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

721 Drawing a stylish computer key

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

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721 Drawing a stylish computer key

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week we're in Illustrator where I'm gonna show you how to draw type as computer keys. But not old school keys like these, nothing against Logitech, they make great stuff. But if you're gonna go to the time and effort of drawing a computer key it should look like it came from a backlit MacBook Pro. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. And so once again we're modeling our computer keys off of those included on a MacBook Pro. And for you type geeks out there we've got a VAG rounded character from 2014 and earlier, as well as the San Francisco character from 2015 and later. All right, I'm gonna start off inside of this document right here, in which I've gone ahead and converted this type to path outlines, just in case you don't have these fonts. But if you do have the fonts I do have editable text documents inside of the live type subfolder. All right, also notice that I have a couple of center guides. And in case you're wondering how I put those together you can check out Deke's Techniques 379, which came out at the beginning of 2015. All right, so I'm gonna be working on the key layer and I'm gonna click off my text to deselect it. And then I'll go ahead and grab the Rectangle Tool from the shape tool fly-out menu. And I'll go up to the View menu and turn on my Smart Guides. So if there's already a checkmark in front of yours you don't need to worry. And then I'll position my cursor at the intersection of those two center guides and I will alt or opt + click in order to create my key from the center outward. All right, now notice that both my Width and Height values are the same. I want them to remain that way, so I'll go ahead and turn on this link icon and I'll change either one of them to 360 points. Happens to work inside of this document. At which point I'll click OK. And now I wanna round off the corners by clicking on the word Shape up here in the control panel. At least that's how you do it in Illustrator CC. Notice these corner radius values right here. And also notice that they're linked into alignment with each other, so I'll change any one of them to 20 points, and then I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on a Mac in order to change them all in kind. And now I wanna fill this shape with a couple of gradients, as it turns out. And so I'll go up to the Window menu and choose the Gradient command in order to bring up my Gradient panel. And if it's collapsed you can expand it just by clicking on this little double arrow icon a few times. And notice that my Fill is active, at which point I'll just go ahead and click on this gradient swatch in order to fill the shape with the default gradient. All right, I do want the Type to be set to Linear, however I want this first color stop right here to have a Location of 30% and I want the last one to have a Location of 80%. Just happens to work out nicely. And I'm gonna change the angle value right there to almost exactly diagonal, but instead of 45 degrees I'll take it up to 46 degrees, like so. And then notice that my Swatches panel is also up on screen, and so I'll grab this shade of gray right here in which the R, G, and B values are all 102, and I'll drag it and drop it onto this first color stop. And then I'll grab the swatch in which all of the RGB values are 51 and I'll drag it and drop it to this location right there, so the final color stop. And then I want black in between, so I'll go ahead and grab black and I'll drag it and drop it right there let's say, really looking for a Location value of 53%. And that way the darkest color in the gradient is a little bit off-center. All right, now I wanna add another gradient on top of that, so that we have all four corners looking a little bit darker than the sides. And so I'll go up to the Window menu and choose the Appearance command to bring up the Appearance panel. I'll click on that existing Fill and I'll make a copy of it by clicking on this little page icon. So we've got one gradient sitting on top of another. And I'm gonna change its angle to 136 degrees. So again, not quite diagonal, which would be 135 degrees, but rather 136 degrees, like so. And then I'm gonna grab this lighter gray in which all the values are 153, drag it and drop it onto this first color swatch. And then I'll get this darker one in which all the values are 77 is actually what I'm looking for, drag it and drop it there. And then I'll grab the gray in which all the values are 26 and drop it onto this location, the center location. That is slightly off-center at 53%. And then I'll click on the word Opacity, so notice my Fill is twirled open, click on the word Opacity, and change the blend mode to Overlay in order to produce this effect here. So as you can see, all four of the corners are a little bit dark and the sides, especially this bottom side, are lighter. All right, now I wanna add a kind of glow surrounding this key and I'm going to achieve that effect using a couple of strokes. So I'll select the Stroke item here in the Appearance panel and I'll increase the line weight to four points and I am looking for a white stroke by the way, but I don't want it to be in front of the Fills, so I'll go ahead and twirl this Fill closed and I'll grab this Stroke and drag it and drop it to the bottom of the list, so now the Stroke is on the bottom and the Fills are on top. That went ahead and twirled back open the Fills, so I'll twirl it closed. I'll click on that Stroke in order to select it, and I'll click on the little page icon to make a copy of it. Then I'll set this bottom Stroke to a line weight of six points, like so. And I'm gonna zoom in here, so you can see what I'm up to. And I'll go ahead and scroll to the top right corner. And with that slightly thicker Stroke selected I'm gonna go up to the Effect menu, choose Blur, and then choose Gaussian Blur. And I'll set the Radius value to four pixels, as we're seeing here, and I'll turn on the Preview checkbox and you can see that gives me quite the nice bounce. At which point I'll click OK. And now I'll click on the Path to select