10 Tips for Rotating Shapes in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch Class™

1. 10 Rotation Tips for Adobe Illustrator Introduction: Hello, and welcome to this class, ten essential rotation tips for Adobe Illustrator. My name is Helen Bradley and I'm a Skol share top teacher. I have over 270 courses here on School share and over 185,000 student enrollments. This class, we'll look at your options for rotating shapes in Illustrator. I hope that by telling you that we're going to look at five different rotation methods in total, that I'll be able to convince you of just how much there is to know about rotating objects in Illustrator. If you've taken any of my classes before, you'll also know that there are going to be lots of little gems of useful information scattered throughout this class. By the end of the class, you're going to have a deeper understanding of your options for rotating shapes in Illustrator and for speeding up and improving your illustrator workflow. So without further ado, let's get started with our tips for rotating shapes in Illustrator. 2. Tip 0 - Revisiting Rotation Basics: Before we delve into some more advanced rotation tips, let's revisit the basics. I have a shape here that's made up of lots of individual elements. If I want this pair to rotate as a whole object, I'm going to need to select everything, so I'm going to the selection tool. I'm just going to drag a rectangle over this shape. So everything is selected. Now when I hold my mouse pointer outside any of the four corners of the selected shapes, you'll say that I get a bent arrow, and that is the rotation indicator. Now you can rotate from any point, it doesn't matter which, so just choose which one suits you best. Click with the left mouse button and rotate. You can see here that I am seeing a tooltip that's telling me the angle of rotation. Right now it's 25 degrees. If I let go the left mouse button, the shape is now rotated to 25 degrees. I'm just going to undo that with control Z, and this time I want to rotate it 45 degrees. If I add the shift key as I rotate this shape, it's going to be constrained to rotations of a multiple of 45 degrees, 45, 90, 135, 180, 225, and so on. You can control the rotation if you want to rotate 45 or 90 degrees, for example, by holding the shift key. I'm going back to just my normal rotation. 3. Tip 1 - Reset the Bounding Box: You might notice that after you've rotated your shape, the bounding box is no longer an upright rectangle. In fact, it's on an angle. Now you can fix this and put the bounding box back to an upright rectangle, not changing the shapes rotation, but just changing the bounding box. To do this, select the shape and go to object and then transform and reset bounding box. That means that the bounding box is now square, even though the shape itself has been rotated. Now, this may not always work quite as expected. I'm going to draw out a star here. This is then the new version of Illustrator. So we've got all of these little tools here for adjusting our star, but I'm just going to rotate it. And when I select it and go to reset the bounding box, you'll see that the bounding box reset option is not available. Now, if you've got your star the way you want it to look and you don't need access to any of these tools for changing the indent of the star points or for adding or subtracting points from the star, if you're happy with it the way it is, then you can select it and go to object shape and expand shape. Now when you select object transform reset bounding box, the option to reset the bounding box is available because of the change nature of your shape. 4. Tip 2 Use Transform Rotate: Let's have a look now at an alternative to rotating by just dragging on the shape. In this case, I'm going to select over this entire shape, and I'm going to object, transform, and then rotate. Now with this option, we can select the angle of rotation, so we can be specific if we want it to be a certain amount of rotation. I'm going to choose 15 degrees here. When I tab away from that slider, you'll see that the shape is now rotated 15 degrees. Can click in here and hold the shift key as arrow to rotate around ten degrees at a time, and then you can just press the up arrow by itself to rotate one degree at a time. But as I'm rotating this shape around, you might notice something that you perhaps didn't notice previously. That is that all of these shapes are being rotated around the center point for the shape. There's a center point for this shape and it's rotating around that center point. The preview option in this dialogue allows you to preview the rotation and you'll probably want to leave that turned on. To rotate this shape 15 degrees, I'll click, and I'll just reset its bounding box. 5. Tip 3 Use the Rotate Tool: One of the limiting features of the transforms that we've used so far is that every time we rotate the shape, it's rotating around its center point. There is another option that we can use. Now, this one can be used to rotate around the center point, but it can also be used to change the center point. We're going to have a look at its rotation around the center point option to begin with. Selected the shape here and I'm going over to the rotate tool. It's sharing a tool bar position here with the reflect tool, but it's a rotate tool that I want to use. