Top 5 Adobe Illustrator Tools You Should Know - Design Tutorial

Hale Matthew and Sienna here and today we have a very special guest we have certified Adobe instructor Daniel Scott and he's gonna be teaching us the top five adobe illustrator tools that we need to know today I got to say this guy's a wizard when I watched this tutorial I didn't even know these tools myself and that shows that one either I'm a complete novice at Adobe Illustrator or two I just haven't been keeping up with the times in any case I was pretty excited to watch and learn these things if you're interested in following along this tutorial we've provided materials in the link in the description below let's get into it hi there Here I am thanks for having me now who is this video for it's for you designer who have the latest version of Illustrator installed and yes still haven't gone through all the new updates from the last two or three versions and worked out how they can really enhance your workflow that's what I'm here to do today so let's get started all right it is feature number one it's called the shape builder tool now throughout the video I'm going to use exercise files okay you can download those if you want to play along exactly there'll be a link in the description otherwise you can just use your own files whatever you like totally fine with me let's get in there okay the shape builder tool is gonna let us use that plus one other tool the ellipse tool and turn now hand-drawn Fox into sexy curves and shapes let's get started first up create a blank page doesn't really matter the size but if you're copying me I've got a u.s. litter and landscape next step is to bring in our hand drawing that will redraw with the shape builder tool so get a file go to place and in your exercise files there'll be a file in there called Fox jpg now this is just a hand-drawn file that I've made I find my process often with things like this I'll draw them in my workbook first and then redraw them afterwards in Illustrator and a cool little trick is when you're bringing in say a scanned or photographed image that you've drawn if you click this little template option as it comes in watch this when I click place it's pretty cool cycling off in the background it is locked it is on its own layer called plate Fox there's being kind of dimmed out a little bit and being locked and it's created this other layer that I couldn't draw on top so you don't have to do that but that little template check box that you've ignored forever will be handy for a few of you who follow this kind of process all right you didn't come for that you came for the shape builder tool so I'm gonna grab the ellipse tool so it's hiding underneath the rectangle tool so just hold it down hold hold hold grab the ellipse tool and over here in your properties panel let's have the fill so click the white square and use the little none option which is a line through it and for the stroke now I click the black box and I'm gonna pick like a real bright magenta or remove it later on but I want to here so you can see I'm gonna move mine up to maybe two points a little bit big but hopefully we'll make it easier to see on the video so now we need some circles I'll draw this body piece first just want to draw our circle and I want it to be a perfect height and a width so while I'm dragging it down remember hold down the shift key that gets a perfect circle X my black arrow I'm just going to manipulate this so it kind of fits this bottom curve here so I'm gonna hold shift and drag it up bigger I'm gonna fast forward this a little bit just so that we get our first circles I'll copy and paste it one more time and I'll do this kind of fella in here he needs to be a little bit smaller so drink it down me you like this alright so we've got the basics in there now this is where the shape builder comes in now if you're thinking what is the shape builder for it's a replacement for the Pathfinder so window Pathfinder if this is your best friend or at least their devil you know and you're like a lot of people and you drag these and you start clicking this and then go nope edit undo click on the next one hit it undo until you eventually find what you need the shape builder is a replacement for this you're laughing because that's how you do it right it's how I do it anyway so black arrow select everything go to the shape builder tool it's this fella here hard to describe arrow with circles and dots okay and click on that one here now by default this thing wants to join up shapes so watch this I can join by clicking holding and dragging across these two which is by itself pretty cool but I don't want to join things okay I can join them all up it's not really what I want to do and undo into other all bits and pieces again to get it to do the opposite instead of joining hold down the option key on a Mac or the Alt key on a PC you'll see that it goes from plus to a minus and now this is the magic I'm gonna drag across uuuu how good is that check across this straight across and you can just click once I need that bit though and we're gonna undo it but you can see how nice and easy and quick it is to start editing shapes and that's the shape builder tool so we're gonna build out this Fox and then we'll look at coloring and using the shape builder tool as well it's another cool little trick we'll do the next bit together and then I'll speed it up a little bit so however you want to draw a line it's going to use the line segment tool and draw this little line that