Working with layers & artboards

Transcript

In this next section, we’re going to look at how we work with art boards and layers.

With this button on the top, we can view all of art boards within our project. And with this plus icon, we can add more art boards. So this is very useful if you’re making a presentation, a multi-page PDF or a carousel for social media, and we can delete them here as well. We can also with the three dots and then select duplicate page to make duplications of our selected artboard. And with the directional buttons in the project workspace, we can slide between all of the boards within our project.

In this example, I’m creating a carousel for social media. I’ve duplicated my chocolate art board and as I can see, the text and the images of all duplicated. And now I’m just going to change the picture of chocolate ice cream for strawberry ice cream when I drag the image onto the canvas. You’ll notice that it is placed on top of the existing layers. And now we’re going to show a little bit on the project layer panel on the top right hand side. If you can’t see the layer panel in the top right hand corner, you may need to press this little layers icon to activate it. Now, if we want to change the order of any element in the layer stack, we can simply just drag it and move it upwards or downwards.

So for this case, we want the image to be at the bottom layer, so every other layer sits on top of it.

I’ve carried out the same process for the page featuring the vanilla ice cream. So using our boards I’m able to quickly spin up this sort of social media carousel with the button on top. I’m able to see all of the pages within the project.

In this view, I can also reorder the pages within my project just by dragging and dropping them. So I’ve made my three pages, but perhaps I want to resize the content so that it is fit for different digital channels. So I can just select the resize button on the top and then select from any number of suggested aspect ratios for Express to duplicate my original piece into different art boards of those sizes. So I’ve selected poster video and flier and then I’ll hit duplicate and resize an express or duplicate every element of my original post onto art boards of different sizes. We can of course use the custom aspect ratio to here to import a specific dimension for the art board. We want.

I can double click on any of the art boards and then adjust the contents so that it fits the new page exactly as I want it to.

I’ve carried out this process for strawberry and vanilla, and now I’m going to show you a slightly different way to do it for the chocolate flavor.

So I’ve selected my background and I’ve set it as the page background, and then once I select the different sized art boards, Express will attach that image as the background and stretch it and scale it to fill all of the available space.

I can then double click that image and manipulators within the cropped space.