Designing a Promo Poster for the new Astrobrite Album!

 

INTRODUCTION 

hey how's it going everybody yesterday I found out that astrobrite has a new album coming out now if you're not a shoegaze fan then that really doesn't mean that much to you but that's very exciting for me because their last album came out in 2015 and we don't know anything at all about the album other than it's coming out in summer of 2023 which really could be anytime now and I got to think it would be really cool to create like a promo poster for it even though I have no information on the album itself 

ILLUSTRATOR

so I have an idea I haven't played around at all with anything yet but I'm just gonna roll with it and let's jump into illustrator and have some fun all right so really anybody who is a kid at heart is going to recognize this logo right here this is the logo for Hot Wheels but Astro bright actually uses their name in the place of the Hot Wheels logo for things like t-shirts and other merchandise and I always thought this was really cool but I got to thinking what's another iconic brand that maybe starts with an A that's also retro and we could easily do something like that for this promo poster and it immediately came to me apple apple starts with an A Astro bright starts with an so we're gonna let this flying apple right here be our inspiration 

FAIRLY SIMPLE

 I want to do something similar to this where we have this apple and this trail of colors behind it and I got to thinking well what's something that we could utilize there in the place of an apple well here's a picture of Scott Cortez who's actually The Man Behind astrobrite and he's wearing this shirt with an astronaut on it and I thought that's perfect an astronaut helmet so that's where we are so let's see if we can find an astronaut helmet vector and there's a lot of options right here but I want something that's nice and solid that we can easily vectorize here we go I found this one right here and it's mostly solid and since we're using it for personal use I'm just going to go ahead and steal it all right let's bring this into illustrator and this is already fairly simple

VECTORIZE

 so we should be able to just hit image trace and it'll just go ahead and vectorize everything for us I don't need those Sparkles so I'm going to get rid of those okay so let's go ahead and scale this down move this over here really quickly and I actually really like the idea of maybe doing the the beige background here that is on this so let's go ahead and set that and what I'm going to do to make this easier is I'm just going to size this down to roughly about right there and I'll go ahead and design our Trail right here and I'll do this horizontally and then we'll rotate it so we're going to use the exact same colors here 

PATHFINDER TOOL 

so I'm going to hold down option or alt if you're on Windows and just drag this down and then I'm going to hit command D and that's going to step and repeat and we'll do a total of six of them right here and I like to make absolutely sure that there's no spacing in between any of these at all so I'm just going to use distribute spacing so I'm going to select this key object right here make sure this is set to zero and click on vertical distribute space so now we want to make these same bars right here the total height the same height as the astronaut helmet so all we have to do is select all of them and bring them up to right here and make sure that it's the same at the top as well Perfect all right this next part's pretty easy all we have to do is color drop so now all we have to do is select all of these option or alt drag over here select everything including the astronaut helmet and we're going to go to our Pathfinder tool and click on divide 

SELECTION TOOL 

so now all we have to do is delete everything that is outside of the area of the astronaut helmet and now we want to select everything here and click on divide again and now we can just delete these little circles in here so that way it gives us dimension doing this can be very finicky and also I forgot to mention make sure that you have your direct selection tool selected all right so now these points right here are just looking a little bit too pointed so I'm just going to smooth that one out right there all right that's looking really good okay so now what we're going to do is we need to set this like maybe around here somewhere this next part is going to be a little bit tricky because what we need to do is we need for the outer edge of this shape to cut and Contour into these rainbow colors just like it's doing right here in this Apple logo but the Apple logo is a lot simpler than our astronaut because we have all these different shapes in here

JAGGED EDGES

 so I'm going to move this over here and I'm going to duplicate this I'm going to go over here to object and path and offset path and I think something like an eighth of an inch will be enough so we need to align the center of this about with the center of the end of this line right here because we need to make sure that we're cutting and we're not going to leave behind any kind of jagged edges or anything so now we're going to select all of this right here and we're going to click on divide and now all we need to do is go in here and basically delete most of this out where all that we're left with is that Contour and going into your outline mode is definitely going to help you with this all right let's take a look and see where we are definitely going to have to do some cleaning up in here but that's no big deal I definitely should have chosen the simpler design foreign let's delete this one

FEW ADJUSTMENTS

now let's bring this over here and see how it's contouring for us it's pretty good we just have a few adjustments to make inside here and most of these are just going to be color changes so we can go in and just select this with our direct select tool and let's close up this path right here so we can easily make this all one color and what we'll do here is just select these and click on Pathfinder again delete that one on the outside and now everything on the inside here can be purple I need to delete that little sharp line right there all of this can stay we just need to change it to red and this one needs to be changed to red as well and this one to Orange 

