Transcripts
1. Class Intro: Social media icons are
everywhere these days. They are an essential part
of business in our society. However, with everybody
using the same plain icons, how can you set yourself apart? You can do this by giving your icons your own personal touch, by using graphic styles
in Adobe Illustrator. [MUSIC] Hey guys, my name
is Kyle Aaron Parson. I'm a graphic designer and illustrator based in
Edmonton, Canada. Over the past 15 years, I've sidelined as a freelance graphic
designer and illustrator. Over the course of my career, I've worked on many
projects like award winning logo designs
and poster designs. Adobe Illustrator has
been a cornerstone of my creative practice
and it's not hard to believe that I've
picked up many tips and tricks that speed up
my workflow immensely. Creating continuity
between your brands has never been easier with the help of the
appearance panel and graphic styles in
Adobe Illustrator. With one click of a button, you can create a
customized icon set that fits your personal style. Throughout this class
I'll walk you through three different styles that you can apply to your icon set. I believe that
this will give you a good foundation so that you can experiment and create
something unique to you. Your project for this
class is to create a custom set of social media
icons in Adobe Illustrator. This class is perfect
for all skill levels.If you're just jumping
into Adobe Illustrator, I will walk you through
step by step the process I use to create
social media icons. If you're an intermediate
or advanced user, you'll definitely find
some helpful tips and tricks to speed
up your workflow. I have provided class worksheets in the Project Panel so you can follow along step by step
as we go through the class. As a bonus, there'll be a set of social media icons that you
can use even after the class. If you're ready to let
your icon stand out, go download the project resources,and I will
see you in class. [MUSIC]
2. Setting Up Your Document: Hey guys, welcome to class. The first thing that
we want to do is we want to set up our documents. So number one thing
to do is download the class worksheets so that you can follow along with these. In the class worksheets, we have three different modules. We first, will start off with Glossy Button and I'll walk you through how to
create this design. Then we'll go through the
Retro stripe design and then finally we'll go through
the cool neon glow effect. I've also added an icon set with many different
social media icons that you can apply your
graphic styles to. So let's just jump
into the document and see what we need to set up. The first thing we
need to do is open up a few windows that we'll
be using in the class. The first window that
I want you guys to open up is the Appearance Panel. If you can't find that, go to Window and Appearance, and then open that up. The next thing that I
want you to open up is the Graphic Styles Panel
because this is where we'll save our graphic
style and be able to apply it to all our icon sets
with a click of a button. The next thing that I
want you to open up is also the Swatches Panel, because we'll use custom
swatches to create gradients and stripe designs. Also, we can use the color
panel and the gradient panel. In addition to those things, if there's any panel
that you see me using, but you don't have it
open in your document. You can always go to
Window and find it here. Something maybe like
the Stroke Panel. All right, after you got
your document set up, let us jump over to the
next class and learn how to create the cool
Glossy Button effect.
3. Glossy Button Effect: All right guys. Welcome to our first module
where we'll learn how to create this cool
glossy button effect. The first thing you have to
know is that we're going to be using the appearance
panel a lot in this class. I won't go through
all the details of the appearance panel, but we'll learn it one by one. If you want to know a detailed explanation about Graphic Styles and
the appearance panel, I created a class
called the power of graphic styles that'll
walk you through exactly what a graphic
style is and how you can take advantage of it to
create cool dynamic text. If you want to check
out that class, definitely go check out that
class here on Skillshare. For this class, I
won't go through all the details and
specifics like that. We'll just jump right into it. The first thing that
you need to know is that in the appearance panel, you can build up your shapes
like the layers panel. However, it's all
contained in one shape. Let me explain that
very briefly for you. On this page here, you can see that there are many different Instagram icons. You would think that if I
went into outline mode, you'd see so many shapes because if I build this
up in the layers panel, each of those elements would
be its own individual shape. However, I built this in
the appearance panel. What you only see, let's check it out, is the Instagram logo. In outline mode, the only
shape that is actually there, according to Adobe Illustrator, is the Instagram logo. Everything else is contained
within that single shape. This is the power of the Appearance panel
and graphic styles. You can build it up
like the layers panel but within the one shape itself. Now we're going to jump right
in here and we're going to recreate this glossy
button effect. Have your appearance panel
open and let's dive right in. The first thing that we're
going to do is we're going to create the ellipse.
