Several default layers already exist on your document’s master page for controlling special items that appear in your document, such as Guides, Grid, and Desktop. These layers have the following purposes: ● Guides layer This is a global layer for guides you create; if you click the Master Guides entry on the Object Manager to select it, and then drag a guide onto the page, all pages in the document will display this guide. If you need a guide on only one page, you choose that Guides entry on the page you’re working on, drag a guide from the Rulers, and that guide belongs to the page and is not a master item. Guides are covered in detail in Chapter 7. You can move a local guide, a guide you created on a page, to the Master Guides entry on the Object Manager to make it global—it will then appear on every page of your document. ● Grid layer This controls the appearance of grid lines. You can control the grid color and visibility, but you can’t set the Grid layer to be printable, nor can you change its editable objects or add objects to that layer. Options in the Grid Layer Properties dialog enable you to control the grid display color and to gain quick access to the Grid page of the Options dialog by clicking the Setup button in the dialog. To open the Grid Layer Properties dialog, right-click the Grid layer under the master page in the Object Manager docker, and choose Properties from the pop-up menu. Grid layer visibility can be toggled on or off by clicking its eye icon on the Object Manager. ● Desktop layer This is a global desktop, the place outside of your drawing page. If you want to keep objects handy but don’t want to print them on your page, drag the object to this entry on the Object Manager. If you put an object on the desktop from a layer, you can’t hide it or keep it from printing, but if it’s explicitly placed on the master desktop, you can hide it, keep it from being edited, and keep it from printing. Hopefully, this chapter has shown you the way—both as an allegory and literally—to better get a fix on what it is you’ve drawn, what you want to draw, and what appears to need an edit or two. Thanks to zoom features that let you home in on a fly’s eye or zoom out to a scaled drawing of Chicago, you now have a handle on the magnifying glass and other tools for panning, navigating, and recalling areas of interest in your work. Chapter 5 is a departure from “The Basics” and a dive into just a little pure fun with CorelDRAW. If you’ve read Chapters 1–4 in sequence, believe it or not, you’re ready to start creating amazing stuff. And even if you haven’t, the steps are guided, the theme is designing a commercial logo, and your own results are going to astound you. Turn the page and help an author keep his promise! 114 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide CHAPTER 5 The X5 Test Drive 115 I n very few guides to software applications will you read, as early as Chapter 5, “Okay, are you all ready to get going?” The CorelDRAW X5 Official Guide is one of them: this chapter takes you through the steps to create a finished design and print it! This chapter builds upon what you know from previous chapters and also serves as a bridge between understanding CorelDRAW’s features and putting them to practical use. If you’re a new user of a graphics program, it’s only natural for you to poke around tools and palettes to get a feel for what you’ve purchased: this chapter is a supervised “poking around session.” You get hands-on experience with some of the advanced features used to create some basic commercial designs and learn how to integrate the features to put together a T-shirt logo for a fictitious company—after which you’ll probably have the knowledge to apply these techniques to your own company logo. But overall, this chapter is all about the fun you’ll have designing with CorelDRAW. Everyone owns at least one manual whose documentation is dry from cover to cover. However, this book gets your feet wet without going over your head. Begin a Design with a Concept One of the most basic rules for creating a good design is to begin with a concept. This might sound strange, and you might be scoffing, “Of course I have a concept! I want to design a logo!” Designing a logo isn’t a concept; it’s a need. To address this need, you’ll want to visualize the logo. In this chapter’s example, you have a fictitious machine parts company, Dyson Gears, and they want all five of their employees to proudly wear the company’s logo on T-shirts. The company has a name, but not a logo; therefore, it’s thinking-cap time before moving on to CorelDRAW’s tools. One of the simplest and most effective approaches to logo design is through the use of an iconic representation. For example, if you ran an ice cream stand, a very simple and effective logo would be a drawing of an ice cream cone. Don’t let the simplicity of this approach put you off: Apple, Inc., has done very well through the years with a logo of you- know-what! What sets apart a logo from every other logo that’s a drawing of the vendor’s product is the artistic treatment of the design. You can visualize an ice cream cone—it’s basically a ball with a triangle beneath it. In CorelDRAW you can draw a circle and a triangle and then apply Artistic Media strokes to the paths to make the drawing look like a child’s crayon rendering or a Victorian oil painting. You can copy and paste a dozen copies of the ice cream cone and then use the Arrange | Align and Distribute commands to pepper a page with all 12 flavors the ice cream stand sells. You can extrude the simple shapes and make a 3D ice cream cone; you can apply fountain fills to the objects…see how the treatment of a simple geometric shape offers you dozens of logos to choose from? Along these lines of thinking, a logo for