today seven golden rules that you must keep in mind when designing icons in
Illustrator
what is that people welcome back to Satori graphics the Hema graphics and
content right here on YouTube the first golden rule in today's video icon design
is the preview bound setting which is essential for web-based projects but
also really helpful for icon design too so to demonstrate I can press M for the
rectangle tool and then click the artboards I then just manually type in
the values of 200 by 200 pixels generate a square if I then take the line tool
and create a line of 200 pixels you can see that the square is actually larger
than the line itself even though I use 200 pixels for both things this is
because the stroke on the square is 20 pixels wide and illustrator doesn't
compensate for this but what we can do is press command or control K to open up
the preferences and then activate the preview bounds option so now in the
transform window you can see that illustrator now measures things from the
edge of the stroke this is very helpful in designing icons and it's something
that you want to keep in mind
the second golden rule icon design is to use geometric shapes rather than drawing
them yourself so just to quickly demonstrate I'm gonna make the top part
of the lock here pressing L for the ellipse tool will allow me to make a
circle and then I conflict the fill label to a stroke by pressing C for the
scissors tool I can then cut the circle in half and then later create rectangles
the same size of the stroke the reason for using geometric shapes to make icons
is that firstly it's quicker than drawing everything out yourself but more
importantly things are more precise and more smooth when you use geometric
shapes it is a lot easier to use the curvature of a circle than to try and
draw a perfect circle using the pen tool so ever possible try to use geometric
shapes to create your icons in Illustrator
the next golden rule in today's video nikon design is to use the preview pixel
modes now by default if i zoom into the design illustrator I can see obviously a
crisp and a clean edge this is because it's a vector design however play press
outs and then command or control Y I'm going to enter into the pixel preview
mode in the bottom left of the screen I can zoom in to 100% to see how crisp the
icon is going to look on a screen when finished so to ensure a crisp and a
clean design make sure your icons are designed on a
pretty large our boys one of the essential parts of designing an icon is
to use a grid and to activate the grid come into the View menu and then click
show grids however you can use a shortcut of command or control and an
apostrophe and the grid is so helpful for keeping your icons symmetrical and
precise so I do suggest using their on all of you like on projects the fifth
golden roof icon design is simple because icons should be simple they can
appear very small on the screen or even a print project so they need to be basic
and also minimal as possible this is so that detail does not get lost when
they're scaled down to a small size
another quick and easy golden rule that you need to keep in mind is that you
need to expand your strokes but before finishing the design if your icon is
sent to someone and then they resize it down or up the strokes will not look
ideal so make sure to outline the strokes before signing off the project a
final golden roof icon design illustrator is to make sure you lay them
out perfectly once you're finished your final product needs to be showcased
really well so utilize the align tool and make the rows and the columns evenly
spaced out and neatly packaged so I hope you know a thing or two now by icon
design and if you do want to keep expanding your skills and your awareness
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next time design your future today peace