Adobe Illustrator 2024: Free Course For Beginners - Part 1 ✍️

hey guys welcome to the complete beginners guide to Adobe Illustrator in 2024 I've been a graphic designer for over a decade specializing in logo type design and I've been using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and the suite of adobe tools ever since I started Adobe Illustrator can be quite confusing for those who are first getting into it so I thought making a video explaining it and giving everyone a rundown of how to use this tool and how to learn to use it better better will help a lot of beginners out there so if you're a beginner designer someone who's just working inhouse even if you're a season designer and just want to learn some of the basics of a few of these tools then this is the video for you just before we get into it if you do enjoy this beginner style content consider subscribing down below join and be part of over 800,000 people who have subscribed to the channel to learn more about graphic design okay first of all download Adobe Illustrator you do that from the Creative Cloud app which looks like this download down load Adobe Illustrator now once you've downloaded Adobe Illustrator you'll be brought up with this window it's the new window this is where you'll find all the project files Adobe Illustrator actually has Adobe Cloud or Adobe Creative Cloud where you can upload your work and it will automatically save to the cloud so whether you're on a desktop and then go to a Macbook or your iPad it will all be there when we press new file we'll get a bunch of these different templates essentially the way that the templates work is that they give you the most known and the most used sort of templates we're going to go for web large 1920 x 1080 which is the same aspect ratio as this video over here we have the width that we can change we can change the actual name of this we're going to call this beginner tutorial we're going to make sure it's in pixels we can change this from points inches feet yards millimeters we can also bring up this box here which gives us the advanced options this option is really important depending on what you're designing or creating an illustrator if you want to create something digitally RGB is what you want if you're creating something printed or physically going to be printed then cmk is going to be your other option and the reason why we use cmk is because we have in the printers C for cyan magenta yellow and key and key is black gray I'm want to stick with digital for now but then we'll explain print more later screen raster effects just keep that at 72 and preview mode we're going to set to default now you notice that we have artboards here we'll just leave that for now we don't need any bleeds we're just going to press create and when we press create we're opened up with a window and a tab the cool thing about Adobe Illustrator is that you get tabs just like in Photoshop so if I decided to create another document let's say this is an A4 document that is a print document we can have that open as well we can sift through these different tabs to go to different files now now this looks very daunting at first so let me explain what's happening on screen over here we have our toolbar this is where we find most of our tools including the pen tool the selection tool the shape tool and much other tools many more tools over here on the right we actually have the properties panel this is where you'll find a lot of things we also have the layers panel and the libraries the properties panel are the properties of each shape that we create in illustrator so when we bring in a shap shape such as I'm going to bring in a square we can see the properties of this when we select it we can see the fill which is the color inside the stroke which is the line around it and how large that stroke is in points and the opacity and maybe some effects essentially the properties panel is where all the properties live so if you need to change a shape color the stroke you need to even transform it and make it a little bit bigger you can do that within the properties panel the layers panel is just like in Photoshop illustrator works in layers libraries is your Creative Cloud libraries so for instance if I like something uh I don't know like a color palette like this Neo one a logo and I want to save it in my libraries it means I've got quick access to bring that back out of the libraries into my document up here we have a few buttons as well the main one that you probably want is up here in window if you can't find something that I'm using always go to window and you'll see we get this huge long list of different windows that we can bring up for instance I want to bring up layers so I'm going to bring layers up here and I'm going to drag layers out everything in illustrator when it's in a window can be dragged out and back in whenever you want and you can place this anywhere in fact I can bring properties out and just bring it underneath layers here you can see I can resize all of these and place them wherever I want on my screen green okay let's talk a bit about Adobe Illustrator and how it works the most confusion happens in illustrator is when drawing shapes of how it actually works so if I wanted to draw let's say a black Square I'm going to just like bring out a black rectangle here with the rectangle tool and I just dragged it out like so now I'm going to go back up here and I've got my selection tool we have two different selections we have the selection tool and we have the direct selection tool and you see if we hover over these they give us some tool tips of how