Hi everyone, hey, this video we're going to look at... something called Layer Blending Modes... they can be helpful with things like black and white logos... not transparent, but if we mess with the blending modes, look... we can make it transparent, we can see through the white stuff... it's a nice little hack...

what I like using them for though is this... can you see, image is a background, we remove all of the color from it... then we can play with the color blending modes... to do some cool stuff with just a solid color... a bit of overlapping color, get some interesting things... we do it with Type as well, this is editable type...

can you see, it's just kind of affecting the background in an interesting way... Color Layer Modes, Blending Modes, Mix Blend Modes... there's lots of names for it, but it's the way that layers interact... and we can use this to our advantage to do some kind of cool creative things... all right, let's jump in. Let's start by bringing in 'Logo 1', '2', '3'...

they're just same versions of the Bring Your Own Laptop logo... and in a pinch you can use a Layer mode... because at the moment I've got this white background... it's a JPEG, there's no transparency... but I can kind of fake it by going, you, over here, in my Layers panel... instead of Pass Through, actually, let's move you across...

so the editors don't have to move across so fast, less zooming... and we can go, Normal, does nothing... Darken, Multiply, look at that... we've got this thing that kind of like appears to be transparent, and it works... obviously, better to go find the Vector version rather than the JPEG... with the Layer Blending Mode set to Multiply, but hey, it works...

there's a whiteout version here. You'll have to play around with the different settings... to see what works for your logo... Lighten, these three, they're kind of grouped... can you see, like all these kind of do the same thing... all of these kind of do the same thing, see the little lines there...

so they're not all exactly the same but they kind of group them together... there you go, got like a whiteout version. It works really great with straight white and straight black... colored logos, yeah, depends on the logo... turns on the color as well, so again, let's move it over... let's zoom in, and let's have a look, so Multiply, can you see...

Multiply, between Multiply and Normal, it actually changes the green a bit... and I would have a problem with that as the designer who made the logo... so it will depend on the color of your logo... can you see, you might find one that's close enough for a mock-up... there's lots of different options down here... but that is interesting...

but where you can get really creative with it, is let's bring in an image... so let's bring in an image called 'Layer Blend'... I'm just going to drag it out here as a size, way too small... so I've got this image, what I want to do is maybe just copy the Fill... if I copy the whole properties remember our shortcut... 'Command C', 'Option C', I click on this Frame here...

and I go, 'Command V', 'Option V', it'll work, goes in the background... but what you might not have noticed is see the square, whereas before... they weren't... they got their squareness from this... so what you can do is, actually, just grab that weird edge out here, copy it... select this and go, 'Paste'.

So it's in the back of my frame... I want to do a couple of things, I want to, with this image here... probably pull out all the saturation and play around with the contrast... probably, the exposure... I want to be kind of dark and moody in the background... so you can do some pretty...

like all the typical kind of photo editing stuff inside Figma. What I want to do now is overlay something over the top... so I'm just going to grab my... 'Frame' tool, I'm going to use a 'Rectangle' tool... why am I decided not to use the Frame tool here, is because I know that... I want this just to be a background...

and if I do a frame and I start dragging things into it... it's going to like embed inside of it... I could do a frame and lock it, I'm just going to use 'R' for the Rectangle tool... I got a rectangle that is the size of my background... there we go, perfect... fill it with color, I'm going to pick...

red-ey future-ey color, there we go... and all I need to do is change this, so from Pass Through... Normal does nothing, and then... and you can find the thing that works for you. The nice thing about doing this is you could switch out the background image... like you could just make images like this in Photoshop, make a part of them...

but actually, what you can do in CSS... your developer can do, or engineer can do, or you could do... is you could have two things, the background image... which you can pull out all the color off, maybe it's all saturation... that can be done by code, so you don't have to do every image... and same thing with this thing that's over the top here...

you can play around with these Layer blending modes in CSS... they're called Mix Blended mode, have a look up that as a CSS class... you can do some pretty cool stuff. So I'm going to pick one, there we go... now we've done a whole background, but you could do something interesting with... oh, I know, actually, boring way, could just be something like this...

actually, this around the corners... holding 'Shift' and dragging it up, you might do something... kinda like this, I don't know what I'm doing... but it doesn't have to be the full covering... I have to play around with my layers, you, up the top... what I'm going to do, I'm going to jump to do some drawing, you wait there.

I should probably take you along for the ride, I've made two rectangles... and I've double clicked to go inside, let's turn one of them off... I've double clicked the one that's up... and I'm going to drag, actually, I'm going to grab my 'Pen' tool... hold down my 'Option' key on a Mac to get rid of that point... and that's kind of cool on its own, I'll click 'Done'.

What I might do is grab the other rectangle that I hid... and go, you, same thing, double click it... grab this one, kind of drag it around here, oh, that might look cool... oh, I'm going to do that... is it going to look cool? Oh, we will see...

I'm going to pick another color because what we want is the overlap... that's what I've decided what I want to do... is I'm going to try and find something that has a cool overlap... and we might have to play around with the Layer modes here. So while this looks cool and that looks cool... that overlap isn't great, and it's to do with the Layer mode...

we can do all sorts of stuff in here to find something that is quite cool... is that quite cool? Oh, I don't know... oh, that's quite cool... all right then you spend ages... doodling and drawing stuff that looks kind of interesting.

That's the one I like the most, there we go, that was worth it... there's a strip down the middle, let's do it with some text as well... we can do the same thing... so I've just duplicated, I started typing, and then I was going to resize... and I thought, "Ah, I know what I'll do"... is we will use some of our shortcuts...

so to do Type you can use a shortcut for size... which is good for small stuff... which is 'Command Shift', 'Ctrl Shift' on a PC, and that '>' and '<'... often though, when I want to do really big changes... I'm just going to use the K tool for Scale, and just drag it up... probably want it even bigger.

The other shortcuts, I'm going to select it all... now you're probably not going to remember these off by heart... but remember, got a shortcut sheet, print it off... it depends on your Type nerdiness... like font weight for some reason is a good shortcut for me... won't be for many people, but it's 'Command Option', or 'Ctrl Alt' on a PC...

and just use that '>', '<'... then find something that's nice and big... 'Option Shift', or 'Alt Shift' on a PC to play around with the line height... remember to smash it because I've got such big type... there you go, who remembers the decreasing the letter spacing? That's right, hold down the 'Option' or the 'Alt' key and that same '>', '<'...

and why do we want to be here, I'm going to hit 'Esc' on my keyboard... because if I try and use the V key... the shortcut doesn't work when you're in the Type tool... so I'm going to 'undo', hit the 'Esc' key... and I'm going to rotate it around and do giant colorful text... 'K' for the Scale tool, and let's pick a color...

muddy yellow, there we go... it's going to change when we look at our Layer modes, let's have a look. I want it kind of as a background thing, not a real, like readable text... I just want it to be kind of a cool background thing... so I'm going to find something that works... you wait there, I'm going to wriggle up and down this for a while.

I'm going to go with overlay, I had my head cocked to one side the whole time... and I might play around with the opacity of this layer... so here, I'm going to go down, oh, let's use our shortcut... with the selected hit '5', 50... '2' on your keyboard, just the number 2... that's what I'm looking for.

All right, that is Blending Modes... there is lots you can do with them, they can be implemented programmatically... kind of at the end, so you don't have to like make a zillion of these... it could be the, whatever the default uploaded image is... remove transparency, add type, give it the mix blend CSS mode... you can have pages looking really unique, that you didn't have to make them all...

all right, that is it Blending Modes, Color Modes... I'll see you in the next video.