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to double click it and that opens up the rotate dialogue. Now that's the same dialogue as we saw earlier, but this tool has some added functionality. So I'm going to just adjust the rotation point here. I'm going to rotate it around 90 degrees tab away to see the rotation, and when I'm finished, I can just click Okay. So this tool essentially is working exactly the same as the other tools, but it doesn't have to. It's got more power built in and we'll have a look at that in the next tip. 6. Tip 4 Rotation around a custom point: It's time now to look at a rotation where instead of rotating around the center point of the shape, we rotate around some other point. I'm going to select this shape. It is a group of shapes. You can tell that because as soon as I hit it with the selection tool, everything was selected. To rotate this shape around something other than the center point, I'm going to click once on the rotate tool. You'll see here in the middle of the shape is a little green indicator, and that is its current rotation point. Now we can move that. Just moving my mouse point out of the way you'll see at the moment, it's just this cross shape. If I add the ult or option key, then it gets some little dots beside it, and that is the tool that we use to move the current rotation point. You need to have the ult or the option key pressed. Can do one of two things. You can click and drag this indicator to where you want the rotation point to be, or you can simply just click where you want the rotation point to be. I'm going to just click here. You'll see that the little indicator jumped, and we've got a starting rotation. Now, this is the rotation I last used. It can be a little distracting when things just jump and you don't expect them to. You can just type in here your desired rotation. I'm going to type in 15 degrees. I'm having no reaction until I tab away from that dialogue. This is the original rotation for the shape and this is its new rotation. We can increase this as we like. When you get to where you want to rotate to, just click. Then as soon as I click on the selection tool, you'll notice that that moved rotation point disappears. The rotation point would now be reset back to the middle of that shape. Let's undo this transformation with Control Z, and I'll show you that second option for the rotation tool. Click on the rotate tool and locate the rotation point. Hold the ult or option key. In this case, I'm just dragging it to where I want it to appear. So I'm going to put it a bit closer to the point of the fruit here. Let go the left mouse button, let go the ult or option key, type in or select my rotation amount and click. Click on the select tool and the rotation point moves back to the center of the shape. 7. Tip 5 Rotate and Copy Multiple Times: Let's look now at some of the options that we can use in conjunction with rotating shapes in Illustrator. I'm going to reselect this group shape. I'm going to rotate it around a point of my choice. So I'm going to the rotate tool, click once on it. Then I'm going to alter or option drag the rotation point to where I want it to be. Let go. Now I want to move this around a little bit more than just the 15 degrees. Let's go to about 40 degrees. I'm going to check it with the original, not nearly as big a rotation as I need. Let's try 72. Now the reason why I chose 72 is that 360 degrees in a circle divided by five is 72. So I can get five of these shapes around a center point Well, I've got one shape right now, but here in the rotate dialogue is the ability to get a second shape. Instead of just clicking to rotate this shape around, if I click copy, I'm going to get the original placed where it originally was, which is here. I'm also going to get this rotated copy. If I click copy, let's see what happens. There we are. We've got our original and a second rotated copy, and our rotation point is still where we moved it to. Now, if we want more of these, we can simply do it by pressing control or command D. I'm going to press that three more times, and I've got three more shapes all rotated around this custom rotation point that I created. You can choose the copy option in the rotate dialogue to make an original plus one copy and then press control or command D as many times as you need to make multiple copies all using the same rotation point. 8. Tip 6 Rotate and Transform Effect: Although it might say that we've seen a lot of rotation tools, we're not done yet, I'm going to select over this shape. I'm going to effect and then distort and transform and transform because this is another potential rotation tool that you can use. One of the reasons why I like this tool in particular is it's completely editable. We're not making a commitment, for example, to rotate something around five times and discover that in actual fact that was too many or too few, with this particular tool, we can change it as much as we like. I have this petal shape here and what I want to do is rotate around this anchor point here. There are nine potential rotation points on this shape and they're each of these markers on the bounding box as well as the central one, and they're represented by these nine boxes down here. If I want to rotate around this point, that's this one here, so I'm going to click on the bottom middle rotation point. Now I can work out what my angle of rotation is going to be. Again, I can change it. Let's go for the 72 that we used previously, and let's go and add four copies. You can see that we can make the copies at the same time with this dialogue. Well, I've got five shapes now created four copies and one original, and the rotation is 72. If I look at this and decide I want more copies, that's easily done. Let's make five copies, and let's reduce the angle to whatever it is that we need in terms of a rotation to fit six petals around a circle. Now that's 360 degrees divided by six. You can get illustrated to do the math for you if you want to. So I'm just going to click. What we have here is a shape that has been rotated. But unlike all the rotations that we've done so far, this is not baked in. This is a fully editable effect. I'm selecting the base shape and I'm going to the appearance panel. Here in the appearance panel, you can see the transform effect. It's a live effect, which means that it's also editable. I'm going to click on the word transform and this dialogue opens again. I'm going to say, well, 72 looks better for me, I'm going to reduce the angle and reduce the number of copies and click. Now I can look and see if this works better for me. The other thing that I can do with this particular shape, which I couldn't do with the other shapes is I can actually change the shape itself. What if I decide that my petal is too tall? Well, I can change it. Again, because this is a live effect, the petal is changing dimension, but