Transcript:
Okey-dokey. So in this tutorial, I’m gonna show you how to create better-looking pie charts all in Adobe Illustrator. Hey, guys, you’re watching danske the place to be to develop your creative skills in this tutorial. I’m going to show you how you can create better-looking pie charts or in Illustrator, and I did a video similar to this A while ago. It got a lot of love. It also got a lot of criticism. A lot of people thought that. I should have used the pie chart tool, and while its true, illustrator does have a variety of different graph tools. Well, we are designers we are creatives. We’re not simply just gonna enter data into some excel style spreadsheet, and whilst it’s true, you might be able to create a graph that is more accurate that is more data driven than ours. Ours will be better. It will be brighter, more magnificent than anything you can possibly imagine, and maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but one day – fun, OK? So, a designer of revolution aside, should we just jump into illustrator and I’ll show you how to do this righty-o so we now in? Adobe Illustrator have a new artboard 1920 by 1080 And the first thing I’m going to do is grab the ellipse tool from the tool bar on the Left left, click and hold shift to draw a circle. We’ll make this nice and big. This is going to be the size of our pie chart and I’m going to select the stroke, set that to none and just double-click on the fill and we’ll give this a color, so we’ll just go with yellow for now click. OK now! This is something that I didn’t find out until very recently as a hidden panel that enables you to create pie charts so easily, an illustrator can’t. Wait to show you this so over here on the right. We have the transform panel. Okay, You can move the X to the Y position. Width height rotation. All this good stuff. But if you go down here specifically for circles, you get this added option, so you can click this and we get all these different pie chart options, so we can adjust the ellipse angle, the pie start angle the pie end angle. And if I change this, you can see. It actually takes a segment of PI out of the circle and we can click on this. Little double ended arrow here to invert that selection, so this is great. We can actually create accurate pie charts really easily. So what I’m gonna do is if I change this. To 90 for example, and you can, of course, click in the box. Enter your own value or use the up and down arrow keys to manually Adjust this, but I’ll keep mine at 90 for now so great. We have a nice, gorgeous segment. Take it out of our pie. So what I’m going to do is hold alt or option and drag and also hold shift as well just to keep it in line that will create a copy and on this copy. If I go to that transform panel again, what I’ll do is I’ll change the end, so we’ll put the end as 90 and essentially swap this around so there we go, We’ve got a new pie segment and I’m gonna double Click on color picker. We’ll, just pick a different color and then what I can do now is I can actually bring this one out again, so alt option and drag holding shift, go to that transform panel, and then maybe we’ll change this to 45 so I’m just gonna keep having it. And then the one over here will change this one from 90 to 45 and there we go, you can pop that one back in. Maybe I could change. The color will change this to like a purple or something, so as long as everything you create, adds up like to a complete circle and there’s no gaps, then you can adjust these values and just create a pie chart as you need to, but remember it’s not data driven or anything like that. So if you do want to do that use, use the damn pie chart tool. If you really want to. But if you kind of have a rough idea like. I know that this quarter segment is 25% of a circle. And then if I half that like I’ve done here. Half of 25 percent less 12.5 percent. Hopefully I’ve done that correctly, but you can kind of roughly work it out. Okay, so we have a pie chart. I’m gonna pop this back in the middle, and I’m actually gonna rotate mine, so just hover over the corner rotate and I’m gonna hold shift. So it just snaps that rotation to 45 degree increments. So I want my two extra segments to be pointing down now. If I select all of these, I go to effect 3d extrude and bevel. This window pops up here. I can check preview from the bottom and I can adjust the 3d extrude and bevel for my pie, but you can see everything is just going all over the place, so we’ll cancel that first thing we’re gonna do is got to object and group, so well group our three pieces of pie all together, in fact. I’m just gonna move this over here. Just so you can see what’s happening, so we’ll do that again. Effect A 3d extrude and bevel. Well check preview and you can see now as I move this around here. All the segments move around together, so you can adjust the angle, depending on how you like your pie to look for me personally. I like to just set all of these to zero. Go, so we’re completely flat again. And then I’m just going to rotate on this. So the top one here. This is the x-axi’s you can enter a value or you could just click and drag, so you’re looking for the red lines. We’ll drag this up and we’re just going to keep dragging like, so depending on the angle that you’d like for your pie. Now we can also go down to extrude depth. We can click in here and enter a different value and you can see, it makes your pie taller or we can just click and drag the slider, depending on how high you’d like to make it. Now you’ll also see we’ve got quite of banding on this pie. If we go down to these shading here, we have this at