Master the creation of a laptop icon using Adobe Illustrator in this detailed guide. Learn how to work with layers, live corners, the rectangle tool, and other functionalities to create a professional and sleek laptop icon.
Key Insights
- The creation of the laptop icon is a two-part process: first, the icon is created without the black fill, and then it is recreated with the black fill.
- The laptop icon comprises a rounded rectangle at the top and one angled to the right, with a pie chart and a few lines inside.
- In addition to creating the main structure of the laptop, the guide also provides instructions on crafting the three lines to the left of the text, with the goal of having three rectangles with the same height but different widths.
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In this video, we'll be working on our next icon, our laptop icon. Let's now zoom in on our next available artboard using CTRL PLUS (+) on the keyboard and scrolling with the mouse.
Within this artboard, we'll be creating our laptop icon. So let's first preview it by opening up our PDF with the icons and as we can see here, we have a laptop icon. As we can observe, it's a rounded rectangle on top, a rounded rectangle angled to the right, and then we've got a couple shapes inside with a pie chart and a couple lines.
We'll first be creating this icon without the black fill and second, going back to recreate this icon with the black fill. So let's begin. We'll click on Illustrator and we'll get started.
First, we'll make sure that we're in our working layer. And next, let's now create the top part of our laptop using the rectangle tool. If we zoom in a little bit more using CTRL PLUS (+) on the keyboard and CTRL scrolling up with the mouse to change our perspective over, we can now create the top of our laptop.
We'll simply click and drag until we have our laptop top. We'll leave it about here. And next, let's round out each of these corners using live corners.
To do this, we'll toggle the dot on the inside of the corner and simply click and drag in. We'll leave it about there and deselect using CTRL shift a to deselect. We're now ready to create the laptop keyboard.
So let's go back to our toolbar, and we'll select the rectangle tool. And next, let's drag a rectangle starting at the intersection of the bottom of our rectangle, dragging over to the right until we're aligned on the right-hand side. We'll make this rectangle a little bit shorter and release it right about there.
Next, we'll now move this laptop keyboard down using the down arrow on the keyboard. If we need to adjust it more, we can use V on the keyboard to drag it up and down. And finally, we now need to shift our rectangle down and to the right.
To do this, we'll simply be shifting the bottom two anchor points so that our rectangle is shifted right on the bottom. Therefore, we'll use our direct selection tool, shortcut A on the keyboard, and we'll simply click the first anchor point, highlighting it in red, and the bottom right anchor point while holding shift. From here, we can move both of these anchor points over by clicking and dragging as we hold shift, and we'll move them just a little bit further.
And in the case of this perspective, we want to move this right anchor point just a little bit further to about there. This looks like an appropriate perspective. Now, we simply need to round out the corners of this bottom rectangle.
To do this, we'll hit V on the keyboard for our selection tool. We'll select the bottom rectangle, then hit A to have our direct selection tool where we can work with the live corners. We'll then drag these in slightly, and if we want them to match the same ratio as our laptop screen above, we can click on this rectangle, click on the live corners, and in the top control bar, we'll see the angle produced on the corner.
It's currently set to 1.15. Therefore, we'll go back down to our bottom rectangle, and we'll adjust the corners to be the same in our control bar, typing 1.15, and hitting enter. We've now matched the same angle of our corners, and we have our laptop top as well as our keyboard bottom. Next, let's work on crafting the three lines to the left of text.
To do this, we'll be using the rectangle tool, and simply clicking and dragging a rectangle of text. Our goal will be to have three different rectangles with all the same height, but different widths, and in this case, it looks a little too thick as the stroke, so let's swap it out, changing the fill and stroke so that we have a black fill, and we'll change the stroke from white by clicking on it, and instead we'll select none. Here we can see we now have our black line of text, so let's copy this shape and move it below.
While we could copy using CTRL C as we have done, an additional way to copy an element is to hold ALT on the keyboard when we see the two arrows for our cursor, and we'll simply click and drag below. Let's do this one more time, selecting our top rectangle and clicking while holding ALT and dragging below. As we'll see on the right hand side, we have pink arrows showing us that the separation between each of these rectangles is the same, so we'll release.
Finally, let's change the length of these lines. To do this, we'll simply zoom in using CTRL-plus on the keyboard, select any of them, and we're simply going to give it a little more diversity by clicking on the edges so we have different lengths of line. We can then zoom out, and let's add one more towards the bottom.
We'll select this bottom one and holding ALT, click and drag, and this time we'll give a little bit more space in between and make it longer at the bottom. Let's now zoom in, and toggling the right hand side to adjust the length, we'll click and drag it to the right. Let's now zoom out, and here we can see we have the beginnings of our laptop.
Let's hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work, and in the next video we'll continue working on our laptop icon. See you there!