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

707 “Quieting down” an overly elaborate design

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

707 “Quieting down” an overly elaborate design

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's techniques. This week, we're going to take that final design from last week, which is eye candy to be sure, but it might be an eensy weensy bit overly elaborate. And we're going to quiet it down. Because as I like to say, if it's broke, fix it. Boom, still got it. And because we're relying so heavily on Dynamic Object Blends and Distortion Effects, this is going to be a breeze. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, here is where we're starting, and here's where we'll end. And because just about everything we're seeing in the elaborate version of the graphic is a function of the Dynamic Effects, it's very easy to achieve this simplified graphic without throwing anything away. All right, so the first thing I want to do is turn off these two layers right here, eggplant and sizzle. And that's going to return us to a very simple background. And then I'll unlock the blends layer, and this is all happening inside the layers panel. And now armed with my black arrow tool, I'll just go ahead and click on the E like so. And notice that it has something of a drop shadow. I want to get rid of that, but not just for this object. For all of the objects that have drop shadows. And so I'll go up to the Select menu, choose Same, and choose Appearance. So that I select all of the blends that have that particular drop shadow. Now I'll go to the Window menu and choose the Appearance command to bring up the Appearance panel. And if you want to get rid of this drop shadow permanently, then you would click on it to select it and then click on a little trash icon down here in the bottom right corner of the Appearance panel. However, it's probably better I did just to hide the effect by turning it off like so. And for the last several years, that is a saved attribute of the file. So in other words, you can save whether a dynamic effect is visible or not. All right, now we still have a little bit of a drop shadow right here, and so I'll click on this blend to select it. And the reason it didn't go away is it's a different drop shadow. It's a different size and direction. And just to make sure I get all of the objects with this particular drop shadow, I'll go back to the Select menu, choose Same, and again choose Appearance. And that selects this second blend as well. And then I'll turn off the drop shadow here inside the Appearance panel. And I'll also go ahead and turn off Zig Zag, and that will go ahead and return me to my undistorted paths. Now it doesn't quite take care of this portion of the U right here, and that's because the two path outlines associated with this blend have different levels of Roughen associated with them. That is to say one is not roughened at all and one is. And so I'll press the A key to switch to the white arrow tool, click off the paths to deselect them. I actually ended up selecting the Z. That's not a problem though. I'm going to go ahead and click right here to select that U and then again inside the Appearance panel, I'll turn off Zig Zag. Now we have a few other effects that are making our artwork a little bit too elaborate. And they include this guy right there. It's a P, and so I'll go ahead and click on it to select it. This green P right here. And then in the Appearance panel, you'll see the Tweak effect. I'll go ahead and turn that guy off. And then I'll go ahead and click on this green foliage up here. It's actually a giant lower case E. And then here inside the Appearance panel, I'll turn off the Roughen effect. And finally I want to go ahead and select this partial L right here. I'll go ahead and click on it again to select the whole thing. It is an open path outline. And I'll turn off its Zig Zag effect. And now notice if I zoom in that things are not quite aligning with each other. If I go to the View menu and choose Outline to switch to the Outline mode which has an ancient keyboard shortcut of Control Y or Command Y on the Mac, then you can see that the back of the L is not aligned with the larger character. And so I'm just going to drag it by an anchor point right here, and for the best result, you want to go to the View menu and turn off the Bounding Box. And so if this common reads Hide Bounding Box, choose it. If it reads Show Bounding Box, leave it alone. And then I'll go ahead and drag this anchor point right here until it snaps it into alignment like so. And I do have my Smart Guides turned off by the way, and that's going to work better. All right now I'll go ahead and press Control O or Command O on the Mac to center my zoom, and then I'll click off that path to deselect it. And I'll switch back to the Preview Mode by pressing Control Y or Command Y on the Mac. And the reason we need this partial L, the back of the L, we need it to be independent of the front of the L, is because this U appears to be cutting through it. And we need this purple back of the L to cover up this chartreuse end of the U. All right now I'm going to press Control A or Command A on the Mac to select everything inside the artwork. And I want to change the color of all the fills so that they match the background. So you want to go to the Swatches panel, which you can get by choosing the Swatches command from the Window Menu. Then make