Hour 5. Applied Layout Techniques

What You'll Learn in This Hour:

• How to create custom color swatches and gradients

• Practical ways to use blends and filters

• Additional tricks for creating perfectly aligned graphics

You've spent the last few hours acquiring basic drawing and graphic-importing skills. This hour, you're going to concentrate on gaining fine control of the features involved with these skills.

On the one hand, this chapter could be called "Advanced Drawing" but the techniques you'll learn have just as much to do with accurately presenting graphics with the right color and alignment as it does with creating graphics from scratch. In fact, I'm probably more authorized to discuss how to present graphics because I'm usually the one assembling the graphics not the one creating them. Everything you learn in this hour should help you create perfect layouts (which is a much different matter than the subjective topic of creating nice looking graphics).