Dive into the process of creating an arrow icon, starting with one line and adding two more to form the arrowhead. Understand the importance of precision through the use of guides, line angles, and object copying for the creation of repeat graphical elements in your design projects.
Key Insights
- In creating an arrow icon, starting with a straight line and adding two lines at 45-degree angles forms the arrowhead. The use of guides helps ensure precision and consistency in the arrow's dimensions.
- Repetition of elements like lines can be achieved easily by copying and pasting an existing line. Rotating the copied line at the correct angle and dragging it to intersect with the other lines completes the bottom line of the arrowhead.
- Visual enhancements like rounding the ends of the arrow lines can be done through the stroke property. This gives the arrow a smoother, more refined look.
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In this video we'll be completing our arrow icon. Currently we can see that we have one line across creating the first part of our arrow, however we need two additional lines pointing to the right hand side to complete our arrow.
To do this let's first set a guide to show where the end of the top line of our arrow will end. We'll click on the ruler up top as we need rulers to create guides. We'll click and drag down holding shift until we reach eight pixels and release.
We'll next create our line. To do this we'll make sure that we have our line segment tool selected and we'll hit d previous to creating the line to make sure that we have the default setting of a white fill black stroke at one point. Next we'll create the line moving from the right hand side to the top at a 45 degree angle.
We'll hover over the first line until we see the anchor point showing and we'll simply click and drag up. However before releasing we want to make this line at a 45 degree angle so to do this we'll hold shift. As we can see the line will grow at that angle 45 degrees or in this case 180 degrees minus 45 giving us 135 degrees.
We'll then release when we're hovering over the guide and we now have our line. To deselect this line hit CTRL shift a and we've now deselected all of our elements. Next let's create the bottom line.
While we could do this the exact same way creating another guide seven pixels below and another line we can also do this by copying the first line we've created and rotating it. So to do this let's go to our selection tool found in the toolbar on top and we're going to be selecting our top path or our top line. With it selected by clicking on it we'll hit CTRL C on the keyboard to copy and next let's hit CTRL V to paste.
We've now pasted our line on top. Next we'll need to move it over. We can do this by clicking and simply dragging it over.
However the angle is currently off so let's fix this by rotating our line. To do this we can hover over either of the anchor points until we see the rotate arrows shown by an arrow rotating. We'll then rotate it by clicking with the left mouse button and rotating it around the center.
We'll hold shift to make sure that it rotates at 45 degrees each and we'll release. Next we need to bring this line so that it intersects with the other lines. We'll do this by clicking and dragging until the points meet and now we can see we've completed our arrow.
Let's now zoom out to view our work using the zoom tool. We'll go to our toolbar and select the zoom tool. To zoom in all we need to do is click.
As we click we'll zoom in and to zoom out we can hold ALT on the keyboard to zoom out. Here we can get a full view of the arrow and this looks pretty good. Additionally if we want to zoom in we can use CTRL PLUS (+) on the keyboard to zoom in or CTRL MINUS (-) on the keyboard.
Finally now that I'm a little off-center let's readjust the view of our arrow by using the hand tool dragging our perspective. To access the hand tool we can either click with the left mouse button on the zoom tool showing us the tool grouping and we can select the hand tool or use the shortcut h on the keyboard. With the hand tool we can drag our perspective.
And we'll center our artboard here. While we can get a good view of our arrow here I feel like the guides are a little distracting in looking at this. So let's now hide them.
To do this we'll go to the selection tool and click outside the artboard on no objects and then right click clicking hide guides. We can now see our arrow. As one final change our lines are currently ended with a flat line not giving us the rounded look of the arrow.
To change this we'll select all three objects clicking on top and then holding shift to select the other two objects. With all three objects selected we'll then go to the stroke in our properties panel or in our control panel as both do the same thing. We'll then click and we can change the cap which shows how the end is flat.
We'll simply change it to round cap and here we'll see at the end of our arrow is now rounded. Let's click outside of these segments and we can see that we have a nice arrow here. Let's save our work using CTRL S on the keyboard to save and in the next video we'll be adding a layer to our file.
See you there!