Creating a Wi-Fi Icon in Adobe Illustrator: Step-by-Step Guide

In this video, we'll be creating our Wi-Fi icon. Before beginning, let's look at a preview of our Wi-Fi icon by pulling up the PDF. As we’ll see, for our Wi-Fi icon, we have a circle in the center that's filled with black, as well as four lines arching over from the center.

Now, let's create this icon. To do this, we'll go into Illustrator and shift our perspective by holding CTRL on the keyboard and scrolling down with the mouse. Next, let’s select our working layer in the Layers panel.

To build this icon, we need to add two tools to our toolbar. To do this, we’ll go to the bottom of our toolbar and select the three dots to edit the toolbar. The first tool we’ll add is the Arc Tool, just to the right.

To add it to our toolbar, we’ll click and select it with the left mouse button, then simply drag it into our toolbar. If we see a blue outline around an icon, it means we’ll add it to the group.

Instead, we want to add it as its own icon. We’ll shift the mouse until we see the blue line, then release. As the second tool to add to our toolbar, let’s add the Rectangular Grid Tool.

To do this, we’ll click and drag, and this time let’s add it to the group when we see the blue outline, adding it to the Arc Tool group, then release.

Let’s now discuss the Rectangular Grid Tool. With this tool selected, we’ll go to the tool options found in our properties panel. From here, we’ll have options for adjusting our grid.

In this case, we want four horizontal dividers and four vertical dividers.

If we need to change this, we can simply double-click and type in four.

When we’ve done that, we can click OK.

Now, let’s begin drawing our grid. To do this, we’ll start at the top-left corner and drag down and to the right until we release at the intersection.

We’ve now drawn our grid, which will serve as guides for our arching lines.

Let’s now lock this so it doesn’t move as we begin drawing our lines.

To do this, we’ll go to the right in our Layers panel and select the group with our rectangular grid.

As we can see from the dropdown in our Layers panel, the rectangular grid actually adds multiple lines to create the grid.

We’ll lock these layers first by toggling the dropdown up, then clicking in the space to the right of the eye to lock our layer.

Next, let’s create our arcs.

To do this, we’ll go to the left-hand side of our toolbar, click and hold the Rectangular Grid Tool, and select the Arc Tool.

From here, we’re going to create lines that span from one edge to the opposite.

To do this, let’s start on the bottom-left square edge and click and drag as we see an arch going across, then release when we see the anchor.

We’ll repeat this on the next line, dragging one line under, and release when we see the anchor.

Again, on the next line, going down to the next anchor, and finally one more, and we’ll release.

We currently have our Wi-Fi bands extending out; however, we now need to create the ellipse or the circle in the middle.

To do this, we’ll go to our toolbar and select the Ellipse Tool. With the Ellipse Tool selected, we’ll now draw an ellipse the size of the bottom square.

To do this, we’ll find where the two lines intersect, click and drag while holding Shift to make a circle until we reach the anchor on the bottom-right side, then release.

Next, let’s hide our grid by going to the group and clicking unlock to toggle the lock, then finally, let’s change the visibility of our grid.

As we can see, we have our Wi-Fi signal here, and it's all set except we need to move this ellipse down and to the right.

To do this, we’ll hit V to get the Selection Tool and drag the center of our circle so that it intersects with the bottom-right side of our artboard.

We’ll release, and here we have our Wi-Fi signal.

Now, we need to rotate it and resize it.

First, let’s group all of our elements into one group.

To do this, we’ll draw a selection box using the Selection Tool, right-click, and select 'Group.'

Next, we need to rotate and resize it.

We’ll see that as we drag in from one corner, we can resize it disproportionately.

To maintain proportions, we’ll hold Shift and see that it sizes proportionally. We now have a more appropriate size for our artboard.

Finally, we’ll need to rotate it.

We’ll click on the top-right corner when we see the arrows. This rotation can be done on any corner of the grouping.

We’ll simply click, and here we’ll see that we can rotate it.

Again, if we hold Shift, we’ll rotate in appropriate increments, allowing the Wi-Fi signal to stand up straight.

Finally, let’s resize it once more, holding Shift as we drag out from the corner until it’s an appropriate size within the artboard.

As a final note, we’re going to now horizontally and vertically align the center.

And we’ve now completed our Wi-Fi signal.

If we want to make one more change, we can change our circle from having a stroke of one point to having a black fill.

To do this, we’ll double-click, selecting only the circle, and all we need to do is switch from a black stroke to a black fill.

While we could do this by double-clicking the fill and selecting black, we can instead swap the fill and stroke using the arrow in the top-right corner of the Fill and Stroke panel.

If we click, we’ll see it’s now swapped so that it has a black fill and no stroke.

Let’s double-click outside the Isolation Mode, and here we have our Wi-Fi signal.

Finally, let’s hit CTRL + S on the keyboard to save our work.

We’ll double-click the group, title it 'Six Wi-Fi, ' and hit ENTER, then drag this group into 'Final.'

Additionally, we can delete our group used for guides by using the delete icon on the bottom-right side, and finally, we’ll save our work using CTRL + S on the keyboard.

In the next video, we’ll be working on our locked icon.

See you there!