Jump into the world of graphic design by learning how to create a wifi icon using Adobe Illustrator. This article walks you through adding tools to your toolbar, using the rectangular grid tool, creating arching lines, and refining your icon with adjustment and alignment techniques.
Key Insights
- The creation of a wifi icon in Adobe Illustrator involves multiple steps starting from adding the arc tool and the rectangular grid tool to your toolbar.
- The rectangular grid tool is utilized to create a grid that serves as a guide for drawing the arching lines, which represent the wifi signal bands.
- Final touches on the icon involve aligning, rotating, and resizing the elements. The circle that forms the center of the wifi icon can be modified by switching from a black stroke to a black fill for a stronger graphical impact.
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 wi-fi icon. Before beginning let's look at a preview of our wi-fi icon by pulling up the pdf. As we'll see for our wi-fi icon we have a circle in the center that's filled with black as well as four lines arching over from the center.
So let's now create this icon. To do this we'll go into illustrator and let's shift our perspective by holding CTRL on the keyboard and scrolling down with the mouse. Next let's select our working layer in the layers panel.
In order to build this icon we need to add two tools to our toolbar. To do this we'll go to the bottom of our toolbar and select the three dots for our edit toolbar. The first tool we'll be adding is our arc tool just to the right.
To add it into our toolbar we'll click and select it with the left mouse button and simply drag it into our toolbar. If we see a blue outline around an icon this means that we'll add it to the group. Instead we want to add it as its own icon.
We'll shift the mouse until we see the blue line and release. As a second tool added to our toolbar let's add the rectangular grid tool. To do this we'll click and drag and this time let's add it to the group when we see the blue outline adding it to the arc tool group and release.
Let's now discuss the rectangular grid tool. With this tool selected we're going to now go to tool options found in our properties panel. From here we'll have options for adjusting our grid.
In this case we want four horizontal dividers and four vertical dividers. If we need to change this we can simply double click and type in four. When we've done that we can click ok.
So let's begin drawing our grid. To do this we'll start at the top left hand corner and drag down and to the right until we release at the intersect. We've now drawn our grid which will serve as guides for our arching lines.
Let's now lock this so that it doesn't move as we begin drawing our lines. To do this we'll go to the right in our layers panel and select the group with our rectangular grid. As we can see from the drop down in our layers the rectangular grid actually adds multiple lines creating the grid.
We'll lock these layers first by toggling the drop down up and then clicking in the space to the right of the eye to lock our layer. Next let's create our arcs. To do this we'll go to the left hand side in our toolbar, click and hold the rectangular grid tool and select the arc tool.
From here we're going to be creating lines that span from one edge to the opposite. To do this let's start on the bottom left hand square edge and click and drag as we see an arch going across and we'll release when we see anchor. We're going to repeat this now on the next line over dragging one line under and release when we say anchor.
Again on the next line going down to the next anchor and finally one additional and we'll release. We currently have our wi-fi bands extending out however we now need to create the ellipse or the circle in the middle. To do this we'll go to our toolbar and we'll select the ellipse tool and with the ellipse tool selected we're now going to draw an ellipse the size of this bottom square.
To do this we'll find where the two lines intersect and we'll click and drag holding shift to make a circle until we reach the anchor on the bottom right hand side and release. Next let's hide our grid by going over to the group and clicking unlock to toggle the unlock and finally let's change the visibility of our grid. As we can see we have our wi-fi signal here and it's all ready except we need to move this ellipse down and to the right.
To do this we'll hit v to get the selection tool and let's drag the center of our circle so that it intersects with the bottom right hand side of our artboard. We'll release and here we have our wi-fi signal. Now we need to rotate it and resize it.
First in order to do this let's first group all of our elements within one group. To do this we'll draw a selection box using the selection tool and we'll right click and select group. Next we need to rotate it and resize it.
We'll see that as we drag in from one corner we can resize it disproportionately. To maintain our proportions we'll hold shift and see that it sizes proportionally and we now have a more appropriate size for our artboard. Finally we'll need to rotate it.
We'll click on the top right hand corner when we see the arrows and this rotation can be done on any corner of the grouping. We'll simply click and here we'll see that we can rotate it. Again if we hold shift we'll move an appropriate increment allowing the wi-fi signal to stand up straight.
Finally let's resize it once more holding shift as we drag out from the corner until it's an appropriate size within the artboard. As a final note we're going to now horizontally align center and vertically. And we've now completed our wi-fi signal.
If we do want to make one more change we can actually change our circle here from having a stroke of one point to having a black fill. To do this we'll double click selecting only the circle and all we need to do is switch from a black stroke to a black fill. While we could do this by double clicking the fill and selecting black but cancel instead we can do this by swapping the fill and stroke using the arrow in the top right of the fill and stroke.
If we click we'll see it's now swapped so that it has a black fill and no stroke. Let's double click outside the isolation mode and here we have our wi-fi signal. Finally let's hit control s on the keyboard to save our work.
We'll double click the group title it six wi-fi and hit ENTER and we'll drag this group into final. Additionally we can delete our group that we used for guides using the delete icon on the bottom right hand side and finally we'll save our work using control s on the keyboard to save. In the next video we'll be working on our locked icon.
See you there!