Dyson Gears would be visually outstanding if you took the initials “D” and “G”, whose facing sides are rounded, and put gear teeth on them to reinforce the idea that Dyson Gears is gears, a literary conceit that works in commerce every day. That’s the concept; read on to learn how to draw gears using a bold 116 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide font as the base, create a visually stunning treatment for the gear design, add some compatible and striking text, and realize a concept. Setting Up the Page for the Logo Although CorelDRAW can open a new document by default when you launch the program, you need to set up guidelines on a default page so the T-shirt logo design will print edge to edge on a sheet of inkjet transfer paper. If you measure an average T-shirt, you’ll see that about 7 inches is a good width for a logo. You can pick up T-shirt transfer paper at an office supply store (or even at the supermarket) that measures full-page letter size: 8½×11 inches. So you’re in luck twice: CorelDRAW’s default document size is the same as most T-shirt transfer paper, and the maximum width of the logo will fit the horizontal measure. The following steps show you how to set up nonprinting guidelines on a default page: T-shirt transfer paper needs about ½ an inch in the clear on all sides so you can peel the transfer from the T-shirt (which still gives you 7½ inches for the maximum design width). Setting Up Guidelines 1. Launch CorelDRAW and then from the Welcome screen choose New Blank document. In the Create A New Document dialog, choose CorelDRAW Default from the Preset Destination drop-down list if it’s not already chosen for you, choose Letter (portrait orientation) for the Size, name the file Dyson Gears.cdr, and then click OK. 2. You’ll want to zoom into the ½-inch tick mark on the rulers for precise placement of the guides. Most of us have a scroll wheel on our mouse, and by default, CorelDRAW uses the wheel as a zoom feature. Put your cursor at the top left of the page you see in the drawing window, and then push the wheel away from you to zoom into this area. If your mouse doesn’t have a scroll wheel, choose the Zoom tool from the toolbox (or press Z), and then diagonally click-drag an imaginary rectangle around the corner of the page (the gesture is often called marquee-dragging or marquee- selecting). 3. You can use any tool to drag guidelines from the rulers. Place your cursor first over the horizontal ruler at the top of the drawing window. Click-hold, and then drag from the ruler onto the page, to the vertical ½-inch tick. If you didn’t get it quite right, you need to switch to the Pick tool (press the SPACEBAR), and then click-drag the guideline to the ½-inch tick mark. 4. Similarly, drag a guideline to the bottom ½-inch margin you’ll need. Then drag vertical guidelines out of the vertical ruler (at the left of the drawing window) to create ½-inch vertical margins inside the page. Your screen should look like Figure 5-1 now. 5. Click the Save button on the standard toolbar. Save Dyson Gears.cdr to a location on your hard drive you can find later. Don’t close the document; you’re not having enough fun yet. CHAPTER 5: The X5 Test Drive 117 5 Using the Polygon Tool to Design a Gear Shape The Polygon tool might not seem like it has features to automatically create a gear shape and this is partially true. The Polygon tool produces symmetrical shapes that can be dynamically edited; they can be dramatically modified and still keep a special base property. Gears are symmetrical. The trick to creating a complex-looking gear to weld to the initials “D” and “G” is to slightly modify a polygon so it becomes a multi-spoke star shape first. Then you add a control node to the object and drag the node to reposition it. This is one of those things it’s easier to see while you do, but in the following steps, you’ll modify a polygon you create so that the spokes end in a blunt, straight edge instead of a point. This 118 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide FIGURE 5-1 Set up your page so there is a ½-inch margin on all sides for printing to inkjet transfer paper. Click-drag guidelines from the rulers. gets you 90 percent of the way to creating an elegant gear shape; the other 10 percent is demonstrated in the following sections. Creating and Modifying a Polygon 1. Choose the Polygon tool from the toolbox (it’s just below the Ellipse tool). 2. On the property bar, set the number of sides to 16. This will produce a polygon with 16 control points and control points in-between. 3. Hold CTRL (this constrains the shape to equal width and height), and then click-drag on the page until the width and height fields on the property bar (the second-from- left fields) tell you the shape you’re creating is about 3 inches. At this point, release CTRL and your mouse button. Your polygon should look like the illustration here. Ill 5-1 4. Choose the Shape tool; hold CTRL, click one of the control points along the path of the polygon, and then drag until the result is a star shape, shown here. The reason for holding CTRL as you drag is that it keeps the control point from drifting to the left or right as you move it. Otherwise this would produce a radial saw blade shape and not a star whose path segments mirror each other. Ill 5-2 CHAPTER 5: The X5 Test Drive 119 5 Number of sides Hold CTRL and click-drag. Hold CTRL and drag toward polygon’s center. Shape tool 5. With the Shape tool still active, click a point on the path, as shown in Figure 5-2. Then click the Add Node(s) button on the property bar. You’ve created a change in the property of the path, although it doesn’t look like a change yet. The polygon can still be dynamically reshaped. Look closely at the polygon path—you added a control node, but there are actually 16 added control nodes, because you made a change to a dynamic object. 