Discover how to enhance your postcard project by learning to manipulate lines and add special details for a professional finish. This article breaks down the process of using lines to separate text, adjust size and alignment, create corner lines, and add URL text with a consistent style.
Key Insights
- The article explains how to use lines to create distinction between different sections on a postcard, such as separating the address from the actual text. This involves copying and pasting lines, changing colors, adjusting size, and ensuring correct alignment.
- A detailed walkthrough is provided on how to create corner lines using the Pen tool and set guides. It is also shown how to apply styles across the entire path, and change these styles, such as creating a wavy or solid line, or adjusting the corner style.
- The author demonstrates how to add a URL and apply the same text styling for consistency using the Eyedropper tool. Adjustments can be made to the text alignment, color, size, and style for an effective, professional appearance.
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In this video, we're going to be working with lines to spruce up the back of our postcard. Up top, on the front of our postcard, we utilize this line.
So let's now copy it using CTRL C on the keyboard, and zooming in, let's hit CTRL V to paste this line. In addition, we can't really see it right now because it's white, so let's change the color from white to green by utilizing our Domus Green from CC Libraries. Here, we've now got our line.
For this line, let's put it right in the middle here, and this way it'll separate the address from the actual text. If we want to change the size, we can do so by dragging it either up or down, and if we hold ALT, it'll drag from the top and bottom. In this case, I'll drag it to about there and hit W to see what it looks like.
It's not exactly lined up in the center. When we see that purple line, we know that it's now centered, or we can also use our Align options, going to Align to Page, and making sure that it's aligned vertically to the center. We'll hit W to see what this looks like, and I like the look of this.
Next, we want to just create some detail lines right in the corner, right at the margin. To do this, we can utilize our Align tool, and we could come up here and draw lines right in the corner. However, if we were to make changes, say making changes to the structure of this line, making it dashed, we can see that we can only make it to one at a time, or we'd have to select both.
Instead, let's select both of these and delete it, going about this a different way. We'll zoom in, and we're going to utilize the Pen tool to create a corner line here. In order to do this, let's first set some guides.
We'll drag out, and for our first guide, let's leave it right at one and a half inches out, and we'll do the same thing down below, right at one and a half inches. From here, we can now utilize our Pen tool, and the way that the Pen tool works is by simply clicking, and here we've created our first anchor point. It'll go directly to whatever our second anchor point is right here in the corner.
Finally, we'll add one more right at the corner, the intersection between the margin and the guide, and we now have our path. We'll hit CTRL-Shift-A to deselect, and hitting V on the keyboard will select this path. Now when we make changes, it'll apply to the entire path.
Let's go into the details of our line here, and if we want to do wavy, we can do that, and I'll stay a little consistent with what we've already done. In addition, with this selected, we can also simply copy the exact same characteristics by utilizing our Eyedropper tool, and clicking this line, we'll see that it now changes to four points and wavy. In this case, it's an easy way to make the same application of style between lines.
However, for this back here, I think I'm going to go a little bit different than the waves. Feel free to make your own choices on how you'd like your lines to look. For these lines, I'm going to utilize the Selection tool, and I'm going to go up to the line here, I'm going to go with solid.
In addition, because it's on the margin here, I actually need it to be inside of the margin, so we'll go to our stroke over on the right hand side, and we're going to change the align stroke so it's inside. This way, all of the color is inside the margin. We can also make other changes to our line.
We can round it out, have it square right at the end, and in this case, I also want to change the corner right here. It's a little bit of a boring corner, and so let's change it up a little bit. To do this, we'll go to our Properties panel, and from here, we have a couple different corner options that we can utilize.
If we go to the right, see a few different options. Bevel, Inset, and feel free to choose whatever corner you'd prefer, and these work with multiple line styles. I personally like the look of this right here, inverse rounded, so I'm going to choose this.
I can also change how far the corner comes out, and I think this looks good right here. In addition, I'm also going to move this just a little bit so it starts right in the corner, so I'll hold ALT as I drag the text in, and that looks good right there. If we zoom out, we can see what this looks like, and this is just a nice little flare here.
Let's now copy this, hitting CTRL C on the keyboard, and let's apply it down on the bottom right-hand side. To do this, I'll hit CTRL V to paste, and we're now going to rotate it using V still and going to the corner here of our path and simply turning it 180 degrees. From here, we'll put it right in the corner, and we're going to add a URL right to the bottom, so we'll utilize our type tool, and let's just drag a text frame here, and we'll type domus.url. We'll then hit CTRL A to copy all, and let's copy the exact same text styling right here, utilizing our eyedropper tool.
To do this, we can come over this text frame, select it, and we'll see that our text has now changed to match. Finally, let's right-align our text, and we're going to now position it within our text frame, utilizing the selection tool, and going to our control bar, we're going to align to the bottom. Additionally, we're also going to change it to green, so if we were to select green right now, we'll see that the actual frame has a green box around it, so let's hit CTRL Z to undo, and then we'll want to make sure that we're editing the color of our text itself, so with this selected and the fill selected, we can now hit green, and now we have our text in green.
Let's hit W to see what this looks like, and if we zoom in, let's make a couple more modifications. First, I think that we want this to be a little bit thicker, so triple-clicking the text, let's move it up to 12 points, and let's also make it bold italic. We can utilize our selection tool and hit W, and I think that looks better, and finally, let's also resize this here.
We're just going to drag it down a bit, so the line is not quite as tall, and let's also drag it to the right. This way, it seems to fit the URL just a little bit more, and if we hit W, I think that looks good. Let's zoom out and hit W to get a holistic view of it, and I like how this is coming along.
Let's hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work, and in the next video, we're going to be working with Data Merge for our addresses. See you there!