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Lesson Info

Symbols & Patterns

Welcome back, folks. This next awesome episode is going to be dealing with patterns which are always kind of funky to go ahead and deal with and symbols, symbols or one of those things that I haven't met a whole lot of people that know about symbols and how they actually work. But you know what? It's really awesome. So we're gonna go ahead and show you what symbols are, how they work and how they can really make your life a whole lot easier. I've created some popcorn here and these little popcorn kernels that I've done. If I want to go ahead and use multiple ones, I would normally just group these together and then duplicate, duplicate, duplicate. The problem is with doing this with the duplicate is that if I ever needed to come back and edit, I need to edit every single one. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna turn this into a symbol and a symbols really awesome, because a symbol is kind of like a master shape that when we edit that master, shape it and it's every place that shape actua...

lly works. So I'm gonna grab this popcorn, and I'm gonna go into the window and I'm going to go down to my symbols panel and the Symbols panel has a few items in it. There's tons in the library. If you ever wanted to go, we had an open symbols library. There's thousands and thousands and thousands of symbols that you go ahead use always like mad science. There's all these really cool logos that air dot in here, and these were all symbols. And it's like, Why would I do something with a symbol rather than just create an initial artwork? Well, you do create an initial artwork here. The thing is, is that with the symbols, it just stores them slightly differently. So we're gonna park this mad science here for right now and come back to that in a bit. But we wanna talk about symbols here. I've created artwork. I'm gonna take this and I want to turn this into a symbol. So it's like the artwork go to the symbols panel. We're gonna create new symbol, and we're gonna name this popcorn. It's not a movie clip. We definitely want to make it a graphic. Here we have our choice of making it a dynamic or a static symbol. A static symbol means if I create a symbol and it goes into my symbols panel wherever I use it in my document, if I edit it in my initial symbols panel, it changes it everywhere. Dynamic allows me to do both editing directly in my symbol to go ahead and change it, but also allows me to edit all of my other instances of symbols because every time you use a simple it's called an instance so I can edit an example of that. And so we'll show you what dynamic actually works like. So here it is. Popcorns graphic. It's a dynamic symbol on a click. Okay, all right, there it ISS now, in order to use a symbol, it's quite easy. You take that and you just drag it onto your document like so on every time you need it Now, you could just go ahead and option. Click here is well and duplicate thes as well. They're all symbols, and I can rotate and I can scale and do all of this, just like I normally would with any other graphic. Now how can I tell if something's a symbol or not? Well, just by looking at him, I can't go into outlined mode. I can if I click on them because the ones that are symbols are going to have a little plus in the middle of them. You can see that the ones that aren't symbols. I don't get that little. Plus it's like, Yeah, I could do this with copy and pasting. Sure, but here's what I want to dio. I'd like to go in and I'm going to edit my symbol. So I'm gonna go back to my symbols panel, gonna edit the symbol by double clicking on it. And now, as I go in here, I'm going to zoom in here so we can see this little bit better. I'm just going to do a little bit of editing with the symbols here to kind of change up how this works. I can edit any one of these shapes, whatever it may be. And when I'm done, I can exit out of symbol editing just like isolation mode. But I go up to the top of my screen and click on the exit or just simply hit escape and you'll notice. Now all of my symbols have now reflected that change right there. And it's like, Okay. And of course, if I don't like that, I can always do a Command Z for undue and then go back through and undo all of my edits here. Okay, so that's how a symbol works. I create one version, and I can then go through and I can apply that everywhere. Now, Does that work? If I make these symbols larger and smaller? Oh, absolutely. Whatever I edit here, no matter what size or orientation, my symbols are how they were. If I edit this symbol and I do something with this, it's going to go ahead, and it's going to change every single instance of that symbol. Regardless of what I've done, it's like, Okay, that could be kind of cool, too. But what happens? It's like, Okay, I have this symbol, but I'd like thes popcorn toe look unique and different. Well, that doesn't mean that I can't go in and I can go in, and I can edit an individual occurrence or instance of a symbol here and then says you're about to edit the symbol, and he edits to the symbol will be applied to all instances. Do you want to continue? And you're like, Oh, yeah. You know, I do that. It's like, Okay, I want to do that. Maybe I do. Maybe I don't. But if I do edit this right here, I'm gonna go in. I'm gonna edit this, and it's like, Okay, if I edit this right here and I change this and then I exit out of this, they all get that It's just very much like going on and editing this symbol. Could I take some object like this and break it out? Sure. I could actually go in