goes all the way from one side all the way through to the other side grab the black arrow and select everything you need to grab all the different pieces go back to my shape builder tool okay remember what was the key to hold down to make sure things disappeared that's right it is o key on a PC and option key on a Mac and I'm gonna say you and I'm gonna draw a line through that line through that Koha so if you're still using they may be the scissors tool or the knife tool trying to join anchor points to get kind of complete parts this is super handy because they are actually instead of just a pile of lines can you see they're actually joined hole shapes super helpful all right I'm gonna speed up the next bit I'll jump back in when we start adding things all right you're back and it wasn't really so much time that I guess I wanted to show you how to sleep them all and I kind of draw maybe too many lines at once - I'm gonna try and impress you with how I can make them all join you ready you guys will join them so I'm not holding anything down now I'm just joining them all up magically a guy needs to join with that guy this guy's gone these guys are drinking it cross then you can click the months but I find just like dragging across them works just as well this guy needs to join up he's gonna grab my last little lips here I'm gonna do and want to make sure you slick them all and after a while you'll start learning this shortcut which is shift in okay and that'll jump to this tool you use a lot like me so you can see it's done a pretty great job it's not perfect there's a little artifact left over here if you do find random things left over and use my direct selection tool and I click it once I'm gonna zoom in because I can't click once it's quite small there it is there delete it a couple of times until that piece is gone let's go to the layers panel let's turn off that template we created back to the properties panel let's color it quickly want to show you one of the tricks for the shape builder tool and coloring I'm gonna go to window I'm gonna go to color themes I'm gonna explore and I'm going to find foxy color you type in Fox Fox even one of the cool things about the shape builder tool especially if you're an illustrator is I'm gonna slick that all the black arrow go to my shape builder tool and what you can do is you can decide like okay I like this color so I'm gonna click it you see it becomes filled over here I'm gonna say you know in that color and I'm going to this for the next color you can just work your way around a document coloring now say you wanted to reuse a couple of colors so I can click and click whatever your cursor is loaded with or at least the fills loaded whether you can just keep clicking away in different parts anyway I find it a nice helpful tip but I can't hack that ten there we go give it a stroke which doesn't work unless you're on the black arrow stroke goodbye and then hey presto he's got a big duck so go behind him because I think it looks cooler maybe anyway you see the power of the shape builder tool let's get on to the next feature all right the next tool that you can't live without is going to be the curvature tool now it's like the pin tool except it's super easy in comparison even if you are a really kind of advanced pin tool user check out the curvature tool I'm pretty good with the pen tool and slowly but surely I'm starting to use the curvature tool more and more let's see why all right with the curvature tool exercise we're gonna start with this hand-drawn Whaley thing and then redraw it using the curvature tool let's get going alright to get started open up the file curvature tool from your exercise files we've done the same handy trick where we've put it in that background and locked it using the template method now we want to redraw this you could use the pen tool but I wonder introduce you to the curvature towards the fourth pull down here if you don't have the curvature tool probably means you've got an older version of Illustrator I'm using 2019 alright and the way this works is I'm gonna zoom in a little is that it really wants to make curves you can't make it do corners I'll show you what I mean so I click once little dog appears nothing really happens they're not gonna have way around this circle here I'm gonna click once more again nothing really happens and then I'm kind of I'm not doing anything I just clicked once with my mouse but you can see when I kind of move my mouse away from it I've got this lovely curved line joining up I'm gonna door or one more curve over here like once member really wants to be a curve and like pretty much every drawing I start I forget to turn the fill to none so I can see what I'm doing again there's another case I'm gonna kind of click once there and click once there it's kind of got a little bit of weirdness in there you can fix that up afterwards now go to this point now I want this to be a corner not a curve so clicking once gives you a curve double-click gives you a corner so click once for a curve double-click for a corner click I'm not gonna draw the spinner I'm gonna show you in the next tutorial with the width tool so I'm gonna carry on here into about there click once cuz I want to be a curve maybe click again once there you can see how lovely these curves are naturally it really wants to be a beautiful curve rather than the pin tool you've got a really kind of guess either be a master of it or fight with it okay no click once once once just picking once my mouse