Explore the process of creating a laptop icon using tools in Adobe Illustrator. This step-by-step guide walks you through how to build a pie chart and laptop icon, all while demonstrating how to manipulate shapes, color fills, and strokes to achieve the final product.
Key Insights
- You can create a pie chart by constructing an ellipse and then removing a slice of it by making a square. This is done with the rectangle and ellipse tools, plus the use of the shape builder.
- You can change the color fill of your objects by selecting them and using the 'fill' option. The tutorial demonstrates how to switch the fill and stroke of screen elements so that they show up against a black background.
- Grouping your laptop elements together allows you to make changes in 'isolation mode', meaning you can edit the group separately from the rest of your artboard. This feature is useful when you want to make changes to a specific part of your design without affecting the rest.
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In this video we'll be completing our laptop icon. Let's now start working on the pie chart.
To do this we'll first want to create our ellipse. Therefore we'll go to our toolbar, we'll click and hold on the rectangle tool and select our ellipse tool. From here we'll actually be building the pie graph off to the side of our artboard by simply clicking and dragging the circle, holding shift, about this size, and next we need to cut a slice out of our pie graph.
To do this we're going to create a square, clicking and holding the ellipse tool and selecting the rectangle tool instead. We'll then drag out from the center of our circle, once we've deselected it, hitting CTRL shift a on the keyboard, and starting at the center we'll click out and drag up. If we hold shift we'll have a square, however it's not important since we'll be using this square to cut out the piece of the circle.
With the square now created we'll hit V on the keyboard, drag in a selection box to select both objects and we'll use the shape builder now in the toolbar to create the bottom shape with a slice out of the pie chart. We'll then create one shape out of the square and hit V for our selection tool and finally we'll select the square and hit the delete key to remove it. We've now created our pie chart so we'll click and drag it over to the right hand side and from here we can adjust it to a proportional size.
In this case I'll drag it over to the bottom, holding shift and make sure that lines up with the middle line and then I'll drag it up, lining it up with the top line. I'll then click outside the artboard and we've now finished our laptop. Let's click and drag a selection box over the entire laptop and we'll reduce the size holding shift, making sure that we fit it within our artboard.
Next we're going to group our laptop by right-clicking and selecting group. While we currently have a laptop that we can make transparent with no fill on the inside, we actually want to use this icon to be able to do a fill icon. Therefore we're going to reverse the black fill of our rectangles and our pie chart and instead make it white with the laptop itself being black.
So to do this we'll select the bottom part of our laptop and remember we're currently in a group, therefore we'll have to double-click on an element to go into isolation mode where we're only editing our group. We'll then click the bottom part of our laptop and we're simply going to swap the fill and stroke and then remove the stroke entirely by clicking it and clicking none. We now have a black bottom of our laptop.
Let's now do the same with the top but before doing so let's change the fill of each of our screen elements so that they show up on a black background. To do this we'll select each of them, clicking the first one and then holding shift as we click the remaining objects. And from here we can see that we have a black fill that we now want to make white, therefore we'll click on the fill and we're going to be switching it to white which we don't see below.
One way we can fix this is by double-clicking fill and with our color picker window scrolling up to the top and clicking OK. In addition we can easily change it by going into our color
Panel where black, white and no fill are always displayed for us. Next let's change the color of the background of our screen to black.
We'll first deselect hitting CTRL shift A and next we'll select the screen. From here we can change our fill to black by clicking the fill and going to black or because our fill square is on top this means that if we click the black within our color it will now become black. If we want to change the stroke we can also do this in our color panel or in our toolbar and since our stroke icon is on top we'll switch this to no fill or none.
And there we have it, we've now completed our black icon of the laptop. We'll double-click to exit isolation mode, click on our icon so that we can center it within the control bar and as a final step we'll then take this group selecting it on the right side of our layers panel and dragging it into final. From here we can double-click and we'll be typing 13 laptop and hitting enter.
Let's now save our work using CTRL S on the keyboard to save and in the next video we'll be working on a traffic cone. See you there!