Discover the art of creating diverse shapes rooted from larger forms using the shape builder tool. This step-by-step guide lays out how to construct an icon using techniques such as scaling, transforming, and direct selection.
Key Insights
- In design, complex shapes can often be deconstructed into simpler elements, a technique that can facilitate the creation of diverse icons.
- Adobe Illustrator offers multiple tools such as the ellipse tool, the scale function, and the shape builder to construct intricate designs efficiently.
- Using shortcuts and transformative features can help in changing perspectives, replicating shapes, and adjusting dimensions more mathematically and accurately, thus enhancing the precision of the design.
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In this video, we'll be creating our construct. Let's start by using the hand tool, shortcut H on the keyboard, to change our perspective, and for this icon, let's leave a bit of gray space right below our next available artboard.
This will allow us to work with different transparency options as we create our shapes. Next, let's go into our PDF to preview the icon we'll be creating. If we look at this closely, it looks like we have many diverse shapes.
However, these shapes can be rooted from larger shapes and built with the Shape Builder tool. In our mind, expand each of these bars running across the construction zone icon. If we enter, we'll imagine that it's four circles all running around each other, similar to a target.
We then have a square that's been skewed with the edges rounded. So the first thing we'll be creating is four circles with alternating colors, creating a target. We'll then create the triangle and use the Shape Builder to specifically isolate a piece or a slice of that target.
So let's get started. We'll go back into Illustrator, and rather than create this shape within our artboard, let's create it outside of the artboard so that we can see the paths a little bit more clearly without transparency issues. We'll start by using the Ellipse tool found in the toolbar, and to start, we're simply going to draw a circle a little bit less than the size of our artboard.
We'll release, and for these circles, we're going to remove the fill by selecting None. Next, we need to replicate this circle and create three additional smaller circles, centered in the middle. To do this, we'll use the Selection tool, shortcut V on the keyboard, and we'll select this object and hit CTRL + C to copy it and CTRL + Shift + V to paste it.
Within our working layer, we can see that we have two ellipses stacked on top of each other, and we have the top one selected. Rather than changing the dimensions of this circle using the bounding box, we'll instead right-click and use Transform. From here, we'll select Scale, and this allows us to more mathematically change the scale of our circle.
We'll go to the top where it says 'Uniform, ' and we'll type 80 and hit OK, and this will allow us to create a circle that is 80 percent the size of the circle outside. Next, let's do the same thing, hitting CTRL + Shift + V to again paste the same circle, and we'll right-click, go to Transform, and go to Scale. This time, we'll be scaling it at 60 percent, so we'll type 60 and hit OK.
Since we still have the original circle copied, we can simply hit CTRL + Shift + V again to paste it, and we'll go to Transform, Scale, and make our final circle 40 percent and hit OK. Here we now have the four circles necessary to create our traffic cone pattern. Next, let's create the triangle that will come up from the middle.
To do this, we'll go into our Shapes group and click and hold, selecting the Polygon tool. As we'll remember, the Polygon tool allows us to click and create a shape by determining the size and the radius. We'll hit OK, and as we can see, this triangle is much too large, so let's scale it by clicking on the edge of the bounding box and holding Shift as we do so to scale it proportionally.
Next, we'll hit V on the keyboard so that we can begin moving it, and we'll move it so that it's centered, so that the top corner matches up with the center of our circles. We'll then drag the bottom of our triangle while holding Shift to make sure that it matches up with the outside circle. Additionally, this triangle is a little bit wider than our preferred traffic cone, so we'll want to bring the sides in.
To change how wide our triangle is, we can click on either the right or left side of our bounding box, and if we drag in, if we hold ALT, we'll maintain the center of our shape, only dragging in the sides. We'll release it when it looks a little bit more traffic-cone-esque, and I'm going to simply move the top of the triangle up using the bounding box. I think this looks like a pretty good shape for our traffic cone.
Next, let's use the Direct Selection tool to select the top of our triangle, and we're simply going to round it out. If we click outside, we can get a preview of what our traffic cone will look like. In this case, I'm going to shrink it just a little bit by selecting it first, hitting V on the keyboard, selecting the cone, and I'm just going to drop it down so it's a little bit smaller.
From here, we can now create our traffic cone. We'll select all of the objects, and we'll use the Shape Builder tool to build out the shapes—the segments of our traffic cone. We'll select the top one first, second segment, third segment, and fourth segment.
These will be the parts of our traffic cone that we use. We can then simply drag over all of the middle circles to create one shape, and delete one extra shape. We'll hit V to use our selection tool.
We'll click outside, and then we can come back and delete the outer circle, hitting the Delete key and the bottom left-hand corner and bottom right-hand corner. We've now created our traffic cone. Let's hit CTRL + S on the keyboard to save our work thus far, and in the next video, we'll be continuing building our traffic cone.
See you there!