Typographic Poster Design Tutorial in Illustrator (Part 1)

hello Gary Simon up design course comm today is February 3rd with our 33rd video of the year and today we are going to design what's called a type of graphic poster so what is that well one it's a poster and two it's based around type pretty simple so we're going to use the initials DC for design cores you can use whatever you want we're going to use Adobe Illustrator CC to do this and it's going to be a two part two video series so will I get it the initial part done today and then we'll finish it up tomorrow so as always check out design course comm and subscribe here on YouTube if you haven't yet already so if you need access to the project files to kind of see what I did there available for free in the description below alright so I this is a preview of what we're going to design all right so let's get started go to file new in adobe illustrator we'll call it typographic poster 16 inches by 20 inches so make sure that is 20 inches over there everything else can be left the same CMYK 300 et cetera alright so let's start off by making our pattern we'll take the rectangle tool and we'll hold shift and just draw right around there I mean you don't have to be perfect that doesn't really matter so I basically this is just a square it has a black back stroke with a white fill we can get rid of the fill we don't need that I it's just one pixel so let's take this go to object pattern make alright this little dialog box comes up and I want that anymore so if that won't happen again and we'll leave it at 5 by 5 for the copies obviously this is what we're working with we're not going to be keeping this square it's just gonna help us see I it'll help us make the pattern basically so alright what we want to do we will zoom up with our magnifying glass hole and you know me but a little bit more and so anything that we do inside this square the reason these are dimmed out is because we have dim copies to 50% so it just kind of lets us differentiate between you know that active basically pattern square thing or whatever between the copies so we'll leave that like that so I'm gonna take the pen tool and I'm going to click right around at the top portion of the square and next parts going to be kind of tricky I've done this a couple times and it's actually been quite irritating so look kind of around the center yeah you don't have to be specific or perfect or anything and then come down back here so we're just left clicking and dragging these points alright okay so let us at this point go ahead and take the direct selection tool which is this one up here and we could kind of see if you hold alt and use your scroll wheel you can zoom out easily our goal is to get this this basically connected over here I so let's go ahead and zoom up again so the goal is like I said we want these two to kind of just flow into each other all right so I'll just adjust we can't adjust these points because they're they don't really exist so that's just one thing to note here so what I'm trying to do is visualize kind of like a smooth curve that goes in between these two and obviously you know you're adjusting these points you know however you think they will work best all right so let's go ahead and hide that square layer right here in the layers panel and now what we want to do is create another point all right now I'm going to take both of these and increase the stroke okay that's at a hundred percent now I know what I want to do is take the ellipse tool and will come out right around there you know just something that's kind of like a pattern I I think that will work out pretty decently okay all right so once you're done what you want to do is take I we can just you can name it whatever you want I'm just gonna leave it a new pattern I'm just gonna hit done and then I'm going to take the rectangle tool and just go basically the size of the document and we will click on that all right so that's our pattern it's filling this in here and it is basically transparent once again I I want to go back if you ever want to edit your your pattern you can just double click it over here in the swatches and I'm gonna make an adjustment we'll go to object path look you got to select them all first object path and outline stroke it done all right so now what we want to do is I'm going to move this above this top layer and yeah it doesn't have a fill that's why we can still see it I I was that the actual I'm sorry what we want to do is duplicate this rather so ctrl C and ctrl F and then make it black and then take the opacity down just to 90% so now we can just barely see our background right here all right so now what I'm going to do is go ahead and I'm going to zoom out here alright so I will take this right here this is our pattern and hit ctrl C and ctrl F to duplicate that and I'm gonna double click on our pattern over here and I'm gonna click on save a copy that brings up this window so I'll just leave it at new pattern - we'll hit OK and okay so I'm gonna hit I I'm gonna hit done over here and I'm gonna double click on the copy that we created and I'm going to get rid of that circle and then just hit done all right so we're going to take the one that we duplicated and change it to this and if I just temporarily hide that or rather lock it so we can't select it now if we move this thing you can see it's staying right there so we have to fix that let me get back here all right so to do that we just have to go to object expand hit okay and now once we move it you know we can kind of see how oops I think I selected the background by accident the other one because the fill is transparent so now if we move this over damn it okay with selecting wrong one let me zoom up here and then we can go ahead and take our transparency of this one just bring it down to around 20 percent and it just gives us an extra element of design I guess you could say all right now I'm going to zoom out here and then real quickly I just want to get the actual text that we're going to use and so I'm just going to click left click once and I'm gonna type in D we can't see it because it's tiny so I'm gonna hold I'm gonna scale this up a lot we will make it white and the font I want to use is no it's not that it's one of these around here there we are Museo slab 900 it's big thick kind of serif font and so for our for the typographic portion it's just going to be DC for me that's short for design course you can use whatever you want and then I'm just going to copy that by ctrl C and ctrl F mu this thing down you can use shift to make it on a diagonal course and I'm just going to change it to a capital C and I want these to intersect kind of right around there and then for just one final thing I will take the rectangle tool and just kind of come in right around here kind of want it to intersect the characters just a little bit and let go we'll go to gradient or you could just go up here same thing and hit the X right here to take away the fill we'll give it a stroke make that a little bit thicker and so you'll see what this looks like 66% now we'll go to object outline stroke and then I want to get rid of I want a little bit of a I guess you could say a margin or a padding between and I want them intersecting so we could take the square tool or the rectangle tool and right around there will work and I want to take both of these and if I just hold shift so we have the both of those layer selected we'll go to window Pathfinder and we want to choose - front and so that will automatically subtract that Square portion we got to do the same thing over here as well so I will take the square tool again right around here and then do it again right around here selecting both oops I had the wrong one uh-oh I think I select the wrong one here - all right well let's give me a pinion hold on a second okay so basically if you take this all you need it's a group right now you need to select the one that we're trying to work with specifically inside of that group which is right here so take that hit control and select also this right here there we go all right so we're already at about 12 minutes I think that's a good time to kind of end it we can adjust this real quick get that over there yeah we can fix that at the end so it's not kind of hanging off all right so that is it for now I tomorrow what we'll work on is kind of cutting these these characters up and give them a little bit of color so all right I will see you then you