5 Essential Adobe Illustrator Tools

hey guys welcome back to my youtube channel so in today's video i am hitting you with my five top essential adobe illustrator tools so these are tools that i live by and i use every single day to create all of the amazing brands that i do so i honestly think that i would be really lost without these tools and some of them i didn't even figure out until about a year ago so i am sharing my knowledge of my top tools for you today so hopefully if you don't know about them you will now so no messing about we are getting straight into the first tool now the first tool is the blend tool now if you don't know what this is then it is basically a tool that you can combine shapes and colors with two or more objects together to make a new object and it is incredible i use it literally every single day and it is just mind-blowing i'm going to show you exactly what it does with an example so i'm going to take two circles i'm going to draw them out now so you're going to put them by the side of each other i'm going to turn them different colors so we're going to go for a green color so i'm going to start one side off being really light one side off being a darker shade of green so you're going to select your two objects you're going to go to object blend and then within here you've got make and blend options so that's the only ones available for us right now so if you click on bend options it's going to come up with some different options for you to choose from so i'm going to go through smooth color first so with smooth color it basically will combine your two objects and make a gradient out of this so if i click ok and then go back to blend and then make it will do this for us so right now we have a really lovely gradient that you can use and obviously you can change the shape of it depending on your object so that is the smooth color now if we do the exact same thing again so if we create two circles so go on to the same options which are blend and then blend options i'm going to go down to drop down menu which is specified steps so this means that these steps between your objects so say if i put five steps in it's going to create five circles between these objects so if i for example wanted the colors in between these two colors i'm going to pick three colors for example it will once you go on to blend make it will choose three colors between your two colors that you have chosen so that means if you want something in the middle you can choose a middle color which is a really handy tool and obviously if you want to increase the amount of steps and want a really nice flowing object then you can do this as well so with this as well you don't have to just use it on shapes you can actually use it on letters so i'll show you how you do this so for example i'm going to take a because it is the first letter of my name and it is an elite letter so what i'm going to do is outline it i'm going to change it to the color of this green and then i'm going to copy and paste in place another color and then i'm going to duplicate this again basically i'm creating a 3d effect for this shape so what you're going to do now is click on both the darker colors you're going to go to object blend and then blend options again i'm going to go and specify steps and i'm going to change it to around 50 because i know this will create a smooth line for me so once i've pressed okay and then object blend make it will do this and i'm going to send this to the back and now you have a 3d shape you can also go back in and change how far you want this and as you will see as you pull the letter out you will start seeing each individual letter that is only because there is 50 steps between each of your two objects so if i was to change this to 500 you probably wouldn't see any of the letters in between but i'm going to just keep it really simple and add it there and you will see that it has created a really nice 3d effect you also see in adobe illustrator you do have a tool for the blend tool so instead of going through the options of going object blend make which can take a lot of time you can find the blend tool which is on the left hand side of your toolbar if it's not there go on to your three dots edit toolbar you can pick what you want in your toolbar so i'm going to drag my tool across both of them and it will make the gradient as above and voila that is basically the blend tool summed up jumping onto tool number two is the color themes tool now i only found this out maybe like a year ago and it has just changed the game for finding the perfect color palette for my clients so there are lots of websites that do this already but i didn't realize that there was actually an option within adobe illustrator that allows you to find the perfect color palette with color themes so i'm going to show you exactly what it can do so say you're trying to find a color palette for your client and your client has given you a few colors that they like but you're not that great at putting sort of colors together and knowing which ones work well so in adobe illustrator if you go to window then color themes it will bring up a sidebar with the adobe color themes now within this you have create so you can create your own color themes and it will bring up a wheel and then it will pick the best five color themes for you you have explore which is the one that i use the most and it is incredible and then you have my themes where you can put your own color swatches into the themes so if we go on to explore this is the one that you should be using the most so it's going to bring up a load of different color palettes that you can choose from which may give you some inspiration of color themes to go for but the best thing about this is that there is a search bar so say for example you're wanting a blue color theme so different shades of blue you can literally type in blue press enter and it will create loads of different colors of blues as well as other colors that go with blue and you have your pick of lots of different color themes which i literally adore because colors are the most important thing for me i always go for bright and bold colors and this way i can do this by just searching the color theme that i'm after so to use it you all you have to do is i'm going to create some squares you can literally click on your color go across to these color themes it will come up with an eye drop for you and you can click and it will eye drop you that color how incredible is that if you didn't know about this please let me know in the comments because this one changed the game for me jumping into tool number three is the shape builder tool now i didn't start using this until a couple of years ago and it is another game changer for me so hopefully if you don't know what it is this can help you with getting to know the tool and knowing what it is so the shape builder tool basically merges two or more objects together and you can also subtract objects as well so i'm going to show you exactly what it does with an example so for this example i am going to create a really cute little flower by using the shape builder tool so i've put my grids on so i'm going to make it quite symmetrical so what i'm going to do is draw four circles out so when you use the shape builder tool what you want to do is the objects that you want to combine you have to make sure that they are selected so i'm going to select all of my circles i'm going to go over to the shape builder tool which is on the left hand side in my toolbar and it looks like this with