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Hello there prospective graphic designers! Today, we're
going to take a look at the very basic aspects of Adobe's superb
application for vector graphics - Illustrator.
In this tutorial, I'll be referring to the functions and layout in Illustrator
10 (although my instructions should scale well to earlier/later editions since
nothing here is too unique). Together, we will design a quick, simple logo for
this website and, in so doing, get used to the most fundamental functions and tools that
Illustrator has to offer. I will assume you have some rudimentary knowledge of
Adobe
Photoshop, as the program will be referenced occasionally, and a mastery of
both applications is very useful. I will also assume that your application
preferences are still the standard factory-set ones.
Step 1: Start by making a new document. Name it "BioRust logo",
choose RGB-colour, and then press OK. In case you didn't know, CMYK is the colour setup
used when designing for print, while RGB is the preferred for
screen-based design - i.e. web design, wallpapers, etc. When it comes to the
document size you can choose from a
range of presets or define your own - is not important either way right now, so just
set it to 800x600px. Illustrator, unlike Photoshop, does not limit your work to
a set canvas size.
Step 2: Now we're in a workspace similar to that of Photoshop. Arrange
toolbars, window sizes etc. to your personal preference, and we'll get started
on the logo! The first thing we want to do is enable guides. This can be done in
the View menu, or by pressing Ctrl+U. The guides are snap-to lines which are
really helpful most of the time, and can be set to become visible at all sorts
of angles from any given point, using the Edit > Preferences > Guides
dialog box. For now
though, just turn them on and leave them on standard settings. You will, however, want to
edit your General preferences (Ctrl+K). Here, simply make absolutely sure that
"Scale strokes and effects" (the second bottom checkbox in the right column on
my version) is checked - you really want this to be enabled. Press OK. Next,
we'll make an ellipse as the base for our logo.
 Step 3: Unlike Photoshop, the two colours on the toolbar are not
foreground and background colours, but stroke and fill colours. For our ellipse,
we'll be wanting a transparent centre - i.e.. no fill. Simply bring the solid
square to the front by clicking it, and select the third of the three boxes
below. They represent, respectively: Solid colour, gradient, and clear. Now, we
want a black border marking our ellipse, so bring the border box to the front,
select the first box for solid colour, and make sure it's actually black. In the second highest section of your toolbar, right side, there should be a
text tool, a shape tool and a Pencil Tool. The shape tool
set to a square as standard, so click it, hold, and change it to a ellipse. Now it's time to do some actual
drawing.
Step 4: With the Ellipse Tool selected, click and hold near the middle of
the document. As you drag the mouse back and forth, you see some blue lines with
an X in the middle. That's our ellipse-to-be. As in PS, holding Ctrl, Shift or
Alt while dragging has its effects; Alt makes the point you drag from the centre
of the ellipse, Shift makes it a perfect circle, Alt+Shift makes a circle with
centre where you clicked, and Ctrl lets you drag the circle by its physical
corner, rather than the corner where the X-axis extremity meets the Y-axis
extremity. Release the mouse, and press Ctrl+Z to undo our shape undo.
This may seem like a backward step, but we'll make our ellipse much
more accurate than this using a few handy tips. Get up the Stroke palette (press
F10 if you can't find it), set stroke size to
25, and click once in the middle of the document - still with the Ellipse Tool
selected. You can now type the exact dimensions you want for your ellipse - that
is, 600px tall, and 370,8px wide. Press OK.
Step 5: You should see a rather oblong shape. It's a little bit too big for your workspace, but this matters not a
jot. That's part the beauty of working with vectors. We could zoom in 2000%,
draw up our entire logo, zoom out to 25% and resize it - and it'd look just as
good, whereas working with raster graphics, you'd just get a couple of huge
squares when trying the same thing. Now that we look at it, however, it's too
tall for our purpose - but how tall should it be? We'll find an example to help
guide us!
 Step 6: Using the brilliant cogwheel tutorial for Photoshop located
here
(download this file if you haven't tried it yet), we've already
made ourselves a nice element reminiscent of something mechanical. Time to use it
in our design, rather than leave it on the HD for "possible future use". Choose
File > Insert, and navigate your way to the .PSD file of the gear. Insert it, and if given a
dialog, merge PS-layers to a single picture. Illustrator can recognize and
import just about any graphics you can think of and then allow you to vectorize
them, which is a fantastic feature. You should have a big, shiny metal cogwheel
spread out atop your ellipse. Choose the Vectorize or Auto-trace tool
(its name depends on your version of Illustrator and language) -
it's located directly below the Gradient Tool, in the second lowest tier of the
toolbar. Now, with the Vectorizer selected, click once
on the shiny metal outline of the cogwheel. If you hit the spot, you should now
have a large, black cogwheel outline atop the Photoshop-version you made before.
Step 7: Ditch the Vectorizer to the benefit of the Standard Selection Tool and select the PSD-import. Delete it. You should now
be left with a large, black cogwheel, with very ragged edges, as well as an
ellipse - both with a stroke weight of 25. Now, for dynamics sake, we'll still be
wanting an oblong shape rather than a squared one. But first we
need to smoothen that cog! Move it a good distance away from the ellipse, and
get your view centered on it again - now we have some room in which we can work. As you can
see when the cogwheel is selected, the blue lines defining its actual shape are
anything but regular, at least in some areas. There are a number of ways correct
this, but we'll go with the most practical, and the one that always works - i.e.
manual adjustment. Find the Pen Tool in the toolbar, click and hold, and select the
Delete Anchor Point Tool - henceforth the "Minus Pen". Zoom in to, say, 400%, on
a section with a good amount of anomalies.
 Step 8: Make
sure the cog is selected, so you can see the blue lines inside the black stroke,
and study it. The dots are anchor points, and can be added, moved, deleted,
or transformed to alter the shape of the object they compose. Study the
sections. There should be two anchor
points on each outer corner, and one on each inner. We want to duplicate
this pattern all around the wheel. Use the Minus Pen, and remove all
superfluous points you find. If there are some points that are in roughly the
correct area, only in a bad position - we'll move them around later. Don't
worry if you remove one too many, or if it looks rather horrible right now -
we'll fix this too.
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- Tutorial written by TVPR
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