plastic shading. You can switch to diffuse. It looks very, very similar now. The reason we get the banding is we have the blend steps at 25 by default, so that is illustrator is trying to blend the darker areas in the lighter areas to kind of create this 3d effect, with only 25 steps. So you can get so much color in there and you get that banding, which doesn’t look great. So what we’re gonna do is we’re going to increase this by dragging this up. This will add more essentially more steps. More colors into that graduation from dark to light. And you can see there. The more increase this. Yes, it will be a little bit more demanding on your computer, but not by much. I don’t think in most cases, and you just get a much smoother gradient, so what we’re gonna do is what we’re actually not going to use plastic shading, but that’s just a nice little tip to know. If you want to go that route, you could just click. Okay there. You go, your pie charts done, but we’re gonna just make the colors look a little bit better, so let’s just select no shading click. OK, and you can see that we’ve actually lost all definition of our pie chart. We have no shading whatsoever. So what I’m gonna do is I’m actually gonna add my own color. So if I select this, it’s still grouped. Let’s just go up to object. First, we’ll expand the appearance, so the appearance of the paths actually match what we’re seeing on screen there. We go fantastic. If you want to check this, you can go into outline mode, which is command or control. Y on the keyboard there we go the paths match. What we’re actually seeing, so that’s good and next. I’m just going to select this and go to object Ungroup and just maybe ungroup this a few times just to be sure, and then I can pull all of this apart. Looks good to me now. I can do is start applying color to these individual pieces, so I’m just gonna hold shift and select these two segments, the colored ones and hold shift and use the down arrow key just to nudge these out the way. I’m gonna work on this one first, so I can just set this top piece now. Double, click the color picker, and I’ve got some colors here, so we’re going to get Fdd Zero Zero Zero click. OK, or press return there. We go a little bit brighter now. These ones here. These are gonna be darker, so I’ve gone with EC9 5:09 so that’s on the inside, so it’s gonna be a little bit darker and we’ll just select the ones on the outside F F/A b15 press return in there. We go still, we have some pie now. I can go and tweak this for sure. I could maybe double click on this. Bring that down a little bit, so there’s lots of different ways that you can tweak the colors, but you can see just by doing this and we haven’t even shaded this. This is still using solid color. It just in my opinion, looks a bit more appealing than using that original default 3d extrude effect with kind of black as the shadow coming through, we could go and add some shadow ourselves who wanted using the gradient tool. But I’m gonna keep this as solid colors for now, and I’ve got these two colors down here, so what I’m gonna do is I have this purple now to pick a slightly darker version or a lighter version, What I like to do is just move in a diagonal, so you can see I’m here to pick a slightly darker one. I would just go down and to the right a little bit. Click, OK, and then you get something That looks really nice and complements a lighter shade as well. This works in most cases. We could even go lighter, so just up into the left. Of course, that doesn’t really make sense in this example, because I want it to be darker, so it’s consistent between the two halves, but that’s how I like to pick colors. So if you’re going darker down and to the right lighter up and to the left and then what I can do. This looks like a bit of a cheese wedge. Actually, you can’t see this, but this actually looks like a block of cheese, so I’m gonna hold shift and use the arrow keys to nudge this back up and you could have these just kind of down a little bit if you wanted to kind of pull one piece of pie out and then label it and talk about that specifically, depending on what you’re using this for or if you just put it all the way back together and well, this is using single color as I mentioned. We could graduate this a little bit, so if I select the top part here of the pie, I’ll click the gradient tool and we can click freeform gradient and we get these three points up now if I just select one double-click the color picker and will enter a color for what was that FDD zero zero zero press return, and then I’m just going to double Click all of these FDD Zero Zero zero, so I’m just adding the same yellow color for all of them so again we have our solid color and then what I can do is actually just click on one of them. Double-click the color picker. And we can’t go up anymore, but we can go to the left a little bit like this click. OK, and you can see. It adds a very subtle highlight and we could actually go and accentuate that even more and then we can move this around in real time, so if you wanted to add shading whether it’s shadows highlights or like a light source onto your pie just to give it a bit more depth, something like this. Then that’s something that you can do depending on the type of pine that you’re trying to create, but there we go, That’s how to create better-looking pie charts, all in Adobe Illustrator Guys. I really hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If you have any questions or comments, you know what to do. Drop those down below, but as always like this video, if you enjoyed it, take care and. I’ll see you next time [Music]!