Creating a Gear Icon in Illustrator: Completing the Inside Circle

Creating the Inner Circle for the Gear Icon: Illustrator Tutorial.

Discover the final steps in creating a gear icon using ellipse and selection tools in graphic design software. This tutorial guides you through the process of creating the inner circle of the gear, combining the shapes into one group, and aligning the icon appropriately.

Key Insights

  • The creation of the inner circle of the gear icon uses the ellipse tool, which is found by clicking and holding the rectangle tool.
  • The two parts of the gear icon - the outer shape and the inner circle - are combined into one group using the selection tool, identified by the shortcut 'v' on the keyboard.
  • The final gear icon is aligned to the center both horizontally and vertically, and the group is named appropriately before being moved into the final set of icons.

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In this video, we'll be completing our gear icon. As we can see, we already have the outside of our gear icon; however, we need to create the inside circle. To do this, we’ll use the Ellipse Tool, so we’ll click and hold the Rectangle Tool and select the Ellipse Tool.

Next, if we hover towards the inside of our shape, we’ll see that we can find the center. From here, we’ll simply click, and holding Shift, we’ll create a circle. Holding ALT will determine the point that we clicked as our center point.

We’ll then drag out until we’ve created a circle appropriate for our gear and release.

Finally, we’ll want to combine both of these into one group, so we’ll use the Selection Tool (shortcut V on the keyboard), click and drag a selection box, right-click, and select 'Group.'

From here, we can align it to the center horizontally and vertically, and rename our group as 'Gear Icon (Number 8), ' then hit ENTER.

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We’ll then move our gear icon by clicking the red box and dragging it into 'Final.'

We’ve now completed our gear icon.

Let’s zoom out and see the progress so far. We can see that we’ve completed the first eight icons within our 16-icon set.

Nicely done!

We’ll hit CTRL + S on the keyboard to save our work, and in the next video, we’ll be discussing transparency.

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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