Illustrator: Symbols

Okay folks, now that we’ve got a basic idea of how this kind of thing stacks up, we can look at some alternative methods, and time-saving tricks. One of the most powerful features in Illustrator is the largely-ignored “symbols” palette. They bill symbols as a cutsie way to get lots of hokey stars all over your screen, and I think that’s why most people haven’t realized their power. When combined with global swatches (covered in the next tutorial), your illustrations can be incredibly robust. We’ll also cover some little-known quirks with the rotate tool.

Okay, as before, we’ll start with a circle.

Now, here’s another little-known trick within Illustrator: smart guides. They’ll drive you up the wall if you leave them on all the time, but I find I use them about 50% of the time. Memorize the keyboard shortcut and practice using it: the more you get used to it, the more you’ll wonder how you survived without it!

Okay, now draw a line from the center of your circle to the rim. This will just serve as a helpful guide. You don’t strictly need it for this exercize, but I tend to use this kind of guide frequently.

Create a new layer, and lock the old one. This way you can still “snap” to the guides we’ve created, but we can’t accidentally select them.

This part is tricky to explain, and explaining the reasoning is even trickier. I’m going to draw my peppermint swirl, and I’m going to do it by creating a “symbol.” Any repetitive shape should be a symbol if possible, because they allow you to make changes much more easily. In this case we’re going to create a swirl symbol, and if we update the symbol, all of the swirls will update in kind. Simple concept, right?

Well, yes. It’s simple. But the problem is that symbol locations on the artboard are based on the object center. That’s all well and good if your object’s location is based on its center (like a pattern of dots or hexagons, for instance), but it’s not very good if your locations are based on something else; in this case, a radial center. The reason this center-based positioning is problematic in some situations is because making alterations to the original will often move the center of the object, thus causing all of the instances of the symbol to move in indesirable ways. This concept is better demonstrated than explained, so I suggest spending some time fiddling with symbols by my method, and then by your own. You’ll soon learn a system that works for you.

So what I do is create a “bounding box” for my object that will stay the same size no matter what, so that the object center will stay the same when I change the graphic, in this case our swirl. So that’s what I’ve done here: I’ve drawn two lines, one vertical, and one horizontal. These should always be the largest points on the object, so make them long enough that your object can never extend outside the box area created by the lines. The reason I use lines–and not, say, a box–is because the box would cause problems for us when we use our pathfinder to add shapes together down the road. Don’t believe me? Give it a try! It’s always best to learn that way.

So now we’ll remove the strokes on our bounding lines so that they’re not visible…

And drag the bounding lines and the swirl graphic into the symbols palette. If you still have all of the default symbols in there, go ahead and delete them.

Note: Dragging an object into the symbols pallette creates a new symbol, but it does NOT convert the object dragged. After you’ve created your symbol, be sure to delete the original and replace it with a symbol.

Here’s where we get to the part about the rotate tool. The same principles I’ll use here also apply to the reflect tool and many of the other transformation tools.

There are four basic ways to rotate an object: using the selection tool, the transformation tool, the rotate tool, or the “transform each” tool. We’ll use the rotate tool here, because I think it will work best for this application.

After activating the rotate tool, notice that the little crosshairs appear at the object-center by default. This is not what we want, because we really want to rotate around the circle-center instead.

So we click once at the center of the circle, and notice that the crosshairs move. Now if you drag the object, it will rotate around the new center. If you hold shift while dragging, it constrains to 45deg. If you hold alt/option, it will duplicate your object. You can also option-click on the desired center and key in your desired increment as I’ve done here. Continue duplicating your objects until you get all the way around the circle.

Okay! Now we’ve got a flat, ugly peppermint!

What I’d like to do first is to make some tweaks to the swirl shape, now that I see it in context. So I drag an extra symbol out onto the canvas and click “break link to symbol” in the symbols palette.

With the link broken, now I can tweak the shape however I want, and click “redefine symbol” to update all of the instances at once! You can see how powerful this becomes.

Okay, here’s another great trick to know about symbols. You can NOT select a symbol and change its stroke or fill. That sucks, right? Well, you CAN if you put the symbol into a boolean object group from the pathfinder palette, like an “add” or “remove”. I usually do an “add,” even if the resulting geometry is the same as the symbol, so that I can apply individual strokes and fills to my symbols out in the art board. This isn’t a very good example object because you could accomplish the same thing by simply applying a linear gradient to the symbol, but I digress.

So go ahead and select all of your swirls and click “add to shape area” in the pathfinder palette (not shown). Now that all of your symbols are “one shape”, you can apply a fill to them. In this case I’ll ad a radial gradient.

And the same for the background circle…

And I’ll create another circle with a radial gradient for a shadow. I set this to multiply mode in the transparency palette so that objects underneith will render correctly.

In the Chiarascuro tutorial I showed you one way of creating these glossy highlights by creating a shape, and then creating an opacity mask to create a fade. I teach that method because it is definitely a much more robust method than the one I’m going to show you here. It will allow you much more flexibility than this method, and is much more stable when rendering (I’ve found that this method doesn’t always work right).

NOTE: Only works in RGB mode. In CMYK the circle will appear all white.

Anyway, this time we’re going to take a little shortcut. Instead of creating an opacity mask, we’ll just add a black-to-white gradient on the circle, and set the object to “screen” mode in the transparency palette. This makes all of the black disappear and only the white shows through. Quick and easy!

A little tweaking and we’re all done! It’s super easy to make changes because we used symbols to define our swirls. Next time we’ll cover global swatches to make your illustrations even more robust. Happy illustrating!