How do we do that? In the appearance panel
here you can see that I've applied a fill of white
and no stroke to it. The next thing that I want to do is in the appearance panel, I can add a new fill, so I can have multiple
fills in my single shape. I'm going to change this
color to maybe a blue. That's pretty cool, but you can't really see anything there. Why? Because this fill is
underneath my white fill. But if I change the location, you can see the blue
fill is shown first. It works like the layers panel, which whatever is on
top will be seen first, and whatever underneath
will be seen second. Keep that in mind
as we're building our graphic styles in
Adobe Illustrator. I'll move that back
underneath and the cool thing about the appearance
panel is you can take one of the fields, isolate it and apply
an effect only to that specific
part of the shape. Let's apply that
to this blue fill. Let's go to the effects, convert to shape and ellipse. The shape options come up. You can see that you have a
couple of different options, you can convert it
to a rectangle, a rounded rectangle,
or an ellipse. We're going to use the
ellipse for this example. You have two options here, you have absolute or relative. Relative will work according to the bounding box of
the original shape. It'll change depending
on the shape you have. Since we have many
different icons with many different shapes
and varieties, we don't want to use
relative because it will distort it in ways
that we don't want. We're going to actually
click the absolute button. Now you can see it's
shrunk down a bit, but we're going to change that. We're going to
increase the size to 165 and 165,
something like that. Now we can see we have a perfect circle around
our Instagram logo. We're going to hit "Okay". The next thing that I
want to do is I want to have a stroke
around this circle. I'm going to add a stroke in my appearance panel
and I'll give it a light blue. I'm going to give it
a light blue as well, but what you can see here, it actually created the stroke
around my Instagram logo, but I don't want that. If I jump into my fill
and you can see I have the effect
ellipse applied to it. If I hold Alt and bring it up to my stroke in
my appearance panel, it'll apply that
effect to my stroke, so if I increase the size, you can see that it increases. Let's change the
color just for now. Instead of surrounding
my Instagram logo it now took the shape of the
ellipse that we created, and let's change that
back to the light blue. The next thing I
want to do is add a little bit of depth to this. I want to create some shadow surrounding
the entire object. It's a three-dimensional
shape. How do I do that? What I'm going to do
is I'm going to take this ellipse or this fill and I'm going to duplicate it by duplicating selected item. Next thing that I'm going
to do is I'm going to change it to white
and I'm going to bring it above everything
except for the stroke. Now I want to apply
a effect to it. I'm going to go "Effect", Stylize, Inner Glow. Now, normally it's
at the screen and it's white. But I
don't want that. I want it to multiply and black. It's a little small, so I need to increase the
size till about there. That's looking
pretty good for me. It's giving you a
little bit of depth and making it look more
three-dimensional, I'm going to hit "Okay". Now what I want to do with this, is I want to go inside
my fill and I can actually change the
opacity properties of this specific fill. I'm going to go in and
change this one to multiply. Now if I unclick, you can see that it's getting a more three-dimensional
form and it's affecting everything
underneath it. I want to add some dimension
to my stroke as well. I'm going to increase
the size just a tad, and what I'm going to do
is I'm going to go into my fill and I'm going to
grab that inner glow, hold Alt, and bring
it up to my stroke. But that doesn't look
very good so I'm going to open up that
property and I'm going to shrink it down a bit until I get a little
bit of that inner glow. Two points or one point, maybe two points looks the best. That's looking
really cool already. The next thing that I
want to do is I want to apply the cool
glossy effect to it. You want to have your items selected and then you
can add a new fill, and I'm going to keep
it white for now, and I'm going to apply the
convert to shape and ellipse. I want it absolute and sure. It can be like that. But I don't want it to
be a perfect circle. I want it to be a little wider than it is narrow or high, so I'll change this to maybe 50. I'll preview that. Maybe I'll change it to 60. Review that. That
might look good. I can't really
tell against this. But what I can do with
this field that has the ellipse of property
attached to it. I can go into fx, distort, and transform
