Character Styles

First, let's add in our links. 0:00 We know that our navigation area is sort of is designated as here. 0:03 We also have this area here. 0:08 I'm gonna delete this for now, because I don't think I want a darker 0:11 colored bar after all, but I do want all of this real estate for my links. 0:15 So there's plenty of room for someone with a touchscreen to allow that to work, 0:20 so I will start typing here. 0:26 And I do have the name, so 0:32 it's events and about. 0:37 And vendors. 0:45 Put about five spaces in between each word for now. 0:46 Just for it to be even. 0:51 And I'm gonna keep with my trend of using Lato as the font. 0:53 And generally, you would probably have a different font in your wire 1:01 frame as you would in the finished design that almost always would happen. 1:06 But for me, I ended up really liking this one font, so I happened to stick with it. 1:11 I got lucky. 1:15 I do want to center this up, so make sure it's aligned to artboard, and great. 1:20 Okay, there we go. 1:28 It's nice and centered. 1:30 I would like to change this color, 1:31 so rather than it being black, I think I would rather it be red. 1:36 I'm going to come back to that. 1:42 Let's go ahead and take this text, copy. 1:45 And then we're gonna go to the correct layer in our Layers bar, 1:51 make sure that's selected. 1:55 I will paste my links here. 1:57 I want it to line up. 2:01 This is our 50-pixel padding here, so I want that to line up. 2:03 Okay, I'll delete our reference. 2:13 Okay, that's not centered. 2:19 Think it'd be nice for it to sort of be centered with this pencil. 2:21 So, I'm gonna select eb in the header, and the header one more time is my target. 2:23 And do vertical distribute. 2:31 Great. 2:34 And this could also Grooves this way a little bit more. 2:35 Then I get the 12 more breathing room. 2:40 Okay, much nicer. 2:46 Illustrator allows us to save character on paragraph attributes so 2:50 we can quickly format text. 2:54 This helps for making changes after you've finished your design because you can 2:57 update and change all instances of that style within the document and make changes 3:01 globally rather than having to click on each individual text box and change it. 3:07 It's gonna to change all of them that have a designation. 3:13 So let's go ahead and go to Window > Type > Character Styles. 3:17 And when you pull up this window we'll have Character Styles and 3:21 Paragraph Styles. 3:26 I'm gonna drag it down like this. 3:28 Tighter swatches for now. 3:32 Make a little room. 3:36 Okay. 3:37 Looks like I was making this earlier, so I'll delete that. 3:40 Yes. 3:44 If you just open this and you haven't done anything, 3:46 it should just say Normal Character Style and Normal Paragraph Style, and 3:49 that's preset in Illustrator. 3:53 It's probably Myriad Pro, and you don't wanna assign that to anything here. 3:55 So, we're gonna start using the character styles. 4:01 And a character style is a collection of character formatting attributes such as 4:05 font, size, color, and it's going to save all those different attributes, 4:11 and we can change the options, which I'll show you how to do. 4:17 So, let's select our links. 4:20 This is going to be. 4:25 Well, we'll call it Links. 4:26 And to create a new paragraph style, oops we want a new character style, 4:29 Okay. 4:45 And to create a new character style we can go right here and 4:45 Create New Style, to change the name we just double-click here. 4:51 We'll call it Links. 4:57 Click off. 5:01 And then if I double-click on it, it's going to give me the information. 5:03 So the font type, Lato, Regular, the Size. 5:10 It also has other attributes, such as Character Color. 5:16 I'll hit OK. 5:23 And I want to assign this text here also, 5:26 I wanna give it the same designation and character style as Links. 5:29 So what will happen now is when I change, 5:37 so when I double click in here and change these settings, 5:42 it's going to change everything with that designation of links. 5:48 So as I was saying earlier, I really wanted this to be red. 5:52 And trying that out and that looks great and 5:57 I'm able to make that change globally to both of them at once. 6:00 I don't have to do it individually. 6:03 So you can see what a huge time saver this would be. 6:05 In terms of size if I wanted to do sizing. 6:11 Which I don't at this point, so I'm gonna take it back. 6:14 I think I'm gonna make it 24. 6:17 Hit OK. 6:20 Yeah, it's looking nice. 6:22 Center this again. 6:27 And put this over here. 6:33 We can do the same thing for headings. 6:36 So, just as an example, I'm gonna select this. 6:40 And a really great trick you can use is, if you option+click 6:44 when you click new style, it automatically brings up this option box, 6:49 and then you can say Heading 2. 6:55 Or actually let's shorten it to H2. 7:01 Hit OK. 7:05 Let´s give the use the same designation. 7:08 So I'll select them and hit this. 7:11 And I wanna change all of these right now to white, so 7:14 I´m gonna double click Character Color. 7:17 White. 7:20 OK. 7:21 It looks like for some reason this one didn't carry over, so 7:22 I'll select it, and I'll select this. 7:27 And you'll see when that happens a plus sign appears, and 7:29 it's telling me that this setting is different than the H2 style. 7:34 And so it's asking me, do you really wanna convert it over? 7:39 And I do. 7:42 And the way you do that is you Shift+click on it. 7:43 It makes this like the others. 7:48 So you can see this is really cool, really helpful. 7:51