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Lesson Info

Draw Lot Of Shapes At Once InDesign Gridify Live Distribute

Hi there in this video, we're going to do cool things with gratify where we drag out. Was that one image? No, no, it's a couple of images all at once. All the same size plus things like this where I draw the line and I grab it and drag it down and then I make loads of versions in between. I'm not sure what I'm doing there, but let's learn how to do that. Plus a few other cool little tricks here in in design. Okay, So first thing is create a blank document. I've got no margins. I've got us letter, half letter. Okay. And I've got a landscape, any old shape you like? We're going to make it. I've saved it as raw cycles catalog. Okay, So you use the gratified tool, you pick any shape. Okay, so rectangle ellipse or polygon, anything you want? Start dragging out with your mouse. Keep your mouse held down so don't let go like that. Hold it down and before you let go. Okay, use your up arrow and then the right arrow and that will just keep adding circles. Okay, going back the other way. So left...

hand down, we'll get rid of them. Okay, just have a little practice with how many you need. Okay, you can drag out loads of them and then just keep dragging out with your mouse. Hold shift if you want to be perfect circles. Okay, And let go when you're ready, we're gonna have lots of little circles or squares or stars. Okay, I'm gonna delete those. I'm gonna grab the rectangle tool and do something. I'm gonna drag it out. Okay? And then tap right twice and up. Once. I've got kind of a group of six. Now see the spaces in between them. You can adjust as well. All you need to do is hold down on a Mac, the command key or on a pc. The control key. Okay, so holding my I haven't let go of my mouse. I'm also holding down the command or control key and use the up arrow. You'll see it's because the space is more in there in the middle and down arrow gets rid of them. Just keep tapping the down arrow. It's a bit of finger gymnastics, you're like, oh this is really that easy. Maybe not. Okay, but it's cool. Gratifies awesome. Okay left and right. Does the gaps horizontally? I would say horizontally. I mean vertically. Okay, so you can do a nice kind of like a grid like that. Delete that, dry out another one. Another thing you can do is I'm going to make the same kind of cube shapes. I'm gonna switch to this one here. The gap tool. The tool you never use. Ok. The fourth tool down and its job is you can see I can click and drag and it starts adjusting the space in between different boxes. Okay, so it's just a really handy way of like keeping the exact same measurements but moving things around. And you can also hold down a couple of keys to get some other tricks. Hold down the shift key. Okay and it will just move one of these. Okay, another key is holding the key on a Pc or the option key on a Mac and you can see it kind of like changes it to moving like a huge kind of connected chunk. Another shortcut is hold down the command key on a Mac or control key on a Pc. Okay, and you can see I can close them up or open them up. Okay, so a couple little shortcuts you'll never remember exactly but smash away at the keys when you got the gap too and it's really easy to kind of eventually find the one you want. Okay, it's really good for handy for margins. Okay say you've got some logos all lined up. You just need to push the margins away a little bit. You can see I can kind of do it that holding different keys gives me different effects, they all look the same effect. But you can grab all of these and just kind of move them up. Okay that is the gap tool used with the gratified tool. Another thing you can use with the gratified tools, I'm gonna select delete and delete them is you can do with text boxes which is handy, grab the text box. Okay, start dragging out and I'm gonna drag it all the way across and use my right arrow just like with the rectangle tool. I get boxes. But these guys are all linked text boxes so if I go to type and go to fill with placeholder text genius. Alright, so it's worked with shapes and its work with text. What if it would work with images and it totally does and this is probably its best use. I'm not sure. I waited to the end to show you but go to exercise files, go to, go to and go to image 126. I clicked on the first image here held shift, grabbed the people on the sixth one and it selects them all. So I got them all selected a little side note before we do the main event trick is that, can you see six is in the brackets there. If I use my arrow keys to tap along, just use the right arrow, it will toggle through the images if I click on right, okay. For some reason mine doesn't update used to there it