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 above and drag the side out and as we drag the side out we'll hold ALT making sure that 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 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 tool 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!