Easy grid creation - Illustrator Tutorial

- [Instructor] Every designer learns how to use grids to compose and organize a design and base a layout on a structured, well-defined system. But not every designer knows about the easy methods provided in Illustrator to quickly create custom grids. So let's jump into it. So we're going to just grab the rectangle tool and we're going to just create an overall shape. Now, I want this a specific size, and this is where the control panel comes into play. Almost got it where I want, I want it to be 15 wide and specifically nine inches tall like that. And oops, we want this to be 15 like that. There we go. Now with that set, I'm going to go to the alignment palette and I'm going to just align it so it's directly in the center of our document. Now here's the cool feature, and I'm going to go up to Object, I'm going to go to Path, and we're going to go down to what's called Split into Grid, I'm going to click it, it's going to open up this window, and it will allow us to tell or apply these settings to the vector shape we have created. So it's separated by rows and columns. So in terms of rows, I want a total of four rows, and then in terms of column, I want a total of six columns. Now if we click Preview, we can see these taking place. So it's dividing this shape up evenly. But I also want to have a nice continuity of gaps in between all these shapes. And so this is where gutter comes in. They refer to it gutter, just think of gaps between the vector objects. And here I want to set my gaps to an eighth of an inch. So I'm going to do 0.125, like that. You can see those gaps created in 0.125 here. So now we have all these gaps in between the shapes and the continuity is intact. This looks good with everything set now, I'll just click OK. And now if we go back to the desktop, these are now individual shapes. Now, there's one thing I want to show you that by default you should have turned on in Adobe Illustrator. And if you go to the Pathfinder palette, we'll go to the options menu and we're going to go to Pathfinder Options, Open this up, turn on Remove redundant points. Will this remove all redundant points in context of creating vector art? No. If you're on a curved line and you add a redundant point or you're doing shape building and you're combining shapes, at times, you're going to get redundant points still, even though this is turned on. So it's kind of ironic, but for what we're going to do here, it's going to make the process a lot better. And actually before we do that, let's not turn it on, we'll turn it on afterwards and I'll click OK, I want to decide how I want to break this grid up and utilize it. And on this one, I think what I want to do is I want to take these shapes here and I just want to combine them with these shapes. So I'll take these and combine them with these shapes. And if I select all of this and I go to Unite, it's now a square shape, but notice the extra anchor points you get. So let's go ahead and undo that and leave it at this point, we'll go back to the Pathfinder palette and the options menu to Pathfinder Options. And we'll turn on the Remove Redundant Anchor Points and click OK. With these shapes still selected, I'll unite 'em again, and notice you don't get those in anchor points. So it will clean up your art as you're building, specifically shape building if you turn on that feature under the Pathfinder options menu. It really does help. So I'm going to do this on a couple more. Maybe I want a more kind of horizontal shape here. We'll do that. And I think I want this one to combine with this one down below so we have a vertical shape like this. And all of these I would go through and set up this grid however I want, but these would be the shapes I'm going to do. Let's go ahead and jump to the complete grid, the way I want it set up like this, and this is where you might want to add some rounds, I could have left them straight, but I think it'd look better if we go ahead and add some rounding to this. So I'm just going to add not a huge round, just a subtle one. So I'm going to point this, kind of pull it out here, and I think something right about there would look good like that. And what is this ideal for? Well, anytime you need a grid, in this case, I was working on a brand grid of a client's final brand identity. And so if I turn on this layer now you can see how I've dropped in certain brand assets, the primary brand logo here and the lockup with the type. We have below that is a badge design. Here we have the colors, the two primary brand colors for this brand. I might select this one and fill this one with a pattern like that. Or I might take this shape in the grid, take a photo where I've mocked up the merchandise, this is going to be a line of clothing, and we'll go ahead and mass that into the shape. Now, notice when I mass, and I'll just point this out because it's just something you should set up on your own. And that is I went to, instead of going to Object and going to Clipping Mask, and make notice, I have an F1 key, and that's because it's a lot faster to use keyboard shortcuts. So you might want to consider those kind of workflow methods you do on a regular basis are great ones to turn into a keyboard shortcut so you can speed up your creative process. Let's go over one other way you can use this kind of grid feature, and we'll turn on this layer here. And this is using another feature that's very similar to it, it's just a little bit different. So we're going to start off with the same methodology of selecting our shape, going to Object, going to Path, and going to Split Into Grid. Once we're here, we're going to set it up a little differently. We're going to use three rows, and we're going to do four columns instead of six. And in terms of adding a gap, or as they call it a gutter, we're not going to do that. We're just going to leave it here. I'm going to turn this on, so you can see it just created a grid of shapes here. And we're going to click OK. Now, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go ahead and select this, and we're going to go ahead and kind of combine the grid feature that we just did with another feature. And on that one, we're going to go ahead and go to here, and I'm going to go ahead and color this this magenta color without an outline. And then I'm going to go to the Select menu, and I'm going to go down and select Start Global Edit. Well, what is this? Well, it will take this first shape you have selected, knowing that you want to apply it to the other objects on your art board here. And if we go to the direct select tool, and we're going to start rounding this, and I'll round it like this, but I'm going to use the arrow keys to toggle into the different kinds of rounds. You have the kind of beveled round and you have the chamfered, and then you have the regular round. I want it to be this bevel, and I'm going to go here and I'm going to create a shape like this. And notice it applies that same methodology to all the other shapes. That's how it works. So it's really, really kind of cool. So all we have to do now is kind of click out. If I go ahead and select this and select all these other shapes now, I can go ahead and just color 'em the same. I can select everything, group it. I can make a copy, Command + C, Command + F. I have that set up as a keyboard shortcut because I'm always making a clone. When I used Macromedia Freehand for 15 years, they had a command for cloning a shape that still doesn't exist in Illustrator so I baked my own and recorded an action, and I use it all the time. So we're going to do this, I'm going to just recolor it, instead of magenta we'll do a nice blue, and we'll go to the Transparency palette and we'll go to Multiply. And that's how easy it is to create something more unique, utilizing two different functionalities and combining them together. So for years, I created grids manually because frankly, the functionality I shared in this movie is kind of hidden within a pull down menu and isn't a forward-facing tool like those shown in the toolbar, for example. When a friend showed me this functionality years ago, my response was simply, "Why am I only learning about this now?" It had been like 15 years I'd used Illustrator and didn't know that feature existed. So in my opinion, as a creative, I don't think it's ever too late to learn new things.