and hold SHIFT and OPTION or ALT to get a slightly larger circle. You'll notice that the
thickness here is bigger than here. So I'm going to hit I on my keyboard to get my eyedropper tool.
And then I'll just click that inner circle, and it'll give it the same attributes.
Now to stop that from happening again, I'm going to hit S on my keyboard to get to my Scale tool.
And then I'll hit Enter or Return. And I'm just going to uncheck Scale Strokes and Effects because
that's what's causing that to happen. Then we'll say OK. I'm going to get on my Selection tool,
select both of these, and then group them with CMD G or CTRL G. Then I'll move them right over here
and just line them up with that other line. And I think this looks pretty nice.
I want to use this circle effect in a lot of different places throughout my design.
I'll start dragging it and then hold OPTION. And then I'll get on a corner, click and drag,
hold SHIFT and OPTION or SHIFT and ALT to make it a little bit bigger.
And we'll put the opacity about 40 for this one. You can also add another set of dots here. And
maybe we'll copy this one too and put it up here. Oooh, and I also want one at the end.
Okay, for the one that crosses this other line, I want to actually delete parts of this line so
it doesn't go through the middle of it. So to do that, I'm going to select the line, I'm going to
hit P which will bring me to the Pen tool, and then I'll hit the plus key (+), which will give
us the Add Anchor Point tool. I'm going to click right outside here and right over here, so I've
got two anchor points. Now I can select a piece in the middle. I'll click off first, and I'll
just select that piece and delete it. So when we zoom in, you can see that it kind of stops here.
We can also move this line back a little bit. Okay, so we have our circle element
that's going through all of our carousel panels. Now I want to add a text box, but one that has
a white background. So to do that, I'm going to hit M on my keyboard to get to my Rectangle tool.
I'll just click and drag right about here. Now you'll see we have that same stroke. So
I'm going to switch this to a fill by hitting SHIFT X on my keyboard, you can also click this
little arrow here. We'll move this over with our Selection tool. And then I'm going to get on my
Text tool, and I'll just click and drag right about here, I want this line to be my headline.
And of course, you'll have real text that you want to put in, but this is just Lorem Ipsum.
So you can just see what it looks like. I'm going to come to my Character panel.
And we'll choose Boson Bold for this, I'm going to increase the text with SHIFT CMD
period (.), or SHIFT CTRL period on a PC. And then I want this text to be kind of a darker orange,
maybe something like this down here. So I'm going to click on my Eyedropper tool,
and I'll just select this orange, and you'll notice it changed the orange over here.
Now I'm going to select the rest of the tags. And we'll change this to Boson Regular. I'm going to
move this back over on to my white block, I'll grab the corner of my textbox and just resize it
so it fits within the box. Now you'll notice we have this little red square with a plus,
that means there's text below this, but it doesn't really matter because this is all fake
text. And it looks like I need to make my white box just a little bit bigger. We're also going
to select this text, go to Paragraph and uncheck Hyphenate, because even though this is fake text,
it's still really bothers me to have a bunch of hyphenation in there.
We'll move this up just so it starts looking nice.
Now you'll notice that that ridge of the trees is here and it's almost matching this. I also don't
like that kind of thing. So I want to overlap it a little bit more. Okay, this is looking really
nice. But I'd like to add a photograph. And I found a nice photo on Pexels.com.
So I'm going to place that now. So we'll go to File > Place, and we'll insert it into our design.
I'm going to zoom in a little bit. And I think I want this one to be underneath the white. So I'm
going to cut it with CMD X or CTRL X. Then I'll select the white, and then paste behind with CMD
B or CTRL B. You can also go to Object > Arrange and choose one of these if you want to just send
it forward or back. But I like to select the thing I want it to be behind and then put it back there.
Maybe we can move this up a little bit. Now I'm not going to go through the whole process
because honestly each little image will be very similar to what you created here.
But I'm going to switch over to one that I already created. And then I want to show you what happens
when you export this. In this design, I used both the circles and I also added these triangles in
just to add interest. Okay, so this one is completely done and ready to export.
I'll come up here to File > Export > Export As and we'll want to use PNG or JPEG both are fine.
And I'll choose Use Artboards. I'll save this as 'Insta.' And then we'll export. I want to export
as screen, so 72 PPI, and I don't need them to be transparent. So I'll just change it to white.
And we'll say OK. Now we can see each of the export images.
And I'm going to airdrop these to my phone. I'll select all five and airdrop them.
I'll click on the new posts button, then I'll click this multiple files button which will be
underneath the first, and then I'll upload them in the order they're supposed to go.
So this one down here will be first - the Discover one.
I'll click Next. And then I could enter my caption or anything I wanted.
And then we'll do Share. And now you can see how they seamlessly flow together as a carousel.
Alright, if you liked this video, please click on the Like button. And I'll see you in a couple days
with another graphic design tutorial. Thank you!!!