Discover the intricacies of creating a unique icon design, focusing on customizing a helmet and glasses icon. Learn about the various tools and techniques, such as swapping fill and stroke colors, adjusting stroke properties, and customizing line width.
Key Insights
- The process begins with the copying of a pre-existing helmet and glasses icon onto a new artboard, using the hand tool and keyboard shortcuts.
- Modification of the glasses and helmet involves swapping the fill and stroke colors, as well as adjusting the stroke properties for more character.
- Customization of lines is achieved through adjustment of the stroke profile and width tool, resulting in a stylized and unique icon design.
Note: These materials are provided to give prospective students a sense of how we structure our class exercises and supplementary materials. During the course, you will get access to the accompanying class files, live instructor demonstrations, and hands-on instruction.
In this video we'll be working on our final icon and our midterm project customizing our helmet and glasses. So to start let's use the hand tool shortcut H on the keyboard and drag over to our final artboard.
From here we're going to be copying the helmet and glasses that we've previously made and adding it to this artboard. To do this we'll go into our layers panel and we'll select helmet and glasses and hit CTRL C to copy. Then going into the working layer we'll paste it using CTRL V. From here we can use the selection tool v on the keyboard and we're going to drag it fully into our artboard and center it.
As an example let's look to our pdf and we can see that for this customized helmet and glasses we've changed the fill to black, we've made the white transparent, and the lines have a little more character. So I'll walk through what the process looks like to be able to recreate this, however you'll have different opportunities to customize your own helmet along the way. So let's go back into illustrator and begin the process.
The first thing I want to do is customize the glasses. To do this I'll double click to go into isolation mode and select the glasses. From here it's as simple as swapping the fill and the stroke.
So I'll click swap fill and stroke and I've now created my black filled glasses. Next let's work on the helmet. So let's double click on the helmet and we're going to swap this out to have a black fill.
Next if we double click outside we'll see that all of our accent lines have disappeared and some of them are actually sticking up into the helmet. We can fix this by zooming in and holding CTRL and using the mouse to change our perspective. Next let's double click back on the helmet and double click back on the helmet again to go into isolation mode for just the helmet.
We'll then draw a selection box over the entire helmet and holding shift if we click on the helmet we'll deselect it only selecting our lines. From here we can change the stroke color from black to white and while we have some issues with our lines this looks like it works well. Next let's talk about customizing the lines.
The first way that we can do this is with this bottom path. I'll hit CTRL shift a to deselect however we'll remain in isolation mode. Adjusting this path we can go into properties and adjust our stroke.
We'll click on stroke and here's where we have many different options of how we can adjust this line. Clicking on the profile we can go through different profiles and feel free to choose whatever one you'd prefer. For me I'll use this profile however I'm going to customize it a little bit using the width tool.
So clicking with the width tool I'll then drag down from the edges just so I can make this line a little bit thinner. Next we'll work on these lines up top. To do this I'm going to minimize the width at the bottom dragging to the right.
I'll do the same thing by clicking and dragging to the left this time and finally in the middle I'll click and drag so that they're all pointing directly down. Next I'll have to adjust these lines so they're reaching over the top of the helmet. To do this I'll use the selection tool v on the keyboard and I'm simply going to drag up so that all three lines are raised above the helmet.
We've now completed our stylizing of our helmet. If we double click we can exit and we've stylized the helmet appropriately. Let's now save our work using CTRL S on the keyboard and in the next video we'll be completing our midterm project.
See you there!