and transform. Now I have the ability to
move it wherever I want. I'm going to move it up
here and I'm also going to rotate it slightly like that. I'm going to hit "Okay." The
next thing that I want to do is I want to apply
a gradient to this. I'm going to go into my swatches here and I'm just going to apply a black and
white gradient. Now I can go into
my gradient panel. I'll just drag this
out so I can see what's happening and I wanted white and I want
it to fade to white. But I want to change
the opacity of one of the nodes to zero. I'll change it to a
circle. Just like that. Now you can see
what's happening. If I "click into this again," make sure that the
stroke is affected, I can hit "G" on my keyboard and decide where this will go. Now, since we created
one gradient like that, we can "click on our
current gradient" and we can duplicate it. So
we have another one. We can jump into the
transform effect, and then we can move
this one around. Let's move it to the other side and turn this one
all the way around. Maybe increase the scale
of it and then bring it back like that. What I'm going to do
with this one is I'm going to change the opacity. I'm just going to
drop it down just a little bit so
it's not as harsh. That's looking pretty
good. The next thing that I can do with this, is I can duplicate my first
one and I'm going to give it a perfectly white fill and I'm going to
change the scale. I can scale it down
or you can change the ellipse and I'm going to make it perfect spot. Just going to find where
the highlight should be. That looks okay to me. Now what I'm going
to do is I'm going to change this property here. I think I want it to
be a little harsher, so I'm going to
go to inner glow. I'm going to just
increase the size a bit. Just like that. You can see that we started off with a simple Instagram logo, but now we created a really
cool glossy button effect. We have a couple more
things to add to this to make it complete. The first thing that we're
going to add is we're going to take our bottom sheet. We're going to
duplicate it and we're going to give it a black fill. The next thing that
we're going to do is we're going
to add an effect. Go Blur, Gaussian blur. I'm going to decrease
that a little bit. I'm going to hit "Okay." I'm going to apply the
transform effect to it. I'm going to move it slightly
down and slightly out. This will give a little bit of a shadow and increase
the size a bit. Give it a little
shadow on the outside. I'm going to give
it a Gaussian blur, change the Gaussian blur, increase that a little bit more. That's good. I'm going to
change the opacity to multiply. The last thing that
we can do with this one is instead of
keeping it a solid color, we can change the inner fill and we can change it to maybe some sort of gradient
that's looking pretty cool. Then our blue stroke, we can change and match
that to an orange. We went from a
very simple shape, simple icon to a very
cool button icon. But now this is where
the cool part is, is we can take this that we
just built and we can go into our graphic styles panel and we can add it as a
new graphic styles. We have six icons at the bottom here and they are all plain. Now since we created the cool glossy button
effect on one of them, and we saved it as
a graphic style. Check this out. We can go
into our Graphic Styles, "click our newly created
graphic style," apply it, and every single one of the icons gets to the
hiss applied to it. Now what's really cool is we can customize this
a little bit more. Do we can "click on
the Twitter icon." We can go up to this menu here, the re-color artwork
and what we can do is we can play around with the
color of this individual one. We can link the color harmony
and we can drag the colors around the color wheel and we can instantly change the color. I know Twitter is a
little more blue. That's the feel you want to get. I'm going to unlink it and
I'm going to bring most of the colors into the blue tone. Bring this out of the
green, like that. That's looking pretty cool. Now we can take the Snapchat and we can do the
same with that. We can link the color harmonies and we can drag it around, maybe drag it the other way. Instantly change all these
icons with a click of a button and customize our
glossy button effect. One more, check that out. Let's unlink the colors
here and let's go far out rainbow style icon. That's looking really cool. Alright guys, for this class, I don't want you to recreate the cool glossy button effect. Go into the appearance panel, check it out, play
around with it, see what other effects
that you can apply to these and create something new, something interesting, and
post it in the project panel. All right guys, I'll see
you in the next class.
