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Advanced Techniques for Designers

Let's talk a little bit more about some advanced tips and tricks. I'm gonna go to my personal account in Canada and that guy. Let's see, I got a couple cool things to show you. These are some things that as designers we see in a lot of other programs on, they're gonna feel very familiar to us. And I just want to show you what stuff is in Canada and what stuff is not. Let's start with this guy here. So these are just a couple a couple tips, key commands, things like that. Okay, so, um, something that we do often in power point some other programs you have a shape you've created on your stage, but, uh, we wanted to be a text box. So basically text for the background. But it's all the same element. It's not two separate elements. We could do that two different ways, like in some of the earlier, like earlier in design, where you had to actually make two elements. You have to make a box. Then you have to make a text box on top of that box in Canada. We can join them together and have it be ...

one it's a simple is hitting T. As you can see, t drops a text box in very quickly. Maybe I have to select it now. All right, I'll figure that one out. Moving on. Another great trick we talked about nudging. Nudging is really important in a lot of design programs in Illustrator and some of the other ones you can designate what your nudge increment is in Canada. It's always one pixel, er, 10 pixels. So if you're working at something like, for instance, this presentation, which you can see is not in pixels is actually 25 centimeters will talk a little bit about how you can figure out what the D. P I is for that. But this will always nudge. Ah, pixel. So let's say this guy's too close. I could legible a 10 pixels, two pixels up, down left and right. It's it's intuitive. I even I did it without even knowing this. I'm just like, oh, can I nudge this boom yet? Done. Uh, added to my arsenal. One of the other cool tricks, uh, undoes are great and reduce. This is more of ah, word of warning. So with cloud based products undoes do not You have a limited amount in the history is not a safe state. So if you close the document, you lose your undue states. A. So far as I know they are, they're probably not unlimited. That would be a lot of memory to take up to have unlimited undoes the There are many of them. I've gone back many, many steps before, so you're safe and sort of playing around again. You guys are familiar with version control. If you're playing around with stuff, just make new files. It's it's you have. You have infinite canvas is and things to play with. And that way you don't have to worry about your history. States, Uh, the history button is gonna be up here. It's also Command Z as as usual. Uh, okay. So selecting There's two ways to excuse me to select multiple objects. The first is, of course, our tried and true shift select. The other one is drag select. I found that in design programs, there's two types of user patterns when it comes to drag. Selecting the 1st 1 is what I call a touch drag. The 2nd 1 is called Encompass Drag, given example, in power point you in order to select things, your cursor area needs to encompass the entire object. If you only if you drag and select and you can let's say you know you're doing this. And it was only on a part of it, like this text here, um, that I'm pointing at my screen like you guys can actually see that. Like the text here. Uh, you wouldn't select it in Power Point. That's not how it works. It's encompass, select. But in Canada, just so we know. And of course, you would figure this out. Most designers the second they do it, it's touch select. So you only need to be barely touching the thing that you want to select in order to select multiples. There is a grouping function in Canada. It's hidden because, uh, I don't know why. I guess they don't want people to, you know, non designers to use it a lot. Uh, and that function is command G two on Group is shift Command G on important note about grouping, and we'll go over this a little bit later. I have a whole section on quirks. I keep a running list of them. There's an old saying, its not a bug, It's a feature. These are features of canvas that designers are probably going to encounter. And I want you to know that they are features, not bugs. One of them is the fact that when you group when you group something, actually, let's do this. When you select multiple objects and one of them is rotated, you lose the ability to change the scale of the multiple selection. You notice that what we usually see is the design anchors as Aziz, the the scale anchors as designers, they pop up pretty much on anything. You select that you can scale it, it's in the corners, on the sides. They go away here that here they are. Okay, so here it is. Down here. I can scale. You just get one for a multiple selection. You don't see it on all sides. There is no scale from center, which is an important thing to note. So when you scale, you can't hold down option. Have it come from the center. It always comes from the from the corner. And so here I have that thing. If I were to take this one object and rotate it. All of a sudden I lose that option and I lose that option. No matter how many things I select, if there is one object that has been rotated, I can't do that. Um, it's a bug, not a feature, but they're gonna fix the feature very soon. This is something that I talked with them they're actually working on so that I go away. But I just want you to know, in case you encounter, that's why it's happening. Your browser is not broken. Okay, so that's multiple selections. There's a quick key for searching for things. So if we see this is our Google FBO box, anything you toss into Canada that doesn't have