Expand your proficiency in creating clean and professional visuals by learning how to resize and adjust icons, as well as how to add text to your designs. This article provides a detailed, step-by-step guide on how to achieve these tasks effectively, ensuring your designs are as engaging and visually appealing as possible.
Key Insights
- The article provides a comprehensive guide on how to resize and adjust icons to fit within a particular space in your design. This includes instructions on how to use the control and alt keys to manipulate the size and proportion of the icon from the center.
- Adding text to designs is another key skill discussed in this article. It details the process of creating a text box using the horizontal type tool and aligning it with a guide to ensure perfect placement in relation to the icon.
- The article also provides a tutorial on how to change the color of text in designs. This includes an explanation of how to use the fill color option in the options bar and how to save specific colors in swatches for future use.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video we're going to resize each of our icons to fit in the circles behind it as well as we'll be adding titles or descriptions under each of the icons. Let's begin by resizing each of these icons.
To do this let's start by selecting the safety icon. If we'll remember we can't auto select icons anymore because we have auto select turned off in our options bar with the selection tool. We'll select the safety icon and now we can adjust the size of this.
To do this we'll hit CTRL T to adjust the size and since this icon is already centered over the circle it's just too big. We can reduce the size by grabbing one of the edges and dragging in. If we hold ALT as we do this it will resize from the center.
We'll resize it to about here seeing that the entire icon is within the circle and we'll hit ENTER. Next let's reduce the size of our other two icons. We'll start with the environment icon and hit CTRL T and again holding ALT as we drag in we'll see that the image snaps when it's the same size as the icon.
These are now proportioned correctly and we'll hit ENTER. Finally with our final icon we can select it in the layers panel and hit CTRL T to transform it and as we drag in holding ALT our image will again snap when it's in line and the same proportion as the other two. We'll hit ENTER to solidify this transformation and now we have all three icons well within each of the circles.
Looking at this first icon while it is technically centered because the proportions are heavier on the bottom it looks like it's a little too large. Therefore I'm going to select the safety icon and with the arrow keys on my keyboard I'm simply going to inch it up until it looks a little more centered. We now have all three of our icons centered within the icon circles.
Let's hit CTRL S on our keyboard to save these changes. For our next step we're going to be adding titles to each of these icons. Let's first start by adding guides.
In addition let's reduce the size of our icons grouping by collapsing it. With the icons group selected we'll add guides. We're going to drop our guide right at the center of each of our icons because there's already one right in the middle we don't need one there however we'll add one to the left and to the right.
Let's also create a new grouping and we'll title this group icon text and hit ENTER. For our icon text we're going to create a text box using the horizontal type tool. We'll go to the center right below our first icon and as we drag to the right we'll hold ALT so that it drags proportionally from left to right.
We'll release and we can increase the size of our text box. Let's zoom in a little bit further. For this text box we're going to make sure that it lines up with the guide below so we'll make sure that the top lines up right at this guide.
We'll then instead of lorem ipsum type out each of our icons as we remember the first icon is called safety. So with this text here we'll go to our options bar we'll make sure that it's centered and now let's change the color of this text to a light gray. To do this let's hit CTRL A to highlight it and then go into our fill color in our options bar we'll click and we're going to find an appropriate gray color.
Let's choose a gray color in this case I'll choose a0a0a0 as I like the color of this gray. You can choose whatever gray you'd prefer and since we're going to be using this gray more often let's add it to our swatches. We'll click add to swatches and then let's retitle this PTC for phase 10 construction gray.
And we'll hit okay and okay again. Next let's recreate this text box for our other two icons. First we'll rename our layer one and title this safety.
If we click we'll see photoshop automatically changes it to safety. Let's create a new layer. For the second one we'll move it using the move tool shortcut v on the keyboard and we'll simply move it until it's in line with the icon above and release.
And for this title we're going to rename it environment. To do so we'll double click and type out environment. We'll go back to our layers panel then we'll click outside and we'll see again the title's been changed.
Let's create one more now dragging into a new layer and for this one we're going to move it over under innovation. We'll hit v on our keyboard as a shortcut for the move tool and we'll move over the environment text until it's centered with innovation. We'll then double click and type innovation and we'll click outside the layer and we now have safety environment and innovation with safety environment and innovation.
Looking at these right now they're a little close to the so let's move all three down. We can do this by selecting one and hitting control selecting the other two and then we can click on them and holding shift to move down we'll simply drag them down until there's an appropriate amount of space. Let's now zoom out to see what this looks like.
We'll collapse our icon text and click outside in the layers panel to see our banners coming together. This looks pretty good let's save our work and in the next video we'll add a logo and title to the bottom. See you there!