Learn how to create an icon of a magnifying glass using Illustrator in this step-by-step guide. Discover how to effectively use various tools and shortcuts on this software to achieve your desired icon design.
Key Insights
- The tutorial guides you to create a magnifying glass icon by using various features in Illustrator such as the ellipse tool for the creation of the main circular part and the line segment tool for the handle of the magnifying glass.
- The article emphasizes the use of shortcuts for efficient design. For instance, Control plus on the keyboard is used for zooming in, shortcut H for the hand tool to change perspective, and shortcut V for the selection tool to adjust the shape and position of the designs.
- The article also highlights the importance of grouping and layering elements of a design. After creating the magnifying glass, the line and circle elements are grouped together, and then moved into the final layer for better organization and easy adjustments.
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In this video, we'll begin working on our magnifying glass icon. So to get started, let's first view a sample of our magnifying glass icon.
To do this, we'll open up our icons preview PDF by double-clicking it. And we'll see that the third icon is our magnifying glass. It's relatively simple with a circle in the middle, as well as a line coming outside.
So let's go back into Illustrator and create it. To do this, let's first zoom in on our third artboard by using CTRL PLUS (+) on the keyboard or hitting Z to zoom in with the magnifying glass. In addition, we need to adjust our view.
We can do so using Control and scrolling with the mouse to change our perspective left and right, or simply scrolling up and down to change our position down. Additionally, remember, we can use the hand tool, shortcut H on the keyboard, to change our perspective by clicking and dragging. So let's now prepare to create our magnifying glass.
The first thing we wanna do, make sure that we're in our working layer, as this is currently a working icon. And we'll go over to the left, and we're going to want to create a circle as the main part of our icon. If we click and hold over the shapes tool gallery, we'll see that we have options for a rectangle, ellipse, polygon, star, and line segment, but no options for a circle.
This is because we'll use the ellipse tool to create a circle. To do this, we can simply click and drag. And we'll see we can create an ellipse of multiple proportions.
To create a circle, we can either click and drag till we see the pink lines up and across, showing us that we've created a circle. Or as we click and drag, we can hold shift, creating a circle. We'll then release, and we have our circle.
Let's delete this for now, using the delete key on the keyboard, as we want to go over one other way to create a shape. The second way that we can create a shape is by simply clicking with the ellipse tool on the artboard. And we'll see that we have an ellipse window opening up, giving us the option to create the dimensions or ellipse by typing it.
In this case, let's type in 15 for our width and hitting tab on the keyboard, 15 for our height. We'll then click okay. And we'll see that it's created an ellipse.
Let's now drag our ellipse using the selection tool, shortcut V on the keyboard. And we'll simply drag it up. Let's also increase the size of our ellipse just a little bit by clicking and dragging on one of the corners.
And we'll notice that if we click and drag, it won't maintain its circle shape. Instead, we'll have to hold shift to maintain the proportions of our shape. We'll make it slightly larger to about here.
And we've now created the circle for our magnifying glass. Next, let's create our line. To do this, we'll go back to our toolbar, and we'll click and hold the ellipse tool with the left mouse button.
We'll go over to the right and select our line segment tool. And before creating our line, let's first deselect the ellipse. We can do this using control shift A on the keyboard.
And now we're ready to draw our line. Even though the line comes from the outside of the circle, let's draw it from the center. To do this, we'll hover over the center of our circle until we see it shown in pink, and we'll click and drag outside.
If we hold shift, we'll maintain 225 degrees, and we'll release. While we've created our line, our line currently stretches too far outside. To change this, we need to change where the anchor point of our line is.
We can do this using the direct selection tool in the toolbar right below the selection tool, or using A as a shortcut on the keyboard. Now with the direct selection tool, remember we can select individual anchor points. And in this case, we're going to want to move the anchor point in the middle of the circle.
We'll move it by clicking with the left mouse button. And as we can see, we can move it anywhere, changing the dimension of our line. However, in this case, we want it to intersect with the outside, our circle, and maintain the path of our current line.
As we'll see, when we get close to the path, it snaps to the middle of our line, maintaining the same line path. We'll simply drag out to the edge and see that our line will maintain the same direction and will release when it snaps to the intersection of the circle as well. We've now completed our magnifying glass.
So before moving forward, let's group our two objects together. First, using the selection tool rather than the direct selection tool, shortcut V on the keyboard. And let's create a selection box by clicking and dragging over both the circle and line.
We'll then right click and select Group. And as a final step, let's now move this icon into our final layer. To do this, we'll click on the square to the right of Working, showing our selected pieces of art, and drag it into Final.
It'll change blue, and we now have our group that we've just created. Let's retitle it by double clicking and typing 3 Magnifying Glass and hitting Enter. Let's now deselect using Control-Shift-A and we've completed our magnifying glass.
Nicely done. Let's hit Control-S on the keyboard to save our work. And in the next video, we'll be working on our fourth icon.
See you there.