How To Create Gear Icons Using Illustrator

• June 24th, 2010
• Illustrator

This is a quick tip in the form of screen cast, This is simple illustrator tutorial on how you can use illustrator in order to create gear vector icons.

Tutorial Details

Difficulty: Beginner

Tutorial estimation time: 10 to 5mins

Program: Illustrator

Expected Outcome

Video Transcript

Hello, welcome to Creative Nerds. Today, we’ve just got a quick tip to share on how to create these gear icons using Illustrator. Today, we’re going to be showing you a simple technique which you’ll be able to create gear icons of your own, similar to these ones. So let’s jump straight into it.

So, you want to create a new web document. So select Web Document. You want to select a width of 800 pixels, and a height of 600 pixels, then select the OK button. Then, we’ll head over to shape tools, and the shape we’re looking for is the star tool. So you want to draw out the star, cover and hold on to the left click, and press down on the arrow cursor keys. This will remove the triangles within the star, one by one. We want to be left with one. Hold on to shift, to keep it straight. Move in to the center of the document. And then you want to select no stroke, and then fill all black.

When I grab the direction selection tool, I want to grab the top point of the triangle. Drag it down until it’s halfway, say, about a quarter of the triangle or a third, if you want to be precise. That gives you a nice, flat, straight edge. You want to drag it out a bit, the bottom of it. And then you’re going to copy it, control-C, and then you’re going to paste it control-V. Or, you can go over to edit copy or edit paste, whichever one works for you. And then we want to rotate this triangle around. Hold on to shift, and this will make it a lot easier to rotate when you’re rotating around.

Then, you want to align it to ensure that the circle is in the center. So, we want to group. This will group both objects that we just created. And so, I select some, and we want to go over to effect, distort and transform. The one we want to select is transform. Be sure that preview is selected, so that you can preview what you’re going to be creating before you apply the settings to the shapes. And you want to select an angle of 30. And then, you want to add, say, five copies. Then select the OK button.

Then, you want to grab the ellipse tool, hold on to shift to do a perfect round circle and place it into the center of the shape. Then you want to grab another circle from the ellipse tool, and this time, turn it white. And once again, we center that circle. This time, we move it up here a tad bit, and then we can draw another circle inside of that circle just to give it a cool effect.

So, we don’t want to add the stroke on this, we just want to add the fill to the circle. Grab the selection tool, and center it in the middle. And then we can just keep adding circles to it quickly. You just create a simple [inaudible] You can click object, and group all of them together and object expand appearance.

There you go. Super gear icon using Illustrator that took less than a few minutes to achieve. I hope you enjoyed this short screen cast, and feel free to leave your thoughts and comments about it. That would be great. Thank you very much.

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