Hi there, in this video we're going to look at creating a Gradient like this one here, in the background. So let's go and make it in our document.

So, I'm on my page 1. So 'Pages' panel, I double click page 1. I'm going to zoom out a little bit, I'm going to keep the 'W' key off. I'll click it so I can see all of my working. Why? Because I need this to go over into my 'Bleed'. So I'm going to grab my 'Rectangle' tool. Don't worry about what color or Fill it has at the moment. Just drag a box that covers everything including our Bleed. And we'll amend the Fill. Just make sure your 'Stroke' is set to 'None'. Even then, if I had a Stroke, it would be cut off and there would have been some big drama there. So what we want to do is, we're going to go to—

The reason we don't worry about filling it with the color is, if I fill it with the color, it's just going to be replaced by our Gradient in a second. Open up 'Gradient's, go to 'Window', down to 'Color', and go to 'Gradient'. With your Black Arrow, the Selection tool here, make sure this box is selected. You might have to grab the outside of it, the edge of it if it has no Fill. And we're going to select 'Type', and go to 'Linear'. Now we're going to talk about Linear all the way through this tutorial, but you could switch it to 'Radial', and everything applies the same. So 'Linear', by default you give him 'Black and White'. We're going to do it once with freehand colors, and then we'll do it with corporate colors.

This little white house down here, this little box, if I click on it, I'm going to switch my colors, so you need to be able to see Color panel. And in here, you can just pick colors from this. If there are no colors in here, you can click on this little flap menu, and because we're going to be working in RGB for most of our documents, we're switching it to that. Then you should be able to pick a color. So pick a color, do the same for the other end. So pick the Black. And this one's defaulted just for our Black side, which is not cool. Go to RGB, pick another color. And, that my friends, is horrific. So, green to pink gradients is banned. I think they're illegal in most countries, definitely here in Ireland.

So to change the direction of this there's a whole tool for it, it's called the 'Gradient Swatch' tool, click on this. And all you do is click, hold, and drag, drag… And you can play around with the angle. You can manually type it in, see the angles here. If I want it to be 90°, I can have it straight up and down, 0° is going to do left and right. Watch this, I can make a really small line as well. Makes a kind of just a little band. We're getting 80s right here. Look at that. Feels like a Jane Fonda exercise video. Not that I ever watch one, but that is what I feel like has happened. These colors would combine in a Gradient. If you want to use corporate colors—

I want mine to go straight up and down, so I'm going to do 90°, or I can click and drag across this to get it going straight up and down. And what I'm going to do, it's a little weird, I need to see this Gradient panel. But I also want to see my Swatches panel. So what I need to do is find my Swatches. Do I have them all applied here? I don't. Some of them are over here. And the problem with CC Libraries at the moment is you can't drag from the CC Libraries panel into the Gradient panel. So what I'm going to do is select all of these. Actually I might 'undo' to get my Gradient back. Click off in the background, so with nothing selected, I'm going to make sure all of these are added. So I'm going to right click them, and say 'Add to Swatches'. So now they're all part of this, down the bottom here. And this is the stuff that I want, so grab my Black Arrow, click on this guy, and with this house here, the first one, I'm going to pick mid green. Click, drag, drag it. You've got to be really careful. Can you see, it goes black there? Means I'm replacing that one. If you don't, if you get it kind of close, but not quite, watch this. Get close in there, and you end up like this, all one little mix there. If you're doing that with this, and there's two of them you can just click, hold, and drag the one you don't want, off. Just kind of drag it down to no man's land. So with this green, to start with, I'm going to grab my dark green to replace this one. And that is my beautiful Gradient. Is there another way around? Yes, I've got it in my example. And that my friends is how to make Gradients.

Now if you're following along with this tutorial series, we're going to add a few extra little parts. We'll add this image down the side here, and this logo, and this text. First thing we're going to bring in is this text. So let's go to the Type tool. Actually I'm not going to bring it in, actually just type it out. So whenever I'm working with a big colored background like this, you can see my Type tool wants to turn this box into a Type box. So what I'm going to do, Type tool, on this side, type it out. I'm lazy, I'm going to copy and paste it from here. You're going to have to type out 'Green at Heart Annual Report', and Style it. It's up to how you style it. That's how I've done mine. The big thing with my type is that I've used the same font, but I've used that old version and this one here is the light version of Roboto Slab. And I've made this font a little smaller just so that they both line up on either side. Do they look good? It's okay.

Next thing I'm going to do is bring in my image. So I'm going to have nothing selected. Go to 'File', 'Place'. And in here it's going to be called 'Green Logo4'. Now this keeps appearing, we're not going to do anything for these changes. I'm going to turn that off. It's a bit of a pain whenever you turn on the 'Show Import' options. So 'File', 'Place'. This down here was awesome when we bring into text, but now it's a pain for images, so there's nothing we want to change. Click and drag it out. How big is this going to be? It's going to kind of sit down here like this document here, so maybe a bit big. 'Command Shift', drag it down, a bit smaller.

To bring in my image, it's 'File', 'Place', we got nothing selected. And I'm going to bring in my image, this one. Not him. 'Table Top', that's it. And I'm going to click, and drag it, so massive. I might have to actually zoom out a little bit. It's hard to work with full size images. And you're very close, I'm going to make mine very, very big. And I'm going to align mine up, something like this. I’m going to make sure it aligns up there. Make sure it aligns at the bottom already. And I'm going to drag this side across. How far is it going to be across? Yes, that far. I'm sure it should be like a third, but I'm just going to wing it. Hit 'W'. Looks alright.

Now, one of the big things that's happened is that, underneath there is my image. Because he was placed in the newest, he's at the top. So what we need to do is play with our Arrange. So I want to push him backwards. So I'm going to right click him. And go to 'Arrange', I don't want to 'Send to Back' because it will get behind the Gradient box, so 'Send Backwards'. So it goes behind the last thing, which was our image. I'm going to put him roughly in the middle. And that is Arranging.

What we're going to do in the next video is we're going to look at doing Layers. Why? Because arranging is fine but sometimes it's just a pain to have a background image on every layer. You just want to put it in its own layer, and lock it. So we'll look at layers in the next video.