15 Tools

Illustrator provides many tools for creating and manipulating your artwork. When you start Illustrator, the Tools panel appears at the left of the screen. You use tools in the Tools panel to create, select, and manipulate objects in Illustrator. Some tools have options that appear when you double-click a tool. These include tools that let you select, type, paint, draw, sample, edit, and move images. To see the name of a tool, hover the pointer over it.

You can expand some tools by holding down the mouse button on the visible part. Hidden tools will appear with the mouse move and and you can start to explore more.

Selection tool (Black arrow)

• Drag objects from one place to another
• Reduce or increase size of the object, illustration
• Group your object

Direct Selection Tool & Group Selection Tool

These two tools help the illustrator to work faster with the shapes and illustration. Especially direct selection tool is important while creating a new objects. ((((((())))))

Pen Tool & Line Segment Tool

With both of them you can reach best results for your project, but they are both different when you use them.

Pen Tool

• Add anchor points on the line or object
• Drag and draw new shapes
• Transform the objects
• Delete anchor points from the illustration
• Add new lines

Line Segment Tool

• Draw perfect lines
• Draw grids or arcs, spirals
• Connect them

Color

As we already know from the style guide, that the document should be in RGB color mode because it is for web, we can start creating a new document with the RGB color mode.

Brush

Brush have a big impact on illustration, so the right brush can be the key to perfect illustration. Choose the brush to start your work. With the pen tool you can create unique forms and shapes or strict lines and rectangles.

Close Paths

The perfect and quality illustration contains closed lines and different layers. If we want to build a shape which would be suitable for our customers, we need to start from the scratch and point by point keep building the illustration. There is a several tools for our choice, so it is up to the illustrator which one to choose.

Create custom tools panels

If you work with only a specific set of tools, you can create a customized tools panel that contains only those tools.

Source:

Adobe: Tools