this actually works essentially the selection tool allows me to just select a shape by clicking on it and dragging it around the direct selection tool focuses on the nodes these are called anchor points and this is the base line of vector art the main difference between Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop is that illustrator is completely Vector art what does that even mean in Photoshop we can edit pixels have you notice that when you go into Photoshop or for instance any image let me pull up an image here and bring it into illustrator if we zoom into this image here you can see it gets blurrier and blurrier until we can see pixels that means there is Fidelity there are pixel counts in this image the higher the pixel count the more resolution it has and the further we can zoom in however in illustrator with this object here I'll just change the color quickly so we can see this better no matter how far we zoom in it'll never get pixelated and that is because Vector artwork inherently uses mathematics instead of pixels to draw and because of this difference between pixel art and Vector art a lot of people get overwhelmed and Confused however let me just explain Adobe illustration and how Vector works for you really easily I'm going to go ahead and open up a file that I've worked on previously It's a poster this is all Vector I can zoom infinitely into this space here and into here and it will never lose quality that is because each one has these sort of paths around it you see these paths with these weird handles this is where everyone gets bit confused which rightfully so it's kind of daunting when you first look at this is in how do these shapes even work well the way that vector graphics works is Through Math luckily we don't have to do any of the maths all we need to do is draw if I bring up this circle up here I'm just going to go to the rectangle and hold down and we get a bunch of these options I'm going to hold shift whilst I drag out a circle if I select this circle and then go up to the left to the direct selection tool and then drag a selection around this circle you'll see that we have points and what are known as handles these are the handles this is the point now a way a shape is created in Vector is through the connections of one or two anchor points if I bring up the penil which is how we manually draw a vector shape and I just draw I don't know some weird squiggly line you'll notice there that the shape's getting kind of filled in I'm just plotting some anchor points and then we close the shape and there we go we have a shape the way that Vector works is it calculates the distances between each point and the curvature of it and it does some crazy maths and gives you the shape which means that we can now scale it up and down infinitely when you're using a font for instance and you zoom into the font you'll notice that it will never lose quality either and that's because fonts use the same Vector system as Adobe Illustrator now the main reason why we use Vector artwork is because when we're creating a font or a logo or an illustration we may need to scale that design up or down and also we want to have perfect resolution with that scale Vector artwork allows us to achieve perfect resolution at any scale that we see fit it can fit on a billboard or it could fit on a business card it could fit on a ring so no matter what we draw inside of a d illustrator or a vector it can be scaled up and down now you see here we've got these two shapes you got one here which is a circle now the way that Vector works is by manipulating shapes and using these shapes to create illustrations and this leads to more of like a simplistic illustration like you're seeing here so I'm going to select this shape and let's say I want to edit this circle a little bit there's a few things we can do I can select it and we have what's known as the bounding box this is the transformational box if you click on any of these you can transform this shape in any way you want if you hold shift and select this it will constrain the angles all the way through if I hold shift an option or alt on a PC and hold shift it will constrain it and transform it from the center if I just hold option it will trans transform it from all sides in the center meeting in the center if I hold option and move the shape it will duplicate that shape every time I click and make another one now the way that we can edit this shape here is we can actually use the direct selection tool so when we're just moving shapes around we use the selection tool and then when we want to edit a shape we use the direct selection tool so click on this one here or you can use a as a shortcut any shortcut will be directed on the actual tool itself then what we want to do is Select our shape or we can do a selection of something like this so we can select certain nodes or anchor points I'm going to select this top one here by clicking on it I'm going to drag it down notice how the shape kind of works this is the best time to learn how the penol and how Vector artwork kind of works on a computer when we move this it kind of creates some strange effects here so it doesn't make sense if I just undo by pressing command Z you'll notice that these these handles can be moved as well we can actually constrain do anything we want with these handles If We Hold shift and push a handle it will keep it to the horizontal or the vertical axis or I could just like mess around with it as much as I want the main thing is illustrator works by just making these weird shapes and we can start from a circle and create many other shapes from it