Creating Basic Shapes in Illustrator

[Treehouse presents] 0:00 [Quick Tips][Creating Basic Shapes in Adobe Illustrator][with Mat Helme] 0:02 Hey, what's up—Mat Helme here with a Treehouse Quick Tip: 0:05 Creating basic shapes with Adobe Illustrator CS6. 0:09 After we fire up Illustrator and create a new document, 0:13 let's head over to the Tools Panel and drag out the Shape tools. 0:16 We can do this by grabbing the rectangle, 0:19 selecting and holding, 0:22 and then releasing on the outer arrow to pull out all of the shapes. 0:25 With the Rectangle tool selected, 0:28 let's get rid of the stroke and change the color of the fill to—say—red. 0:31 Now, clicking and holding down, you can place the rectangle shape onto the canvas. 0:39 If you wish to make a square, you can simply hold Shift, and it will scale it proportionally for you. 0:47 Now, if you want to make a square at a specific size—say 200 pixels x 200 pixels, 0:54 simply select the canvas with the Rectangle tool, and a window will pop up; 1:00 it'll ask you for the width and height. 1:05 So, 200 pixels x 200 pixels, select OK, 1:07 and you can see we have our perfect rectangle at 200 pixels x 200 pixels. 1:13 Now, let's grab the Rounded Rectangle tool, and—again— 1:19 select the canvas, and we will do 200 pixels x 200 pixels. 1:23 Now, we're given a corner radius; 1:29 let's give it a corner radius of 20 pixels. 1:30 And again, we have our perfect rounded rectangle with the corner radius of 20 pixels. 1:36 Now, say if I want to make this 300 pixels wide, 1:43 I simply transform it out to width 300 pixels, 1:46 and notice how our corner radius stretched. 1:51 Now, a quick tip here for making rounding corners is you take the Rectangle tool, 1:56 let's select a square here, go to Effect, Stylize, and select Rounded Corners. 2:02 Now we can select our radius—say—50 pixels, preview it—it looks good— 2:11 and when we stretch that, you can see our corner radius stays correct throughout. 2:17 Now, let's select our Ellipse tool, 2:23 and with this tool we can make ovals or circles by holding Shift just like the Rectangle tool. 2:25 Next, let's grab the Polygon tool, 2:37 and what's great about the Polygon tool is we can add and subtract points to it. 2:39 So it defaults as the Polygon tool but very easily—if I press the down arrow twice— 2:44 we now have a square, and one more, a triangle. 2:49 This works the same as adding; 2:53 we press the up arrow, and it then adds points. 2:55 This is the same for the Star tool. 3:01 You can simply create a 5-point star as default, 3:05 but say if we wanted to turn this into—say—a sun icon, 3:09 I can then add many points by just holding down the up key and changing the color. 3:13 The last tool you will see here is the Flare tool. 3:23 I wouldn't worry too much about the Flare tool; 3:25 it's been around for about as long as I've been using Illustrator, 3:28 and I've really never used it. 3:30 It's kind of like an Easter egg in Adobe Illustrator. 3:32 Basically what it does is it puts a lens flare on everything. 3:35 Not that cool. 3:38 That about wraps up our quick tips for creating shapes in Adobe Illustrator CS6. 3:41 For more in-depth tutorials and projects using Adobe Illustrator CS6, 3:47 head over to Treehouse and treat yourself to a gold membership—you deserve it! 3:52

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