4. Retro Style: Jumping right into Module 2, we're going to recreate
this cool retro design. We can see our
Twitter logo here. It's a very plain Twitter logo. However, we're going to spruce
it up in a retro style. The first thing that we
want to do is we want to create a custom color palette. We can jump into
our swatches and you can see that I've already picked out a few retro color
palettes that I like to use. But how you can do that
is you can jump online, you can go to
color.adobe.com and find some retro color palettes
and you can save that into your creative
Cloud library. That's exactly what I did. I searched for retro
color palettes and I found a few that I liked. All I did was I right-click and I add
them themes to swatches. Now I have all these color
palettes in my Swatches panel, and this will be very useful as we create our retro designs. The first thing
that we're going to do is we're going to go
to the Appearance panel. Let's give this a fill using
one of our color palettes. I'm going to use this
bottom color palette here. I'll just use the
basic yellow there. For this one, we're going
to use a lot of strokes. We're going to open up our
Strokes panel and we're going to use maybe
this blue stroke. Now I'm going to increase
just a little bit. I'm going to go into
my Stroke panel. I'm going to open it up here. Now what we want to
click on is we want to click on rounded cap
and rounded corners. This just rounds off
the corners so that we don't have those
harsh points. We don't want those. I'm going to increase the
size one one more time, and that should be good. The next thing that I want to do is it doesn't look
too great because it pushes into our logo itself. We want our logo
to stay the same. In our Appearance
panel, we can drag our stroke underneath our fill. The fill appears first and then our stroke
goes behind it. That's looking really good. After that, we want to
duplicate our stroke. Now we have one stroke on
top of another stroke. On our bottom stroke, what we want to do
is we want to apply the distort and
transform effect. We're going to apply a
distort and transform effect and we're going to
create multiple copies, layering them to create a cool
drop shadow stripe effect. Let's see how we do that. What we can do is we can move this stroke horizontally
and vertically. Now, the cool thing
about this is if we push it over one pixel, it doesn't change
too much right now. However, if we go down to this feature here called Copies, we can increase the
amount of copies or layers that will be applied
to this transformation. Let's see what that does. Let's add 10. Preview that. That's looking really cool. What that did here is if we zoom
in really closely, we can see that there are multiple layers copied
one on top of another. But it's a little bumpy. What we want to do, we're
going to jump into that. We're going to
decrease this from one point to 0.5 points, and 0.5 on the vertical as well. That smooths it out a little more and I'm going
to hit "Okay". Now it created a cool little
drop shadow effect to it. But I want to layer my colors
one on top of another. I'm going to take this stroke
that we just created with a transform effect applied to it and I'm going
to duplicate that. I'm going to give
it a new color. In my Color panel, let's go with the yellow color. Now I'm going to open up
the transform effect in that stroke and I'm going
to add 10 more copies. A total of 20 copies. You can see exactly
what that did. Underneath this green stroke, it just allowed it to go 10 steps further than
the green stroke, layering it and creating
a cool stripe design. Let's continue doing that
and build up our design. That's looking really cool. We got a cool retro stripe
design going on there. The next thing that
we want to do, we want to add some
stripes to this. How are we going to do that? I'm going to pull out
over there for now. I'm going to drag out
my Gradient panel. First select our icon, then go into our panel, apply a gradient to that. It doesn't look to
the great right now, but what we can do is if we
have our Swatches panel open, we can take the colors from our selected swatches and apply it directly
to our gradient. Let's apply our green,
drag it into there. We can get rid of the white. Apply our yellow,
apply our orange, apply our light red, apply our dark red, and we can drag out our black. Now, we have all our colors one after another in
our Gradient panel. This doesn't look too great yet. But what we're going to
do is we're going to use a gradient to create
a stripe design. How do we do that? Very easy. What we need to do
is we need to make multiple copies of our nodes. We're going to hold
Alt and click and drag on our node to
make two of them. We're going to do
it with that one and with the green one. The next thing that we want
to do is to create a line. We have to bud up the nodes
right against each other so there's no gradation between the two and it's a
nice crisp line. We're going to drag over
our green and drag over our yellow until it
makes a nice sharp line. To make it easier to work with, let's expand our panel. Now I'm going to drag it
up just until it touches. Now you can see it's a nice