you can see those kids ok corner what was it double click you got it come on let's finish this one off you go back I want this to be a curve click once go into here let's actually draw this bit so here I wanted to double click for a corner click once for a curve double click you can see how quick and easy this is just clicking once clicking once this is a weird bit you're like what do we do here you know I don't want to be a curve where I do say you have clicked in you like oh I thought it had to be a curve but now it needs to be a corner how do I go back and change it you just actually double click it and it turns it into a corner click once note twice for a corner once recurve twice for a corner and get back here you can see I haven't actually clicked anything it's previewing it so me it's the wrong thing so what do I do to override it double click it you want to be a curve again double click it again go away just kind of toggles them back and forth now if you're like hey you're ignoring this thing down here and little weakness going over there don't worry we got the basics in you can still use your direct selection tool confounding the anchor points and it's just like a regular path and shape okay you can go through and start modifying it dragging out the handles add more handles go fix it with the pin tool if you prefer a little bit it's gonna drive me mad I know it is it's actually not too bad alright so that's the curvature tool it's definitely better when your new pin tool can be quite tricky but as you saw there does block in some really easy flowing shapes let's use it in combination with one of the other tools the shape builder tool so coverture tool instead of clicking on the edge here I'm actually gonna do it all the way through so gonna click once click again and I'm gonna click once there because I want it to be curved click once out here so how many clicks one two three four and I didn't just click once of them all because I want them to be all a nice flowing curve yeah if it's stuck to this you like the off hit Escape key on your keyboard that kind of disconnects it now what I want to do is kind of slice this into a piece and color it will also draw the eye I'm just using the ellipse tool now grab them all with my black selection tool grab our handy dandy shape builder tool and I'm going to hold down the option key or the Alt key on a PC just to get rid of these little bits and over here I want to use my window color themes and I've just done Explorer and I'm just looking at the most popular colors at the moment and I'm gonna pick this one and use these two colors she and I want to join these up and color with this nice look at that combo move the curvature tool with shape builder tool all right that's gonna be it for the curvature tool on to the next picture all right the next feature is the width tool it's a way we can draw two parallel lines that curve around and actually flow together without spending two and a half days with the anchor points and handles and you don't really know what I mean yet do you let's jump in and I'll show ya all right this is what I mean by the width tool where there's a kind of a curve that runs along the top and it runs paralleled on the bottom that's super easy to do with the width tool also do something a little bit more fancy like this where they're these curves and you'll connect in this little dollop to the end it's all done with the width tool it's jumping now and figure out how all right the width tool is this fella here looks like kind of a bow and arrow something click on it you can grab any line okay I'm gonna grab this one we did here okay click hold and drag it go up select off you can see how it goes through and just kind of does a nice kind of flowing both sides all running parallel a little bit of a bump down here because of my corner boy and undo that let's look at this option here we're gonna use curvature tool if once once once once okay so I've got a nice curve it's kind of the same as the one flowing through there how do I get it to stuff being connected that's right escape I'm gonna get rid of the fill color by now what I want to do a curve like this if I leave this stroke as is I think the strokes at one point it's gonna doesn't look as good get it real low like here lines of 0.25 escape key again let's get it nice and thin it doesn't really matter if you drop with the pin tool the pencil tool the coverage at all just make sure it's nice and thin stroke and I'm gonna grab the width tool and I'm gonna click hold and drag it in the middle you can kind of see what I mean right Izu min a little bit you can see have you ever done it I've done the pin tool on the top and then try and do the pin tail on the bottom to match it and never seems to flow nicely kind of does it for us we can do adjustments afterwards because I want the thickest part to be about here so you can grab the center of this I'm still using the width tool you can just drag it along and say I want to be about there I can make it a bit wider okay but let's say you don't want it as wide the bottom is at the top you can hold down the option key on a Mac or the Alt key on a PC okay and just drag one of these little white squares here to kind of start adjusting it it's just one side not the other you can have more than one point I'm gonna click and drag here and with the width talks you got a click hold and drag on that center line and you can add a different points you can have different shaped lines you get the idea right I'm gonna