Understanding Libraries

- So, once you have your exercise files, you're going to need to get these into a CC Library. That makes your assets available for you and your invited team members wherever you are, whichever application you're in. So, let's get in a sense of what that's like and create the library for our course. I'm actually going to start up by opening up quite a few of these .psd's. In fact, every single .psd in here, with the exception of the sketch .psd, is what I'm going to open.

So, I've just got those selected, I just command click those. You, of course, control click them on a PC. Then it's a right-click, and I'm going to choose Open With, and Adobe Photoshop CC, just there. And they'll all open. And now, I need to go to my Libraries Panel. If you can't see that, it's in the Window menu, under Libraries, just here. And so what I can do is create a new library. So, if I just come across to the fly-out menu here, I can choose Create New Library and I'm going to call this Accelerated Design.

Then just click Create. Then, all I need to do is with my move tool here in Photoshop is drag these images in, it appears there and it'll stay that way. So, I can close that one up. I can drag this one in and I can close that one up. I can drag this one in and you can see the emerging pattern, just there. Drag this one in and it'll close up. And they're all taking on these names because that was the name of the layer they're on. And you can see I can do that with the background.

So, that's the Photoshop files taken care of, let's now take care of the Illustrator files. So, if I just go back out to my finder here, I'm just going to double-click this massife.ai, and just here I've got all the different logo components. You really don't need to add all of these if you don't want to, in fact, basically the ones that are used mainly are this full color roundel here and this version with the white-out word, massife, just there. You might also find that you get something telling you, when you open it, that you need to update a type kit font, and that's just fine.

Just do that, allow that to happen. And, you'll need a CC subscription to do that, otherwise work with something of your own and it will look slightly different in here. But let me just go to my Libraries panel. Again, if it wasn't around, you go Window, and then Libraries, just here. Navigate to the Accelerated Design Library and then I'm just drag this roundel in like so. And you'll see that it's got a name just here, and ordinarily, Illustrator will just call this artwork, 1, 2, 3, and so on.

The reason mine picks up a name is that I've bothered in the Layers panel to actually name these groups. And that's a small but important step, I think. It's good, it's organized, and so I've just got something where previously it said Group, double-clicked on it and renamed it like so. Makes it so much easier if you're using a workflow like this to just be able to drag things in, and know that you're getting exactly the right names, that you've got a convention for it. Then, happy days, you've got all of those things. So, there you are.

You can just add things to those libraries, and that will sort you out from the remainder of this. You don't need to add anything from Indesign, you can if you want at the Photoshop sketch from the exercise files as well, just as you did with the backpacks, and everything there. But, otherwise, once you've got everything in the library, if you were sharing in reality with somebody else, of course, you won't share this one, but if you were, you would just choose Collaborate, just here, and that would be available to everybody that was collaborating with you on that.