sharp line on our image. Next thing, I'm
going to duplicate my orange and I'm
going to bud it up with the yellow right there. I'm going to duplicate my red. I'm going to bud it up with the yellow or the
orange right there. I'm going to duplicate
the dark red, and I'm going to
bud it up with the light red right there. Now you can see that original
gradient that faded into each color has now become a
cool retro stripe design. Now we can hit G on our
keyboard and we can control how our gradient
appears on our icon. I like this cool
diagonal look for these ones and
something like that. The next thing that
I want to do is I want to make some
contrast between this line that's underneath the one that has a
transform effect to it, to the one that's on top. I want all these colors
to remain the same. However, I want
everything that's transformed to be in a
shadow. How can I do that? I'm going to duplicate the bottom stroke that has the transformation
applied to it and I'm going to bring it up right underneath my top stroke. But the next thing that
I'm going to do is, I'm going to give
it a black fill. Instead of keeping it 100
percent opacity and normal, I'm going to change it to
multiply and change it to maybe 50 or 30 percent around there. It looks like it's in
shadow and there's some contrast between what's
down here and what's on top. We created our retro effect. Now we want to save it
as a graphic style. We can grab all our icons at the bottom and we can
apply a graphic style to it. Now what we can do is we can take our
Instagram icon here, and we can go into the
Edit or Recolor Artwork, and we can go to the
Advanced Options. Now the cool thing
is that since we have specific colors
applied to it, a specific color panel, I can select another
retro color palette and apply it instantly to my
current color palette. Let's see how that works. I can click and I can play
around with all the cool, retro color palettes like that. That's looking pretty
cool for Instagram. Let's change Snapchat. Lets go to Recolor Artwork. There you go. You can see how
you can transform a simple icon into a really cool retro design
using the transform effect, using gradients to create
a cool stripe fill, and using blending modes
to create a shadow effect. For this module, I
just want you to try and recreate the
cool retro design. I want you to use the
transform effect to build up the layers and create a cool straight
drop shadow effect, and then use the
Gradient panel to create a cool stripe fill using
a retro color palette. Guys, I'll see you
in the next class.
5. Neon Glow Effect: [MUSIC] Hey, guys, welcome to the third
module where we'll learn how to create this
cool neon effect. Jumping right in here
you can see it goes from a simple icon
to a simple stroke to gradient stroke and
building up until we get this cool neon effect. Let's see how that's done. Let's jump right into here. We're using the Google Plus logo or icon here
and we're going to apply some features to it to create a
cool neon effect. The first thing
that we see here, it has a fill. But for this design, we're not going
to use any fills. We're going to remove that
fill by just going into it, clicking that fill,
delete that fill. Now we see nothing but
we want to add a stroke. We applied a stroke to it and we want to change
that to white. Now you can see
what's happening. Now what I want you to do
is in your Stroke panel, if we open up the
Stroke Panel window, "Stroke", we want to
change our corners to round and our caps
to round as well. This will be important as
we build up our design. The next thing that I want
to do is I want to keep this white fill or this
white stroke because this will be the brightest
point of our neon effect. Now what we're going to
do is we're going to create a new fill. We're going to apply
a gradient to it. I'm just going to use the
orange and yellow gradient. Now, you can see nothing really happened
because remember, in the Appearance Panel, whatever is on first
will be seen first. Except for when we
increase the size. Because wen we
increase the size now we can see what's
underneath and you could already see that it looks it's glowing because we
have the brightest white in the center and then we have the gradient underneath. We want to apply
a simple effect. Let's go and select
the "Gradient Stroke". Now apply our Blur,
Gaussian Blur. It's a little too much, I'm
going to bring it down. For this first one, I just want it to
be a little blur. Now it's already
looking a little neon. The next thing that
I'm going to do is I'm going to
duplicate this one. With this one, I'm going
to increase the size. Remember click on your
"Icon", duplicate, increase the size and then I'm going to go into my Gaussian Blur
and I'm going to increase the Gaussian blur just a little bit and then I'm
going to duplicate this one. I'm going to go in,
increase the size, increase the Gaussian Blur quite a bit more. Look at that. We went from a
simple stroke to a really clean, nice neon effect. The next thing that I
want to do is I want to take this last stroke, make sure we have our icon selected and then we're
going to duplicate our last gradient
