today I have a fresh and a new isometric design tutorial but we're not going to
use a single grid throughout the entire process
now I'm nearly finished with the logo design process video and that's going to
be coming here on Wednesday but now let's make some isometric designs using
no grids so here are some of the base colors that I'm gonna use for my design
and to make life easier let's add them to the swatches library
like so so now we have some colors in the swatches window we can begin the
isometry design process without the use of grids first I'm going to make a
background by pressing M for the rectangle tool and then covering the
entire board or the shape our sampling colors from the swatches window couldn't
be easier just click the swatch whilst your shape
is selected now lock down the background with command or control - or you can
come here to the drop down menu for my isometry design I'm going to show you
the techniques by working on the base first now it's important to make two
edges the same length and the height
the actual isometric style is achieved in a 3d section under bevel and extrude
so right here you can see we have isometric options I'm gonna use the top
aversion first now you can leave this with the two edges automatically
generated for you but I personally like to make everything manually because then
I have a hundred percent control over my design but of course you can use this
option to generate the edges of your designs it's completely up to you to
turn it off drag this slider down to zero and also turn off the shading to
heat the original color of your design so this is how we're going to be doing
things today but there is yet more to learn in this isometric video upload
once the shape has been altered expand the appearance so the bounding box fits
the shape and it's more easier to work with I'm going to show you one more time
with the shape here but for this shape I'm gonna use the left edge option
instead of the top isometric generation
so again don't use the shading option if you want to retain the original color
choice that you did select earlier as you can see I do have the smart guides
activated which can be toggled on or off with command or control you another
command that you're probably going to find useful is command or control Y
which will enter into outline mode this helps us stay precise and you know line
everything up efficiently so the base is ready for my isometric design but I want
to have it in a different kind of layout so I can just select everything and then
reflect it in the transform window I just prefer it looking this way for some
reason and also of course click the preview box to see your changes in real
time now I'm going to add some interest and a unique quality to my design by
elevating one element kind of hovering above you can see in the outline mode
I've already gone ahead and made the isometric shapes using the previous
methods however now I'm going to adjust the opacity of two of the shapes you can
obviously watch today's tutorial and then use the techniques to be creative
and make your very own designs but there is yet more to learn so let's keep going
I've simulated two lines of text using the same isometric method but I want to
show you some of my layers in the layers window it will help you a whole lot if
you label your layers because then you can keep track of things and it's going
to be easier to move and select things around when your design gets more
complex so I'm gonna duplicate the base layer and then change its color to
resemble the shadow lowering the opacity here probably works best for my design I
feel so as I mentioned I do have text resembled as single lines and I've gone
ahead and grouped these three shapes together to make up one line of text and
of course to do that just press command or control G instead of going through
the whole 3d isometric process that we looked at earlier for these I simply
selected this shape here and duplicated it by holding down the alt/option key I
then grabbed the direct selection tool which is a on your keyboard and I shift
clicks to anchor points and move them upwards by holding down shift
I then rescale things with a selection tool and finally use a direct selection
tool again to correctly extend the shapes outward using the original lines
as a kind of guide to keep the isometric proportions true so here's a trick to
keep the lines of your texts isometric and equal distances apart line them up
to the edge here and then by holding down the alt/option key duplicate one
exactly over
then press command or control D repeatedly over and over again you can
then remove two lines at a time and this will leave a precise column of text like
so and the green circle was made using the 3d process that we looked at earlier
I finally let's create yet more interest and more uniqueness in the layers panel
I duplicated the three shapes that make up the base layer if you want to
properly scale this shape without distorting the isometric appearance
shift click and drag from this Anchor Point and not from the corners then I'm
going to add a Gaussian blur to the shape which is all part of the plan for
this final technique for this did not look pixelated your design shouldn't be
too small and to make sure all the raster effects do look smooth I'm gonna
raise the arrest effects pixel tolerance right here now these are the techniques
for making isometric designs without the use of a grid in Illustrator I'd love to
see your creativity when it comes to this kind of design so do tag me on
Twitter if you do make a design but until next time guys design your future
today peace