Explore the intricate process of designing a pipes icon using Illustrator in this comprehensive guide. The article offers a step-by-step walkthrough, detailing how to create a rounded pipe, utilize the shape builder tool, and adjust live corners for a more refined look.
Key Insights
- The process of designing a pipes icon begins with the creation of a rectangle that represents the downward-moving area of the pipe. This is achieved using the rectangle tool in Illustrator.
- The shape builder tool is used to create one unified shape out of multiple rectangles. This helps in achieving a seamless look for the pipe.
- The final touches to the design include adjusting the live corners of the pipe for a more visually appealing and rounded look. This involves the use of the direct selection tool in Illustrator.
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In this video, we'll be working on our pipes icon. So let's start by scrolling over to our next artboard and we'll open up the PDF of our icons to view our pipes icon.
Looking at one pipe at a time, we can see we have a rectangle with our pipe that's curved, another rectangle, and then we can simply copy this pipe over to the next pipe intersection and add our water droplet without the accent line from the icon before. So let's get started. We'll go into Illustrator and we'll start working on our pipe.
As always, we'll start by selecting our working layer, and let's start by creating the pipe. Rather than creating a rounded pipe off the start, we'll start with the rectangle tool and we're simply going to start by drawing the area of the pipe that moves down. We'll drag a rectangle about this size, and next, we're going to add the part of the pipe that jets out to the right.
To do this, we'll use the exact same rectangle, hitting CTRL + C and CTRL + Shift + V to paste our second rectangle in place, and then we need to rotate the second rectangle, so we'll hit V on the keyboard for our selection tool and rotate it by going to one of the corners and holding Shift as we rotate. We'll then line up our shape so that it intersects, as shown by the pink lines, with the other rectangle, and we now have the start of our pipe. To create it as one shape, we'll drag a selection box over both rectangles, and we'll use the Shape Builder to create one shape out of both rectangles.
Next, let's create the top rectangle on top of our piping. To do this, we'll go back to the rectangle tool and we'll first deselect this shape. To do so, we'll hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect, and let's start by drawing a rectangle from one anchor point to the other anchor point.
We'll release, and we now need to adjust the size of this top rectangle. While we know it's centered on top, we'll simply drag the bottom of our rectangle up and drag the side out, holding ALT to make sure it moves from the center. We'll release about here, and I'm simply going to add a little more height to this rectangle, and that looks pretty appropriate.
I'll hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect and view the work, and this looks like a good start to the pipe. We'll now need to add a second one to the bottom right-hand side. To do this, we'll hit V on our keyboard for the selection tool.
We'll select the top rectangle and hit CTRL + C and then hit CTRL + V to paste. Next, we'll rotate this rectangle, going to one of the corners and clicking and dragging while holding Shift, and finally grabbing our rectangle from the center, we want to center it on the right side of our pipe. We've now created a good-looking pipe; however, we do need to adjust the edges here.
To do this, we'll use our Direct Selection tool and adjust the live corners of these two corners. Therefore, we'll hit A for our Direct Selection tool, and selecting only the middle anchor here, we'll simply drag our live corner in slightly, and selecting the bottom anchor point, we'll drag this one in more drastically. For this corner, we can drag it in just a little bit more, and this looks good.
Let's now hit CTRL + S on our keyboard to save our work, and in the next video, we'll be creating the second pipe as well as adding the water droplet. See you there!