Re-sizing graphics is a vital [yet easy to learn] skill that will see your visual content being repurposed and getting much further reach. In this tutorial, we break down the basic steps on how to resize, and throw in some tips and tricks to have all your designs looking like they’ve been made by a pro Designer!
Watch the video walkthrough to get started! This example takes you through a complex design. If your design does not contain many design elements, you’ll be able to bypass some of the steps!
The resize tool is available on Plus and Edge plans, and during your 30 day free trial of Plus.
Once you have your initial design finalised, ensure you still have it open in the Easil editor. Then, it’s time to get to know the Layers panel, located second from the bottom, on the right Sidebar.
PREPARING YOUR INTIAL DESIGN FOR RESIZING
Before we start moving elements around, or even thinking about clicking that Resize button, let’s ensure our original design is set up for success.
- Open the Layers panel to ensure our text and elements are nicely organized into Groups.
- We suggest grouping elements by their visual location on the design. For example, if you have a heading which comprises of several text boxes, and some graphic elements, we would suggest creating a group called ‘Heading’ and drag all of those associated elements into that group, by clicking and dragging.
- You’ll note that all Easil templates are set up with groups to start, so it’s often set up with sections such as ‘Heading’, ‘Images’, and ‘Body Copy’.
If we click the visibility icon here, we can start to see our design has been grouped into each of these main sections. If we select just one element on the canvas, it moves only that element. However if we use the layers panel and select the group, we can move the entire group all at once. This little trick is going to save us a lot of time:
STARTING ON YOUR NEW DESIGN SIZE
Now that we know our groups are nicely organised, we’ll click on the resize tab located at the top of the right sidebar, where we’ll be able to choose the size of the new design we will be resizing to.
For this example, we’re working from our original portrait poster size, to a new landscape size. We’ll select a Landscape TV Screen, and click on it to start the resize process.
You can see we now have two different sized designs in our side panel, that you can toggle between:
On our new size, we’ll open our layers panel again and work from the back to the front making our adjustments to fit the new size. We start by selecting the background image, and simply dragging the handle on the corner, outwards to fill the space.
Graphic elements that contain 8 ‘handles’ can be dragged out and stretched. Pulling them out with the pill shaped handles will move them out of proportion from the original shape, and using the corner handles will increase the size in proportion.
In this example, as we’re going from a portrait to a landscape, we’d like to fill the space, and use the shapes in a landscape orientation, so we pull the handles out to extend the size of both the boxes, one by one:
Hot tip: If you have trouble getting any of the boxes to line up, try toggling off the grid snap functionality, which is the grid icon to the right of your design (that looks like a hashtag!).
Next, we’ll resize the two callout sections. Again by selecting the entire group in the layers panel, and resizing in proportion by pulling out one of the center corner handles.
Now for the text in the middle. This is all too small and we have those big white spaces on either side which can be better utilized.
Moving back to the Layers Panel, we can see that the text is currently in one group. We’ll be splitting it into 2 groups in order to place them side by side:
- Start by creating a new group and naming it Heading.
- Hold down shift, select each of the elements that to move into the group, and drag into the new Heading group created.
- These two groups can now be moved independently, so you can click on one, move to the side, so they are both placed evenly & balanced.
Make final adjustments if required to fill the space:
Once you have created a landscape size, you should use that as the basis for other landscape sizes, for example a Twitter graphic, LinkedIn graphic, or Facebook.
TOP TAKEAWAYS
- Start with a design that is the most similar to the resize you are creating. If you have a portrait design and require another portrait image, start with that!
- Learn to love the Layers panel! Create and select groups to move your elements and keep them organized.
Use the link here to follow along with this design and try it for yourself.