sure the fill swatch is active. And it's perfectly fine that it has a question mark inside of it. That just tells you that all the fills are different. And then if you're working along with me, you could change it to pale yellow in order to produce this effect here so you have a little distinction between the blends in the background. Or you can make the two match by selecting this color, this pale shade of brown that begins with R=199. And you will get a perfect match. Now at this point, things look pretty darned good. My only problem is that some of the blends have too many steps. And I'm going to solve that problem by first pressing the V key to switch to the black arrow tool, then I'll click off the path to deselect them, and I'll just click on any one of these blends here. For example, I'll just go ahead and start with the E. And then you want to go up to the Object menu, choose Blend, and choose Blend Options. And that'll bring up your Steps. Turn on the Preview checkbox, click in the Steps Value right there and press Shift down arrow to take it down to 100. And I think that looks slightly better, at which point I'll click Okay. Now I'm going to want to do this over and over again. You can only modify similar blends at the same time. So for example, if I was to click right here to select the back of the L and then shift click down here in the front, I would select those two blends that make up the L and now if I were to return to the Object menu, choose Blend, and choose Blend Options, I can see that they are both 170. But they definitely have to both be the same if you're going to modify them together. And now I'll turn on the Preview checkbox, and I'll select that Steps Value and I'm just going to enter a different value of 122. So I'm taking that one down quite a bit, and that will ensure that the steps look okay when they're crossing behind this portion of the U. And then I'll click Okay to accept that change. Now my point is that I'm going to have to do this over and over again. I don't want to have to keep calling on that command. And so there is an easier way to work which is to just click here, for example, to select this rear portion of the U. And then switch to the Blend tool down here near the bottom of the Tool box, which has a keyboard shortcut of W for whatever reason. And now all I have to do is press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac to bring up the Blend Options dialogue box. So anytime the Blend tool is selected, pressing Enter or Return brings up Blend options at which point I can turn on the Preview checkbox, and I'm going to change the number of steps to 31 like so. So I'm just taking it down a little bit. And I just figured out this works through trial and error. And now click Okay. And now, the problem is I need to select a different blend. Well I can temporarily access my black arrow tool, the last arrow tool used by pressing and holding the Control key, or the Command Key on the Mac, and then clicking right about here for example, and that'll select the next blend. And then I'll just go ahead and release the Control or Command key to return to my Blend tool. And now I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to once again bring up the Blend Options Dialogue box. And I'm going to change this Steps Value to 81. And I'll turn on the Preview checkbox to see what that looks like. It looks very good. And so I'll go ahead and click Okay to accept that change. All right, now I'm going to Control or Command click on the P over here to select it. Then I'll release the Control or Command key to return to the Blend tool. And I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, and I'm going to select this Steps Value and take it down to 95, so it involves a little bit of manual labor, but you can see if I turn on the Preview checkbox, that it's looking quite nice with respect to the others. And then I'll go ahead and click Okay. All right, that leaves us with just one more. This vertical Z right here. And so I'll press the Control key, or the Command key on the Mac, and I'll click on it to select that Blend. And then I'll release the Control or Command key and press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, and I'll take this guy down to 60 steps this time around. Turn on the Preview checkbox to see what that looks like. Totally awesome. And so I'll just go ahead and click Okay to accept that change. And now I'll press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool, and I'll click off the Path outlines to deselect them. And that my friends is how you quiet down an overly elaborate design that relies on Dynamic Object Blends and Distortion Effects here inside Illustrator. All right now if you're looking forward to next week, we are going to kick off the Summer movie season by combining the aesthetics of two of the most popular movies ever made using a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator working together. So here we are looking at a list of the top 23 movies because that's all that would fit on this page, domestically here in the US adjusted for inflation. So instead of #2 being Avatar, it's the original Star Wars which sold a heck of a lot more tickets. Now we're going to be combining movies 4 and 17, which are E.T. and Jurassic Park, respectively, in order to create this piece of box office movie magic right here. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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