

Set your width to 150px and your height to 75px. Another width and height menu will appear. Select the Ellipsis tool (click on the Rectangle tool and hold until the context menu appears, then click on the Ellipsis tool.) With the Ellipsis tool selected, double-click on your art board. With your art board populated, it’s time to get started. Your art board will populate, though this might take a second or two. Set your orientation to landscape and click “Create”. In the width and height boxes on the right of the “New Document” dialog, enter 200 pixels (200 px). For our project, we’re going to define a custom canvas. You can choose from Adobe’s pre-defined Mobile, Web, Print, Film & Video and Art & Illustration canvases, or define a custom canvas of your own. The “New Document” dialog box will appear, asking you what size of canvas you’d like to use. Select “New Document” from the “File” menu. When you first open up Adobe Illustrator, it will ask you what size canvas you want to work off of. Swole’s Protein Shakes” and the logo will look a little something like this:

Now that we have some of the basics down, let’s create a logo in Illustrator to put what’s on the page into practice.

The panel docking area: The panel docking area has three different panels inside it: the Properties panel, which allows you to change the properties of the selected tool the Layers panel, which allows you to manage the different layers you’ve created inside your Illustrator document and the Libraries panel, which allows you to manage collections of design assets across computers. If you can’t remember which tool is which, we’ve included a reference image below to make things a little easier. The tools panel: The tools panel is where you’ll find all of the different tools that you can use in Adobe Illustrator®, such as the Pen tool, the Brush tool, or the Text tool. It is generally used for high-level operations that affect the whole file or workspace, such as changing the image size, changing the canvas size, saving out Illustrator files and opening new files into the work space. The main menu: This menu contains your File and Edit menus, as well as the Help menu and others. There are three main sections of the Illustrator work space: We’ll take a deep dive of the Illustrator work space shown above and walk through each of the tools at your disposal before we start building a logo in Illustrator. That doesn’t mean that the raster graphics of Photoshop are an adequate replacement for Illustrator, especially when it comes to print media: Illustrator still has some tricks up its sleeve in that department. This is because Adobe has slowly but steadily begun to intermix the features of the different Creative Cloud apps, so that each can do a little bit of what the others can do. If you said to yourself, “Hey, that looks a lot like Photoshop!” you’d be right. The Illustrator workspace looks a little something like this: Adobe Illustrator® basics – the work space Let’s get started with the basics of the Illustrator work space. We’ll walk through the basics of creating vector images with Adobe Illustrator®, starting with the basics of the work space all the way up to creating a logo in Illustrator. Most often, however, it is simply used for creating vector images out of a graphic, which can then be printed without losing image quality. It is used to create everything from logos to business cards to t-shirts and even package designs – essentially, if you can think of it, Illustrator can be used to make it. In this post, we’re going to dive into the basics of Adobe Illustrator and creating vector images.Īdobe Illustrator® is a drawing program that is designed to output images as vector graphics. In our previous two posts, we took a look at the basics of Adobe Photoshop®, including working with smart objects.