undo that my drawing was only kind of a suggestion so I'm happy with the way it is zoom out before I show you a little bit more of a hard core use of this tool often what people want to do is they want to go to object and they want to go to expand appearance and it'll turn it from being like a lovely kind of stroke to a fill then we could do cool things like I could join it to this slick both of them grab the shape builder tool I could say you and now all one shape so the technique won't work if it's still a stroke so I'm gonna undo that because that's not what I wanted be something you want to do at some point all right let's jump to this other document all right if you want to follow along open up living spree from the exercise files this is a drawing I did a long time ago it's kind of based on size Scott's he's got that amazing kind of style with those animals as trying to do some type stuff with it but why it's here it's got some really good examples of the width tool and I want to show you how to do these we'll call them head polls the end here you can do those with the width tool so I'm gonna lift this eye for us to do so I'll show you how I did it so I'm gonna grab the ellipse tool okay and I'm gonna draw an ellipse if you want to know how to draw it from the center you hold down the shift key and the option key on a Mac or the Alt key on a PC it's kind of close to where I wanted it right now I want to slice it off I'll just show you I've taken to doing this so grabbing the line segment oh and going steady using like the scissors tool which would be perfectly fine okay I select them all and use the shape builder tool that we learned earlier and just start to delete these guys remember holding down the Alt key the option key on a Mac or dragging through them just the nice way of sneaking up lines anyway that's not the trick the trick is doing the little tadpoles so grab the width tool now what I'm gonna do member with the width tool selected and click hold and drag out there's a nice big in peace okay maybe not so big and then just a bit further along I'm gonna click hold and drag out a smaller piece that could be a little tricky give it a couple of goes maybe you're clicking and dragging on both the in piece and a bit further in we're gonna just tuck it in so it's a little bit smaller now by default it's probably going to have this nice and flat in that's called unfortunately named a butt cap to change it go to properties go to stroke and change it from that one to rounded cap okay and that should give you the nice little bobble at the end table and that's kind of what I did with the rest of these I cannae some of them might just drew with the curvature tool and just put a bobble on the end some I want it to be like a perfect circle anyway I wanted to show you just a little bit more of the width tool before we get on to our next feature all right I'm left in and I feel like it's better introducing these new features live so we get to meet each other see each other in the next feature that we're going to discuss together is going to be the freeform gradient it's cool feature let's jump inside the computer again and check it out alright so in this video we're gonna look at doing gradients where you can actually just move points around other than a complex gradient mesh we're trying to fake it with lots of radial gradients the freeform gradient it's super easy to use really complex gradients and did I mention it was easy to use right let's get going alright from your exercise files open up the free-form gradient file but you can use any vector shape this is a logo that I did a little while ago I spent ages playing with gradient meshes and linear gradient to try and get the result I wanted so a free-form gradient is easy to apply so my black arrow I'm gonna click on so got two separate shapes right so I'm gonna click on this first option here over here it says fill I'm gonna pick just the standard black to white linear gradient and then kind of just click out and what you'll notice is with it selected you've got linear you've got radio and you've got this new one that's the magic one freeform gradient click on that and we'd this happens it does a really good job while really good job it has a guess it tries to reach out and look around the document for the colors use pick white and black from the document and the green so what I want but it's put in some nice dots you might find there I'm gonna delete these you can just click and delete them you might have one sometimes it's a bit weird that way so I'm gonna undo put them all back in let's say that you've got three or one all you need to do to change the color of it so you've got this white one you're like I don't want white just double-click the center ok and you'll open up either your mixer okay or your swatches I'm gonna use the swatches panel for the moment I've got a couple of colors premix I'm gonna use this darker green at the top and kind of in the center here I want to add another color just the light green all you do is click once and you get a swatch that will click it to change the color remember decide with you using the mixer or swatches use the lighter green here you can see how complex this is it's not just a linear gradient now there's all sorts of things happening let me show you a couple other things so double-click this one I'm going to make it the dark dark green what else can you do and I'm going to click back on it to kind of close it up this is the extent see this kind of like