20 Illustrator Reflect and Rotate tips in 20 mins - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Graphic Design for Lunch 20 Reflect and Rotate tips Intro: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design class 20 rotate and reflect tips for Illustrator in 20 minutes or less. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at tools and techniques for rotating and reflecting shapes in Illustrator. We're going to look at a range of tools that will help you rotate and reflect objects and each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses. We're going to look at making mirror text and symmetrical shapes. Also going to look at a nontraditional rotation tool which will help you create rotated shapes around, for example, a circle. Now as you're watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which asks if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying and learning from the class, would you do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes to the fact that you would recommend it to others. Secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now, if you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready, now let's get started with 20 rotation and reflection tips in 20 minutes or less. 2. First 5 Tips: Rotate a shape using the bounding box. Whenever you select either a shape with the selection tool in Illustrator you get nine anchors around the shape, and if you pose your mouse pointer outside any of the corner anchors, you'll see the mouse pointer changes to a bend arrow. That's telling you that you can click and rotate the shape using that mouse pointer. If you hold the Shift key as you do that, the rotation is going to be constrained to multiples of 45 degrees. You're going to be able to rotate vertically and horizontally, as well as in increments of 45 degrees. When you let go the left mouse pointer, then the shape will be rotated appropriately. Rotating using the rotate tool. With a shape selected in Illustrator you can use the rotate tool here in the toolbar to rotate that shape. Click the "Tool" and you can now rotate the shape. It will rotate around its center point. If you add the Alt or Option key as you create the rotation, you'll see the mouse pointer change its shape to two arrows. When you let go the mouse pointer in this case, instead of just rotating the shape you will also make a duplicate of the original. Set your own rotation point to use with the rotate tool. I'm going to select over this shape and target the rotate tool. If I start to rotate the shape now, it's going to rotate around this center point. If I wanted to rotate around a different point, I can make it do that. I'm going to start by clicking on this anchor point here because I want that to be the rotation point. I'll click it to select it. Now when I drag on the shape you can see that it's rotating around that point. Let me just undo that. Let me go back to selecting over the shape, select the rotate tool. This time I'm going to click to create a rotation point well away from the shape. Now as I drag on the shape you can see that it's rotating around that point. If I add the Alt or Option key on a Mac, then I'm going to duplicate the shape as I'm making the rotation rather than just rotating that single shape. Rotate a shape using the rotate dialog. I'm going to select over this shape. I'm going to the rotate tool, as I have been doing so far. I want to set my own rotation point, but this time instead of just clicking on that point, I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key. In the bottom right corner of the mouse pointer, you'll see a series of little dots telling you that a dialogue is about to open as soon as we click here. I'm going to click once. The rotate dialog appears. Now into this, I can type the angle of rotation. If I just tab out of the way, we get a preview here because preview's turned on, of where our shape is going to be rotated to. If we just want to rotate the shape alone, then we can click "Okay". If you want the original shape plus this copy, then just click "Copy". Calculate the number of degrees for a rotation. I'm going to select over this shape, go back to my rotate tool, click on it. I want to rotate my shape around a custom rotation point, so I'm going to Alt or Option click at this point to make it the rotation point. When the dialog appears, if I don't know the angle to use, I can get Illustrator to calculate it for me. For example, if I want 20 of these shapes to be rotated around this point, then I'm going to need to use an angle that will allow me to fit all 20 around nicely. The number of degrees in a circle is 360. I'm going to start by typing 360 and then the forward slash key which is a division key. If I want 20 shapes, I'll type 20, and I'll tab away. Illustrator is telling me if I want 20 shapes evenly spaced around a circle around this point here, then I would need to rotate each of them 18 degrees. So 18 is now preset. I'm going to make a copy, so I'll click "Copy". 