so is every copy of this. This option effect, distort and transform, transform, has a lot of power. Probably its biggest limitation that we're going to see in a minute how we're going to get around. Is that we only have nine rotation points. We only have rotation points that are actually immediately around the petal and not elsewhere. But as I said, there is a solution for that. 9. Tip 7 Spiral Rotate: Now, there's plenty for us to look at in the transform dialogue, but what I want to look at right now is one of the possibilities for rotating the shape, but actually getting something very different to this flower shape. Going to double click on the transform option. In this case, I'm only going to rotate around say 15 degrees. Again, because this is editable, I can change my mind in a minute. I am going to keep this bottom point as my rotation point for now. What I'm going to do is I'm going to move my shape as I rotate it. Let's try 20 pixels. So I'm moving it horizontally and vertically, 20 pixels each time. So every one of these four copies is moved from the one before it. But it's also possible to scale it at the same time. So I'm going to take it down to 95% of its original size, and let's bump up the copies. And you can see here that we're getting this very interesting effect. Now we may need to move things a little bit more or a little bit less to get a really good result. But you can experiment with the possibilities in this dialogue. Now, in addition to changing the angle and the horizontal and vertical movement, it's also possible, of course, to change the rotation point. Every one of these options, every one of these rotation points is going to give you a slightly different effect. Going to click and I can just move my shape down into my document. But again, this is just a transformation effect if you don't like it or want to make changes to it. Just click on the transform entry in the appearance panel for the shape. You'll re open the transform effect dialogue, and you can make changes to it. 10. Tip 8 Expanding a Shape with a Transform Effect: I've returned my shape back to this initial transformation. We've got four copies, each rotated around 72 degrees. There is no scale or movement for this particular shape. But what I want to talk about here is expanding this shape, because right now this is not baked in, it's a shape with a transform effect. In some cases, you may want to bake this in to break it out so that you actually have five petals. To do that, you're going to object and then expand appearance. Let's have a look in the layers palette to see what that gives us. It's going to give us a hierarchy of groups. The topmost group is the entire flower shape, and then underneath it are groups for the petals. But you'll see that something rather unusual has happened here. The shape, which was originally a filled shape with a stroke around it has actually been broken out into two objects. There's a path for the outline and a path for the pink. And so if we go ahead and continue to ungroup this, we're going to break it out into its component pieces. For every petal, we have the pink part of the petal and also the outline. Now, that's really hard to get around. There are a couple of options that you have if you want to get back to the concept of having a petal and a stroke. One of them is to, before you actually expand the shape, is remove the stroke from it. You're only expanding the pink bits and then later on put the stroke back on. What we're going to do is something similar. We're actually going to get rid of these blue bits. I'm going to select one of these blue bits. I'm going to select and then same full color, and that will select all of these blue bits, and I'm just going to delete them. So now I have my basic shapes. I'll select over every one of these shapes, and let's put a stroke back on. Now we have five petals and every one of those petals is a shape that has a fill and a stroke. It's just a bit of a gotcha that when you're expanding things that you created using this distort and transform transform effect, that they'll be broken potentially into two different pieces, and if you want that not to be the case, be aware that that's likely to happen and use one of the two workarounds for making sure that you end up with the shapes that you want, not the shapes that illustrate necessarily gives you 11. Tip 9 Rotate around a Custom Point: Now, while the effect distort and transform and transform option only had a selection of nine rotation points, and none of them were outside the shape itself. There is a possible work around. So I'm going to make sure that nothing is selected. That's really important because I'm about to remove the fill and the stroke here, so I have no fill and no stroke. I'm going to the pen tool, and I'm just going to click where I want my rotation point to be. So I think that I want a rotation point about here, so I'm just going to click once to create an anchor. And then I'm going to press escape to stop drawing So the anchor, even though it has no fill and no stroke, it's actually a something. Let's just go to the lays palette. Let's just see what we've got. We've got this path, which is this no no stroke point, and when we've got our other path. If I select over both of these and group them with object group, Then when I go to rotate this shape, I can rotate it around this point here, which is the anchor point, the middle bottom anchor point, but because we've got a combined shape, it looks like there's actually a space in here. What we're actually doing is rotating around this point. Let's go to effect distort and transform and then transform. Let's again do our five petal flower four copies, one original, and let's set our rotation point to down here. One of the benefits again of this kind of effect, which is simply a transform effect applied to a shape, which is editable in the appearance panel. Here is that we've got a live effect. If I come here with the direct selection tool, I can locate that little no fill no stroke anchor point and I can move it. Well, let's just see if I can get it. There it is there. I