circle here you can drag it out to make it bigger you can see it's just um a zoom in so we can make it yeah extend further these are the guys are just fighting with each other okay who's got that strong gradient I'm gonna make this nice and small because I want it down in there this is where it gets really nice cuz you're like oh I just wanted to because a radial gradient might get you this far but now I actually want to inject a bit more of the lighter color here okay and these guys are gonna fight each other a little bit close quarters I'm not sure why they're fighting but you the idea all right let's go down here actually I want it to be the light one I'm just messing around now I'm gonna show you a couple of other tricks so moving them just grab the center extent you can delete them by say you add one and you don't want it there just have it selected and hit delete on your keyboard gone to other features one is you can do a gradient line so we're just doing its called points can you see over here says draw points it means just like these random points that you can move around delete them if you need to but you can actually draw a line which is pretty cool so I'm gonna grab my black arrow and click on this chunk what I'd like to do is add the gradient again so over here this is fill you use black and whites cuz it down now click on this one here freeform gradient edit some random dots what I'm gonna do is I'll leave that one there this one here I'm just gonna kind of move over the side and I'm gonna switch from points to lines it's better if you move any existing points away otherwise they start joining so what it does is I'm gonna click once and I'm gonna double click it just to start off with the right color okay and then kind of close it back down you either hit escape on your keyboard or just click on the dot again what you'll notice is you see this it's kind of connected to it now it operates the same way it's the curvature tool that we learnt earlier on I feel like I'm never gonna use that tool he doesn't matter and illustrator has forced it into a few different tools like this one so what happens is it looks like a straight line but remember when I click once and then move off can you see it starts wanting to do a curve I can do a straight line and by kind of just having one there and one there to do some ones that are kind of close to each other ends up straightening it out you see I get a nice kind of cool curve that follows along here I'll kind of accentuate it by going back to points and moving some of these guys around you can start to see it's got this kind of like green force field okay that follows that line there so that's kind of what I want to do I want down here I want double-click you I want to be black on it to be the dark green down here be the dark green again and with hey let another one ended up you get the idea of this kind of really complex gradient we can do all with points that's fine but the line tool is going to be amazing for those people who do more illustration in Illustrator I tend to do logos with gradients in them so that line option is going to be amazing for those people doing full illustration in Illustrator alright one last thing I promise was you can do opacity which is really cool all right an example if I grab the black arrow click on this one if you want to get back into editing it you've got to cook on this option this is edited gradient ok and let's say this one here instead of at disappearing kind of dark I want to actually have the opacity down on this one okay so it looks like it's gone white but really what's happened is let me select at all zoom out and just drag it over here and you'll see when it crosses halfway across this you see there it's not actually white I guess it's showing through the background so that can be really handy as well all right give it up for the freeform gradient tool all right let's jump into the next and last feature alright it's time for the last feature this one is called global edit now don't be confused it's at the end not because it's the fifth of my favorite beaches it's because it's the least sexy of them all okay I keep that really cool-looking ones at the front but this one's probably going to be the feature that is gonna change your workflow life the most so let's jump in and look at the global edit in Illustrator alright from the exercise files open up this one here called global edit now this document is just an example of like a mock-up website I did in Illustrator there's nothing special about it this will work for you as long as you're using one of the later versions of Illustrator 2019 or above alright what it does is it's for things like this like you've done a big project where like let's say this arrow and this button here appears multiple times I'm gonna got three outboards here but you can imagine doing this is just a really simple website design you're likely to have a whole lot more pages for a website and lots of different sizes it could be tens or hundreds of pages probably not but you get the idea this thing appears on lots of documents really handy as well for I do a lot of design like this say Google banner ads ok you need to make a change and with this selected here I want to change the arrow don't like it it's too pointy whatever it is I'm gonna zoom a little bit and I want to change on all apples what you can do is click on this magic by its click start global edit and something magical happens in a zoom out a lot you can kinda see here I'll zoom