an image in it, but should is gonna have this A p o. Box. Here, here we can commands Question marker command forward slash In order to get to the search feature on Remember, search is where we're also going to go to access all of our stuff. Um, another quick note. I don't want to jump around too much, but while I'm here, I want to talk a little bit about the icons that can. Va comes with um, that guy. So, uh, we talked about SPG being able to change the colors of S P. G's so awesome. I wish more programs allowed me to do that. Um, more online cloud programs. You can do the same thing with all of the assets that can becomes with in the buckets in the drawer. Consider them S P G's. I'm pretty sure that's how they uploaded them. So here I just dragged went onto the stage, and I can easily change either of the colors that this guy comes with. So I could dio Let's do Redskins colors. Awesome. So, uh, the changing color of the icons. And of course, if you want to search to put something else in there, it's a command question mark on a Mac and control question mark on Windows. So that's those air. Some tricks. I want to show you a little bit more. Yes, thank you. Leave the page. It's going to this guy, and this is just some or interface stuff to get us used to the creating things to be efficient again. There is no proper substitute for time and patients, but let's look at here. So here. Okay, So if we're gonna change things uppercase, typically, we have a setting up in a top menu structure that says change case with Canada. It's a little bit different. You're gonna select all and it's gonna be a command shift. K takes it from upper lower, in case you need Teoh do that quickly instead of having to re type stuff. Uh, another one. You could do a border around a text box with ult a sorry all to shift be or option shift to be So we'll pick this guy here. Oops. I mean, you do that So selected option shift B and it just it just borders the box. I just deleted my whole thing. Here we go, um, great for making interface buttons of anything that needs a really cool stroke around it. And that's nice, because then you don't have to create two elements. Yeah, photos or colors or shapes or anything or just text. Let's find out. Let's tread. So we go into shapes. Let's say this circle command shift, uh, option shift. Thank you. So it's just it's just text boxes. So clearly on the code side, they have a different designation for for them on. That's how that works. Okay, we talked about this earlier, but I'd love to go over it, selecting objects back and forward in the order of things. This is something that I do in in design all the time for want to get this something beneath their And it's just a simple is holding command and clicking another word on layers. And where things live in the Z axis, backgrounds are treated differently than anything else. Again, there are no layers in Canada, but the background is will always if you go into here, selecting an image through background will always place something in the back here that will stay back there and will not be considered in the order of arrangement. I'll give any good example. So if I go into background and let's choose like a nice bloke, a background. So if I go Teoh, send this backwards, back, back, back, back it won't go past the background. So sort of lives in this sort of limbo back behind everything. And it does that for people who may not be designer so that they don't accidentally throw an image on top of everything, and then wonder where all their stuff went. It just kind of lives in the background. There it is. Clickable. You can still move it around and delete it. It just doesn't. Doesn't consider itself in the order of arrangement. All right, so the next trick, Um, so this is cool. And this is something that I didn't even know. There is a hidden grid in Canada to get to the grid. It's the same command as eso. Its command, command, and then colon ends are semi colon. And the grid is gonna be based off of what you've imported for a grin, and I'll show you what that means. Let's go down the way. Let's under. That will go down. We're gonna add a new page here just so I can show you what it looks like. I'm gonna go into search, uh, grids. Let's pick something like this. So just a triple grid. If I turn on grids, it's actually back there, but it's in the background. So me, we show you it does groups, columns of three go backwards. Get rid of that. Okay, So does columns of three. And, um, it's not really anything. We could change its marginally helpful As a designer, I really like to make my own grid or decide what it's gonna be. Um, I can't change the pixels. The pixel with I can't make horizontal grids. It's a little bit limited, but if you want to see it, it's there for us. So I'm gonna actually refresh, um, feature, not a bug There, there. There's the thing with chrome, where the grids kind of get a little funky. So I need Teoh refreshment to make it go away. Let's go into something a little bit more functional, moving layers up and down. So I've been clicking on this back and forward buttons in the menu bar I. It's second nature for me. I just dough in all the adobe programs. How to send things back, back back for afford to send two fronts in the back. In Mac, it's gonna be command up and down. So here I'm sending the flower up and down, um, and other programs. It's, you know, sometimes command open bracket closed bracket, but here it's gonna be up and down just some nice, more key commands to make things simpler on. Those are some tricks. I want to talk a little bit now. Any questions? First, before I go on so you can't make your own grid? Uh, no, you can't. You can, um, by possibly creating a grid, another program and bringing it in if you really want to align something like that, but otherwise no.