Create a Cute Notebook Icon in Adobe Illustrator
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Hello and welcome to another Every Tuesday tutorial. In this week's tutorial we're going
to be creating this vector notebook icon in Adobe Illustrator. So what you see on screen is exactly
what we're going to be creating together. I'm going to give you the colors and then we'll get
started. So the colors for these, we're working in RGB since this would be an icon that you would
use on the web. So for this dark slate blue color right here, that is the color build for that.
Here is the medium blue, the light blue, the teal color, and the gray that we're using.
Okay so I'm going to move this one out of the way and then we will start working. So we're
going to start off by creating it straight and then we will rotate it at the very end to give
this kind of more dynamic look to it. So the first thing we're going to do is just create a rectangle
that's three inches by two inches. So I'm going to hit M on my keyboard, double click twice,
and input three inches by two inches and hit okay. And I am on Illustrator Creative Cloud which gives
me these live corners which are really amazing. It will be a bit longer of a process because if
you want to apply rounded corners to an older version of Illustrator you'll have to go to
effect, stylize, round corners, and input the radius of your corners there. Whereas with
Creative Cloud you can just grab the corners and pull them in. And I'm going to pull them in where
it says 0.1 inches, so just like that. And I'm going to color this one this light blue. So I'm
going to hit I on my keyboard for my eyedropper and color this blue. And now we've got the base
of our notebook but you can see that it's broken in half because this is a spiral bound notebook.
So in order to break it up I'm just going to hit M on my keyboard and draw a really skinny
rectangle. And this rectangle is going to be 0.05 inches which you can see in that gray box that's
showing up right there. If that's not showing up for you make sure you turn your smart guides on.
You can do that by going view smart guides. And now we want this centered right in the middle.
So I'm going to return back to my selection tool by hitting V on my keyboard. I'm going to select
both of these and then just hit this icon up here at the top for horizontal align center.
And now it's perfectly aligned in the middle. And then come over to your pathfinder palette
over here. If you don't see it you can get to it by going window pathfinder. And you just want to
hit this icon right here for exclude. And then you want to ungroup everything. So command shift G or
control shift G on a PC. And then you're just going to select and delete these extra pieces.
So now I've got two pieces of my notebook right here. I'm going to group these two together. So
command G or control G on a PC. And now I need to add in my paper right here. So my paper is exactly
positioned within my notebook covers. So you can see that it's the same distance on all sides.
And in order to accomplish that there's actually a really quick way to do it. All you have to do
is with your notebook selected come over here to object, path, offset path. And you want to
input a negative 0.1 inch offset. And if I preview this you can see it pops in these pages that are
right where we need them to be. So because it's on the inside that's why we need it to be negative
0.1 right here instead of a positive 0.1. If we had positive it would push it to the exterior of
our notebook cover. So we're going to hit okay and now we're just going to eyedropper this white
and we can eyedropper just the background of our paper right here. Okay and finally you can see I've
added a little extra depth to my pages by adding a dark blue page right behind my white pages right
here. Totally optional. I like that it adds a little bit of extra depth to the illustration
so that's what I'm going to do. So right now everything is grouped together since that was
an offset path. So I'm going to ungroup command shift g or control shift g on a pc.
I'm going to select each one of these white ones so hold shift and then select your second one
and just group these two white pages independently of the cover. So command g or control g on a pc
to group. And now I want to make a copy of these. So hold alt or option on your keyboard and then
tap your right arrow over once and then release your alt or option key. And then you just want
to tap them down one time. So you can see just like that and now I can eyedropper this this
darker blue color and I can send it behind my white paper. So in order to send it behind once
you can just hit command open bracket and you can see it it pushes it back just like that. And if I
want to distance it just a little bit further I can just hit my over arrow key and then my down
arrow key and I like that distance. So now that's all set we've got that extra distance right there.
So the next thing we're going to do is add in our spiral binding right here. So first we need to add
in our little circles. So I'm going to zoom in nice and close right here and put a circle up at
the top. So I'm going to grab my ellipse tool over here and I'm just going to hold shift so I get a
perfect circle as I start pulling it out and I'm going to pull it out to 0.04 inches right there.
