How to change the Radius of the Rounded Rectangle Tool - Adobe Illustrator CS6 (Change how curved the corners are)

Having difficulties changing how round your corners look on your rounded rectangle in Illustrator? Look No Further

Hold down the shape button to reveal the menu and select Rounded Rectangle Tool




If you click once after selecting the tool, a toolbox will appear.
The third one down changes the corner radius manually.
The better way to do this is actually with the up and down directional keys on your keyboard whilst you draw the shape. You can do it live on the art-board and see how rounded you would like the corners.

Tip: Remember to hold down shift while drawing your box to have equal length sides.

7 tools illustrator beginners will be interested to use

I usually use illustrator for manual vector work (when I say 'manual', I am referencing the new image trace features in CS6) but I love to design colourful website backdrops, especially using these awesome tools. If you you are a beginner with Illustrator, I'm sure you will love this.

1. Bring up the sub menu of the icon that looks like an upside down moustache and select a tool. Here's a demo of those tools. (in order)

Warp Tool

 Twirl Tool (one of my favs)

 Pucker Tool

 Bloat Tool

 Scallop Tool

 Crystallise Tool (good for comic book stuff)

 Wrinkle Tool (makes for good sound-wave pictures)

 Enjoy!

Below is something I made using a few of these tools.

Fotor: A good enough replacement for Photoshop.

Fotor is free at the moment on the mac app store... grab it. I know a lot of people have written about it online but when I tested it out myself I had to share.

What Fotor is: A good and powerful way to edit photos WITHOUT adjusting any sliders or graphs, panels and colours. It's probably what you would imagine if you mixed Elements 10, with iPhoto and the Snapseed iPad app in a big mixing bowl...

It has an easy drag and drop interface:

A huge selection of well described menu items:

And another sidebar for selecting different sub menus, and export features:

It has gained its place next to Photoshop and Illustrator in my dock. On the whole: I think this is a great app for on-the-go photographers who don't have the time to open Photoshop and setup for an editing sesh.

How To Use The Pen Tool In Illustrator

Being able to use the pen tool in Illustrator is a very useful skill. You may hear it is a long way of using the Image Trace tool, but it produces a different effect. The Image trace feature does not always pick up the detail. You could combine the two using anchors.. but thats a different story...

Open up a photo, If this is your first time using the pen tool, then keep it simple. I am using a photo I took of some pencils at my desk.

I'm going to start with the green pencil. Click on the pen tool, (the one that looks like a calligraphy pen)
and click wherever you want to start outlining the object/subject. A small dot should appear. This is called an Anchor. Wherever you click again, will create a line between the two anchors.

So I start by making two anchors- creating a line, down the side of the green pencil.

The pink line is the new outline. Now, as I am outlining only the Green section, I will have to curve the line. This is done by clicking the other end of where the curve will be, but instead of letting go of the click, hold it down and drag it in the opposite direction of the curve. When dragging, a second 'dragging' line will appear. Do not worry, this is only to help you move the curve, it disappears after plotting a new anchor.

Before plotting a new anchor, and just after you have finished the curve, click on the same anchor, otherwise, this creates a new curve in the direction of that blue line... and you most probably don't want that. Here I have done the curve and now I need a straight line, so I click for a new anchor. And its simple as that.

Remember, to finish the outline, you must join the first anchor to the last. Like so:

-Heres one I made earlier-

So now I have made an outline of the pencil, I'm going to change the stroke and the fill to the same colour as what the pencil was. If you want to do this , make the fill transparent so you can see just the outline, then click on the eye drop tool (looks like a pipet) and click on the colour.

Once you have this, make the stroke transparent and you have a cool cartoon version of the pencil. This  is just a segment of the picture. The more shapes you go over, like shadows and different lines, the better it will look.

Cool Cartoon Eye In Illustrator

Want to make this cool eye in illustrator?

Level: Begginer/Moderate

Skills needed: Pen Tool, Pathfinder Tool

Heres how:

Make a circle:

Then, using the centre of the circle as an anchor, make a triangle in the top left hand of the circle, at a 45° angle.

