515 Dressing up your logo star

- [Voiceover] In this movie we're gonna take our so far unadorned logo star and we're gonna gussy it up here. And I think the most interesting elements are this white border that surrounds everything uniformly, as well as these shadow elements right here. Notice these gradient shadows that are being cast by one logo element onto another. Alright, so the first thing I'm gonna do is create a new layer. And just in case you're interested in shortcuts, you can create a new layer behind the active one by pressing Ctrl + Alt + L, or Cmd + Opt + L on the Mac.

And that's gonna bring up the layer options dialog box. I'm gonna call this guy back, and I'm gonna change his color to brown, and then click OK. Alright, now I'll go ahead and zoom out. And I wanna draw a big rectangle across the entire artboard, so I'll go ahead and select the rectangle tool in the shape tool flyout menu, and then assuming that your smart guides are turned on, you can go ahead and snap into alignment with the corners of the bleed. So I'll drag from one corner to the other. And that gives me a shape with a stroke, which I don't want, so I'll get rid of the stroke by setting the second swatch to none.

And then I'll click in the first swatch and I'll select this default shade of sort of drab brown that's included with any basic RGB document, and notice that it begins with R equals 83, in order to produce this effect here. Alright, and now I'm gonna twirl open this layer inside the layers panel and I'm gonna lock this rectangle just by clicking in this second column. And that way I don't end up messing it up and it basically doesn't get in the way of me working. Alright, the next thing you wanna do is switch to your black arrow tool and then click on any one of these green shapes.

And then select them all by clicking on the select similar objects icon on the right side of the control panel. If that doesn't quite do it for you you might have to click on this down pointing arrowhead and choosing all, meaning all fill and stroke attributes in order to select all of these shapes. Alright, now what we wanna do is expand them outward uniformly in all directions. Now you can't accomplish that using the scale tool incidentally, instead use a special variety of scale command called offset path.

And to get to it you go up to the object menu, choose path, and then choose the offset path command. And I'm looking to offset these paths outward by 24 points. And you can see what that looks like by turning on the preview checkbox. And we end up with this peculiar effect here, but it's gonna work out absolutely great as you'll see. Alright, I'll go ahead and click OK in order to accept that change. And one of the great things about offset path for our purposes is it not only draws these bigger paths, but it also keeps the smaller ones.

And I'm gonna go ahead and fill these shapes with white by clicking on this green fill swatch up here in the control panel and selecting white instead. And then I'll drag this purple square right there on the right side of the layers panel down to the back layer. So that these shapes are now sitting in front of that brown rectangle. Alright, obviously this is not quite the effect we're looking for. We've got some holes and we also have an awful lot of busyness going on here. To get rid of the busyness to fuse things together go up to the window menu and choose path finder.

And one of the great things about the path finder operations when compared with the shape builder, which I know an awful lot of people like, but when you just have a bunch of shapes selected and all you wanna do is fuse them together there's no sense dragging around with this tool when all you have to do is just click the first icon in the first row, which will go ahead and unite all of those shapes together. Alright, I still need to get rid of the holes of the inside however. And that's caused by the fact that I now have a compound path that's indicated by the words compound path on the far left side of the control panel.

So I'm gonna get rid of that function by going up the object menu, choosing compound path, and choosing release. And that goes ahead and releases the compound path to a bunch of independent path outlines, as we can see merely indicated by the word path on the left side of the control panel. And now I'll press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool and I'll Shift + click on this outermost white path, and then I'll press the Backspace key, or the Delete key on the Mac, to get rid of all the other paths on the inside. Alright, now I'll select that big old path there, and what the heck? I'll give it a drop shadow by going up the effect menu, choosing stylize, and then choosing drop shadow.

And I'm just gonna go with the default settings, which you can see listed here. You can see what they look like if I turn on the preview checkbox. So a little bit of a drop shadow there. After which I'll go ahead and click OK in order to accept that change. Alright, now we wanna create those little gradient shadows. And here's how I accomplish that. I'll go ahead and zoom in on this top region of the star, and then I'll switch to the rectangle tool, and I will drag from this intersection right there to this one in order to create a rectangle that's exactly this size, which as you can see in the width and height values there I've got a width of 119.98 points and a height of 38.96 points.

