Bring in your vector logo to the layout

Hey there, in this video we're going to bring in our lovely, sexy, vector logo, and we'll drop in our Nav bar, play with the opacity, and add a bit of ‘Type’ for our navigation. Alright, let's go and do it.

So you can start obviously by replacing things, I often just go through, and this is what I've kind of used to get my ideas across to the clients, but that's not something I find useful to start with, I kind of start off--    a little bit more about the product. I keep my wireframes closed, I print them off and stick them close, but I don't switch them out of the [datums 00:00:39] it's not that kind of design process.

What I do, I'm going to kind of start, I'm going to use them as a guide, don't get me wrong, but I'm just going to kind of let the content push, and move, and jiggle as it needs to, because I've got images from the client now, and I've got logos from them, and everything's changed just a slight bit. I'm going to bring in my logo, this will give me my first bit, and it’s going to probably drive a lot of the design, especially colors, maybe fonts, so we're going to bring them first.

Now, when you're finding the logos from your clients, make sure it's a vector version. What we're going to do is, we're going to go to 'File', 'Place'. In our exercise files I've got lots of logos, there are five versions. 'jpg' and 'png' are bad, 'svg', 'eps', or 'ai' files are good. Reasons are, I'll show you the kind of difference between the two. All of these three are very similar, pretty much the same. These guys have a very similar sort of working as well. So let's bring in a 'png' and let's bring in the 'eps' version, or let's say, the 'svg'. Let's see the difference between the two.

There's something called pixels versus vector, or bitmap versus paths, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn my guides off and I'm going to zoom in. They look exactly the same, but watch what happens when I start scaling both of these. So if I grab these guys and I start scaling them up, nice and big, you can see, one starts pixelating, looks horrible, and this other one here stays nice and crystal clear. So if you do have the option, the client says, "Which version do you want?" make sure you get the vector version. And the vector is 'svg', 'eps', or 'ai'. Sometimes it can be a 'pdf' but stay away from 'png'. 'png' are handy because they have transparency so if you only have, say a 'jpg, and a 'png', get the 'png' version, that's not going to scale very well, that’s not going to help us with our responsiveness, it's not the end of the road. 

Let's compare it with the 'jpg' version. 'jpg' is a clear loser, because he has a white background, he's still the same kind of pixels, he still pixelates, but you can see, at least the 'png' has a transparent background often, not always. So goodbye, you guys, I'm going to bring in our 'svg' again, just because it came through at the right size. 

And there's going to be a logo for my site. Remember, we’re working at 'Command 1', actual pixels. You'll notice that our logo has a white background, it’s because what I want to do is, turn my ‘Guides’ back on, if you've forgotten, it's 'Command ;', or 'Control ;', and we get it to kind of bang up, maybe just a little bit, because what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab my rectangle tool, and I'm going to put a Nav bar along the top, I'm going to make it semi-transparent later on, so you can see underneath it and make it all cool. I'll move it across so I can see both sides. And I'm going to draw a rectangle in here, it's going to go across 12 columns, I'm going to give it a fill color of 'black', and I'm going to give it 'No stroke', so that little red line through it, means there’s no ‘stroke’, I'll lower the opacity a little  bit. I kind of love the gray, I'm going to put stuff behind that. Actually when we build our site, we're going to pin it to the top, so it means that it's going to scroll down when we start scrolling, and it's going to stick to the top, and we'll always be able to see the logo in the navigation. It's kind of cool.

At the moment the logo is in the wrong side, this box is on top, so we just right click it. If you're on a Mac, you hold down 'Control', and click with any buttons you've got. On a PC it's very easy, right click and go to the one that says 'Arrange', and go to 'Send to Back'. You can see, I've got my logo in front. Cool. I'll tap it so it sits in there, turn my guides off, and it looks okay. 

Now what I want to do is, I want to put in the text for my navigation, so I'm going to go to 'Type' tool, and I'm going to click once, doesn't really matter where it goes, and I'm going to go 'About Us'. It's going to be 'About Me' because it's my portfolio, and what I'll do is, I'm going to copy and paste it, stick it up next to him, and there's going to be another page called 'Contact Me'. I may have my 'Portfolio' button as well, I've decided just to keep those images here at the bottom, to get to our portfolio. It’s these guys here. I'm going to make them white, so with the black arrow I've got them both selected, I can grab my 'Type' tool now, and at the top here I can go and change the color to white. Actually what I'm going to use is this off-white all the way through it. I don't know why I like it, just a little hint on the white, looks white basically. So we’ve added our 'Type'. We're going to go in and style fonts in a movie just after this one, we'll just use 'Arial' for the moment.