on going to the object menu and I could expand this and I could expand this and break it out of being a symbol, so it could just be a symbol all by or not even a symbol. It's just a shape all by itself that I could get in, go in and I could edit. So I've got kind of this Catch 22. Do I use symbols? Do I go through and do this? Well, it's like, Yeah, you know, I like it. Maybe I like it. Maybe I don't like it. Who knows, But I'm gonna take this object right here that is not assemble. I'm gonna turn this into a symbol here, going to create a new symbol from this. This is gonna be my new popcorn. We're gonna show you the difference between dynamic and static. I'm gonna do a static symbol. It's gonna be a graphic here, okay? And then when I go in and I do a static symbol right here, I could go in and with a static symbol. If I go in and I edit this symbol here, go in that it that it will also go through and edit these particular shapes. Now, if I want to go in and I want to define these symbols differently, what I can do is I can break a link to a symbol which is saying, you know what, this particular one, I no longer wanted to be part of the symbol. So if I edit this, I can take this one and this being a static one now, it's not going to be linked to it. I can simply break this apart. And I can edit this particular object totally separate from the original symbol, so I don't have to have them stuck together with this and have them be part of the entire symbol instances. But I can go in here, and I can kind of have a little bit of flexibility with HMAS. Well, now what I like about using symbols is that Aiken scale them. I can rotate them, Aiken, squish them everything else. And it doesn't affect the original symbol here. It just doesn't do that. But going in and dragging multiple times multiple times from my symbols panel is a real pain, and you'll notice. In fact, I'm just gonna delete thes and do this again. I don't want to keep dragging and keep dragging and keep dragging and doing this and having these repeated. Then I gotta rotate everything else. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go in, and I'm gonna use the a liberation of symbols here. The symbol shifters, cruncher spinner, spinner screeners, Styler tools. And you're like what? Yeah, this is what it does. You get tired going ahead and placing all these symbols, we're gonna use the symbol sprayer tool. And I could go ahead and use my left or right bracket to go ahead and adjust the size of the sprayer on Aiken. Spray all around, and it sprays all these symbols. It's like great spray popcorn. Awesome. If I want to adjust, I can double click on any one of these symbol sprayers, cruncher strainer tools, and I can choose what size and how they're going to work and what direction. So these are all the different types of things where I can go and use all the different tools here so I can control how much I want, how big I want, and then I can go in and set all these great settings. So here I go through do my symbol sprayer. Okay, sprays popcorn everywhere, while I could do the shifter, the scrunch er, the size or tool the size or tool is kind of interesting, because once I spray my symbols, I can use the size or tool that allows me to go in and click on certain ones. It allows me to size up the symbols again. If I hold down my option key, that's going to size them down so I can go through here and I can very quickly and easily, rather than one at a time, which I could do, But it could go through and mess with all of these using the symbol tools I can use the spinner tool, which allows me to go in and allows me to just click and rotate on any one of these kind of like wind direction. I could go through and I could just kind of rotate around and kind of change the direction of them. Just kind of paint over that as well. Um, it's a lot of fun, this shifter tool. I could go in and I can just kind of move and just kind of hold and grab on some of these, just kind of wipe over them and get all this kind of craziness. This is great for doing bubbles or doing grass, things like that. And if I ever edit any of these symbols change the color, it does all of them. Now, I can remember when I first started using this stuff. It's like, Okay, this is ridiculous, because where am I going to go ahead and use this? I'm gonna use this all the time. If you were making maps and you need thousands of trees My gosh, this is great because you can create anything, anything that you want. You can simply go in and drag right into your Cymbals Here. In fact, if I wanted to take this entire popcorn bucket, I could just drag this right into my symbol document right there and put it right in. And there it is. And now I've got this where I can go in and I can use my symbol sprayer any size that I want on all of a sudden, I've got buckets of popcorn everywhere. So you could imagine if you want a lot of things leaves flying around that kind of stuff, You could do this. You could just create a symbol and work with it. Now the symbols are nothing special at all because they're all created artwork. There's nothing amazing about them. You create the artwork, you simply drag it in there, and then we just have all these options Now the interesting thing is, is that your file is actually smaller when you use symbols, because instead of copying and pasting, copying and pasting, symbol is kind of like a little protected, not really like a picture, but it's kind of a protected little packet, so it actually takes up less space in your document than it normally would, Just doing copying and pasting. Plus, you've got so many other