Using the Adobe Market for free icons
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
Alright, in this video we're going to cheat, we need a tick, and we're going to just steal it. Okay, stealing is the wrong word, we're going to appropriate it from Creative Cloud market place, and there's lots of good stuff in there that we can use, and we're allowed to use legally, and it's all scalable and vectoriness, and that will save us from drawing it, so let's go and look at that now.
So, to get to the Adobe market, we've got this Creative Cloud app installed. So if you don't have it installed, go to adobe.com/downloads and get the Creative Cloud app, that's the one you're looking to download, it's probably already installed on your machine. On a Mac it's on this top icon over here. If you're on a PC it's on the bottom right, down the bottom here, you're looking for this kind of interactive cloud thing.
You want to go to 'Assets', and you want to go to 'Market'. We kind of looked at this earlier, and what we're going to do is-- The market is really, really good for icons, so I'm going to click in here. So I need a tick. So, 'I'm currently available for work', you may have a tick and a cross, so I want to put in a tick, and go through and just pick the tick that I want, and there's lots of options in here. The cool thing about them is they're scalable vectors, and the one here looks good to me. I'm going to download it to my 'Dan's Portfolio'. Perfect. Here he is, downloading there. Eventually. And I'm going to drag him in, I'm going to drag him in again.
The reason it's not dragging in - you might all run into this problem as well – It’s that I'm on the layer called background, and it's locked. I pretend I put in on there on purpose, just to show you, but I didn't, it happens to the best of us. So, we're in here, our art layer, the unlocked version. Drag it on to this layer here, and what we're going to see is that, we've downloaded an image, and you can see it's not a very good one, because it's a pixelating one, I get bigger.
So when you're downloading them, go to market place, and when you click on them-- this one was made in Photoshop, not good. Just click on this one here, this is in SVG, remember, SVG is awesome, Scalable Vector Graphics. Needs to be AI, EPS, or SVG in your work. Even though I don't need this, that's fine, I'm going to go to ‘Download’, and I'm going to download to 'Dan's Portfolio'. Lovely. Here he comes. Showing the right layer. The download, here he is. Okay, there he is there. And the cool thing about this now is-- You can kind of see, instantly it's got the blue line around, but you can see, it's scalable, which is really cool.
What I'd like to do now is, I'm going to right click it, 'Ungroup', I'm going to right click 'Ungroup' again. Sometimes, depending on how these are grouped-- I'm going to delete these bits, and I've got myself a little tick. So I've ungrouped it twice. I'm going to give it a fill color of my off white, and I'm going to scale it down and use it as my graphic. I'm going to zoom in. Holding down 'Shift' in the corners, remember, that's my little ticker in here.
Alright, so the cool thing about using Adobe Market is that you can find vector stuff in there, and you can use it commercially. You could draw your own tick, we'll do this in a little bit showing you how to use the pen tool, but things like that, I use it for all sorts of icons, just easier to find them in there.
Alright, that's how to use Adobe Market to borrow icons to use for your designs.