Cheat sheet - Adobe Illustrator CC 2017

Course contents
SECTION: 15
Cheat Sheet 5:23

Questions

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Course info

45 lessons / 4 hours

Overview

UI design skills are one of the most employable opportunities of our lifetime. In this course you’ll learn how to design a professional website in Adobe Illustrator. We’ll start right at the basics of Illustrator and work our way through to building professional UI designs. This course doesn’t cover how to code a website but focuses on the design processes that professional UI designers use when working.

This is a project based class for students who are new to the world of app & web design. I created this for people nervous about changing their careers into the world of user interface design.



We’ll build a professional portfolio website. You can use this course to build your own portfolio website (the one you’ve been putting off for years). You’ll learn how to design desktop, tablet and mobile versions of your website. You’ll learn what you’ll need to deliver at the end of a project to your client.

This course is for people serious about becoming a User Interface design professional.

Know that I’ll be around to help - if you get lost you can drop a post on the video 'Questions and Answers' below each video and I'll be sure to get back to you.

Now it’s time to upgrade your skills, get that better job, and impress your clients.


What are the requirements?

  • You'll need a copy of Adobe Illustrator CC 2017 or above. A free trial can be downloaded from Adobe.

  • No previous design skills are needed.

  • No previous Illustrator skills are needed. 

What am I going to get from this course?

  • 45 lectures 4 Hours 7 minutes of content!

  • You'll learn to design a website with in Adobe Illustrator.

  • User Interface essentials. 

  • 27 Completed files so you never fall behind. 

  • Learn how to wireframe at all levels

  • How to design for a responsive website. 

  • Downloadable exercise files & cheat sheet.

  • Forum support from me and the rest of the BYOL crew.

  • Techniques used by professional website designers.

  • Professional workflows and shortcuts.

  • A wealth of other resources and websites to help your new career path.

What is the target audience?

  • This course is for beginners. Aimed at people new to the world of web and UI design. While no previous Illustrator experience is necessary.

Course duration 4 hours

Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I 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.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files

Transcript

Alright, this is our Cheat Sheet. We're going to go through some of the bits we've covered in real quick bullet points, and add some super extra fancy tips and tricks. Let's go do it.

So you tried exporting your web graphics, some pngs from Illustrator, but they're coming out a little low-key, a little crusty around the edges. This cheat sheet tip will show you how to fix that. Let's go to 'View', and let's go to this one which says 'Pixel Preview'. This is going to preview what it's going to look like as a png in pixels, and you can see, fuzzy, so let's select all of these guys, and let's fix it by right clicking any of them, and going into one of them that says 'Make Pixel Perfect'. My goodness! Look how crisp those are. That's how to fix them before you export them as pngs, it aligns them to the pixel grid, and you get perfectly crisp exports.

So before you start working on any web project, or UI design project, you're going to have to change your preferences to pixels because we can't use anything else online, so with nothing selected, I can go up to here which says 'Preferences', or I can go down to 'Edit', 'Preferences' on a PC, or in case of my Mac here, it's under 'Illustrator', 'Preferences', 'Units'. What we want to do is make sure that 'General' is set to 'Pixels', and the 'Stroke' is set to 'Pixels', and 'Type' is set to 'Pixels'. 

Against all the other life-long training, it's all about pixels. Click 'OK'. Happy days!

So you need 12 columns for your responsive web design grid. To do it in Illustrator, grab the rectangle tool, drag a box that spans the whole width, and then go to 'Object', get on to 'Path', and lets go to 'Split Into Grid'. It's changed the number of columns to 12. The gutter's here, I'm going to use 30 to match Bootstrap, I'm going to click 'Add Guides', click 'OK', and we're kind of there, you can stop there if it works for you. Now if you right click any of them, and go to 'Ungroup', and select just these top ones here, they're just lines, not actual guides. So I'm going to cut those, delete all the junk that's left over. There is a bit of junk there, and let's go to 'Edit', 'Paste in Place', or 'Paste in Front' to put it back to where we got it, then go to 'View', then go down to 'Guides', and go to 'Make Guides'. Now I've got proper guides.

So you're only using two fonts for your entire site, but you have to scroll through this entire list to try and find the font you were using over and over again. There it is. I'm using 'Playfair'. I'm going to hit this little star button here, and that means, now, when I come in here, and I say, "What fonts am I using?" click this little star here, and it's just going to show you my favorites. There's my 'Playfair'. Makes it super easy to use. And then over here, click this, just 'Playfair'. Ah, happy days!

So I’m ready to export my graphics to build the website. Now I'm going to go up to 'File', go to 'Export', and then I'm going to-- Don't do it. 'Save for Web', don't use it anymore, we're going to use this guy in here, 'Window', and it's going to be the 'Asset Export' panel, and all we need to do is select graphic where you want to export, click, hold, and just drag in the middle here, give it a name, and decide the format.

Do you need 'Export’ right now? Easy; Click 'Add Scale', and I've got an option, twice the size. I've got these little icons in the bottom. I'm going to drag these in, and I'm going to use, instead of png and jpeg, I'm going to pick the lovely famous 'SVG' for Scalable Vector Graphic. Click 'Export', and you're away.

So you supply graphics to a developer, and you spend a lot of time in Illustrator, planning and designing, you give it to them, and they come back and nothing looks the same. What you can do to make sure this process is more streamlined is give them some 'CSS'. To do it in Illustrator, you select on the object that you want to get some CSS code from, go to 'Window', and then go down to 'CSS Properties'. Out there, you can copy this, and paste it into an email, and say, "Dear Developer, make sure it's Playfair, and it's Bold, and the size is right, and the color is exactly the way I've picked it." Nothing else. Or else, it says something else, like this orange box here, and you could see no CSS code is generated, so to get around that, this first little option down the bottom here, 'Export Options' which says 'Generate CSS for Unnamed Objects'. And the other thing I'd like to turn on is 'Include Dimensions'. And voila, it's going to give me my size, and height, and color for my lovely little [?? 00:04:34] action button. There should be no excuses now that everything doesn't line up, look great, exactly how you've designed it in Illustrator.

You need to share this project with somebody else in your team or another designer, or just archive it. The problem is that you've used images that come from your library, and off a network drive, there's fonts the other person doesn't have, don't worry, you can fix it all by going to 'File', go down to 'Package', make sure it's saved, still a little place to go, and I'm going to hit 'Package', click 'OK', kick back, relax, and on your desktop, in a second, 'Show Package', I've got a useless bit of text, I've got my Illustrator file, I've got all the fonts that have been used, and the images that have been linked. Now I can zip this lot up, and send it along to the next designer. Happy days! Thank you, Illustrator! 

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