Transcript:
(LIVELY Guitar Music) – [Instructor]. Hello, and welcome to this Design. Cuts video tutorial Today were looking at installing graphic styles into Illustrator, As usual. I’m using some Design Cuts assets for this video and the ones I’m using are from Retro Supply Company. And it’s the RetroType pack Now. There are a lot of interesting and really fun. Retro styles in this particular pack, and we’re going to look at how to install them. And how you will go ahead and use them. So the first thing to do obviously is to download this zip file. Now if you’re on a Mac, you’ll just double. Click the file if it hasn’t already expanded for you and it’s going to be expanded. On a PC, things are a little different. So what you want to do is to locate and double-click on your zip file, Then? When you get this sort of dialogue appearing, you’ll click here on Extract All Files, And you’ll need to extract them into a folder so that you can get access to them. Once you’ve done that swing over to Illustrator Now inside Illustrator, you’re going to need to create a new document. It doesn’t matter what size that document is. We’re just going to use this for the process of actually installing the graphic styles. Now you’ll need to get access to the graphic styles panel. I’ve got it here in my list, but you can also get to it by choosing Window and then Graphic Styles. The first thing that you’ll want to do is to remove the current set of graphic styles. So click on the very last one and then Shift +. Click on the second one. You can’t actually get rid of the first one, so there’s no point in selecting it because you won’t be able to delete it, but we want to delete all of the rest. Next we want to get access to the graphic styles in the files that we just downloaded. So we’ll click here on the flyout menu and I’ll choose Open Graphic Style Library and then Other Library and we’ll navigate to the location where those expanded files are. Now mine is in My Downloads folder and here is the RetroType folder. So I’ve located the folder. I’m going to navigate through the folder structure until I find the pack that I want to install. Now I’m going to install the Retro 3D one, so I’m selecting that and clicking Open. This is my Graphic Styles panel, and this is the Retro 3D styles. What I have to do is get them from here across to here, but the Illustrator has some pretty strange behaviour here. So let me just explain what’s going to happen. We want to select all of these, so I’m going to click on this one and then Shift +. Click on the last one, But you’ll see that as soon as I clicked on the first one, it got added. So you’re always going to end up with two of the first one that you select, but as long as you know that it’s going to be easy to get rid of it in just a minute. Go to the flyout menu and choose Add to Graphic Styles. So all of these graphic styles are now here, but we’ve got two of the very first ones, So I’m going to locate one of those and click the trashcan here and click yes. So now we’ve got only one of each of these graphic styles. I’m going to close the Retro 3D panel. At this stage, these graphic Styles only belong to this document and if we were to close this document and create a brand new one, we’re going to lose all these graphic styles. So what we have to do before we leave here is actually save them and save them in a location that Illustrator is going to be able to find them next time. We want them! To do this, well click the flyout menu and choose. Save Graphic Style Library and Illustrator will take us to the location where it expects to find these graphic styles in future. So I’m going to call these 3D Retro, but you can call them. Whatever you like and some people like to actually put the designer’s name after them. You can do whatever you like. Just name them so that they’re named in a way that you’re going to understand what’s in them later on, I’ll click Save. Now we don’t need this document any longer. So I’m going to close it and I’m not saving it. So let’s create another brand new document. When we go to the Graphic Styles panel, you’ll see that the graphic styles are the exact same graphic styles as we had in the previous document that we opened. These are the defaults that are shipped with Illustrator, and that’s always going to be the case. So let me just type a piece of text and we’re going to go and get the new ones that we’ve just installed. It’s pretty cold around here at the moment, so I’m going to type the word SNOW. I hold the Shift key as I enlarge it so that my type is scaled very nicely. So let’s go and get our graphic styles and we’ll do that through this flyout menu and choose open Graphic Style Library. Now, although Retro 3D is here, that’s not the one that I just saved, and it’s not going to be there next time we reopen. Illustrator, So don’t count on that one always being there what you will need to do. And what is the most reliable way of getting access to those? Styles is to go to User Defined. Because that’s where you save them to And here is the 3D Retro. So this is the set that I just saved Ill. Click on it to open it up. Now I can select over my type and apply a style to it by just clicking on the particular style. Now it might look like this process is quite cumbersome, but you’re always going to be able to find your styles through this flyout menu. You’re also going to be able to find them through this Graphic Style Libraries Menu. If you click down here on User Defined, you can also access them that way. What we’ve done in this process is to make sure that these 3D Retro Styles are always where Illustrator can find them, because otherwise they would have just been in your Download’s Folder. Illustrator wouldn’t have known that they were there and you would have had to find them manually every time. Now a couple of things about these graphic styles. Let’s just go and create a rectangle that is filled with black and so it has no stroke at all. Now, if I select this rectangle and click here on the graphic style, the graphic style is going to replace any formatting on that rectangle. Let me just undo that. If instead I hold down the Alt key on a PC option on a Mac and click on this graphic style. Then the graphic style is going to be added to the shape, and in this case, it hasn’t been highly successful because the shape already had a fill to it. But in some cases, you may find that, adding a graphic style is actually an important thing to do rather than replacing it. For example. Let’s go back to our just black-filled rectangle, one of the default styles that is shipped with. Illustrator is a Drop Shadow Now. If you just click on this to apply it, nothing happens. In fact, your entire shape has lost. Its formatting, but if you. Alt or Option, click on it, Then it’s added, and that makes sense in that context, so you will want to be aware of that different behaviour because some graphic styles you may want to add some graphic styles, you may want to operate as a replacement. Now, another thing to be aware of. Is that sometimes your graphic? Style’s panel isn’t going to look like this because there are a couple of ways of showing your graphic styles. You can use a square or you can use text, and if you choose to use text as a preview, then things are going to look different. The styles are exactly the same, and they’re going to work exactly the same way. It’s just that they’re going to look different in this dialogue. Now one final thing to consider is what happens if you scale a shape or a piece of text that has a graphic style applied to it. So here I’m just going to enlarge this one quite a bit, and you’ll see that the edge effects have also got a whole lot larger. Now if I were to have created my text at this size to begin with and then applied the style to it. It would look very different. Let me just go and reapply this style. And now you’ll see that the edge effects are much smaller. Now the reason why they got so much bigger is the setting in Illustrator. Now, on the PC, you’ll go to Edit and then Preferences On the Mac, you would choose Illustrator and then Preferences, and you’re going to General, And there’s this option called Scale Strokes and Effects. And if you’ve got it enabled, then Strokes and Effects are going to get bigger or smaller if you scale an object, And if you’ve got a style applied that has Strokes or Effects, then they’re going to get bigger or smaller Now. If you don’t want that to happen either, you reapply the style once you’ve resized your object or disabled this option so that you can make things bigger or smaller without the Strokes and Effects growing or shrinking with the scale of the object. So that’s how you can install graphic styles in Illustrator and it works the same on the Mac and the PC. I hope that you’ve enjoyed learning these Illustrator techniques. Let us know what you think in the comments below and give us a thumbs up if you enjoyed this tutorial. Until next time, I’m Helen Bradley for Design Cuts.