Discover how to create a lock icon in Adobe Illustrator, starting from changing perspectives to designing intricate elements. Learn how to use various tools for designing the icon, including the rectangle tool and the rounded rectangle tool.
Key Insights
- The lock icon is created in Adobe Illustrator using a variety of tools such as the rectangle tool for the bottom part and the rounded rectangle tool for the top part of the lock.
- The process involves holding shift while clicking and dragging with the rectangle tool to create a square, which eventually forms the base of the lock. The color fill of the square can be modified to suit requirements.
- Creating the rounded top of the lock can be achieved by using the rounded rectangle tool. The dimensions of the rectangle and the roundness can be adjusted using keyboard arrows, providing a high level of customization to the design.
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 creating the lock icon. To do this let's first change our perspective by scrolling over to the right, scrolling down on the mouse while holding CTRL on the keyboard.
Next we're going to be designing a lock within this artboard. Before moving forward let's check our preview and within the pdf we can see that we have our lock icon here as a square, a rounded top, and if we look closely we'll see that we have a circle connected to a triangle to make up the key portion. So let's now begin.
We'll go back into illustrator and we'll start by clicking on our working layer. The first thing we'll design is the bottom of our lock using the rectangle tool. Within our toolbar we'll click and hold and select the rectangle tool.
For our lock we're going to be creating a square and similar to how the ellipse tool works by holding shift to create a circle, the rectangle tool works to create a square by holding shift as we click and drag. We'll drag our lock to be about this size and as we can see here our fill is still set to black from the wi-fi icon. To change this from a black fill to a black stroke we can click on swap fill and stroke or we can simply hit d for default on the keyboard.
Next let's center our square. We can align it with the horizontal line and the vertical line and next we're going to create the top of our lock. To do this we could either create an ellipse and a rectangle combining both shapes into a rounded rectangle at the top or we can use a new tool.
In this case let's use a new tool by going to edit toolbar and we're going to add the rounded rectangle tool. To do this we'll click and drag rounded rectangle and let's group it in with the other shape tools. We'll release and we'll see that automatically we have our rounded rectangle tool selected.
Let's now click on the artboard and we can look at how this tool works. The first thing we want to do before creating our shape is hit control shift a to deselect all objects. Next let's go to the top center of our square and we're going to start drawing our rounded rectangle from here.
From here we'll click and drag and we'll see that we have a rounded rectangle. In addition to establish the point that we clicked at as our center point we're going to hold ALT on the keyboard. As we can see here we have a rounded rectangle and we can simply establish where we want to go.
Additionally we can also change the dimensions of our rounded rectangle and how much round there is by using the keyboard left and right arrows. As we click over left and right we'll see that the round changes. If we use the up and down arrows we'll see it changes more gradually.
Let's now go back to the center we'll hold ALT and this seems to be a pretty natural round top for our lock. Drag it down a little bit and let's release right about here when you feel like you have a good proportion. We now have our round top of our lock and our square lock below however we need to now remove the bottom section of this shape.
Before doing this however we'll use the selection tool shortcut v on the keyboard and we'll drag a selection box for both objects so that we can work with all of our units and sections. Using the shape builder tool we'll now go in and we'll see that we have three different sections that we can combine into shapes. In this case since we want to remove this bottom section we can absorb it into the square simply making the square section.
We'll release and we now have our lock. Next let's deselect our object using CTRL shift a to deselect. Let's now save our work using CTRL S on the keyboard and in the next video we'll be completing our lock.