and we're going to give it a black fill, it's
not looking too great. Now, I'm going to go into this and I'm going to
change the opacity to multiply and lower the
opacity to maybe 62 percent. That's looking
good. I'm going to apply a little effect to it. Let's apply the
transform effect. I'm going to move it
horizontally just a little bit and move it
vertically just a little bit. This is giving a little shadow underneath and
it's really making those colors pop out like it's away from
the wall a little bit. That's looking pretty cool. I'm going to close
all those strokes. If this is where you
want to leave it, this is perfectly
fine. This is awesome. It looks really cool
and really clean. However, we're going to
take this one step further, and I want to show you that. Have your icon selected
and we're going to duplicate our first stroke. Now, we're going to use our Stroke panel to make
a few adjustments to it. Before we do that, we're going to apply an effect
called ''Offset Path.'' We're increasing the path
by maybe two pixels. It's going to be
a little further, well way maybe three, maybe five. Let's
see how that is. Maybe four I think will be enough for us. I'm
going to hit ''Okay.'' I'm going to decrease
the size of this one a little bit because
it's not going to be our main focus, it's going to be a
smaller accent piece. I'm going to go into
my stroke panel and I'm going to change
this up a little bit. Instead of keeping a solid line, I'm going to create
a dashed line. But I don't want it
to be short dashes, I want to be long dashes, so I'm going to increase
that to maybe 50 and then I might change this to 25. Maybe this one needs to
be a little smaller. Maybe even smaller. Let's see what's
happening over there, 20, 25, 22, 30. I'm just playing around with
the dashes and the gaps and creating something unique. The next thing that I want to do is I played around
with the dashes and the gaps of my dashed line
to create variety within it. That's going to be my base
effect for another neon glow. One thing that I forgot to
do is in my offset path, I want to change it from
miter to round and preview that and it gives it round corners so it looks a little more smooth,
a little more clean. Let's move on. Now
with this second one, we're going to build it
up the exact same way. But for this one,
I'm just going to keep it with one color. I'm going to duplicate
this stroke and I'm going to change this
one to maybe yellow. I'm going to increase the
size and I'm going to go ''File Effect Blur'',
''Gaussian Blur.'' I don't need it that big
because it's a very small one. Then I'm going to
duplicate this one, increase that and I'm going to blur it out a
little bit more. Now we're building
up the neon effect. Now we have the inner
effect and then we have the cool outer effect to give
it a little more dimension. Guys, so that's our
cool neon glow effect. Now what we can do again is we can go into our
graphic styles, save it as a graphic style, and we can apply it to our icon set down here with a
click of a button. Boom, we got cool
neon glow effects. Again, what can we do with this? We can select our item, we can go into re-color artwork, and we can adjust our
colors anyway, which way. Now it's a really cool
pink and blue neon effect. Let's move over to Facebook. Let's change that one. Let's make it maybe green and yellow,
something like that. That looks really cool. Let's go over to Behance, make that one change up a bit. Let's unlink the
colors and play around and see what things
we can create. Now that one is really cool,
like a rainbow effect. [MUSIC] For this module, I want you to recreate the
cool neon glow effect. Play around with
the Gaussian Blur, play around with
the Stroke Panel, the Offset Path, and create something
really unique to you. You have a lot of
skill sets now to use to create your
own custom icon set. I definitely want to see
everything you guys create, so experiment with
everything and create a cool custom icon set that's unique to you and post it in the project panel. I really look forward to it. I'll see you in the
next class where I just want to say thank you.
6. Thank You!: Hey guys, I just want to thank you so much for
taking this class. Throughout this class, we've worked with the
appearance panel to take a plain old social
media icon and created it into
something very unique. Now you have the skill set to develop your icons
in any way you want. Definitely play around
with all the tools and explore some that we didn't
even go over in this class. I definitely look
forward to seeing all that you guys create. Don't forget to post your
project in the project panel. If you have any
questions regarding anything discussed
in this class, or you have a suggestion for future classes of something
you might want to learn, definitely leave a comment
in the discussions panel, and it'll get back to
you as soon as I can. If you learned something
or enjoyed this class, definitely consider
leaving a short review. It really helps promote this class to others
in the future. Thanks again, and I really look forward to traveling
with you along your creative journey [MUSIC].
Kyle Aaron Parson, Graphic Designer and Illustrator
