This article provides a detailed step-by-step guide on how to create a gear icon using Illustrator tools. It breaks down the process into manageable stages, from creating the initial circles and rectangles to refining the shape and rounding out corners.
Key Insights:
- The gear icon is created starting with an outer circle and rectangles that form the gear edges. The ellipse and rectangle tools on Illustrator are used for this purpose.
- To ensure precision and symmetry, tools such as the selection tool and rotation tool are utilized. Keyboard shortcuts like "ctrl c", "ctrl v", "ctrl shift v" are key to replicating shapes and positioning them accurately.
- Refining the gear shape involves using the shape builder and the lasso tool. The latter is especially useful in selecting and adjusting specific points on the shape, such as rounding the inner corners of the gear edges.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video we'll be working on our gear icon. So let's start by looking at our pdf to view our gear icon.
As we can see we have a circle in the middle, and on the outside we have what appears to be a circle with multiple rectangles coming out of it, as well as some rounded inside corners. So let's now begin. We'll go into illustrator and let's shift our perspective, this time using the hand tool, shortcut h on the keyboard.
We'll just drag our perspective to the next artboard. Next let's get started by creating the outside circle. To do this we'll use v on the keyboard, and we'll create our gear icon using the ellipse tool.
For this we'll click and drag a circle, about this size. And next let's create the rectangles for our gears. To do this let's use the rectangle tool, going back to our toolbar, selecting the rectangle tool.
And in order to create these, let's roughly create each of the gear edges to be about this wide. And using the selection tool, v, shortcut on the keyboard, we'll click and drag this so that it intersects when we see center with our circle. This means that it's evenly spaced within our circle, and we have our first edges on top and bottom.
To recreate this three additional times, let's hit CTRL C on the keyboard. In order to paste this we can hit CTRL V, however it doesn't paste it exactly evenly. So let's hit CTRL Z to undo this, and instead of just CTRL V, let's hit CTRL shift v to paste an additional rectangle in the same spot.
We automatically have this rectangle selected, so we're simply going to rotate it by going to one of the edges until we see the rotate cursor, and we'll click and let's drag it at 270 or 90 degrees. We'll then release, and we now need to create two more. Rather than doing this two additional times, let's hold shift to select both rectangles at once, and we'll hit CTRL C to copy and CTRL shift v to paste in place.
We'll then rotate both of these rectangles looking for the rotation icon on the top right, and we'll click while holding shift until we've rotated to the right. While this looks complicated in the middle, understand that we have our spokes on the edges. The only thing we now need to do is transform each of these into one shape.
To do this we'll use our shape builder, but first we'll want to drag a selection box over all of the shapes. We'll then go to our shape builder, and we'll drag across each of these shapes making sure that we've combined them all into one total shape, and release. I missed this one, this one, and this one, and we now have the outside of our gear.
Let's use the selection tool now to resize it so that it fits within our artboard. Remember to hold shift so that we rescale proportionally. Next let's round out the inside edges.
To do this we're going to want to use our direct selection tool, shortcut a on the keyboard. In addition we can actually round out these corners by using what are called live corners. As we'll see if we select just one anchor by clicking on it, we can use live corners to adjust how round our corner is.
However, instead of going through and adjusting each anchor point the same way, what we can do is select only the inside anchor points and adjust those all at once. To do this we'll use a new tool called the lasso tool. This is grouped with the direct selection tool, so we'll click and hold selecting the lasso tool.
Our lasso tool allows us to add a selection of just the anchor points drawn with inside our lasso. We're now going to draw a lasso by clicking and holding around the inside anchor points, leaving out the outside anchor points. When we've completed it we'll see that only the inside anchor points are red showing that they're selected.
We'll then go back to our direct selection tool, clicking and holding direct selection tool. Finally we'll round out these corners until it looks more gear appropriate. We'll then hit CTRL shift a to deselect and we have the outside of our gear.
We'll hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work and in the next video we'll be completing our gear. See you there!