From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

980 Drawing a universal power symbol in Illustrator

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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980 Drawing a universal power symbol in Illustrator

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week, you know the universal power symbol, the one that looks like this. That is to say a circle interrupted by a vertical line. Or if you prefer, a zero interrupted by a one, which happen to be the two values available to a single bit of data, which is to say off and on. So simple, but can so easily go so wrong. And so the key to getting the balance right is to create that perfect interruption at the top of the circle, using a live ellipse that you can turn into a Pac-Man like pie, only with its chompy mouth appended at the top inside Illustrator. You get where I'm going with this? Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, so here's that universal power symbol open inside Illustrator. I'm going to start off inside this document which contains a couple of center guides that I've relegated to the guides layer. I've also created a big blue rectangle on the field layer. I'm going to start off on this empty power layer at the top of the stack. And next, I'll go ahead and select the ellipse tool from the shape tool flyout menu. Now, you want to go to the View menu, and confirm that your Smart Guides are turned on. And then, position your cursor at the intersection of those two center guides, and drag outward while pressing the Alt key, or the Option key on the Mac, so that you're creating the shape from the center outward. You also want to press the Shift key to constrain the shape to a circle. So here in the PC, I have both the Shift and Alt keys down, on the Mac, you want to press and hold the Shift and Option keys. Now I'm looking for both the width and height values to be 600 points. That's not really that easy to pull off however, so I'll just go ahead and undo the creation of that shape. And instead of dragging, I'll press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac, and I'll click at the intersection of those two center guides, in order to bring up the Ellipse dialog box. Now, because both values are identical, I'll turn on this link icon right here, and then I'll change either one of the values to 600 points. And now, I'll click OK, and because I Alt or Option clicked, I create the shape from the center outward. All right, next you want to confirm your bounding box is turned on, and you can do that by going to the View menu and checking out this command right here. If it reads Hide Bounding Box, you're fine. If it reads Show Bounding Box, go ahead and choose the command to turn it on. I'm just going to press the Escape key, and now notice this circular round corner widget. If I drag it, then I'm going to convert the circle to a pie. Now I want the edges of the pie to go upward, like so, so I'll just go ahead and drag this guy up as well. However, I want to make sure that this pie is exactly symmetrical, but before I do that, I want to change the fill and the stroke. And so, assuming that you're seeing the horizontal control panel, up here at the top of the screen, then click on the first color swatch and change it to none, and that will make the fill transparent. And then click on the second color swatch and change it to white. Now, I want a big fat line weight, so I'll go ahead and triple click inside this line weight value right here, and I'll change it to 48 points like so, and that'll just allow us to better see what's going on. All right, now, as I said, I want these sides of the pie to be exactly symmetrical. And so I'll click on the word Shape, once again, up here in the control panel, and I'll tap my way down to this value, the pie start angle, and I'll change it to 90 degrees, which would be straight up, plus 20, like so, and then we'll press the Tab key, at which point Illustrator does the math for me and figures out that this value right here should be 110 degrees. Now, I'll change the second value to 90, once again, minus 20 this time around, and when I press the Tab key, that converts the value to 70 degrees. So we have this symmetrical line segment. All right, now press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to hide that panel, and then I'll switch to the White Arrow Tool, the one that Illustrator calls the Direct Selection Tool, even though it has a keyboard shortcut of A for arrow. And now I'll select this anchor point right here, the one at the intersection of the two center guides, and then I'll press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac, which not only gets rid of that anchor point, but it also expands that live ellipse so that these end points are now fixed. In other words, you lose that pie functionality. All right, now I want rounded caps, and so I'll click at the word Stroke, and I'll select the Round Cap icon like so. All right, that finishes off the off portion of the symbol. Now to draw the line that represents on, I'll go ahead and select the line segment tool, and then I'll drag from the intersection of those two guidelines, so not from that center point, but the intersection of the two center guides, once again, upward like so. Now I want this line to be somewhat taller than the circle, and I actually want it to be exactly 24 points taller. Now, as you may recall, this interrupted circle right here measures 600 points wide by 600 points tall. So in other words, it has a radius of half that or 300 points. And so, I'll go ahead and delete that line and recreate it, by clicking at the intersection of the two center guides, and I'll change the link to 300, the radius of the circle, plus let's say 24, happened to work out. Why 24? Because it's half of the line weight, which is 48 points. Now notice that my angle value is 90 degrees straight up and down, at which point I'll click OK to create that line. Now I want the line to be a little thicker. And so, I'll click in that line weight value right there, and I'll enter plus half of 24, which is 12, like so, and that gives me a line weight value of 60 points. All right, now, I'll switch to the black arrow tool, the one that has a keyboard shortcut of V, and then I'll click off the line to de-select it, and I'll turn off the guides layer. And that is at least one way to create a universal power symbol, here inside Illustrator. Looking forward to next week, that's when we'll take a look at how you can create very large art boards inside the same program we've been using, Illustrator. Now, assuming you're up to date, Illustrator's canvas can now measure 163,830 points in either direction. An area that's 3,340 square meters, or if you prefer, eight tenths of an acre, which is nearly big enough, and this is true, to comfortably fit the largest 747 ever built. Oh, and by the way, that up there at the top, that's 10,000 point type. Ever created 10,000 point type? That's like painting your words as tall as an elephant, or a whole herd of elephants if you decide to write a sentence, such as this one. Deke's Techniques each and every week, keep watching.

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