From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

681 Connecting the gizmos wirelessly

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

681 Connecting the gizmos wirelessly

- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to finish off the artwork by connecting all of these devices wirelessly, by which I mean we're going to add these WiFi and Bluetooth icons. And as it turns out, I've gone ahead and drawn these icons in advance. I'm thinking of showing how this works next week but for now, you just want to go ahead and click on the WiFi icon, notice that it's trapped inside of a clipping mask, and then shift click on the Bluetooth icon, you do not need to select the text. Then go up to the edit menu and choose the copy command, or of course you can press control+C or command+C on the Mac. Now a couple of things I want you to notice, first of all, these objects are confined to this layer called wireless right here inside the layers panel, and second, if I were to press control+0 or demand+0 on the Mac to zoom out, you can see that I've already put these icons exactly where I want them inside of the context of the larger art board. And so I'm going to switch over to my document so far and go up to the edit menu and choose the paste in front command, but before I do, I'm going to make one modification here. I'm going to return to the layers panel, click on the flyout menu icon in the top right corner of the panel, and turn on paste remembers layers, and that way when I paste these objects, I will put them on an independent layer automatically. So I'll go ahead and choose that command to turn it on, and by the way, you know it's on when you see a check mark in front of the command, and then I'll go up to the edit menu and choose paste in front, or you could just press control+f or command+f on a Mac, and that goes ahead and pastes those guys exactly in place as we're seeing right here. All right so, I've gone ahead and zoomed in a little bit too far, and I did that by control space bar dragging, that would be command space bar dragging on the Mac. Notice they've added a wireless layer to the top of the layers panel. I actually want it to appear below the film layer so that the Bluetooth icon is not white, but rather it's that pale shade of violet, so ill go ahead and drag and drop the layer below the film layer like sow. All right now you want to click off the icons, so deselect them and then select the Bluetooth icon by itself. Go ahead and scroll all the way down to the bottom of the layers panel and turn on the guides layer right there. Then, go over here to the rotate tool, click and hold on it, and choose the reflect tool from the flyout menu, and then position your cursor at the intersection of these two guides right here and alt or option click to bring up the reflect dialog box. You want the axis to be set to vertical. If you turn on a preview check box, you can see the operation applied on a fly, after which you want to click the copy button to make a copy of that icon. Now I'll press and hold the control key or the command key on the Mac to temporarily gain access to the black arrow tool, and click somewhere on the wireless icon to select it. If you click like sow and you don't end up selecting anything, then just try again, you want to locate that triangle that represents the clipping mask, and then go ahead and release the control key or the command key on the Mac. To return control to the reflect tool, position your cursor at the intersection of those two guidelines, alt or option click to bring up the reflect dialog box and change the access to horizontal this time around so that you're flipping around a horizontal axis, and then click on the copy button in order to apply that transformation. All right, now you can press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool. Click off the artwork to deselect it and turn off the guides layer. Now I'll press control+0 or command+0 on the Mac to fit the artwork on screen, and I'm going to duplicate those transformation effects from the laptop layer by pressing the alt key or the option key on the Mac, and dragging this kind of gradient meatball right here up and onto the wireless meatball, and the reason I'm calling 'em meatballs is because that's what they're called internally at Adobe, and notice that I've got a little plus sign next to my cursor, and then as soon as I release, I go ahead and repeat these wireless icons. Not repeating them properly, however. Notice that I'm missing the second and fourth rows, and to fix that, you need to target the wireless layer by clicking on a circular meatball, then go up to the Window menu and choose the appearance command in order to bring up the appearance panel, and you want to click on the second appearance of transform, which is also the second transform effect we applied, then turn on the preview check box and change that vertical move value to half what it is now. So click after the value and enter /2 like sow, and then press the tab key, and that'll go ahead and reduce the vertical value to 144, the horizontal value should be zero points incidentally, and then you want to click in the copies value and press the up arrow key a couple of times in order to increase that value to three copies so that we're all together filling out the artwork. At which point, click OK in order to accept that change, and then click in an empty portion of the artwork to deselect everything. And there you have the final version of the magical checkerboard solution complete with a bunch of gizmos and these connecting wireless icons just to make it look as sweet as humanly possible.

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