so how does the illustrator work for creating clean shapes well there are a few ways but first I want to give you an analogy of how I think illustrator Works compared to photoshop imagine this artboard here which is this white box is a real artboard it is a piece of paper that has other pieces of paper which are your shapes on top and they are physical shapes that you can move up and down you can actually fit one shape on top of another shape like you can fit this book and then you can fit this pencil and then I can put the p pencil behind the book or on top or I could cut the pencil out of this book that is the same way that Adobe Illustrator works it's just virtual I've got one red circle there if I bring in a black Square so I'm just going to draw a square and I'm going to change the color down here to Black this black square is going to naturally go on top of this red square and that is because of the layering system that we have you see here on this layer panel don't worry about all the Dragon it looks a bit complicated but it's not layer one is here and you will be in layer one so we going to press this button and it will give us the individual layers you can see we've got the rectangle here and then we've got the red circle there the red circle is behind the rectangle so there if we were to move this Square it's always going to be on top however if I go to this rectangle here and just drag it below the square or the circle even we will see that it's now always behind the square so this is how it actually works in illustrator it's like physical but it's digital making it easy we can do the same again we can bring the rectangle on top we can bring it behind we can also select one shape right click on that shape and we get a bunch of different settings here don't worry too much about these settings all we should do if you want to change where something is layered is go down to arrange and then we can bring to front bring forward send backwards or send to back bring to front will mean that it will come right to the front of the layering system bring forward will bring it one layer up forward to you send backward will bring it right to the back of the layering system and send back will send it back just one so let's just bring it to front and there you go it's brought to front now something you may have noticed during all of this is this weird box that follows you around whenever you click on a shape you'll get this context ual task bar or this contextual bar this is quite recent and new to Adobe Illustrator and is very helpful for beginners because it has everything you could ever need really for quick work inside of this taskbar let's go through it first of all we have generate this generate is the text to Vector generative button and we can actually generate something inside of this rectangle we can write Dark Moon and we can select the subject the scene icon or a pattern which going to create a scene and we can actually take a style as well from another image but we're just going to press generate and you will get this box that pops up generative AI andoe apps you are signing here that you're going to use it correctly so make sure you read the license before agreeing and using it now it's going to go ahead and generate it and you'll see this loading bar and it depends on how fast your internet connection is and how fast Adobe is at generating your prompt but you'll see here that we get a fully texted Vector Dark Moon prompt which has being created created for you if we click on this and we go to the properties panel to the right and again if you don't see the properties panel go up to window and then go down to properties and you'll see it pop up so we select this and now we can actually change through the variations that it's created for us we can even create a detail in Vector graphic so we can bring the detail down or we can bring it right up to complex so this box here has everything you need we have generate beta we have edit path when you press this it will automatically just give you the direct selection tool which is pretty nice over here we have repeat object and what this allows us to do is if I just scale this down a little bit if I press repeat we'll get the radial grid and mirror let's do radial this will create a radial grid around this object here it might look a bit strange right now but if I press this down you can see that this is changing the instances which is the duplicates of this square and the more we bring it up and down the more we get if we press this one here it will actually increase the space the circumference of the whole thing and we can get some fine tuning here this one shows us how many we want if we want to cut it in half or something or maybe we just want half of it like so then we can increase it here and then bring it around and we can still move this up and down like so we can create some interesting patterns and visuals within this this button here will duplicate the object so if you press that button you might see nothing's happened but in fact if you look at the layer panel as I'm pressing this button we have duplicated it if we press this button here it will lock the shape now no matter what I do I can't select this with the selection tool or the direct selection tool that's because in the layers panel you'll see this little lock button here this lock button determines that whether a shape is locked or not and this can be very useful when designing things like this when we've got a background here but let's say we want to select all of these mountains here and I haven't layered them correctly they're all in this kind