6. Take your time on this step: with the Shape tool, drag the top control node a little to the left and then a little down. Stop when you have the shape shown here. The polygon looks very much like a 16-tooth gear now, doesn’t it? Ill 5-3 120 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide FIGURE 5-2 When you add a node to a polygon object, additional nodes are created symmetrically around the shape. Click to add a node. Click a point. Click-drag to the left and then down. Welding an Edge to a Typed Character CorelDRAW has a number of operations you can access from the property bar (and from the Shaping docker) when more than one object is selected; you’ll achieve more dramatic objects that are the result of overlapping objects. These operations can weld two shapes into a single one and can trim the bottom object using the top object. These two operations— Weld and Trim—are used in the following sections to add only part of the gear you created to the rounded side of a capital “D.” Shaping the Polygon 1. You can substitute any available font you like in the following steps, but if you own Futura XBlk BT—the filename is tt0148m_.ttf and it’s in the Fonts folder on the CorelDRAW installation DVD—install it if you haven’t done so already. It’s a very good workaday typeface with scores of design uses, because it’s very plain and extremely bold, ideal for adding a few gear notches without ruining its legibility. 2. Drag and drop a copy of the gear for future use; with the Pick tool, drag the gear off the page, but before releasing the mouse button, tap the right button to leave a duplicate of the gear. 3. Zoom into the original gear shape, choose the Text tool, and then click an insertion point directly over the gear, hold SHIFT, and type D. 4. Choose the Pick tool, and then with the character still selected, choose Futura XBlk BT from the Font list drop-down on the property bar. You can also highlight “24 pt” to the right of the font name and then type 300 in the Font size box. There are approximately 72 points to an inch in typesetting, so a ballpark estimate of the character’s size makes it approximately the size of the gear. Click over the No Fill color well on the Color Palette to remove the fill of the character, and then right- click over the black color well to give the character a black outline. Now you can see both objects to reposition the “D”. Ill 5-4 CHAPTER 5: The X5 Test Drive 121 5 Right-click to set outline. Left-click to remove fill. Text tool 5. With the Pick tool, move the “D” so that its right side aligns to the gear. If necessary, hold SHIFT and then drag a selection handle away from or toward the center of the “D” to proportionately enlarge or shrink the “D” so that its right curve lies just a fraction outside of the gear. 6. Choose the Pen tool from the pen group on the toolbox; drag on the icon of the current tool to access any other tool in the nested group. Click points around the left side of the gear to make an object, shown next, that surrounds the left side of the gear, encompassing the hole in the character “D”. You’re going to remove these areas using this object and the Trim operation. Ill 5-5 7. With the Pick tool, select the shape first, and then select the gear, holding SHIFT and clicking one object at a time. On the property bar, click the Trim icon. 8. By default, the shape that trims the bottom shape remains in the document, but it’s now unnecessary. Select it and then press CTRL+X to delete it. 9. Select both objects by marquee-dragging with the Pick tool, and then click the Weld icon on the property bar. 122 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide Pen tool Single-click to create shape to trim the gear. Ill 5-6 You’ve done great. But the “G” needs to be added to the design with the same gear effect. Add a “G” to the page, and use the spare gear you duplicated in the previous Step 2. Alternatively, if you feel you’ve had enough of a workout (you haven’t!), a Dyson Gears partially completed.cdr is available in the Chapter 05.zip file where you downloaded the tutorial files for this book. A Brief Excursion into Gradient Fills A linear gradient fill for the characters might make them look a little more metallic and will add to the complexity of the logo with a minimum of effort. For this example, let’s do a little hands-on with the Interactive Fill tool and use the default Linear fountain fill style. The features you use in this test drive are cross-referenced at the end of this chapter; you’ll learn how to expertly use the Interactive Fill tool later in this guide. Adding Visual Complexity Using Fountain Fills 1. Choose the Interactive Fill tool from the toolbox. 2. Click the “D” gear shape to select it, and then click-drag up and to the right (drag toward about 2 o’clock on the gear shape) and release the mouse button. By default, the “To” color of the Linear fountain fill is the place where you released the mouse. You work “From” your click-drag start point “To” your destination within the object. CHAPTER 5: The X5 Test Drive 123 5 . with the Pick tool, and then click the Weld icon on the property bar. 122 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide Pen tool Single-click to create shape to trim the gear. Ill 5-6 You’ve done great. But the. to the Pick tool (press the SPACEBAR), and then click-drag the guideline to the ½-inch tick mark. 4. Similarly, drag a guideline to the bottom ½-inch margin you’ll need. Then drag vertical guidelines. every day. That’s the concept; read on to learn how to draw gears using a bold 116 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide font as the base, create a visually stunning treatment for the gear design, add