parameters that you can use with this. All of a sudden it becomes, You know, I could do this any repetitive. Anything leaves, grass, rain bubbles, you name it. Do it is a symbol. And then you can go through and have so much fun with us. You want to do boiling water or water? You know, bubbles coming up through water, do a circle, put it is a symbol, and then go through and use all your special little tools here to do this. They seem really ridiculous while they are, until all of a sudden, there, like things could really work. Now. Hidden inside the symbols library are a lot of cool symbols that have already been made for you. And the symbols library hangs out in the lower left hand corner. Here. We've got all these three D symbols and these all come up a separate panels here again, All artwork that was created arrows, artistic fashion vector pack Right here. So all these really cool florals, you're like, Seriously? Yeah, drag it in there. You want some type of artwork? It's free. It comes with its like, Wow, if you want to turn this into Vector, you're one step away from turning this from a symbol into edible vector artwork. Go under or click on your symbol here. Go ahead and take this symbol. You can double click on it and you can edit this definition here so you can get that content. Or you can simply take that symbol, go under the object menu, expand. And now you've gone in. You've taken this symbol and actually turned it into edible artwork. And there it is. It's all vector. I've always liked the mad scientist ones because they've got the really cool, fun things like this, you know, like the little ones like this. And you can find out how these things were created and break thes or expand these into artwork right here. And it's like, Okay, really cool. Thousands and thousands of thousands of one's already done, you know, primitive stuff. Sushi, tiki or the tiki ones. Air fun, too. I always love this, especially because of this car right there. There it is. There's that little vector automobile you want to spray this all over the place, Something sure or expand it. You've got it right there. Classic little television right there. Cool stuff. And all these are symbols super easy. And if you never use it, at least keep that in mind because they're there and they do actually have a really useful purpose. So instead of grouping these things and copping all bunch of things, turn into a symbol and see what you can go ahead and do with that. So the other thing I want to show you along with symbols is creating patterns and patterns air really tricky because especially when you get repeating patterns, it's hard to go ahead and get things tow line up. Well, so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna create some very basic artwork here, and I've got to some really simplified artwork. No matter what it is that you create, you could go ahead and turn this into a pattern. So I select my artwork, go into the window menu, we're gonna go down to pattern options. And this has a couple little funky, weird things that happen with the pattern options here. So definitely it's not one of those things. You just jump in and not knowing what you're doing. Select whatever you want to turn into a pattern. Go to your pattern options and it's totally dead until you go into the cheese grater. And then whatever you have selected, you choose Make pattern. Now when you make the pattern. Okay, what is going to Dio is it's going to tell you it's been added to the swatches panel right here and you're done. Any changes made while in the pattern editing mode will be applied to the swatch upon exit. It's like, Okay, so before your pattern options panel even lights up, you've already created the pattern and it's in your swatch panel right there. Now your pattern options show up. Well, what we're seeing here is a man dimness back here so we can see what's going on. The artwork in here inside this box is what's going to go ahead and be repeated as your pattern. If it touches the edge of the artwork or the edge of the box, all of those patterns are going to touch. If you don't want it to go ahead and touch each other, then you just keep that in from the box there. You can rotate and scale this. However you want to do this now, in the pattern options here, we can go ahead. And we can name this if you want Thio, and then we have our grid structure. Do you wanna do it on a grid? A brick lay, and then you can have, you know, quarter overlap half. However, lap 1/5. However you want to do this wallpaper, you know, you name it. You can do that. You can do brick by column, brick by row. You could do hex. You can do grid. Keep in mind that all of this is always part of the bounding box. If I go well beyond the bounding box, my pattern is going to go ahead and reflect that. This may seem a little confusing here. All of the areas that are great out here can be set. It's basically creating copies. And if we're gonna keep this simple, Aiken, do three by 35 by five copies. All of this down here. The three by three copies and the dim have no effect on the actual pattern. This is just you seeing what's going on with this so that we can work with us, okay? It just shows you how this pattern is going toe work. So when I choose my grid, when I choose my hex or my role where how this is all going to come about, this is where I could go through and I can begin to edit, and I can shape these things. So if I did want to go ahead and have these things line up, I certainly could. Now, anything that I draw inside this box here is gonna be part of my pattern. So if I came over here with my brush and I started