of just one huge layer here I don't want to go through and find it so what I want to do is Select this object and we can go ahead and lock it so now we don't select the background object or even this object I don't want to select that I just want to select these mountains here now notice when I select these mountains the contextual bar will change and it will give us new things we can do for instance we have generative beta which is already there we also have now recolor which is different and group these two are very different let's go through them differently group does exactly what you think it will group objects into a layering system to which we'll group them together so you can make edits on the Fly and transform it on the Fly this is great for just organizing similar objects so let's go ahead and select these I'm going to hold shift and select this one and this one and I know they're selected because I can see the outlines there I'm then going to press group that means now when I select them they will all move as one but as well as that we can check if it's is a group by going to the layer panel going down we can find the group where is the group here it is this is the group and within that group it has got all of the layers so this is a great way of organizing your layering system throughout the project now when you're in a group and you want to change just one item there's a few things you can do we can either ungroup the whole group and that will mean that we can go ahead and change that one item but that's a bit annoying instead we're going to go into isolation mode which sounds really complicated but it's not so click the group then find the shape that you want to edit I want to edit this one here well I'm going to double click this and when I double click it it will just pop out in front of me the background will go kind of a gray color and then now we can actually go through this entire group and select all the objects make our changes to zoom in I'm going to press Z or we're going to go to this microfine glass and we're going to just scroll in like so well not even scrolling we're just clicking and dragging if we want to move around we're going to hold the space bar button which is pan and when we hold that and click it will allow us to pan around so zooming panning now I can go to my direct selection tool and make any of these changes that I want maybe I want this to be I don't know like slightly nicer looking like a tooth maybe it just doesn't fit right but you see the level of precision we have I can also select an anchor Point here and use my you won't see it very much but use my arrow keys down at the bottom to go left and right when I'm done you can see here I'm going to just press layer one and I'm going to press escape and we have escaped and we have the edit that we' made so now we can go through this and we can select certain shapes we can highlight and drag if you want to be more precise we we can go ahead and click and shift click but I prefer to drag cuz it's normally shapes within shapes and press group now whenever we group them we can just move them all together as one group group group Vector programs have what are known as booing options and this is where I normally lose people or people get lost when it comes to Vector artwork booing is essentially just a yes or no a true false kind of equation I'm going to go up here to window and I'm going to go down to something called Pathfinder to show you this is an old old sort of tool we don't really use it all the time anymore however it is incredibly useful and it's vital for you to understand in order for you to get a good picture of how illustrator really works let me delete these shapes let's say I want to create a Target so I know that I want a circle and then I kind of want a white circle so what I can do is I can highlight this press command C to copy it and command F to paste where when we press command f it means paste in front if we press command B that would be paste behind same as the ordering of the shapes if we press command V it will appear somewhere random so now that I've got two I'm going to go ahead and scale down by pressing shift and ALT I can scale this down to about here and it's still black so you can't see anything other than the outline there are a few things we could do you might think going over to your color panel and double clicking on it dragging up to White and pressing okay will do the job and yeah it looks like it's being cut out of the black however remember when I said illustrator is very literal it's like paper it's like real life we physically need this to be cut out right now if I drag this over and off the artboard you'll see there is a white spot that we can move around that's not what we want we want this to be cut out so we get the background gray in this black otherwise whenever we print this or put it onto a poster or put it onto any sort of media you'll see this white object it won't actually be white sure you could go ahead and click this and press the ey drop at all or I and then click the background to get the color and it will look like it's been cut out but it's not because if we drag it back to the white it's not been cut out what we need to do is find a way to cut this shape out exactly there are a few ways we could do it the noob way of doing it would be using an eraser so we could make guides out of this and use an eraser but that's just simp instead what we want to do is Select both shapes the great thing about the selection tool is when we drag we select both things when we click we can click one select both shapes we know they're selected