Tutorial Author - TVPR (http://forums.biorust.com/member.php?u=143)
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| An Introduction to Illustrator Tutorial Author - TVPR (http://forums.biorust.com/member.php?u=143) |
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.
|
Step 9: We should now have a 1-2-2-1 pattern of
anchor points all the way around the cogwheel. That said, I seem to be missing
a couple of points myself. To rectify this, change the Minus Pen to a
Plus Pen
(or Add Anchor Point tool if you want to be picky about it). Simply click the
path roughly where you need that extra point. By now you'll have noticed that
your tools snap to the anchor points and the path as you work your way along
- one of the wonders of the guides we turned on in the very beginning. Now
that the correct number of points is in place, we can allow ourselves a
quick zoom out to get a quick overview. Much better already, aye? But now is no
time to rest on our laurels - our vector still needs some work. |
Step 10: Back at 400% zoom, it's time to do some
dirty work, using the Direct Selection tool (A) and the Convert Point tool (Shift+C). The Direct Selection tool is a pain to use, by the way, you'll soon see
why. Select it - it's the innocent-looking white pointer at the top of your
toolbar - but make sure the cogwheel is unselected. Thanks to the
guides, moving the cursor along the path will highlight it with blue, and
snap to the anchor points. Now we'll simplify our work further, by hiding
everything that's not a path. Click View > Outline, or just press
Ctrl+Y. Your
beautiful, fat strokes should disappear, leaving you with a thin black line -
your vector path. Move along it with your Segmenting tool and move any
out-of place anchor points where they belong. |
Step 11: Select the Convert Point tool -
it's in the box with the pen tool - and we'll get started. It's a good
idea to turn off the Outline mode, so press Ctrl+Y on the
keyboard again - That way we'll be able
to see our changes right away. Clicking and dragging an anchor point with
this tool will allow you to transform both its handles at once. Handles
determine which way the path will take from that anchor point, in both
directions, to reach the next one. Keep this in mind for when you're drawing
your own paths. Anyway, you can also transform one handle at a time,
independent of the other. This can give some pretty funky (and unrealistic)
effects, so we'll try to stay out of that for now. Try experimenting a
little, and drag around the handles until you're satisfied. You should note that
simply clicking once on an anchor point with the Converter tool will erase both
handles, effectively turning the anchor point into a straight corner. This
is useful
if you're after a harder effect, of if your handle handling has gotten way
out of hand, and you'd like to restart. |
 Step 12:
Assuming that you are satisfied with all your anchor points, handles,
curves and corners, we'll zoom out and continue. By now, it's probably
dangerous for me to say this, but you could have gotten away with not
editing a single anchor point and still gotten a lovely cogwheel. If you'd
painted up your cogwheel in PS using the aforementioned tutorial, and
stopped before adding any texture, effects, gradients etc - and just kept
that simple, solid-colour cogwheel, you could have imported that, vectorized
it, and not needed to think of anchor points for one second. But hey,
where's the fun - and learning - in that? ;) |
 Step 13:
The ellipse must be smaller. It will be representative for the hole in
the cogwheel, as well as the letter 'O'. Grab the ellipse by a corner, hold
Shift+Alt, and drag it
towards the centre. The Alt makes sure your scaling is relative to the
centre, and the Shift makes sure the shape itself is not altered. Stop
scaling down once the ellipse is inside the cog, like in the picture. You'll
notice, however, that your stroke gets really thin, because we chose to scale
strokes and effects in the general preferences back in step 2.
This is not good in
this particular case, so select it, and set the stroke size to something
nice and heavy - 25 is a good value. |
 Step 14: Now
for the finishing touches. Choose the regular Pen tool (P), which is my
personal favourite of all the tools in Illustrator. It severely rocks, as
you will come to learn! Using the guides to aid you, find the top-point in
your ellipse, and click once. Now, simply go down to the bottom of the
ellipse, 90 degrees down from your brand-new anchor point, and click once
there as well. You now have a line dividing your ellipse in two halves,
representing the letter 'I'. To emphasize this a little, we'll make a
little circle above it. Using the Ellipse tool (L), hover over your new line
to activate its guides, and Shift+Alt-click roughly in the middle of the
space that's directly up from that point. Drag out a nice little circle, and
release the button. You'll see the circle, but your stroke weight is set to
25 or so - so it's huge, and completely black. Set it to 15. Now no-one
can deny that the line through your 'O' is an 'I'. Currently, we only lack a
'B'
to get 'BIO', and the cogwheel - a mechanical element - can pretend to be
the 'rust'. :) |
 Step 15:
Its first things last, it seems, as we begin working on the first letter in "BioRUST".
Select the Pen tool again, and find the middle of the ellipse. Do this by
activating the guides, hovering the tool over the left or right anchor point
of the ellipse. Follow the 0 degrees guide towards the centre, and click
once where the guide intersects the straight line path of the 'I'. Click once
to create an anchor point. Now, follow the 135 degree guide from this point,
create a new point roughly half-way between the one you just made, and the
contour of the ellipse - but do not release the mouse button! Instead, drag
the mouse downwards along a 90 degrees guide, until the handle you see
rising up on the other side of your current anchor point is about level with
the one in the middle of the 'I'. Release the mouse button. Now, just follow the 0 degree
guide from the handle you're already hovering over, until it intersects with
the 'I'. Simply click once. Things should look like this now. Select the
brand-new crescent shape of yours, drag it downwards and out, scaling it to
look like the "belly" of the letter 'b' up against the 'I'. Set the
stroke
weight after scaling to 20 or so - and we're done! If you want, you could
always select it, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to copy and paste, then move the second
crescent on top of the other so as to form a "B" rather than "b". This is a
matter of taste, and really... I prefer the small "b". :P |
|
You can now save your vector for web, export to PDF, or experiment as
you will with colours, fill, gradients etc. Illustrator is an immensely
powerful tool, and one that no designer should ever have to be without. You've
just learned to master the first, most basic steps of it - it's up to you
what you want to do with these skills in future projects. |