painting with my brush here and I wanted to line these things up, it's going to go in with this pattern here who don't want to use that. I'm gonna go in and use my pencil tool and do this. Somebody use the pencil tool. I'm gonna draw something. Apply a stroke to that right there. So I've got that where I draw that stroke. Then I can see what's going on. So if I want to align patterns up here, I certainly can. The biggest problem that people have withdrawing patterns here is going in and having them a line like from one side to another. So say I go in and I draw my pencil here and I go in this side and out the other. And then I set this stroke. Okay, Now, if I'd like this to go ahead and line up, you can see where I could start the stroke here, and I could then go in and complete the stroke coming out over here. So those were gonna line up I could then take, and I could line these up here for the pattern and touch those. So now I get this repeating pattern. It's not perfect because the ends of my lines are really quite chunky. But you can now start to understand how you can use this to draw a pattern. People used to do this manually and kept adjusting because every time you went out one side trying to line it up with the other is really tricky. But I can do this quite easily. And of course, while I've done this, I can select all of this content in here because this is all selectable heart working here. I'm gonna around those ends of the kind of blend together a little bit better. And this is all my pattern. I can select any of this rotated scale it. Anything that I want Thio be done with it right there. Now, this is all saved of second. You went ahead and selected what you've done and then chosen the cheese grater and you go ahead and save pattern here. You're done and it's automatically saved it. And it's like, Well, wait a second. I started out here and then I've done all these changes. Hasn't actually saved it. Well, when you're done with this up here in the control bar or up here above here, you gotta pay very close attention. Do you want to save a copy? Well, saving a copy is now going to create a different pattern than the one that was saved the second you created it by clicking done here. Whatever you've now done is now updated in your swatch panel. So this this isn't a linear kind of process on how this works Now, how you actually get your pattern applied? A pattern is a Phil. Just like a color is a fill. A pattern is a Fila's well, So if I go in and I draw a shape and I go to my appearance panel and I fill it in, there is my shape that I've done on. I apply that, and there it is. That's my fill inside my shape. Now what's really weird with patterns is this. As I move my window around, the default is the pattern stays in the same location, and I'm just moving my window when it's like what it's like. Yeah, that's what it does. And it's like, Okay, how do you do this? So if I go in, probably should go ahead and name this correctly here because I can spell. But I can't type. I go in here and it's like, I really don't have any riel help with the pattern options here about what's going on with this. Well, here's the problem. When you have a pattern, Phil and you have an object here and you start to move it around. The object moves independently in the place that you can fix. That is to transform panel. The transform panel allows you to or by default is set to transform the object only or you can transform just the pattern. And it's like, Okay, so I could go in and I could do just the pattern here as well. Or I could do both. Where if I scale my shape here, it's going to scale the pattern. That's probably what you want. You probably wanna move this around because if you have just the transform turned on the box, you could make the box larger and smaller and move it all around in the pattern. Kind of sits behind it like artwork, and it never gets transformed. But if I transform the pattern here, it's like, Okay, now, when I rotate this or I scale this, it's all going to go with the shape, and it's like, Okay, that makes a whole lot more sense because you can really get freaked out about patterns. If you wanna go in and move something and then the pattern doesn't move and your container does. Now, if you want to go in and you wanna edit this pattern here, what you do, would you go back into your fill panel? I know you don't go back into your pattern options here, and you're gonna double click on your pattern, Phil. And once you go back in on the pattern, Phil, and touch it, then you're gonna go in. You're gonna be able to edit this pattern here and change any of those attributes that you want A of that pattern. When you're done, you click. Done. Unless you want to keep the original pattern and then save this as a copy. Don't click, Save a copy, but I can go through. And I can make many patterns by saving copies. So every time I make a change, if I save a copy, I will have the old and I will have the new. But if I simply want to update everything, I'm going to go in and click the done button. And then when I go back in, then I will have my done button, and this is what will give me my fill. Now here's one of the problems with going in and setting in your transform panel that you're going to transform both your fill or your pattern, Phil and your object. If I go to make the object bigger now to go ahead and reveal more of the pattern, guess what happens with the pattern. It stretches and it's like That's not what I want to dio. So now I'm gonna go back under the transformed panel, choose the transform object. Only I can make this larger. So I get mawr of the