because we can move them in the Pathfinder tool we have a bunch of icons that look hella confusing don't be confused it's all good let me explain them we're going to go ahead and duplicate these like so so we have a few options to go off if I highlight this if I highlight this and then go to this Pathfinder option here it will highlight unite and it will say option click to create a comound shape path disregard that don't worry if I press unite what will happen is the top shape will Unite with the background shape kind of fusing them together let me show you this again let me just drag this circle which is on top of this black one select both of them if you don't select both of them it will not work press unite and you'll notice it will turn gray cuz the top object is gray and it will physically fuse them together we know this because if you go into the direct ction tool here and drag over it's actually created the past fors and Infused it all fors together but what if we want to cut it out well that's where the next one comes in this one is called minus front now remember when we talked about the arrangement of the front to back well minus front literally means it will minus the front shape from the back deleting the back shape so I'm going to select both shapes and we're going to go ahead and press minus front and you'll notice that it will turn white or turn out whatever ever the background color is and that is because there is nothing in this section here you can see it as me going over the artboard there is nothing in there it has been cut from the shape this is really useful because it allows us to create geometric changes to a shape by click of a button without any guesswork we know it's perfectly done now this next one here is called intersect this has another function and again it's a yes or no mathematical equation if I highlight both of these shapes no matter where they are next to each other they have to be kind of on top of each other what it will do is it will find the intersection and delete it it will not worry about the outside section here and it won't worry about this it will only worry about this area here and that is because it's intersect so let's press intersect boom that is going to delete everything other than what has intersected in between if I press exclude it will actually exclude what is intersected instead of taking it and making its own shape these other ones down here such as divide when you press it it feels like nothing's happened however what has actually happened is it has divided each shape and we know this because if we press ungroup because it's automatically created a group and we move this it is basically done a cookie cutter stamp and allows us to move these shapes like so so that divided the shapes by the cut points interesting the good news is that you don't need to know any of that and that is because illustrator is far too easy nowadays it has come a long way let's create that example of the target again I'm going to select this I'm going to create a duplicate by pressing this contextual bar I'm going to hold option shift to drag this down select both shapes and instead of going to the path IR to we're going to delete that we're going to press shift and M or or go over to the left here and we get this cool thing called the shape Builder tool this allows us to more modernly do the same thing as the Pathfinder tool but without knowing all the little icons and buttons let me explain now we're on the shape Builder tool our cursor has gone to a Crosshair now when we highlight the shape you'll notice that it's understood which shape is which and if I click the shape you'll notice what will happen if I drag it will unite them if I click this shape it won't do much if will actually click take out the back of that shape but intersect it if I hold option and click it will minus that shape from it the great thing about this is that we can actually create a bunch of shapes like random shapes like so highlight them all press shift and M and with this tool we can whenever we want to we can delete a shape if we want to from here or we can add this shape in like so and we're doing this by dragging like so or if we want to we canete delete this at one with the option button and then with this one here we can just bring together like so and we can even delete that one too we can create any shape we want with mathematical Precision now so I hope you enjoyed lesson one in the beginner's guide to ad Doby illustrator I know it was long thank you so much for watching if you did write down below orange because that's my brand color and also lets me know that you've watched to this point if you've got any questions please leave them in the comments if not me someone from the community or in my subscribers channels will happily answer for you subscribe so you don't miss the next part of this and my whole goal here is to teach you Adobe Illustrator like a pro thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one [Music] cheers [Music] I

Channel: Will Paterson

Views: 29,351

Keywords: design, vlog, graphic, art, photoshop, illustrator, adobe, graphic design, adobe illustrator, adobe illustrator tutorial, adobe illustrator tutorials, illustrator tutorial, Adobe Illustrator 2024: Free Course For Beginners - Part 1 ✍️, adobe illustrator tutorials for beginners, will paterson, beginners logo design, #minimal logo design, will pattison, stars in illustrator, visual communication, graphic design trends 2024, #how to design logo in illustrator

Id: S4NjBvo8Bz0

Length: 28min 5sec (1685 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 11 2024