Learn how to create an icon of a magnifying glass using Illustrator in this step-by-step guide. Discover how to effectively use various tools and shortcuts on this software to achieve your desired icon design.
Key Insights
- The tutorial guides you to create a magnifying glass icon by using various features in Illustrator such as the ellipse tool for the creation of the main circular part and the line segment tool for the handle of the magnifying glass.
- The article emphasizes the use of shortcuts for efficient design. For instance, Control plus on the keyboard is used for zooming in, shortcut H for the hand tool to change perspective, and shortcut V for the selection tool to adjust the shape and position of the designs.
- The article also highlights the importance of grouping and layering elements of a design. After creating the magnifying glass, the line and circle elements are grouped together, and then moved into the final layer for better organization and easy adjustments.
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In this video, we’ll begin working on our magnifying glass icon. So, to get started, let’s first view a sample of our magnifying glass icon.
To do this, we’ll open our icons preview PDF by double-clicking it. And we’ll see that the third icon is our magnifying glass. It’s relatively simple, with a circle in the middle, as well as a line coming out of it.
Let’s go back into Illustrator and create it. To do this, let’s first zoom in on our third artboard by using CTRL + PLUS (+) on the keyboard or pressing Z to zoom in with the Magnifying Glass tool. In addition, we need to adjust our view.
We can do so using CTRL and scrolling with the mouse to change our perspective left and right, or simply scrolling up and down to adjust our position. Additionally, remember, we can use the Hand Tool (shortcut H on the keyboard) to change our perspective by clicking and dragging. Let’s now prepare to create our magnifying glass.
The first thing we want to do is make sure we’re in our "Working" layer, as this is currently a working icon. We’ll go over to the left and create a circle as the main part of our icon. If we click and hold over the Shapes Tool gallery, we’ll see that we have options for a rectangle, ellipse, polygon, star, and line segment, but no option for a circle.
This is because we’ll use the Ellipse Tool to create a circle. To do this, we can simply click and drag. We’ll see that we can create an ellipse of multiple proportions.
To create a circle, we can either click and drag until we see the pink lines appear both horizontally and vertically, indicating we’ve created a circle. Or, as we click and drag, we can hold Shift to maintain a circle. We’ll then release, and we have our circle.
Let’s delete this for now using the Delete key on the keyboard, as we want to go over another way to create a shape. The second way we can create a shape is by simply clicking with the Ellipse Tool on the artboard. We’ll see that an ellipse window opens up, giving us the option to create the dimensions of the ellipse by typing them.
In this case, let’s type 15 for our width, hit TAB on the keyboard, and type 15 for our height. Let’s then click OK, and we’ll see that it creates the ellipse.
Let’s now drag our ellipse using the Selection Tool (shortcut V on the keyboard). We’ll simply drag it up. Let’s also increase the size of our ellipse just a little by clicking and dragging one of the corners.
We’ll notice that if we click and drag, it won’t maintain its circle shape. Instead, we’ll have to hold Shift to maintain the proportions of our shape. We’ll make it slightly larger to about here.
We’ve now created the circle for our magnifying glass. Next, let’s create our line. To do this, we’ll go back to our toolbar, click and hold the Ellipse Tool with the left mouse button.
We’ll go over to the right and select our Line Segment Tool. Before creating our line, let’s first deselect the ellipse. We can do this using CTRL + Shift + A on the keyboard.
Now we’re ready to draw our line. Even though the line comes from the outside of the circle, let’s draw it from the center. To do this, we’ll hover over the center of our circle until we see it shown in pink, then click and drag outside.
If we hold Shift, we’ll maintain 225 degrees, and we’ll release.
While we’ve created our line, it currently stretches too far outside. To change this, we need to change where the anchor point of our line is.
We can do this using the Direct Selection Tool in the toolbar right below the Selection Tool, or by using A as a shortcut on the keyboard. Now, with the Direct Selection Tool, remember we can select individual anchor points. In this case, we want to move the anchor point to the middle of the circle.
We’ll move it by clicking with the left mouse button. As we can see, we can move it anywhere, changing the dimension of our line. However, in this case, we want it to intersect with the outside of our circle and maintain the path of our current line.
As we’ll see, when we get close to the path, it snaps to the middle of our line, maintaining the same path. We’ll simply drag it out to the edge and see that our line maintains the same direction and will release when it snaps to the intersection of the circle.
We’ve now completed our magnifying glass.
So, before moving forward, let’s group our two objects together. First, using the Selection Tool (shortcut V on the keyboard), rather than the Direct Selection Tool, we’ll click and drag over both the circle and line.
We’ll then right-click and select "Group." As a final step, let’s now move this icon into our "Final" layer. To do this, we’ll click on the square to the right of "Working" and drag our selected pieces of art into "Final."
It will turn blue, and we now have our group that we’ve just created. Let’s retitle it by double-clicking and typing "3. Magnifying Glass, " then hitting Enter. Let’s now deselect using CTRL + Shift + A, and we’ve completed our magnifying glass.
Nicely done! Let’s hit CTRL + S on the keyboard to save our work. In the next video, we’ll be working on our fourth icon.
See you there!