pattern showing here, and I can move that around Thio, then get the pattern, then go back under my transform and choose transformed both because now I can scale this down and have the pattern where I'd like it to be. Now, there are some default patterns that air in your file here and your fill panel and these patterns are all here. If you want to see how these air made, go in and select that Phil and then go ahead and you can see we get the pattern options right here. When we use our appearance panel, you can call up the pattern options here, and then you can double click on these to go ahead and get your content back in here. So pattern options. There we go. It's not allowing me Thio, get it? This one here going through and doing this edit pattern. There we go. Usually you could double click, but we've got to go through here and she was edit the pattern. Now we can go in and you can see how this particular pattern is done. It's great because if you find a pattern and you wanna know just it's in your fill panel, select it, click on the edit right there. And now this is actually set up because this was kind of set up a za hex here, and this is hex by column. I could change this. However, I'd like I can edit this whole thing. I can change that scale that down to create that really cool effect right there. You'll notice that when I'm scaling this, it's scaling the tile, and the tile is basically the area in which I'm defining my pattern. If I undo the scale tiled art, I can go ahead and I can scale my artwork separate from the tile here. This doesn't affect when I put this into a container here, the tile is on Lee, the defining area inside the pattern definition. So if I want to go ahead and I want to keep the tile the same, but I want to scale this up or down, then they could do that scaling the tile with the art is going to keep everything constrained. It just allows me to go ahead and set the detail larger or smaller with that so interesting fun stuff right here that you can dio and when you're done, of course, click the done button and now you've got your shape filled with this particular pattern. Now, when I'm done with a pattern, if I'd like to break this apart and I no longer wanted to be a pattern, I can go under my object menu and choose expand. And that's going to go ahead and expand the fill completely. And that's going to give me all of this as separate pieces of artwork here. And if I go into my preview here, it's really weird would to see this, because what we're actually doing with a pattern Phil inside a container, it's very much like a clipping mask. This pattern is being repeated in the area that is being seen, and so when we go in and we go into our outline mode here, this is exactly what we're seeing. We're seeing these little patches of sections here that are all now basic artwork put together all layered on top of each other. So it can be kind of interesting to see how this goes together once you go ahead and you expand everything here and break it apart into all of your objects. And now you got all your funky objects here and it just goes on and on. So if you ever try to break patterns apart and expand them, you could be in for a lot of work because of the way illustrator absolutely puts it together. Since Illustrator doesn't actually put anything truly inside a container, it all becomes a clipping mask. So kind of interesting to do that. But if you want patterns, there are lots of patterns that you could go ahead and access here, and there are always going to be in your fill panel right there. You can go through and you can grab your swatches. Okay. And swatches are not just color swatches, swatches or patterns as well. And you can see if you go under your cheese grater in your swatch panel Open Swatch library. You may think, Okay, it's just watches. No, we do have patterns in there. There's a whole bunch of patterns. You know decorative patterns. There it is. And there's a whole host of decorative patterns that you can use as a fill, whatever you want to do. And you're like, Oh, my gosh, this is school Sure, and all this is is going in. If you want to see this, go into your pattern options, edit the pattern and find out how somebody made this. There's so many things to create all this awesome cool stuff with. So instead of drawing all these things and doing the step and repeat and duplicate, do it as a pattern. Then you could go ahead, and with those patterns you can then go ahead and create any shape that you want and fill those with a pattern here, texture, whatever it is. And this is how we create textile effects, clothing, all that stuff in illustrator without actually going in and drawing it. Every time we need it, we create it. We put it in our patterns here, and then once we use it, it ends up in our fill panel here, just like it does along with our colors. Patterns end up there, too. Definitely something to go ahead and try. Um, it's not something we use very often, but keep in mind when you do use this, you're gonna need your transformed panel because you're transform. Object is gonna be great to go ahead and scale your object up and down without scaling your, um, texture or your pattern. And then when you want to move everything, then you can move everything in scale, everything when you do this. But you gotta have your transformed panel available in order to do this or else weird stuff is gonna happen. But a little quick and short one that was all about going in and using, um, our patterns as well as going in and using our symbols here to duplicate multiple objects. Good stuff, and we've got more fantastic stuff to come.