You can see the little gray box. Okay and now what I want to do is make a copy of the circle and
position it all the way at the bottom of this page. So I'm going to hold alt or option on my
keyboard click and drag and while I'm dragging hold shift to keep it straight put it into position
and that looks good. And now I need to fill in the space between them and I'm going to use my blend
tool for that. So I'm going to put 10 more dots between these two dots so I can do that with my
blend tool. So your blend tool is right over here just double click on it make sure specified steps
is selected right here and change this to 10 right here and hit okay. And now what you want to do is
when you have the little star appearing when you're hovering over your top circle click once
and then come over your bottom circle and you'll see a plus sign and hit that once and now it'll
fill in the gaps. And now we need these circles to appear on the right page of our notebook. So
I'm going to hold alt click and drag while I'm dragging I'm going to hold shift and position
those just like so and now we're all set for our spiral. So I'm going to grab my rounded rectangle
right here and I'm going to zoom in really close so we can see it really well and just draw out a
rounded rectangle and my rounded rectangle settings are a corner radius of about 0.16
and this is my width and my height 0.35 and 0.02. So I'm going to recolor this rectangle right here
my medium blue so let me do that I'm just going to hit i on my keyboard click on it and there we go
and now I'm going to do the exact same thing we just did with the dots only with this rounded
rectangle. So first I need to make a copy of this and position it down here so I'm going to hold alt
or option on your keyboard click and drag while you're dragging hold shift to keep it straight
and then position it right down here and that looks like it snapped right into position and it
did. So now we can do the same thing we did with our blend tool. So just come over to your blend
tool double click make sure you've got specified steps 10 steps hit ok hover over your top rounded
rectangle until you see that star click once and then hover over the bottom one until you see that
plus sign click once and you can see it filled in all the spaces and now we've got our spiral
bound notebook. So moving right along we're making really good progress the next thing we need to do
is drop in our lines of text since this is an icon we're just going to use some basic rectangles for
this to give the impression of lines of text. So what I like to do is just hit m on your keyboard
and I like lining it up with this first dot and making it just a little skinnier and that looks
good. I'm going to eye drop in my gray color for this and then I'm also going to make a copy of
this bring it all the way down like we did before and now we're going to fill in the gaps right here
but I want these lines of text to be closer together so it doesn't look too similar to my
spiral bound right here so I'm going to double click on my blend tool one more time and this
time I'm going to change this to 15 steps instead so it's a little denser than my spiral. So I'm
going to click on this top rectangle click on this bottom one you can see I have way more lines of
text than I have spirals over here for my binding. All right so the next thing we need to do is make
these individual elements we don't need to worry about that for our spiral because our spiral is
going to stay the way it is but we want to manipulate some of these lines of text so we
can drop in areas that look like photos or illustrations within our notebook. So in order
to do that with this selected I'm going to return back to my selection tool by hitting v on my
keyboard and with it selected you want to come up here and go object expand and hit okay and then
ungroup so command shift g or control shift g on a pc and now these are individual elements
but I need these to be replicated over here because we're going to put in those illustrations
or those photos on this side as well so I'm going to reselect all of these lines and then I'm just
going to copy them over here so alt click and drag and while you're dragging hold shift and now we've
got them copied over there and for my notebook I'm going to have a big illustration at the top
of this side so I'm going to delete all of these lines of text and now I'm going to grab my
rectangle tool hit m on your keyboard and I'm going to draw out a rectangle and I want to make
sure that it's aligned with the left side of this text so I'm just going to drag it in until I see
my smart guides telling me that it's in position and this time when I drag in my corners I'm going
drag them to 0.05 instead of 0.1 inches and now I'm going to recolor this this teal color
okay so now I'm going to put in two more illustrations so there's going to be one on
the side and one kind of rectangular one right here so I'm going to do the square one on the
side first I'm going to hit m on my keyboard and this looks like a good place for it I'm just going
to drop it in right here and then put another one like right here and that looks good and then
I'm just going to pull in these corners one more time to 0.05 inches so select this one 0.05 there
we go and now I can select these rectangles I'm holding shift as I click so I can select more than
one at a time and then I can just drag them over so there's a little bit of distance right here
between the photo or illustration and the text so I'm going to do the same thing here drag them over
all right so now we need to put in our bookmark which you can see is just this
bar right here which is really easy just grab your rectangle tool draw it out from the top to the
bottom this one's going to be 0.05 inches eyedropper your dark blue color and then if you'd like to add
just a little bit more depth you can add in a shadow right here I've got this kind of flat
style shadow of this light gray coming off of the back of the notebook and if you'd also like to do
that just select your notebook so I'm going to select this side and then this side I'm going to
group them together command g or control g on a pc and then in the same way that we added the extra
depth for our notebook pages we're going to do the exact same thing for this so hold alt or option
and then just tap your right arrow key over once and then release alt or option on your keyboard
and then just tap the down arrow once and now you can eyedropper the gray color and we're going to
send this to the back so I'm going to hit v on my keyboard right click arrange send to back and now
it's all the way in the back and if you'd like to toggle it over a couple more clicks you can do
that I'm going to do that I'm going to tap it over to the right once and then tap it down once
and then we've got our shadow so this is all done so now we need to group all of our elements
together so we don't accidentally nudge anything to make it off center so we're going to select
everything command g or control g on a pc to group and then the final step is just rotating it just
to add a little bit of extra energy or a visual interest to it because it is just a notebook
so with it selected you just want to hit your rotate tool over here so double click on your
rotate tool input negative five degrees and you can preview it right here so it's just a very
subtle rotation but it creates a really nice effect so just hit okay and now you are all set
so that is how to create a cute notebook icon in adobe illustrator if you enjoyed this tutorial
please subscribe and don't forget to head on over to my site every hyphen tuesday.com for even more
design and lettering tutorials and a bunch of design freebies thanks so much for watching and
i will see you next time