Discover the art of creating diverse shapes rooted from larger forms using the shape builder tool. This step-by-step guide lays out how to construct an icon using techniques such as scaling, transforming, and direct selection.
Key Insights
- In design, complex shapes can often be deconstructed into simpler elements, a technique that can facilitate the creation of diverse icons.
- Adobe Illustrator offers multiple tools such as the ellipse tool, the scale function, and the shape builder to construct intricate designs efficiently.
- Using shortcuts and transformative features can help in changing perspectives, replicating shapes, and adjusting dimensions more mathematically and accurately, thus enhancing the precision of 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 our construct. Let's start by using the hand tool shortcut H on the keyboard to change our perspective and for this icon let's leave a bit of gray space right below our next available artboard.
This will allow us to work with different transparency options as we create our shapes. Next let's go into our PDF to preview the icon we'll be creating. If we look at this closely it looks like we have many diverse shapes.
However these shapes can be rooted from larger shapes and built with the shape builder tool. In our mind expand each of these bars running across the construction zone icon. If we enter we'll imagine that it's four circles all running around each other similar to a target.
We then have a square that's been skewed with the edges rounded. So the first thing we'll be creating is four circles with alternating colors creating a target. We'll then create the triangle and use the shape builder to specifically isolate a piece or a slice of that target.
So let's get started. We'll go back into illustrator and rather than create this shape within our artboard let's create it outside of the artboard so that we can see the paths a little bit more clearly without transparency issues. We'll start by using the ellipse tool found in the toolbar and to start we're simply going to draw a circle a little bit less than the size of our artboard.
We'll release and for these circles we're going to take out the fill selecting none. Next we need to replicate this circle and create three additional smaller circles centered in the middle. To do this we'll use the selection tool shortcut v on the keyboard and we'll select this object and hit CTRL C to copy it and CTRL shift v to paste it.
Within our working layer we can see that we have two ellipses stacked on top of each other and have the top one selected. Rather than changing the dimensions of this circle using the bounding box we'll instead right click and use transform. From here we'll select scale and this allows us to more mathematically change the scale of our circle.
We'll go to the top where it says uniform and we'll type 80 and hit okay and this will allow us to create a circle that is 80 percent the size of the circle outside. Next let's do the same thing hitting CTRL shift v to again paste the same circle and we'll right click go to transform and go to scale. This time we'll be scaling it at 60 percent so we'll type 60 and hit okay.
Since we still have the original circle copied we can simply hit CTRL shift v again to paste it again and we'll go to transform, scale, and make our final circle at 40 percent and hit okay. Here we now have the four circles necessary to create our traffic cone pattern. Next let's create the triangle that will come up from the middle.
To do this we'll go into our shapes group and click and hold selecting the polygon tool. As we'll remember the polygon tool allows us to click and create a shape by determining the size and the radius. We'll hit okay and as we can see this triangle is much too large so let's scale it by clicking on the edge of the bounding box and holding shift as we do so to scale it proportionally.
Next we'll hit v on the keyboard so that we can begin moving it and we'll move it so that it's centered so that the top corner matches up with the center of our circles. We'll then drag the bottom of our triangle while holding shift to make sure that it matches up with the outside circle. Additionally this triangle is a little bit wider than our preferred traffic cone so we'll want to bring the sides in.
To change how wide our triangle is we can click on either the right or left side of our bounding box and if we drag in if we hold ALT we'll maintain the center of our shape only dragging in the sides. We'll release it when it looks a little bit more traffic cone esque and I'm going to simply move the top of the triangle up using the bounding box. I think this looks like a pretty good shape for our traffic cone.
Next let's use the direct selection tool to select the top of our triangle and we're simply going to round it out. If we click outside we can get a preview of what our traffic cone will look like. In this case I'm going to shrink it just a little bit by selecting it first hitting v on the keyboard selecting the cone and I'm just going to drop it down so it's a little bit smaller.
From here we can now create our traffic cone. We'll select all of the objects and we'll use the shape builder to build out the shapes the segments of our traffic cone. We'll select the top one first, second segment, third segment, and fourth segment.
These will be the parts of our traffic cone that we use. We can then simply drag over all of the middle circles that it creates one shape and one less shape to delete. We'll hit v to use our selection tool.
We'll click outside and then we can come back and delete the outer circle hitting the delete key and the bottom left hand corner and bottom right hand corner. We've now created our traffic cone. Let's hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work thus far and in the next video we'll be continuing building our traffic cone.
See you there!