goes, it updates. Its a bit weird. Head down yours will, mine used to work and stop working. So just use your left and right arrows and you can just decide on which image to print out, you know, to drop in first. That's why that's quite useful. Okay, so if yours is working, mine's not there. It is, it switches out. I've got to give my mouse a wiggle for some reason. So that's one thing. So what I'd like to do is drag out, I'm going to click and drag out but before I let go, we're going to do our gratify tool exactly like we did before. This one's got a fixed height and width because that's where the images came from. But if I use the right arrow you can see, I can do my kind of like up up one across to okay to get my images here. I can remember hold down command and use up and down Okay to change the spacing between them if I wanted to. But that's gonna work for me. I'm going to do something that looks like that and yeah, that is a super quick and easy way just to dump them all on the page. They're all the same size, which is great rather than trying to import them all and scale them all down together or change them all separately. One thing I might do though is that they've kind of fit in there, but they've got this kind of like white area on the outside with them all selected. Right click any of them. If you're on a Mac, hold down control and click any of them. If you don't have a right click and go to fitting and this is the one we want fit frame to content. So that shortcut. They're not a sexy shortcut, but it's one of the ones that I use quite often watch this when I hit it. Okay, it just wraps the frame around the box so that's just a really quick way I guess to make them snap to the edges. That particular one just as a side note and works great for text boxes as well to say you're drawing something and this is my title. Okay. And I just don't like all this area around here. I don't need that exact same shortcut command option C Okay, We'll just wrap the text box around it, which is handy. And if you're on a pc, that's control C. Okay. And you want to know or just remember right click, go to fitting and fit frame to content will work there awesome. Okay, next part of that kind of whole shifting things around gap tool gratified thing is let's go to page two and something called live distribute. Okay, so let's draw out a rectangle. I'm going to use my gratify to make it into say there's many of them. Okay. And what I'd like to do is let's say, I want to kind of adjust the spacing between them all. Okay, I've got a couple of options. I could kind of like drag him out. Okay, and then drag you out to be the same distance and live. And what do you call it? Smart guides will try to automatically, you see Gozo magic, do you mean these sizes and you see little green arrows match the sizes up, but then you've got to kind of stretch the top ones out and you want to kind of disperse them perfectly. So with the more selected the shortcuts, a little hard to remember. It's a weird shortcut. Okay, so you start dragging okay, and that's not what I want. I always want the gaps to get bigger, right? And so if I start dragging, if I hold down the space bar tool after I started dragging some, holding, holding, dragging with my mouse, then hold space bar. Cool. Huh? So it's my little squares and just get to play with the spacing between. I'm going to undo the same with the bottom, remember drag first and while I'm dragging holding space bar. Okay, it will, it will kind of separate them out and and great for the bottom, right as well, so start dragging and then hold space bar and you can kind of live distribute all of these guys here hold shift and it will kind of lock the height and width. Just a really nice way of opening up gaps and can be text boxes, can be images, anything you like live distribute if you hold space bar first and then start dragging you end up moving this around or going into the like zoom preview thing, so make sure drag first, then hit space bar. Another thing we're going to do in this kind of like super fantabulous drawing modes is I'm going to actually, I don't want these boxes, I want you guys to be on actually page to page one. So I'm not going to go to page one now. There you go. Page one zoom in. Okay. And we're gonna do some lines. So grab the line tool. Okay. And I'm gonna make sure my stroke is set to black and I'm going to have the fill set to Okay, so I'm gonna have a two point stroke. Okay, So it's just going to draw a line like that. So what I'm going to draw is I'm going to hold shift while I'm dragging. It gives me a straight line. And another thing I'm going to do is I want to duplicate of it. So I'm gonna grab my black arrow and you may or may not know this already. If you hold bulky on a Pc or