Hi, this is Anne for Graphic Design How To, and today I want to tell you about how to
make a ribbon design - an arch driven design - in Illustrator.
So first off, I want to go over the key commands I'm going to be sharing with you, I'll say
something like grab the M tool or grab your G tool or your V tool.
And when I say that, I just mean press the letter M on your keyboard.
So that will get you to the tool over here on the left unless you're in a text box where
it'll just type the letter M. So if that happens, just click out of the text box and then you
can just type the letter M or T or whatever.
That's not CTRL M or SHIFT M. It's just the letter M. So let's get started.
First, grab your M too.
That is your rectangle and then just click and drag a long rectangle like this.
And I'm going to choose a...let's go with a green color over here.
Now, with your V tool, OPTION-drag this kind of like this.
And then we'll move with your V tool, sorry, your V tool, move this over like this, and
we're making this part of the little ribbon right now.
Now go up to Object>Path and add anchor points.
And what that does, if we zoom in here, you can see we've got...usually you'll have four
anchor points, but when you add anchor points, it adds an anchor point halfway through or
halfway between the anchor points that are existing.
So now that we have that, let's switch to the A tool and then start drawing a rectangle
out here, like this, and select just that one point on the screen.
There.
Now use your arrow keys to move this in.
You can also hold the SHIFT key and arrow and they'll go a little faster.
Okay, so let's do about like that, then you can CMD- to get back to where you were or
CMD 0.
To get the Hand tool, you can hold down the spacebar and move, move the canvas around
to wherever you want it.
Okay, so let's change our color to be a little darker than this color.
To do that, I'm going to click over here in swatches to add a color.
And then you can hold OPTION and CMD and pull these sliders over and that will make a light
or a dark tonal of that color.
So if you have...if you're on a PC, you'll want to you do CTRL and OPTION.
Okay, so let's do it CMD OPTION and drag a little bit, just make it a little darker.
Okay, and it's in the front right now.
So hold SHIFT CMD and left bracket to send to the back.
You can also go to Object > Arrange > Send to Back here and you can see the key command
there.
Alright, now with the V tool, let's copy, paste in front.
Whoa, that didn't work the way I thought it would.
Okay, so if you need to, click off, click back on, copy, paste in front.
And now you can see that there are two layers.
I'm going to undo that.
So now hit your arrow tool and then hit return and that will bring up this dialog box.
Do you want it to be vertical?
And then say OK.
Oh, past in front was CMD F or CTRL F on a PC.
Now let's slide this over with your V tool, click and just drag and hold SHIFT to get
it to stay on the same axis.
Okay, so now we've got this part of our, our banner, let's...with the V tool, select all
three, draw a box around all three like this.
And let's go to the Pathfinder.
And some options aren't showing right... or I guess the align...sorry, the Align, come
down here to 'distribute spacing.'
And go ahead and click Show Options if this isn't showing for you.
Now click this second one, it'll distribute the spacing so they're all equal.
Okay.
Now, we're going to need to draw this little shape here.
So get your P tool or actually, oh, then hit your P tool.
You can also hit SHIFT CTRL A if you're on a PC.
Okay, so let's zoom in a little here.
That's Z and drawing a square.
And then with the P tool, click here, here.
Here.
Then close the shape.
Click back on your first one.
Okay, now this we want to fill with an even darker color.
So let's add a new swatch.
There we go.
And hold the OPTION and CMD to make it a little bit darker.
There we go.
And still say...stay within that tonal range.
Okay.
So now get your V tool, click on that little shape, copy, paste in front with CMD F, or
CTRL F, hit O and then return which will bring up the reflect dialog box.
Vertical is what we want.
Say OK, and then with your V tool, let's slide this over where it should go.
Okay, so we've got most of our shape here.
Let's get the V tool and select everything with a box around everything like this.
Let's group these things.
CMD G, or CTRL G on a PC.
Now go to Effect > Warp, and I like arc.
Arch will keep this side straight, but art kind of turns them out and think it's a little
more natural.
So let's go with arc.
And 24% is a good amount.
So let's say OK.
And now we have almost exactly what you see above.
Okay, so to get our type on here, there's two ways to do it.
You can just type on a straight line, group it with this shape, and then do the Effect
> Warp > Arc thing, and it will do it all together.
But that kind of makes your type a little warped.
If you don't want that, you'll want to make a copy of this and that's what we're going
to do in this tutorial.
So hold SHIFT OPTION and drag, actually start dragging and then hold SHIFT and OPTION to
make a copy.
And then let's go to Object > Expand Appearance.
Okay, now we have some pieces here and I want to use that piece to get that arch and make
it really easy to type on that path.
So grab your A tool, click off, grab your A tool, and just get on the very edge of this.
Okay, so all of your little handles should be white right now.
If you click on the edge, there'll be white.
So copy and then SHIFT CMD A to clear and then paste in front.
Okay, so we've got a fill and we don't want the fill over here.
So you can either click this or you can hit the question mark key to clear that out.
Now let's use our V tool to move this up a little bit, right here, and then grab your
Type on a Path tool and just click right on there.
Now this is going to be, it's going to cause a little bit of a problem.
You're going to be typing upside down, but that is normal, and we'll fix it here in a
second.
So let's type your title here to match the text above.
And then click...you'll have to actually click the V tool this time.
And then you can get on the little line there.
And let's pull that all the way over here.
Now there's a middle line, and we'll want to click on that and hold and drag it up.
That'll put it right side up.
Now let's go ahead and just center it.
So you can go to paragraph and center or you can do SHIFT CMD C. But let's get our eyedropper
tool with the I key and just click the title.
And we're almost done.
Now you can use your V tool to position it how you want.
And that's it.
That's the entire tutorial for today - how to make a ribbon.
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If you have any trouble.
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And yeah, that's it.
Thank you!!!
This is Anne for Graphic Design How To.