3. Second 5 tips: Repeat the last transformation. In the last tip, we looked at rotating this shape around 18 degrees, so we would get 20 shapes around a complete rotation. Now I don't have to rotate each shape individually. As soon as I've got one rotated, I can do one of a number of things. I can choose object, transform and then transform again and that would repeat the rotation, the last rotation that I did. I can also hold down the Control key on a PC, command on a Mac, and if I repeatedly press the letter D, every time I press the letter D, one of those rotations is going to be made for me. Now we selected 18 degrees, so we would fit 20 of the shapes evenly around our central rotation point. Control or Command D allows us to make that transformation quickly and easily. Rotating using the Distort and Transform effect. I have a shape here, I'm going to select over it. I'm going to rotate it using effect, distort, and transform and then transform. One of the options in this dialogue is to rotate a shape. I'll click "Preview". I want 30 copies of this shape around my circle so I can type 360 divided by 30, and Illustrator will do the math. Now at this point, I'm determining that rotating them around the center point is not going to be advantageous to me. I want to rotate these shapes around this point here. This is one of the powerful features of this dialogue. I can click down here in the middle bottom of these nine little boxes to change the rotation point. Then I can increase my number of copies. Because I planned on 30, I'm going to need 29 copies plus my original. If I'm happy with the result, I can click "Okay". Using the distort and transform dialogue, I can preview the effect and make changes to it if need be. Set your own rotation point to use with distort and transform. One of the limits of the distort and transform dialogue is that you're limited to the nine anchor points around the shape for the rotation. Well, we can change that. The workaround is to click on the Pen tool and set the stroke and fill to none. You're going to click where you want the rotation point to be. I want it to be approximately here. I'll press "Escape". I'm going to select over the anchor point that I just created plus my shape and choose object, group. Now, I'll go and do the distort and transform effect. I'll turn preview on. I'm going to rotate around this bottom middle location, which will give me more flexibility with my transformation. I want 18 of these shapes, so I'll type 360 divided by 18 tab away. If I want 18 shapes then I need 17 copies plus my original, again, I'll tab away. I can preview the result if I'm happy with it, I'll click "Okay". Having done this, we can then expand the shape with Object, Expand Appearance. We'll choose object ungroup until ungroup is no longer an option. At this point, every one of those 18, no stroke, no fill point has been removed from the document. It happens automatically. We'll just click to group these objects together so that we have our rotated shape. Display the center rotation point for a shape. I have a shape here in Illustrator, and when I select over it, there is no center point visible. If this happens to you, you can choose Window and then attributes. You'll click the "Fly Out" menu and choose "Show Options" if it's not visible here, but this is the option that you need to click, it shows center. Now we can see the center point of this object. If we go to, for example, the Rotate tool, you'll see that this is marked as the point at which the shape will rotate and we can rotate it around that point. Rotate selected objects. I have three objects here. They're not in a group, they're all individual shapes. I'm going to select over all of them. If I use a tool like the rotate tool, then these shapes are all going to rotate around the center of the selection itself. We're going to add the Shift key in here so that I'll just rotate them into a vertical direction. Using Object Transform rotate is going to have the exact same effect. I'll type 45 degrees into here and when I tab away, you'll see that the entire selection has been rotated as if it were a group. 4. Third 5 tips: Rotating objects individually. In the last tip, we saw that if we select over a series of objects and rotate them, they're going to be treated as if they were a group of objects. Well, what if we want to rotate each of these squares 45 degrees, but not as a group? Well, this is how we're going to do it. I'm going to select over all of these shapes and I'm going to choose "Object", "Transform", and I'll choose "Transform Each". I get a Transform Each dialog, which looks very much like the distort and transform dialogue. What I want to do, is rotate each of these shapes around their center points, so I'll click here on the center. I'll click "Preview" and I want to rotate them 45 degrees, so I'll type 45 degrees. When I click "Okay", you can see that each of these shapes is still an individual shape. Each of them has been treated independently of the others and rotated 45 degrees, but all in one step. Rotate a shape using the Free Transform tool. It's possible to rotate a shape using the Free Transform tool. I'll select over my shape and click "Free Transform". If I want to rotate around this center point, I can just rotate the shape. If I want to move my center point or my rotation point, I can do so. I'm just going to pick it up and move it down below the shape. Now, when I rotate the shape, it's going to rotate around my selected rotation point. The difference between this tool and the Rotate tool, is that you can't make a duplicate of this shape as you rotate it, you just have to rotate the original