this once you hover over your objects it will bring up like a grid pattern to make sure that the thing that you're selecting is what you want so i'm going to go over and i'm going to drag my tool over all everything within this and it will combine the objects together which is really cool so it has combined the inside as well because that was an object that it found within it so now that is the basics to my flower and i'm going to add a circle to the middle change the color so i can actually see it and then i am going to select everything again go to my shape builder tool and i'm going to click on this once i've clicked it it means i can now take it away and it will take the behind away as well so we have the basics of a little flower shape now which is really cute now to make some leaves for this instead of using the pen tool or trying to go around with the rectangle tool i'm basically going to make two circles i'm gonna change the color so i can see each circle and what it does so i'm gonna make the leaf out of these two shapes i'm gonna grab the shape builder tool and i am going to click between each of these tools so it is picked up here that there is actually a shape between this which is why it's a shape builder tool so all i'm going to do is click onto this now it has made a shape for me and i can take that and that is the perfect shape for a leaf so then if i wanted to add some leaves around my flower i now can do so because i have some leaves so that was a really easy way of making some really simple shapes you can get some very intricate designs by using the shape builder tool this is just a way of showing you exactly what the tool can do and its capabilities so if you haven't used this tool make sure you go onto adobe illustrator try out the tool play around with it and see exactly what it can do hopefully you've learned some stuff already but we are on tool number four out of five and this tool is typing on a path tool so i'm gonna use a circle for a reference because this is something that i found out not so long ago and it is just an incredible tool so if you haven't used the type on path tool already it is such a good tool basically you can type on a line or a shape whatever it is you can type on it so i'm going to choose a circle as a reference so i'm going to draw out a circle go to my type on path tool which is within the type tool so as you can see there are lots of different options i'm going to click type on path tool go over to the path that i want to type on and just click on it it will bring up this so you can type on it so i'm just going to type type on path so right now as you can see the type is on the baseline of the circle this means the bottom of the type is just sitting nicely on the outside of my circle now i didn't know that you could actually adjust where the type sits on the circle or any object that you're using so this changed the game for me because i was always using like a long-winded process because the type would never sit right if i duplicated it and so on so in your options so if you go to type and then you go to type on path and then type on path options within this it will bring you up a lot of different options so i'm going to press preview so we can see exactly what each one does so right now as i said it is sat on the baseline if you go to center you will notice that now the type is on the center of the circle and i will show you why this is a beneficial one in a minute um you can go to descender which is off the baseline of the circle and away from it you can go on a sender which means that it's inside the circle but yeah i'm going to take center as an example so i'm going to click that press ok and then say if i wanted the type on the bottom of the circle all i'd have to do is copy and paste it in place turn this around and then using this line here you can just change where it is turn it round and you have your type perfectly in line with the top type and honestly knowing this has just changed everything for me because i used such a horrible process and now i just know with one simple click i can change where exactly the type is so last but not least tool number five is the magic wand tool in adobe illustrator so that is a magic wand tool in photoshop but i am talking about adobe illustrator today so if you haven't used this already make sure to have a play around with it because it is a really good tool to know so the magic one tool you can basically select one object and it will basically pick up the same colors of that object and you can change the tolerance for this so say for example you've got a pink color and the tolerance is really really low it means it will basically pick up that specific color but if your tolerance is really high it will pick up some pink shades around that and i'm going to show you exactly what it can do so i have drawn out some circles that are in different colors and i'm going to put the magic wand tool to the test so to the left hand side is my magic wand tool on my toolbar i'm going to click on this and it is going to bring up a load of different options so within this you can pick stroke color stroke weight opacity blending mode so i'm just going to leave it on full color for now so at the moment my tolerance is 8 i'm going to put this down to four so this is really really low and basically if i click on say i want to click on this orange color right here it should hopefully pick up just that orange color so if i click as you can see it has picked up all of those orange colors which is really really handy if you have a really complex object and you're trying to change the color say of that specific color it will pick just that color for you and you can just change that color without having to faff around and select each color so that was the tolerance being really low so if i was to put it up to say 40 let's put it to the test and see what it does with these orange colors so i'm going to click on it as you can see it has just picked up near enough around the orangey red colors which is really really good as well so if you have different shades of colors that you want to select you can do the following you can do exactly the same for straight colors all you have to do is tick stroke colors stroke weight opacity and it will just magically pick up what you are trying to find which can be really beneficial so hopefully you have learned at least one new thing today and if you have learned something new and make sure you go on to adobe illustrator try the tool out and just have a play around with it because that's the best way to learn please let me know in the comments what your favorite tool is in adobe illustrator and one that you use on the daily that you could not live without let me know if you enjoyed this video and you want to see some more tools that i use within adobe illustrator if you like this video make sure to give it a big thumbs up and subscribe to my channel if you want to see some more content

Channel: Abi Connick

Views: 82,454

Keywords: illustrator tools tutorial, illustrator tutorial, illustrator tools, shape builder tool, logo design tutorial, illustrator tips, adobe illustrator tutorial, design tools, illustrator tutorial 2021, graphic design for beginners, adobe illustrator 2021, adobe illustrator draw tutorial, adobe illustrator tutorials logo design, adobe illustrator tutorial create a vector logo from a sketch hd, shape builder tool illustrator cc, logo design tutorial illustrator for beginners

Id: -JjR4XNJ-eo

Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 18 2021