10 MIND BLOWING Design Hacks in 10 Minutes 💥

Here are 10 genius graphic design hacks in under 10 minutes. You probably think that this isn't real. This looks pretty real to me, however being us designers, we're sceptical of things that look real because this has obviously been made in a 3D software. Well you're wrong, this is actually, if you can believe it, made in Adobe Illustrator and it only takes a minute to make this out of any shape. This was also created in Adobe Illustrator, this is my logo here, looks pretty real. All you need to do is get a shape, it can be lettering that you've created, it can be your logo. Just select it, go up to window, go down to 3D and materials and you'll get this box that pops up, it's quite long. Highlight this and go to object and we're going to press extrude. Now it looks a bit strange, it kind of just looks weird but don't worry about that. From extrude we're going to go to bevel and we're going to make it a bit more natural so we're going to create a rounded bevel on this. We're also going to go ahead and increase the depth so you can actually increase how large you want this to be. Then I'm going to increase the size to make sure it works well. The bigger it is, the slower it will take your computer to render this out. Okay so from here we need to change the materials which is just to the right. Keep on the base material but down here take roughness all the way down so we get that nice light and that shine on the material. In lighting we're going to go ahead and click shadows on and then below object so the shadow is below and from here we're going to change the rotation so the shadows are facing the right way and the light is there. Then we've got this little nifty button up here, this is called render with ray tracing. Click that and it will start doing its magic. You'll see that it's rendered it out and it looks really good but we can go a step further and click on this dialogue box here, press high, render and it will increase the render quality for you and that is how you get this. It looks ridiculously real and it's all inside of Adobe Illustrator. The second tip is expand with wireframes. This is a really quick and nifty trick to create cool patterns. Create any old shape, let's create this one and go to revolve in the materials options and then we select this and expand as wireframes and it will expand it as wireframes. We can even do it with this one which looks super real, if we expand as wireframes you'll see how it's actually made and it can give these really cool nifty effects. Number three is logo testing. A lot of the time when we're creating logos it's difficult to test whether it works or not. Now when you've got an icon such as this one and you want to test if it works, there's a few things you can do. Select the icon, go to effect and we're going to go to blur and we're going to just put a massive Gaussian blur, not too big but just enough. Scale this down until it becomes barely visible. Now if you're able to scale in and out like this, so zooming in and out and still get the core concept of the design, then you've done a pretty good job in making this scalable and usable. However, if you've got a logo type, that's a wordmark or logo that is a word, you need to do a few different things to test whether it works and there's any errors in it. The first thing I do is I go ahead and reflect it, press O, hold option or alt and just click and essentially reflect it vertically, so create a copy of this. This way now your brain looks at this as a shape and not as letters. We're going to repeat the same thing, we're going to actually change the colour to a sort of grey and we're going to add a Gaussian blur to this and we're going to scale it down and we're going to zoom out. Now this is where you can start to see some problems with your design really easily. This is just tricking your brain into seeing problems better so you can fix them. I don't see any problems with this one because I've already done it years ago but that is how you test out logos and logo types. Number four is a quality of life hack. Let's say we've got this crazy artboard here. This is just for a video that I've done recently for a logo design and I need to export some of the stuff either for a client or for a video. Let's say that you've gone ahead and made a new artboard with the logo just sitting nicely on it in the centre. Well, instead of going ahead and copying this into Photoshop and saving it, you can just press command, option or control and alt E and that will bring you to the export for screens. You can select which artboards you would like to export quickly and easily, exactly where, give them a suffix name and a prefix name, change the file format, the scalability, all in one document box. This will save you time, a lot of time in exporting and you can also do this for assets as well. The next one is instant colour palette. On your iPhone there is an app called Adobe Capture. If you've seen something in the real world that you would love to take a picture of and to take colours or you need some inspiration for colours, go ahead, grab your phone, download the Adobe Capture app and essentially just go ahead and take a picture. As you're taking a picture, you'll see that these dots fly around the screen and they're capturing the colour of things around you. When you capture it, it will create swatches where you can change the harmonies and some of the values of those colours. When you save it, you can save it to a library on Adobe so it appears on Adobe Illustrator. Mine hasn't saved because I didn't save it but you can go to libraries which is window down to libraries and it will appear here. Tip number five is one for those who are messy like myself. You've got Illustrator open, you've been doing your work in it, you've got artboards everywhere, it looks like your bedroom when you were 12 years old, it's messy. Well this is magical function now, if you go to object, down to artboards, rearrange artboards, you can rearrange them exactly how you like, press okay and boom, they look really nice and tidy and in order of those that you've created which is pretty nice. The next one are for those who love the eyedropper tool. The eyedropper tool allows you to grab a colour into your colour swatch here or if you are on this one, you can grab it and bring it in but did you also know that if you grab the colour, you can actually force the colour onto another shape by holding alt and it will switch that eyedropper tool so when you click on another shape, it will change it. Isn't that pretty cool? A really cool new feature inside of Adobe Illustrator is the history feature that we've got. Go to window and then down to history and this box will show up of all your history. No longer do we have to press command Z loads of times to get back to where we need to be. We can actually just click and see where we went wrong or what we want to change or move back to a certain point and also if we find that we don't like something that we've done, let's say I don't like this part over here where I created this ellipse, let's say I like it here, we can create a new document from there and it will just copy it over really quick and easy so we don't mess anything up. Before I go any further, I just want to shout out Assets 4D. It is a new online store that I've created for amazing design resources for a great price. We have a few products up there but I wanted to let you know about the brand guidelines. The branding guidelines template allows you to quickly and easily create a branding guidelines for your client without having to design it every time. It is a template that is fully customisable allowing you to input your client's logo and information and saving you a load of time before presenting the brand or creating the guidelines at the end of the process. This will save you hours and a lot of pressure that you shouldn't have towards the end of a client project. Click the link down below in the description to get a discount on the branding guidelines template. For those of you that bring a lot of work into Photoshop from Adobe Illustrator, they've added this great feature that you did not know about. Go ahead and select your work, it doesn't matter if there's loads of layers, live text or not. Select your work and command C to copy it. Go into Photoshop and press command V and you'll get this dialogue box that you see normally but they've added a new one called layers. Now when we select layers and press OK, it will create a group. What it's done is it's actually created these layers for us to quickly change and edit and in fact we can actually change the type here still. So this means now that I can go into this shape here, we can add a colour overlay if we wanted to. We can convert things to a smart object and add blurs to the background of these little shapes that we've brought in without having to manually sort out all these layers. That's a pretty good time saving tip for you. Now the next tip is a bit boring but it will save time. Again, go ahead and create a text layer like so. Let's increase this text size a little bit here. Create some lists, this is what we want to do. Create some random lists. Now what we can actually do is if we highlight all this, go to the paragraph function, we can create a numbered list or a bulleted list now. This is a really good time saving part of Adobe Illustrator that they did not have before. So there you go. That was 10 graphic design tips that will change your life or 10 genius design tips. Not sure on the title but if you did enjoy this video, press the red subscribe button and turn on that bell notification. I upload two videos every week and they're all designed and made for you to become a better graphic designer or creative professional. If you haven't noticed, I've started doing TikToks so follow me on there for even more tips and sign up to the newsletter down below so you can get even more info and more deals of things that I bring out to you. Thank you guys for watching and I'll see you in the next video, goodbye.