shape. Holding the shift key will constrain the rotation to multiples of 45 degrees. Rotate a shape without rotating its pattern fill. When I select on this shape and try to rotate it around 90 degrees, you'll notice that the shape rotates, but so too does the pattern. If I don't want that to be the case, I can select the shape and double-click on the rotate tool. This opens up the rotate dialogue. Now, I already know that I want to rotate this shape around 90 degrees, but in doing so, I don't want to transform the pattern, just the object itself. Deselecting transform patterns and clicking Okay allows me to make that rotation, but in this case not affecting the pattern fill. Reflecting text or an object. One way to reflect text or an object, is to select over it and choose Object, Transform, and then Reflect. In this instance, I want to reflect over the horizontal axis, and I'd like to make a copy as I do so, but I can choose horizontal or vertical and click "Copy" when I'm done. Here I get mirror text. Reflect a shape using your own custom reflection point. It's possible to reflect the shape using a custom reflection point. I'll select over this shape and I'm going to click here on the Reflect tool. Now, I can hold the Alt or Option key and click to create my reflection point. That opens up the reflection dialogue. Here I can choose to do a horizontal or a vertical reflection. In this case, I want a vertical one. If I click "Copy", I'll make a duplicate of my shape. If I click OK, I'm just going to have reflected the original shape. Well, I want a copy, so I'll click "Copy". 5. Final 5 tips: Reflect a shape across an axis. I've marked out a 45-degree line here in Illustrator. I want to reflect this shape across this line. The reflected shape's going to be above up here. I'll select my shape, I'm going to click on the reflect tool, I'm going to click on the path once, and then I'm going to click again at another point on the path to mark out that path. When I do so, Illustrator reflects my shape across that path. Now I'm going to undo this and let's see how we do that and duplicate the shape at the same time. I'll select the shape, go back to the reflect tool. I'm going to click once on the path and this time I'm going to Alt or Option click on another point on the path. This is telling Illustrator where this path is and holding down the Alt or the Option key, make sure that in this case we get a duplicate shape reflected across this path. When we're finished with the path, we can simply delete it. Reflect a shape using distort and transform. I'm going to select over this shape and choose the effect distort and transform and then transform. This dialogue has a lot of uses and one of them is to reflect a shape. I can click here to reflect it across the x-axis. If I increase my copies, we can see what we would get. But we don't have to reflect it using the center point, we could reflect it from an edge, for example. We can also reflect it over the y-axis so we can turn it upside down at the same time, should we wish to. Again, we can choose different reflection points for our shape. This tool is really handy when you know the effect that you want but you don't know exactly what tool to use to get it because you can do a lot of different reflections using this tool. When you're done, click "Okay". Just be aware that these aren't actually two shapes, it's just one shape with a reflection. If you want both shapes, choose Object, Expand Appearance, and now you'll have both shapes in a group. Rotate using blends. There's another way to rotate a shape around, for example, a circle, and that's using a blend. I'm going to create two stars, so I've just duplicated a star. I'll select over both of these and click the blend tool. I'll click on one star, click on the other star, now I've got a pretty good blend here for now. I'm going to click away from that shape and I'm going to make a circle around which I want my stars to appear, so I'll just drag out a circle. I'm going to select over my stars and my circle. I'll choose object and then blend and choose replace spine and that moves these stars around the circle. The problem is they just haven't gone all the way around the circle. Increasing the number of stars is not going to affect this, this is not a problem that can be solved that way. Instead, we need to go to the scissors tool and we'll just click on an anchor point here to break the line so it's still a circle but the ends are separated. Having done that, our blend is now appearing around our shape. It's also still a blend so if we go to the blend tool, double-click on it, click "Preview", and click "Specified Steps", we're able to increase or decrease the number of steps live. Using reflection to create symmetrical objects. I've drawn out half a heart shape here, it's just an open path and the anchor points here and here are directly in line with each other. I'm going to select over the half heart shape using the selection tool and I'm going to click on the reflect tool because I want to use it. I'm going to hold down the Alt or Option key as I click on this anchor point here and that opens up the reflect dialogue. Now, obviously the angle reflection is not what I want, I want a vertical reflection. It's been reflected over this point so if I click "Copy", I'm going to have two hearts