Production video - finalizing nav, hero box and fonts
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.
In this production video-- production video just means, I’m not really doing anything new, I’m just going to be filling in the holes for our design, you can watch or you can skip it along, it's alright. So this is what we're going to get to at the end of this video, we're going to be putting in some text, some colored boxes, but we know how to put text and colored boxes in, so let's go and do that now.
First stop is, let's draw our little buttons at the top here, you could just leave them as just text but what I want to do, is grab my rectangle tool and draw out a kind of button thing that fits in there. Now I'm going to use my colors that we downloaded, that BYOL portfolio colors, and the color will be green, that's kind of cool. And I'm going to right click in, and say-- now before we even 'Arrange', we 'Send to back', we send them to the back, goodbye. He's behind the navigation, kind of just see him there, so I’ve undone it, so 'Edit', 'Undo'. What I'm going to do is, there's an option in here that says, 'Arrange', and ‘Send’, we send it to the back, which is all the way at the back, send it backwards, it's just back behind, kind of like the guy in front of him. I'm going to just go in here, put the right size, and I'm going to make a copy of this guy, I get them banged up together, but I'm going to use that kind of red color for it. I'm going to right click, 'Arrange', send backwards. Sometimes there's a couple of guys in between, and backwards doesn't work, you got to keep going, send backwards, you can see there's a shortcut, 'Send Backward', I'm going to do that till I work it all out.
So, that guy needs to be in the center, I'll zoom out a little bit, 'Command 1' to get it to the actual size, actually I'll zoom out one more time. I'm going to put in my big kind of Hero box at the top here, so I'm going to turn on my guides again, I'm going to grab the rectangle tool, and we're going to look at images in a separate video, but I'm bring in my image now, we're just going to put in a big colored box, send it to the back, and look at putting in the rest of my type. So let's build that out, I'm going to grab my type tool, I'm going to drag out my box, it's going to cover-- not exactly sure how many yet but I definitely know, I've got my text, my inspirational, amazing 'Hire me as a trainer', ‘UX designer’.
Great! Font size, I kind of like it, it's looking alright. It’s going to be white so I'm going to put a reasonably dark image behind it, actually it's going to be that kind of off-white that I've been using, that off-white's in here as well, so I send the color so you can use either of them. And what I want to do is, I probably want to insert it by one of these columns, you can do that in web design easy enough, you can say, leave that one empty, and then start this text box a little big further along. I'm going to have a little bit of type above that, I’m going to leave that for later in the tutorial. This one needs to get a little bit lower, I'm using my black arrow just to drag it down a bit, I'm going to put a white line underneath it. Why? Because I like the idea of it, so I'm going to get my line segment tool. At the moment it doesn't really matter what kind of fill it has but it definitely matters what color stroke we have, I'm using that off-white again. And I'm going to click it across, just going to go across, I'm going to hold shift just to make sure it goes straight. How many pixels? Probably just one pixel's going to look fine, and I turn the grids off and on just to get a sense of it all; I like it there.
Now I'm going to do a button underneath, it's going to look exactly the same as this, so I'm going to steal it, copy and paste it, it's going to be my, like, ‘Call to Action’. 'Hire me, please.' So I'm going to zoom in a little bit, a bit bigger. I'm probably going to use the same font size, and this one's going to say, 'Let's talk'. You can write things like, 'Let's get a coffee.' 'Let Me Help You.' You can think of your own disarming version. One thing I've noticed when I'm in here, can you see this, there’s a stroke around the outside, so click on this, there's actually that off-white around the outside of this, put the green fill, but I'm going to turn the off-white to a red line, which means it's got no strokes, and it kind of lines up, still doesn't line up perfectly, does it? I’m just going to drag it off, dragging it back, that looks perfect now.
Anything else I want to do? No, that's kind of like a lot of the core stuff that I want in there. Actually one last thing while we're spending ages doing this, is I'm going to copy and paste that text, and I'm going to put it up here, and there's a bit of copy that I want to go in there. I'm going to have this little thing that says, 'I'm currently available for work.' I'm going to use that yellow color, and I move it along, and I'm going to put in an ellipse here, like a little circle, and I’m going to put the tick in, we'll save the tick for later on because I'm going to show you how to do that in the symbols part of the video series, but for the circle, hold down the rectangle tool, grab the ellipse tool. If we just drag out a random one it's going to be okay, you’d probably bring it, but if you hold down ‘shift’ while you're dragging it out it will make a perfect circle while you're driving. If you were driving, ah, it's been a long day.
So, it's going to be a kind of a circle in here, and we're going to fill it with this kind of lighter green, it's going to make more sense when we change this image out in the background.
Alright, so client one, everything is alright. Size, I think, I feel like it might be-- that circle is a bit big, but we'll change it later on. Alright, that's enough for the production video, let's go off and start doing the next bit.