can move it to wherever I want it to be, and this effect is live, so everything is changing. Let's go and get it again and I'm thinking, that's actually more like where I want it to be. I'm just going to click away from it. Again, it's still a removable effect, and it's still an editable effect So I can make changes to it here, change the angle, change the number of copies, whatever I like. Again, we would need to expand it to bake it in. Once it's where I want it to be, object expand appearance. Check and see what the las palette is giving us. Well, in this case, it's actually broken out to a single shape that has a fill and a stroke. So with one there, if you like, Other thing that you might notice is that that little anchor point is nowhere to be seen because it was a no fill, no stroke anchor point, it actually disappears in the expanded process. Let's just go and ungroup these. We're going to do object ungroup until ungroup is no longer an option. We just have five petals. Then it's going to move as a single shape, we'll just group it back up again. 12. Tip 10 Rotate Uneven Amounts: Might have thought that by now we have exhausted every single possible rotation tool in Illustrator because quite honestly there are a lot of them, but we haven't. I've still got one up my sleeve here. What I want to do is I want to rotate each of these shapes that I have arranged here. Now, every one of these is just an individual shape, but I want to rotate all of them. I'm going to select over all of them. Now, if I try to rotate them this way, I'm going to rotate the entire set all at once. But that's not what I want to do. What I want is I want to rotate this shape and then this one and this one and this one, So I could rotate them individually, but I could be here all day doing that. The easiest way is to use the command, which is transform each. So let's select over all of these shapes, and let's go to object transform, and then transform each. Now, the transform each dialogue again gives us some transform as well as scale and move options. We just want to rotate at this point. What I'm going to do is I'm going to rotate everything at an angle of 15 degrees and the transform each command treats each one of these shapes individually and rotates them individually. It used to look like this and now it looks like this. L et's go back to the way we started and there is another feature of that dialogue, which is really interesting. I'm selecting all of my shapes. I'm again going to object transform and transform each, and I'm rotating them all 15 degrees. But what if I didn't want all of them rotated 15 degrees? What if I wanted them rotated somewhere 0-15 degrees and all different amounts. Well, there's an option here called random. When I click on that, every one of these gets a rotation somewhere 0-15 degrees, but every one of them gets a random amount. Let's just crank that up so that you can see the effect here. Every one of these shapes is rotated, they're all being rotated, a different amount 0-53 degrees in this instance. Now, we also get nine boxes here nine rotation points. At the moment, every one of these shapes is being rotated around its midpoint, but we could rotate it around some other point. Of the nine options that we have, and each one of these will give you a different result. I'll just click. Now, what we get now is each one of these shapes just has a rotation applied to it. These are not live effects. So when I go to the appearance panel for this shape, there is no transform effect. This is what this shape now looks like. It's baked into it by the process. 13. Review the Rotate Tools: You wouldn't be wrong to think that in this class, we've covered a lot of rotation tools. We've learned to rotate by hand. We've learned to rotate using the rotate tool and moving the point of rotation. We've also seen that there are options under the object menu here, Object transform rotate, and also object transform transform. Then there's the option under the effect menu, which is effect distort and transform and transform. Now, every one of these has its purpose. Every one of them has its advantages and disadvantages. I hope that throughout this course, that you've got an understanding as to what's available in terms of rotation tools and an idea as to how you might use them in your workflow. For me, the object transform transform each tool was an eye opener when I first discovered it. It gave me a lot of tools that I could use, for example, in patterns to break up a very tight organization of objects and give it a little bit more fluidity. Like that tool a lot. I also like the distort and transform transform tool for its power of giving me an editable effect, something I can experiment with until I get what I want and then be it into the objects. I hope that I've given you plenty of things to think about in this course and plenty of things to experiment with in making shapes and patterns in Illustrator. 14. Project and Wrapup 10 Rotation Tips for Adobe Illustrator: We've now completed the video training portion of this course, so it's over to you. Your project for this class is to tell me which of these methods for rotating shapes in Illustrator you found most exciting and the one that you just can't wait to try yourself. I'm looking forward to hearing what you think. Now, I really hope that you've enjoyed this course, and you've learned lots about rotating shapes in Illustrator. If you did enjoy this course, I would really appreciate you taking the time to review it. Even just indicating if your expectations were met will be helpful to me. By writing a sentence or two explaining why you enjoyed the course, you're going to help other students to see that this is a course that they too might like to take. Now if you see the follow link on the screen, click it and you'll be alerted when new classes are released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your questions and comments and I look at and review every single one of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for lunch. I look forward to seeing you in another class here on Skillshare very soon.