that are going to be perfectly aligned with each other. At this point, I would go ahead and select over both shapes and choose object, path, join. That will give me a closed path which could in turn be filled with a solid color. Rotate multiple shapes using the same rotation point. I have three shapes here, I want to rotate them around a point of my choosing but I don't want the exact same number of each of the shapes so I can't do them all at once. What I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the Ellipse tool, I'm going to drag out a small circle using the Shift key in the location where I want the rotation point to be. I'm just going to center all of these over that particular point. Now I can select my shape, I can go to the Rotate tool and I can Alt or Option click on this center anchor point, it's easy for me to pick up and then I can set my rotation point. If I want 18 of these, I'm going to do 360 divided by 18 and click "Copy". I'll just press "Control" or "Command D" to get all the rotations for that shape. Next up, I'll select the next shape. I'm going back to the rotation tool, I'm going to Alt or Option click on the center point of this shape. Now I can rotate this as many degrees as I want. Well, I'm going to rotate this 36 degrees. I want a copy and so I'm going to press "Control" or "Command D" to repeat this transformation around this central shape. Finally, I'll select on my dot, I'll click the rotate tool. I'm going to Alt or Option click on the center point of this marker here and then I'm going to set this to 10 degrees. I'll click copy and I'll press "Control" or "Command D" repeatedly until I get my shapes all the way around this central shape. At this point, I can go ahead now and remove the central shape because I only needed it as a rotation point. I'm going to select over everything else, I'll just hold the Shift key as I'll re-size it in proportions. Now all of these shapes are centered neatly around a center point that was created only for that purpose. 6. Bonus tip and wrapup: The final bonus video for this class as a way of creating something like footsteps going round in a circle. Now I've taken this path from Photoshop, I've bought it into Illustrator and I've just filled it with color. I'm going to set it down to where approximately I want my footsteps to begin. I'll click away from the shapes selected and choose "Effect", "Distort and Transform" and then "Transform". I'm going to set preview on in this dialogue. At this point we want one copy of our shapes, so I'm just going to click one. I want it to be reflected based on its center point, and I'll click "Reflect Y" so that we've got a foot going in a slightly different direction. Now I need to move this foot away from the other foot, so I'm going to start moving in a negative horizontal and a negative vertical direction until I get my feet approximately where I want them to be. I need to rotate this foot as well, so I'm just going to rotate it around so that it looks pretty good. Now at this point, I might want to just change my values a little bit till I get my foot in exactly the position I want it to be in and I'll click "Okay." Now I have a shape that has been reflected using a transformation effect. I'm going to go ahead now and I'll choose "Effect", "Distort and Transform" and then "Transform" a second time, and we're going to apply a new effect. Again, we want to turn preview on. Again, we want to do everything relative to the current center point. I want to set my feet off at an angle and I want them to go all the way around a circle, so I'm going to choose a angle which is something like 36, because that will give me 10 sets of feet around a circle. I'm going to add nine copies because that will be nine copies plus my10 feet. Right now things are not looking too good, but all we need to do to solve the problem is to set our feet off in a direction. I'm going to start increasing my horizontal value. The further I increase the horizontal value, the more the feet step apart. Now I have a series of feet going round in a circle. I'll click "Okay." Now if I want to adjust how the feet look, I can go to the Appearance panel. There's a Transform here for the one copy so this is the original set of fate and the transformation here is the one that sets them off around the circle. I'm going back to the initial feet and just see if I can match this foot forward just a little bit. Of course, I'll need Preview turned on so that I can see the effect that I'm creating. I'm able to adjust the feet in relation to each other, and I could also adjust the feet as they're rotated around this circle. That's a fun wrap-up for this video. Your project for this class is going to be to tell me which of these tips you think is going to be of most use to you. Do that in the class project area. I hope that you've learned things here in Illustrator that you didn't know before. Now as you were watching this class, you will have seen a prompt which asked you if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learn things from it, do two things for me; firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend the class, and secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you want to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions. I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.