That's actually not that important, I just wanna make sure that this thing is big enough to fit inside of this space. That's coming in on the wrong layer, so I'll just go ahead and drag this brown square up to the purple layer, like so. And then I'll twirl the back layer closed. And I'm gonna change this color for now to black, like so, just so that we can see it. And now I wanna skew it into the proper position. So I'll go ahead and select the sheer tool from the scale tool flyout menu. And then I'll go ahead and click on this bottom left anchor point to set the transformation origin, that little target, and then I'll drag upward on this bottom right point while pressing the Shift key as I drag, so that I'm constraining the angle of my skew to exactly vertical, until I snap into alignment like so.

Alright, now I wanna combine this shape here with the shapes in the background, so I'll switch to my black arrow tool by pressing the V key, and I'll go ahead and click on the purple shape and the green shape above this black shape right there, and I'll copy them by pressing Control + C or Command + C on the Mac. Then I'll go ahead and Shift + click on this black skewed rectangle and I'll once again go to the path finder panel right here and I'll click on one of the more obscure path finders, which is this guy right there, crop. And that's going to end up cropping the purple and green shapes inside of the black one.

At which point I'll go ahead and hide the path finder panel. And you can see what this looks like here, we have some extra stuff going on, a couple of extra white shapes. And they're all grouped together, as you can see by the word group on the far left side of the control panel. So the first thing I need to do is go to the object menu and choose the ungroup command. And then I'll Shift + click on the purple path as well as the green path to deselect them and I'll press the Backspace key, or the Delete key on the Mac, to get rid of the white shapes. Alright, now I'll just go ahead and click and Shift + click on these two shapes and I'll press Ctrl + B, or Cmd + B on the Mac, to paste those original shapes in back of them.

Now what we need to do is select these shapes once again, click and Shift + click, and I'm gonna combine them into a single compound path by going up to the object menu, choosing compound path, and choosing make. And we end up with this effect here. Now I wanna fill these paths with a gradient. So what I'm gonna do here is go to the window menu and choose the gradient command in order to bring up the gradient panel. And I'll expand it as well by clicking on this double arrow icon right here. Make sure your fill is active and then click on the gradient ramp in order to fill the shapes with a gradient.

Alright, now the toughest part here is figuring out the angle of our gradient. We want it to run perpendicularly from this edge right here. So we need to figure out what the angle of that edge is. And you can do that most simply using the line segment tool. So just go ahead and grab that tool. And so I'll go ahead and drag from this anchor point to this one along the base of that compound path. And notice there in the heads up display we don't care about the distance value, the angle value however is 18 degrees. So what we need to do is draw a gradient at a 90 degree angle from that 18 degrees.

And to pull that off just go ahead and press Control + Z, or Command + Z on the Mac, to undo that line, and then change this angle value to 18 plus 90, and then press the Tab key. And you'll see that the gradients are now at precisely the right angle. The problem is they're going in the wrong direction, but you can solve that just by clicking in the reverse gradient icon on the left side of the gradient panel. Alright, now I'm gonna collapse the gradient panel once again. And I'm gonna go up here to the word opacity in the control panel, click on it, and change the blend mode to multiply, like so.

And then we wanna reduce the opacity value to 30%, so that we have a more subtle effect. Alright, now I'm gonna zoom out by pressing Ctrl + zero, or Cmd + zero on the Mac. I now need to rotate these shapes around the star. And the best way to do that is to obviously switch to the rotate tool, and then you wanna find the center of that circle. Do you see it right there? If you can't find it just press Ctrl + Y, or Cmd + Y on the Mac, to switch to the outline mode and you'll find the center at this location. At which point Alt + click, or Opt + click, on that center point and then change the angle value once again to 360 divided by five.

So 360 slash five, press the Tab key, that reconciles to 72 degrees, at which point go ahead and click the copy button in order to duplicate those shapes. And then press Control + Y or Command + Y on the Mac again in order to return to the preview mode. And press Ctrl + D, or Cmd + D on the Mac, as many times as it takes in order to create a total of five gradient shadows. Alright, now press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool and I will click off my path outlines to deselect them.

And that's how you dress up your logo star with a big white border created using the offset path command, as well as a handful of skewed gradient shadows here inside Illustrator.