Completing the Arrow Icon: Adding Two Additional Lines

Adding the Final Touch: Adjusting Line Endings and Hiding Guides

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 at the top, as we need rulers to create guides. We'll click and drag down, holding Shift until we reach eight pixels and release it.

Next, we'll create our line. To do this, we'll make sure that we have our line segment tool selected, and we'll press D before creating the line to ensure 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 now we 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.

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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 at the top, and we’re going to select 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 the line. To do this, we can hover over one of the anchor points until we see the rotate arrows, indicated by a rotating arrow. We’ll then rotate it by clicking and dragging the mouse button around the center.

We’ll hold Shift to ensure it rotates in 45-degree increments, and we’ll release it. 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 to drag our perspective. To access the hand tool, we can either click the zoom tool with the left mouse button to reveal the tool grouping and select the hand tool, or use the shortcut H on the keyboard. With the hand tool, we can drag our perspective.

We’ll center our artboard here. While we can get a good view of our arrow here, I feel that the guides are a little distracting. So, let’s now hide them.

To do this, we’ll go to the selection tool and click outside the artboard on no objects, then right-click and click hide guides. We can now view 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 by clicking on the top one and holding Shift to select the other two. With all three objects selected, we’ll then go to the stroke in either our properties panel or the control panel, as both serve the same purpose. We’ll simply change it to a round cap, and here we’ll see that the end of our arrow is now rounded.

Let’s click outside these segments, and we can see that we have a nice arrow. 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!

Matt Fons

Adobe Instructor

Matt is a jack of all trades in the realm of marketing and an expert using Adobe’s Creative Cloud as the essential software for supporting students and clients. With experience in graphic design, photography, web design, social media planning, and videography, Matt creates impressive and comprehensive marketing strategies. In his free time, Matt and his wife enjoy surfing and hiking California’s Central Coast and traveling to countries around the world.

  • Adobe Certified Instructor
  • Adobe Certified Specialist
  • Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign
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