Happy Holidays Poster: Illustrator Tutorial

Alexandra Duncan

Figure 1

So the Holiday Season is upon us and you want to flex your graphic design skills! How about creating a Holiday poster to brighten up your social media feed or your family and friend emails?

1. Start your journey by downloading the following file: SnowyBirchForest.jpg

Or you can simply find your own holiday photo with high resolution.

2. Open Adobe Illustrator and create a 10 by 10 inch document with 1 artboard. No bleed or margins are needed. The screen should look like Figure 2 below.

Figure 2

3. Next find a font that you think would be fitting for your Holiday Poster. For this activity, I chose the font "Shine " that can be downloaded on Dafont.com at this link.

4. Select the Type Tool in the tools panel that is usually located on the left side or use the shortcut "T" on your keyboard. If you can't locate it, go to top menu, go to Window> Workspace> Essentials Classic, and you should be able to find it.

5. Next, using your Type tool, create a centered square about the size of your document. Highlighted placeholder text will appear, but you can simply type over it whatever text you'd like. For my poster, I used the "Let it Snow" in 132 sized font.

6. After you've inputted your text, highlight it using the type tool and go to the top menu where it says Type, then select Create Outlines. Creating outlines allows the text to be turned into an object that allows us to manipulate it easier in Illustrator.

7. Next, head over to the rectangle tool and select it. Click and drag the cursor over the top left of the document and drag to the bottom right corner of the document, then release. You can change the fill color by clicking on the swatches panel on the right side of the document or by clicking on the colored squares located on the tools panel to the left as seen in Figure 3.

Figure 3

8. After you've created your square and selected a color, make sure to lower the opacity on the square so the image you selected at the beginning of this tutorial will be visible. You can do this by going to the control bar just below the main menu and adjusting it in the Opacity bar. For this activity, I lowered the opacity to 80 percent.

9. Next, select both the square and text, making sure that the text is below the square. Next go to Window> Pathfinder and select the Intersect option, the third option in Shape Modes.

10. You should get the following result as show in Figure 4.

Figure 4

11. Next, we add our picture! Go to File> Place and then locate the picture you downloaded. Once you've selected it, the picture will be loaded up on your cursor where you can click and drag it to the size you desire.

12. Once you've placed your image, double click the image and go to Arrange> Send to Back.

13. You should get your final result with the snowy holiday picture behind your lettering. You should save your file as an illustrator first before saving as a pdf or jpg so you can revisit it again.

Thanks for reading!

Alex is a technical writing major with a focus in multimedia and a minor in Africana Studies.