Things to help you get started - Illustrator Tutorial

- Now, before you get started with your own projects let me give you three points of advice here. Now, first of all, I would like you to think about sketching or drawing out your ideas first. So just take a regular piece of paper, take a pencil and draw out your icon first. Now, if you're a little bit like me, then you would probably just start out there wreckly using illustrator or Photoshop. And the problem is that throughout the years I have discovered that, that's actually the wrong approach. So I would have as amazing idea in my head. And I would visualize that in my mind. And I would try and draw that large directly onto the screen using illustrator. And I would often conclude in the end that the result was very bad. It was a mediocre or it just looked horrible and look nothing like the way I imagined that to be in my head. And the problem with that is I would often be disappointed and that would result in me abandoning to the idea or just the project altogether. So, what you need to do instead is just take a regular piece of paper and start sketching out the idea that you had in your head. And I have noticed for myself that drawing something on paper, we'll give you something to hold on to. It will give you a visual representation of that concept and it will be a lot easier to go from your paper's sketch next to you, next to your keyboard for example, to the screen. Okay, so just try and draw something. Now it doesn't have to be perfect. I myself for example, I'm really bad at illustration. I'll perfectly admit that. I don't really enjoy illustrating that much to be honest, I still consider myself a designer but for some reason, people think that you're amazing at illustration because you're a designer, just like some people think that I would know everything about digital photography or camera settings again because I'm a designer, which is of course not the case. So, sketch out your idea first, illustrator second. That's my first tip. The second tip is about inspiration. Now you might have an amazing idea in your mind but be careful with just that idea. If you can please broaden your horizon a little bit go online and just look up more inspiration. Go to Google images, which is I think the most obvious thing to do and see what other people have done. Go to other community-based portfolios, like Behance, WB Behance, which is an amazing platform. Again, look up more inspiration, look up stock images, look up books that talk about the subject that you would like to use for your icons. If you want to create a set of icons based on like winter or fall or different seasons. Grab your camera, go out and take a walk and just take few really nice close-up pictures of the things that inspire you and where you can draw inspiration from. So again, looking up inspiration is going to help you broaden your horizon and it will actually either confirm the idea or the concept that you had in your head, or it might actually give you more insight that there is more than one approach to that one specific icon idea that you might have. So again, inspiration is really, really important. And the last point is about scalability. Now, if you're a designer like me then you would probably have a very large monitor. And the problem with that is that we'll probably designer icons in full screen, or at least at a very large scale. You have to keep in mind that the icon that you're designing is not going to be used at that scale. It is going to be no larger than the thumbnail. So, the thing is that you might often focus a lot on specific details in the icon but those details will get lost the moment the icon is scaled down to its proper size to size where it's actually going to be used. So, I'll just have a few tips for you here. So what I would do recommend that you do is that you first of all, just show the icon that you have to someone that does not know what the icon means. You know what every single detail in the icon does and what it means, but that person does not. So that's always a good test. Furthermore, if you do scale down the icons which is something that needs to happen, you will lose a lot of detail. So don't spend too much time on title details, but again if you can, design the icon as small as possible looking at the icon at that exact size. So this is something that you have to take into account because you're going to lose details. When you scale on the icon, there's a good chance that the meaning or the significance or the clarity of the icon, the legibility of the icon, might actually decrease, so again something that you have to be careful for. And it's actually not that uncommon for a designer to design not one but two versions of the same icon, one at a relatively larger size and one at a much smaller size. So if you want, you can always come in and just emphasize certain details just for that smaller version. Let me show you an example of how that works. Now, I'm here inside of Adobe illustrator or I have the original legacy Adobe illustrator icon opened on my screen. Now I have two versions of that same icon. I have the one on the left, which is a larger version. I have the one on the right, which is a smaller version. Now the one on the left is a larger version, and I would typically use this, let's say on a webpage or maybe when creating a promotional graphic or a banner. And the one on the right is a smaller version which is that I might be able to use. Let's say, when I'm scrolling through a list of Adobe applications and illustrator is one of them on my smart device. So simply put a location or a situation where I need a very small rendition of the original icon. Now let's take a look at the layers panel and I'll come in and I'll click Ai icon to activate these guides. And I'm just going to zoom in a little bit. And what I'll do is I'll quickly do a quick test because this is your original icon and this is a smaller version of the icon. Now let's try and recreate this. So I'll take the original and I'm just going to de-select these guides here and I am going to scale this down. Let's zoom in a little bit and I'm going to use these guides here to help me out to make sure that I have the exact same height settings for my version of this icon. There we go. And I'll just de-select the guides layer again to hide them. And this is what I wanted. So let's compare both icons. Now, as you can see the one on the right is the exact same size as the original on the left. But you can clearly see that the stroke that is going around the original icon is a lot thinner here compared to the original. So the original small icon has been designed specifically for this size. And I have to say that the one on the right is not really looking that good because it's actually kind of disappearing in the background, so the stroke around it is too thin for its use. So this means that if you take a look at the original one here, that the designer for this icon, specifically added a thicker stroke when the icon needs to be used in smaller locations, in smaller situations. And it's really important here as a takeaway that you understand that it is perfectly normal to have a larger version of an icon with more detail and have a smaller version of that same icon for specific situations where you, maybe you leave out certain details or where you emphasize other details. So, don't just take the regular icon that you have and don't just blindly scale it down into multiple versions for say, web exports instead to try and optimize the work that you have in order to keep the quality of your icon as high as possible. And to make sure that the icon is always clearly legible and easy to understand.