the entire thing, and I'll go ahead and give it an Outer Glow by returning to the Effect menu, choosing Stylize, and choosing Outer Glow. And I'm looking for the color to be white, which is it. If not, you can click on that color swatch and change it. A blend mode of Screen is just fine. I'm looking for an Opacity of 50% and a Blur setting of one point. At which time I'll turn on the Preview checkbox and we get a very big bounce indeed and that's because we're assigning that blur on top of the existing Gaussian Blur, so we're making it blurrier still. All right, now click OK to accept that change. And I want this current shape to serve as a kind of beveled edge, and so I'm gonna add another rounded square in front of it by once again making sure that my Rectangle Tool is selected and then I'll position my cursor at the intersection of those two center guides and I'll Alt or Option + click in order to once again bring up the Rectangle dialog box. And I'll take both the Width and Height values down to 340 points, click OK. And I wanna round them as well. And it might be difficult to anticipate how much roundness you want to apply, but watch this. If I click on the word Shape up here in the control panel and I click in one of these corner radius values and I just start pressing the up arrow key at a point I'm gonna be able to see that at a corner radius value of 10 points, which is half of what we applied to the previous square, we get the proper amount of rounding. And what do I mean by that? Well, I'll hide that panel by pressing the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac. I'll press the v key to switch to the black arrow tool, and I'll marquee these two shapes. And notice that the anchor points are aligned vertically at this location and horizontally up here. So we have the effect we're looking for. All right, now I'll click off the shapes to deselect them and I'll click on that guy to select him independently. I don't want a stroke, so I'll click on this second color swatch up here in the horizontal control panel and I'll change it to none. And now we need to modify the gradient that's assigned to the fill. So I'll make sure my Fill is active here inside the Gradient panel. I really just want two color swatches, so I'll grab this guy and drag him downward to get rid of him, then I'll move this black swatch all the way over to the right. And I can confirm that it's black by double-clicking on it and then switching from Swatches, if that's active, over to this guy, Color. And then I'll see that my RGB values are all zero, which is what I want. Then I'll grab this guy and drag him all the way to the left. If I double-click on it it's 102, that's what I want. So all three of the values are 102. The problem is that the Type should be Radial, like so. And now I'm gonna switch to the Gradient Tool, so that I can see my gradient annotator right there. And I'll go ahead and zoom out. And I'll move my cursor to this location right here, just slightly outside that square, so I can see the rotate cursor. And I'll move it around to this location. And then I'll drag that square outward to about here, let's say. And then I'll drag that circle, that big circle in the middle, in order to move the gradient. And now I need it to be bigger, so I'll go ahead and drag that square until it completely fills up the top right corner. All right, now I'll press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool. I don't need that guides layer anymore, so I'm gonna switch back over to the Layers panel, I'll go ahead and switch over to the Stroke panel as well, so that the Gradient panel isn't taking up as much room, and I'll turn off the guides layer. And now I'll press ctrl + 0 or cmd + 0 on the Mac to zoom back in. Click on the Appearance tab to switch back to it. Make sure that my Path is active, and now I wanna add an Inner Glow by going up to the Effect menu, choosing Stylize, and then choosing Inner Glow, like so. And these are the settings I came up with. I'll click on the color swatch here. Notice that my Hue value is approximately 205 degrees, my Saturation is 30%. I say approximately, because Illustrator will automatically switch it to the closest RGB values. Then I'll click OK. I've set my blend mode to Screen, my Opacity's just 10%, so very low, and my Blur is set to 20 points. And so to see what that looks like I'll turn on the Preview checkbox and I have just a little bit of cool blur. And now I'll click OK in order to accept that change. All right, now at this point we have a pretty good looking key. I want the letter to interact a little better with the key in back of it. This is gonna be a very subtle effect, by the way. But what I'm gonna do is switch back to the Layers panel. Notice if you twirl open this symbols layer right here that I've got an A, which is representing all of the alphabetic characters. If you turn that off and turn on the next guy down you'll see that we have a number key along with it's Shift equivalent, which is a little bit smaller. Of course, that's the at sign. But I just wanna make sure anything I put on this layer interacts with everything below it. And so I'll go ahead and target the entire layer by clicking on its so-called meatball over here on the right hand side, and then I'll click on the word Opacity up here in the horizontal control panel, and I'll change the blend mode to Screen. And so you'll see things brighten up ever so slightly and that just gives it the appearance of being backlit. At which point I'll click off everything in order to deselect those path outlines. And that is how you draw a stylish computer key, specifically one modeled after a modern MacBook Pro, here inside Illustrator. Now if you're a member of lynda.com slash LinkedIn Learning I have a follow-up movie in which I show you how to take your lonely computer key and use it to spell an entire word. Now you may look at this and say, I got this one, Deke, I know how to duplicate things. Which is why the movie is all about sizing your artboard and properly spacing the keys. If you're looking forward to next week we'll be in Photoshop by the way where I've got a doozy for you. We're gonna take a photograph and turn it into a hedcut. Finally doing it. Deke's Techniques, each and every week, keep watching.

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