option counter MAC while you're dragging, you can get a duplicate. Okay? So if you just drag it obviously without that key just moves it around. But if you hold always dragging it gives you another version. Ah and this is what brings us into this next cool little trick is if I do that. Okay. And I'm holding old to drag it but I haven't let go of my mouth yet. Okay, so I haven't let go. Haven't let go use your up arrow, like gratify. Oh, there's one in the middle there. It's a little hard to see, I guess in this video because it's only faint. Another one. Another one. Another one. They go into this weird line. Don't worry about those lines. But look, I get to kind of like, I'm pressing up loads and I just get loads to join them to let go of the mouse. And it's a really easy way instead of like maybe Stefan repeater, What is it called in here? It's called? It's called step and repeat. You might have done it in illustrator. Okay, so super handy. Super useful. I'm going to draw out a box and the same thing. I'm going to give it a fill color, ugly full color and hold down old, drag it across and before I let go of my mouse up key and it joins the two. I can hit the right key as well. Okay, and it gives me kind of like a gratify thing going on with that object. Don't use that one so much. But you play around with it, drag it out holding or option on a Mac and use the up key and maybe the right key and get lots of multiples of it to fill in the gaps. All right, so that's gonna be it for super fantastic drawing techniques. I'm now going to follow on with our little tutorial. Okay, so it's gonna be a bit of a production video so you can continue watching or skip to the next one because we're gonna import some images and build out our home page because we want to actually end up with something nice. So I'm gonna go to file place and I'm going to go to go to drawing, find cover image. I'm gonna drag this one out from this edge. Okay, to this edge, it's a little big. So I'm gonna grab my black arrow if you're bored already, you can move on. And so I got this, I want to use my little line tool trick. Okay, so I'm gonna drag a line that goes holding shifts so it's a perfect line. I'm gonna fill mine with actually white. It's gonna be two points. Okay, I'm going to drag it so it's kind of in the middle of the document somewhere like that holding bolt down on a PC option on a Mac and to drag it down to the bottom. Okay, and before I let go of the mouse, I'm going to use my up arrow because I want this kind of like stripy eighties. I want to say kind of line going maybe past their great along with the capacity of all of these guys. I just want this kind of like stripey line thing going in the background. Why am I doing it? It's mainly So I have an excuse to use that little line trick. We're gonna bring in a logo. So nothing selected, bring in the logo dot ai and drag it out. So it'll be in the middle here And on page two, I want to kind of tidy this up. I'm gonna grab my type tool. This is going to be my bike catalog catalog. No idea if that's about right, I'm that bad. I'm going to change the color because I want to put this in the background. So I'm gonna draw this. I'm gonna grab the eyedropper tool. So instead of the color theme to which we've used, the eyedropper tool just steals colors. You can steal it from images. I'm gonna steal from this kind of color here. Let's put it around my strokes. There's a little arrow here. He toggles between being the pink on the stroke. Can you see it to the pink now, being in the film. That's what I want. Okay, so I want you and do I want anything else? I am not sure. Yeah, let's do A slash E. Things. I'm going to copy and paste this. I'm totally now just trying to make it look. Okay, I'm gonna rotate it around for the wt wt is the preview key. Okay, It just gets rid of all the background stuff if you haven't already done that. And I'm gonna grab him, bring my filter the front. Okay, and over here, I'm going to switch it to a slightly darker color often it's easy to go to C. M. Y. K. To switch this around because you can just drag that k slider up a little bit. Okay, I'm gonna take both of them and send them to the back and then hit the w key again and that's what I'm kind of trying to do. All right. That feels like it's got a white stroke around the outside, does it? Or is it just a bit small? Come here. Yeah, it's just not attached to the you just cute. It could be bored, you can hear the dog in the background. This is such an amazing video then. Alright, bye catalog doing it, just finishing some basics. Alright, it's not that good. Alright, so that's gonna be it for this video. Finally get into the next one. We're gonna do some cool stuff with strokes and arrows and stuff. Let's go to that one.