Mastering Text and Shape Layers

The instructions want you to create the text layers first for the country labels,  and then it wants you to create the rectangles for the bars. It makes the country labels first because otherwise you don't know where to put them if the bars are covering them. So it's actually kind of making the things on top first.

Okay, it's up to you. So text,  it tells you what font I use, have fun with that. Okay, wow, that is enormous.

So it tells you like the font I use, the size, that sort of thing. You can do something different,  it's no big deal. I believe it actually is Arial Black.

Am I lying? It's actually Arial,  it's regular Arial. Arial regular is what it's using. And it tells you the size I use,  like everything else.

But if you just again want to just approximate it, that's fine, no big deal. Okay, it's supposed to not be all caps. So it's Arial Bold, I guess it's what it was doing.

But again, if you want to listen, let's go right ahead. Okay. And honestly, if I want that,  I can line it up.

I can duplicate the layer, drag it down and just change the content. So that's Italy. Duplicate layers, Command D, the layer highlights it.

If you select multiple layers, you can use a line to just line them up to the selection to each other, like that. There, by the way, there's also a distribute option, which would spread out their space horizontally or vertically, it's up to you. Okay, so they have to exactly match, it's up to you.

Okay, so don't go wrong. Make the shapes, make sure nothing is selected, take your recipe,  rectangle tool, stroke. I'm going to click on the word stroke up here in the options where the rectangle is active.

That opens a dialog box and I'll choose none, first choice. For fill, I'll click on the color box and I'll use the eyedropper to sample from the color. Seriously? So color box, eyedropper, sample.

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Okay. And now when I draw my rectangle,  it's like that. Okay.

So one note, and then I'll let you get to this. The anchor point of new shape layers is not in the middle of the shape. It is over there in Duckburg,  which is actually the center of the composition, by the way, is what it does.

Now, can you move anchor points? Yeah, sure. You definitely can. Annoyingly, at the moment,  the pan behind Zool, and I could drag the anchor point into the center.

I turn on snapping, it will actually kind of force itself into the center. But, or wherever you want, you drag it down there, wouldn't care. The instructions will eventually have you move this, so it's over here.

If you want to force all new shape layers to make their anchor point in the middle,  because maybe it's just easier to find it that way when you're working,  you're going to change it later. What you can do is change the setting,  affect settings or edit preferences to general setting, center anchor point a new layer,  new shape layers. I like turning that on because now when I draw a new shape layer,  for the record, this one is France, bar France.

Now when I draw this shape layer here, again,  I'll do the fill to eyedropper, that blue color. Okay, now the anchor point when I create it is going to be shoved in the middle. Okay, do you have to do that? No, I mean,  it just depends on how you like making shapes.

So, the instructions want you to name them bar and then like hyphen whatever, so it's bar hyphen. The reason it has you do that to the bars in the name is basically it's going to use the search field a little bit later to isolate them. Keep in mind that before you use the shape to draw the bars, you want to make sure nothing is selected, so you're making a new shape layer.

If you have a shape layer selected,  that same exact tool will place it on the same layer. So, you can use the fill color picker,  which is interior color, eyedropper when the color pair pops up, pick the colors you want like that. It has you move each of the shape layers after you name them bar hyphen US below the text, so you'll be able to see them.

Okay, do that now. In a later step, it has you adjust their heights, because I've heard that they're not the same height. It has you adjust their height, so it's the later step.

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You highlight two layers, you can align the selection with the line panel to center them. So, you can grab each of your bars and each of your countries and each of the country names and center them if they're not already centered with that. So,  if I grab the bar layers, the little stars, the bar layers, command to select them all,  this is my properties.

This is my properties panel. Layers names the rectangles that are on each layer. So, the shapes you make are the content of the shape layer.

Okay, when you have multiple layers selected with multiple contents, you don't see their properties. However, I can see rectangle. I'm holding down command rectangle one, rectangle one from each layer.

When I select those, I see the shape properties. This is literally the settings of the shape. Okay, so when that's selected like that, this is the size of all the rectangles.

It's a little slash because they all have different heights and widths. Now, the different widths make sense. The bars are different widths, but the different heights are because I wasn't able to make them exactly match.

But if I go to shape property size when all the rectangles are highlighted, I'm going to uncheck the little link and I'm going to take the second number, which is the height, and I'm going to type in 250 and press return. It's going to make them all the same exact height. Whenever you have multiple things selected in the properties panel, anything that has a little hyphen in it means it has different values.

Typing, overriding the hyphen, clicking on the hyphen and typing a value will set them all to that value. So, if you want to make everything 250 or 350 or whatever it is,  that's how you can do it. That's the last part of the editing the shape layers.