in on the video but you can see there's these three have been selected across all the artboards I've done nothing to them there's nothing like like special about them they're not symbols it just magically reached out and grabbed everything that happened to be the same shape in color I can go through now grab my white arrow and say actually I'm gonna zoom in and stop missing with the corners here and kind of make it this pointy and magically let's go over look at this fella zoom in on him he's less pointy so is the other guy cool huh all you do is click on something you like this orange box is Mandarin box here I need it to be I need to change it to panel at the pill shape just click stack logo later you can see grabs all of them didn't grab this one because it's not the right kind of shapes right color okay and I'm gonna drag these coins if you there's a little dots for the rounded corners are super handy you were like where are those make sure you got the latest version of illustrator by go to view and it's this one here it's called corner widget turn those on and so yeah super helpful huh let me show you one more here's my little kiwi down the bottom here stack global edit you can see it picked em and hemp now we're physically changing things it's really good for color as well and this highlights an old feature there not everyone knows let's say that I do like I want to change this kind of Mandarin color to something else right I want to go this has been in here forever it's under select you can go the same and go to fill color this is just real handy this is good for doing like it's gonna pick every single vector object that has that fill color and I can go through and change it okay this might be good when you don't trying to do some color ways for a brand you trying to figure out different styles okay terrible colors then but you get the idea right and that's been in there for a while where global edit is quite helpful is I'm gonna undo is that say I licked on this and I don't want a color I don't you know i don't want to color everything I just want to color the circles there's only two of them there's a couple let's go to let's go to global edit okay and it's reached out and grabbed those two guys there okay and it means I don't have to go through one of the things though is you see I click on green it's like it is an updated look it's not even noticed he's got to kind of click out of this and eventually updates amazing huh one of the other little tricks is if I undo that what on by default is well I've got this one selected so I'm gonna click off click on him okay and down here it says global edit you can hit this little arrow here you can add some options so let's say that I don't want to match the size I think it's off by default so yours might be off by default hevachick I want to stack global edit but I don't want it to match sizes okay and click on it you can see it grabbed all the circles down here it's probably doing it for you by default but it's just really handy sometimes later on you're like actually don't grab those just grab you drop this down match the size start global edit and just these two guys will match go ha a couple of little things just so you're a pro edit is that down the bottom here there's you can pick different app boards and include objects on canvas that just means anything in this great area you can include lots of people end up working in this great area you want to adjust those as well make sure that's ticked the other thing to note as well as that it's not working for text at the moment if I've got editable text I can't do global edit I really like to I'd love to go through and as you you know pull on these different fonts and adjust them and doesn't work for images as well so it's for actual physical Victo graphic pieces rather than and images at the moment all right that is global edit I'll pass it back to real Dan to finish this up all right hi bye thanks for having me I hope you enjoyed the videos I try to make them they're a little bit longer I know but I try and make sure that the tools are described and they're kind of entirety so that you can go and start working with them straight away in your professional work and know the ins and outs I'll hand it back over to the future to do the outro I'll see you around if you like this video from Daniel Scott and you want to see more of him let us know in the comments section below and let us know what software package you want us to focus on next if you want to master your technical skills consider taking one of Daniels courses he's a certified Adobe instructor and he teaches you a range of tools and techniques from Photoshop to illustrator to XD and much much more check out the link in the description below if you got some value out of this video let us know by giving us a comment like and subscribe it really helps us out with that out of the way it's time to get back to work

Channel: The Futur Academy

Views: 770,413

Keywords: futur academy, the futur, disrupt design education, chris do, how to, design tutorial, graphic design, how to design, adobe illustrator, satori graphics, illustrator tips, illustrator tutorial, adobe illustrator tutorial, illustrator tricks, adobe illustrator cc 2019, adobe illustrator tools, logo design tutorial, illustrator tools tutorial, freeform gradient tutorial, shape builder tool, width tool illustrator, global editing illustrator

Id: XnJByIkcUS0

Length: 30min 17sec (1817 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 20 2019