Learn how to create your first icon file using Adobe Illustrator, from setting up your custom file to starting your design with guides and lines. This guide will walk you through all the steps needed to successfully illustrate your first icon.
Key Insights
- The first step in creating your icon file is setting up a new custom file in Adobe Illustrator. The dimensions for the icon should be a square artboard of 30 pixels by 30 pixels.
- As your icon will be used mostly for web-based and computer-based viewing, it's vital to select RGB color mode and ensure that raster effects are turned to high 300 ppi for higher resolution.
- Starting your design involves placing guides within Adobe Illustrator, which help to create your icon within the center or on specified units within the artboard. The guide placement is followed by adding your first line using the line segment tool.
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In this video we'll begin creating our first icon file. If you haven't done so already, let's close our interface file by clicking the x on the top tab of our file.
Next, let's create a new file for our icon. We'll go to file, new, and we'll be creating our own custom file. To do this, we'll go to our preset details and we'll double click the title giving it the new name construction icons.
Next, let's change our width and our height. To do this we'll double click width and we'll type 30 and next let's go to height where we'll double click and type 30. We'll click outside height and we'll see that the width and height have been auto calculated to be 30 points.
Let's now change this to pixels by selecting the drop down menu for the units of measurement and we'll select pixels. Because this is a square artboard of 30 × 30, the orientation is not important and in this case we'll have one artboard. Moving on through our details, we don't need a bleed which is often used for cutting projects and so we'll move on to our color mode.
CMYK color is often used for printing however for our icons we'll be using them mostly for web-based viewing as well as computer-based viewing so we'll click the drop down menu and select RGB color. Next, we'll make sure that raster effects is turned to high 300 ppi. 300 ppi is 300 pixels per inch meaning it has a higher resolution than 150 or 72 pixels per inch.
We'll keep it at high and keep the preview mode at default. Let's now click create. Here we can see we have our square artboard of 30 pixels by 30 pixels.
Let's start by saving this file going to file, save as, and we'll see that our title is already filled in with the extension .ai showing that it's an adobe illustrator file and we're within our c drive as well as our unzipped folder so we'll click save and okay. Before moving forward let's now look at the preview of the icons we'll be creating. We'll open up our folder and double click icons preview pdf within our unzipped folder.
Looking at these icons the first one we'll be creating is the arrow on the left hand side. As we can see it points to the right and we can fit this within our artboard. Let's now close this preview window and get started.
We'll click within side illustrator and let's now begin. Before we start drawing lines let's first place guides which allow us to create our icon within the center or on specified units within the artboard. To do this we'll go to properties and making sure that our selection tool is selected within the toolbar we'll click on the icon for click to show rulers.
We'll then see that we have a ruler both on the top across and a ruler going down. Our artboard goes from 0 to 30 pixels and 0 to 30 pixels so let's now create guides right in the middle of our artboard. To create guides we can simply click and drag down to place our guide.
We'll then hold shift while dragging to make sure that our guide goes to a specified unit. We'll release right at 15 pixels and we'll see that we have a blue guide going across our artboard. Next let's create two additional guides one pixel both from the right and the left to give a little buffer zone.
We'll click on the left ruler and drag it over to the right holding shift and release at 29 pixels and do this one more time clicking from the left and dragging it holding shift until we're at one pixel. We'll then release. Let's hit CTRL S on our keyboard to save our work and next let's add our first line.
To do this we'll go to our tools bar and select the line segment tool. Remember if you don't see the line segment tool it may be in the tools group with the rectangle tool ellipse tool polygon or star tool and so simply click and hold on that tool and release over a line segment tool. We'll then go to our artboard and when we see it intersect and we're hovering over both lines intersecting we'll click and drag to the right until we reach the other intersect and then release.
In this case I don't have a line so we'll need to see what's wrong. The first thing we'll look at is we'll look at the left hand side and see that I have no fill and no stroke set. To change this back to our default we'll again use the default command on our keyboard d so we'll press d and now we'll see that we have the line.
Let's now save our work using CTRL S on the keyboard and in the next video we'll finish our arrow. See you there!