Transcript:
Hello, thank you for watching. In this short little video we’re gonna go over a couple tools in Adobe Illustrator that a lot of people aren’t familiar with, but they’re really powerful when developing logos, so the first thing is going to be flattened, transparency and the second thing is going to be expand appearance. So what the heck are those things? So let’s say you have a logo and you’re building it up and you’re going pretty fast because you want to not hinder the creative process as you should and so with that, you end up having various lines overlapping each other and just creating a visual, appealing, visually appealing logo, and so this is all fine and dandy, but let’s say you wanted to place this logo on a black background, for example, or let’s say a blue background. Let me just change this to black real fast, so you can kind of see. So what would happen if I tried to place this on this logo? Well, let me put it ahead of it. First you’ll see it’s got all these white lines, and it’s not the actual correct logo like these should be negative space. So how do you do that correctly and then let’s say. I wanted to switch the entire logo to a different color like black. Well, right now! I can’t do that. You can see, there’s a lot of funkiness going on so that’s. What these two tools do so the first one that you need to be aware of is that flatten transparency? So what you do is you come over here to the the direct selection tool and you’re going to select all of the objects in question, just like this and now. I’m going to actually move my mouse outside of the screen right now. Because the window that’s filming, it doesn’t go this high and I’m going to select in the top menu object. You can see it pop up right here. And then there’s this thing that’s called flattened transparency. It’s a menu item. I just need you to trust me. That it’s there, its right, It’s three things above create trim marks. You click flatten transparency, and now this little pop-up appear the default options are pretty good. I would just go to okay, and now you can kind of see. It kind of breaks up all of this stuff. So the next thing you want to do is come back up to object again and then go to a flattened or let me see your expand. Sorry, so you want to go to expand, and once you go to expand what that essentially does, is it just kind of breaks apart all the different layers and so the final thing that you want to do is come over here to the Pathfinder and go to the divide tool. So if I select all these options again, I can come over here to divide and see how it kind of made all those lines go away. I’m gonna hit undo so you can see that again hit divided and it kind of breaks it all up and so now it actually broke up every single aspect of this tool so again, the first thing I did was flatten transparency, then expand, and then now I go to divide and now check out how cool this is so now everything is kind of broken up, and so what you’d want to do in this case is you could actually come in here and you could delete all the stuff that isn’t being used very simply just like this. Oh, not like that, all the negative space. And then you can merge things together. So if I select this layer, I hold shift. I select this layer if I come over here to my shape modes in the Pathfinder window right here, This says unite and it will merge it into one. Let me do that again there. So you have to actually select over the line and so this is really cool, because now I can just select this. I’m getting one step closer, just being able to select an object and just change the color. So I’m almost there, so let’s see what this looks like if I select it at all. And if I wanted to make it black, you can see all the areas that still exist. So this is kind of fun. It’s like a little puzzle. You can actually just come in here and you just select directly on the part that you want to get rid of just like this. If you can’t see it, you just kind of hover over, so you can go, oh! I’m going to delete this part. This part this far, this part you can select right here. Select in the middle of the shape right there and then select right here. You can see this little guy. Get rid of that and you just, you know. Clean it up! Delete all the extra lines. Get your shapes in there, and you know if it needs more work, if when you go to select everything If the random areas fill up with unwanted shapes. And so what I mean by that is if I come like this, and if I go select this, and if I go red, and if there’s a bunch of weird stuff, then it’s not good and as you can see. This is pretty good. I deleted all the extra stuff you can see. I got one little funky guy up here, so I’m just gonna do a little trick where I just select both anchor points and then I’m just gonna drag them in. Just get rid of it. I’m gonna do the same thing with this. Both anchor points drag it straight in. Just get rid of it real fast, so that’s all fine and dandy. You also notice there’s a few different shapes. So if we wanted to merge those, we do that same process, we’d come up. We’d select both of these. We’d come up to unite and then it kind of merges it into one you’ll notice. We still kind of got a little straggler here. I would use the negative tool, the delete Anchor Point and just delete the anchor points. Just like this, okay. Those are not anchors. So I’ll do that like that. Clean that up and I think we got. Do we have any more floaters? Nope, so that’s fine and so what you want to do is unite this whole thing, so let’s unite this thing boom. So now we have one complete shape that we can just select, we can change to any color we want and we can place it on any background, and so this is the the correct protocol when you’re doing print ready logos that need to be able to be placed on any any surface. You want to get it completely cleaned up just like this with the negative space, and so now this can actually be printed in one color. Obviously, if you wanted multiple colors, you would just do what you normally. Would you just select the various areas like this, and you just changed the colors as needed and so the beautiful thing about this. Let’s come back to the whole point of it all if I want to place this on a shape. Tada, and now I can just place it on anything and none of that stuff is there. I can just change it to white real fast. You don’t need to worry about changing the stroke because there are no strokes. It’s just one solid United shape, so that’s how you take advantage of the expand tool, the flatten transparency and the various Pathfinder tools, including divide. And you night. I hope that was helpful. I’m Shane Michael with and creative and thank you for watching.