SMOOTHING

now this will be a little bit tricky because we need to just bring this over here with our direct select tool that's good and now we'll just bring that one over and I'll just add this right here so that we can smooth that out a little bit since we don't have the option of smoothing this one here is a little bit pointed but I'm not too concerned about that and now we'll just go in and color this one yellow and this little bitty part right here needs to be colored green all right very cool and now what we can do here is just we can you know move it out a little bit to about right there or so looking good all right so now we're going to bring this over here and that looks really cool so now let's go ahead and select both of these and group them together and before we set our angle

GRADIENT STROKE

 let's go ahead and type out our text and it's going to be just like the old Apple logo right here so let's go ahead and turn this all right cool and if you're curious the name of this font for the old Apple retro logo is modern tectura by default the kerning on it is pretty terrible so you need to go in and make sure you manually turn it all right so let's select everything here we'll create outlines and I think what we'll do here is add a really cool gradient stroke so let's go over here to window and gradient and this is going to be just on the stroke itself

COLOR DROP 

 so what we'll do is We'll add a couple of colors here we have a total of six and we'll just color drop from the colors that are in this rainbow here we can't really see it too well right now but we will in just a second after I deselect everything all right very cool so each one of these have their own path when it comes to the stroke however you do have the option of having it Go continuous across the entire text and I'll show you how to do that all right so if you want the gradient to go across the entire text select your text go to object compound path and make and it's going to take away the fill color so all you have to do is grab your eyedropper tool hold down shift and click on black 

EYEDROPPER TOOL

now it's one continuous shape going from left all all the way to the right and then we can grab our eyedropper tool hit X on our keyboard to switch to stroke and now just color drop on that stroke and now it's going all the way from left to right now that is really cool and everything but for some reason I just like this better at the top and I think that it fits a little bit more in line with what astrobrite does and you can play around with the angle right here my default is usually 135 and if you want you can reverse the gradient actually kind of like that best so we'll leave it like that and rather than going 100 black I'm going to go like maybe 15 black just to make it look a little bit more retro all right 

MEASURE AND FIGURE OUT

so let's grab this and we'll group all that together and I'm going to align this to the center I'm going to grab this whole unit right here align this to the center and I don't want it to be dead center vertically like this so I'm going to bring it to the center and then maybe go like this negative three inches and now we will align this to the very bottom of this and push it out maybe an inch or so that's a little too much maybe like half an inch there we go that's good okay so next we need to do our rotation so what we need to do here is when need to measure and figure out what this rotation is and it's really easy to do that so all we have to do is I'm just going to make this a black stroke right here and we're just going to go like from here to here and then I'm going to create a perfectly straight line going from here to here 

LITTLE CROSSHAIRS OVER

so now I'm going to select this bottom line hit r on my keyboard and hold down option and bring these little crosshairs over to here on this side and then that'll bring up our rotation and we will rotate this up to looks like 20 degrees so we'll just make sure that that rotates at 20 degrees all right that's looking great but what we need to do is we need to make sure that this is going to the edge of the paper so I'm going to add a line up here and this is really just going to act as a guide I'm going to lock that line real quick and now I'm going to hit a on my keyboard to activate the direct selection tool and we're going to select just the left side of These Bars and we want to make sure that it stays in line with everything and that's what that line is for all right 

NEW ALBUM

now we can hit unlock and delete that so there's our Astro bright poster right there and let's just add something like new album summer 2023 because that's all they've told us all right the kerning is done there and now I just want to bring this up to I actually really like when it's tight like that in between the the lines okay so we'll move this down here to the bottom and then bring it in by like negative one inch or so looking good and we'll set our Anchor Point to the bottom right and we'll just make it go like an inch or something like that all right and let's color drop this black right here with that same that same black color all right so our very last step is going to be to mask the artwork inside of the poster itself so all we have to do to do that is click on our background I'm going to hit copy and paste in front

CONCLUSION 

 now I'm going to go up here to object arrange and bring to front move this over here just for a second and I'm going to go back to our original background and lock that and now bring this back over and align it to the center and then select everything right here and just do command 7 on my keyboard and that's going to mask everything on the inside of this so there it is our Astro bright promo album for the new album coming out in summer 2023 whenever that is all right well thank you so much for watching I really hope I taught you something in illustrator today if you like this video please hit like And subscribe and click the bell for notifications to be notified of all future videos thank you so much for watching I'll see you next time bye

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