Use the pathfinder tool to cut a hole into the circle.

Draw another circle.

Change the circle you have just drawn to whatever colour you want the eye to be, and the 'pac-man' shape to black. 

The blue circle is on top of the black circle so if you right click > Arrange > Send to back

Alternatively, you can move the circle onto a new layer and drag that new layer to the bottom.

then move the black shape onto the blue circle.

Open a new document and make a circle, then copy and paste it so you have two identical circles.

Move them on top one another so they look like a venn diagram.

Their edges should touch the centre anchor of each other.

Then use the pathfinder tool > intersect. this makes a shape that is made from the overlap.

Take this new shape and turn it exactly 90°. You can do this by holding shift and rotating it with corner 

'rotate' icon. this appears when you put your mouse on the corner of the shape object box.

Now make it white and use the selection outline to see where you are putting it, (you wont be able to see the actual shape)

Then once you have positioned it, Add a cartoon skin tone, I opted for pink but you can match it to your comic book character.

The pink box will be in front of the eye, so again, right click > Arrange > Send to back.

with the pen tool, Draw a curved, skinny triangle in the left top corner. Make it the same colour as your eye, but a tiny bit lighter.

Add a small white circle on top of the black shape.

Go to the toolbar at the top and find Effect > Stylize > Feather. this will bring up a small box. Set the radius to 7px. Press Ok then draw a similar shape to the light blue one, or you can copy and paste this, then mirror it, but that is more difficult. Make it black.

Huzzah.

Using the Image Trace tool in Illustrator

CS6 has a new tool in town, and I am going to show you how to use it.

Grab a photo that you want to trace, and open it up in illustrator. 

Tip: the higher the photo quality, the better the results.

Heres a picture of my new macbook pro box. cool.

Click the 'Image Trace' button, found in the top toolbar. 

(Circled below)

This should produce something similar to this. If not, your image is either not eligible- this could mean its too low quality, or too many similar colours in the image.

In the same location where the 'Image Trace' button was, there should be a button that says 'Expand'. Click this so that you see all the main shapes surrounded with coloured selection lines.

Once you have done this, right click or (ctrl + click for mac users). You will see a drop down menu. Press 'Ungroup'. This is also found in the 'Edit' toolbar. Do this once, and try clicking on individual objects. If you cannot, try 'Ungroup' again.

Huzzah.

Adding a Glossy Look to Your Logo (Illustrator)

Making your logo look that tiny bit more classy. 

Level: Beginner

Making a program or an app icon in Illustrator? Want to know how apps have that 'sheen' look? look no further.
first things first, open up your vector logo in Illustrator. Here I have a basic shape, commonly used for mac icons. I have added a gradient, and made the lines invisible, of course this is just an example...

Next, press cmd + A (Mac) or ctrl + A (Windows) to select all and every object in your logo. I only have one, so I can just click on it. A coloured line should surround the image with a box. (the box did not show up in the screenshot).
.

Once you have done this, click shape tool and select the tool which matches the shape of the outer line of your logo. In this case, I would select the circle tool.
Tip: Click and hold the mouse for the shape tool menu.

Create and equal sided shape by holding shift before you make the shape. I have made the circle roughly 30% smaller than the logo shape.

Now I have the circle, I am going to add a gradient. Open the gradient tool box by clicking the 'gradient' tab. Once you have done this, click the small box in the left top hand corner to make the shape have a gradient. These two buttons are circled in pink.
(If you don't have this toolbar, go to the help section and type in 'Gradients')

Once again you have to have the logo selected (cmd/ctrl + A). Once you have done this, click on the gradient bar so that two little 'house' shaped arrows come up on the left and right.

Set the angle above this to 90°.

Click the left 'house' arrow and set the opacity to 0%, then click the right one and set the opacity to 50%. 
(50% is my preference, but you can try out some different opacity levels).

Huzzah.