Transcript:
Hey, Ben Keyser. Here and today. I want to show you how to use the Pathfinder tool in order to get perfectly clean shapes either around your objects or putting negative space between objects. It’s a really quick tip, but it’s something that I struggle with for a long time and just didn’t take the time to figure out a better way to do it. So I’m gonna show you now how to find a better way to use the Pathfinder tool. If you’ve yet to subscribe to this channel, I highly recommend doing, so I put out daily videos, helping you level up your graphic design skills as well as creating media that packs a punch and builds an audience. Now if you like the content, give me a thumbs up if you don’t well, but I hope you like the content. We’re gonna head over my screen right now. Check it out! Welcome over to the screen where I will now be showing you the top tips and tricks using the Pathfinder tool in Illustrator, and we’re looking right now at the image that I created over that icon for the New Globe 180 retreat, but let’s get into the details. So what I want to show you to do is how to get this perfect spacing around your shapes in Illustrator. And how do you cut this off? And I did this wrong for quite a long time, but recently I thought I’m gonna share my tips and tricks and secrets on how to get their nice spacing on your objects. So let’s jump on over right now to illustrator, and let’s do this and as you see? I would add in a lot of the shapes here, just as I’m gonna show you the basic way, and you can expand on it from here, but what, anyway? I’m gonna show you is. We’re gonna start off with this shape here. What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna duplicate in this shape and I’m gonna do that by hitting option or Alt on Windows versus Mac. And then I’m gonna toggle over right and then back to left on my keyboard of interests ahead of this. We’re gonna hit option right arrow and theyll. Tong us over to the right. And then we’ll release the option and click back to the left and then below that’ll do is that’ll duplicate the shape. Now what I want to do is in my stroke panel. I want to add a to point stroke. That’s why I bet you put. Stroke hit enter and that passes the stroke. So now this will give us. We come up here and we turn this white. You’ll see this spacing that we’re gonna get around the shape. Now, remember. This is gonna be a little bit bigger. Then it’s gonna because the stroke adds on the both the inside of the outside, that’s just a side note gonna create our object expand and click enter all right now that it’s expanded, we’re gonna go to the Pathfinder tool and we’re gonna completely expand that entire shape so that where the shape is larger. So now we expand that shape now before we convert this shape. I’m gonna show you in the past. What, I always tried to finagle into doing and I’m quite embarrassed to say it, but I would come up here. I would click this point here. I’ll click this point here on this point here, and then I would go and I would delete this middle point. Now what that would do is it would attach the shape there from there. I would delete these extra shapes that I’ve created. I would change this to end all right then. I would kind of turn this infant haggle it into what I want. I wanted to be and it was in. It was an awful idea, but that’s what I did. Okay, so let’s come and see all that out and I’m gonna show you the correct way to do this now. How do you get this to trim out? One thing I want to note is after you do this. You will not be able to go back and edit your shape as you did before. So, for instance, if I wanna do something like that after I make this switch. I’m gonna convert this to a shape. I won’t be able to do that again. So what I always recommend doing is as you see here. I have multiple versions of my object. I duplicate my objects to make sure I have backups in case I mess up and think well. I really don’t like where that turned out. I want to revert, so that’s what I do. So what you do is youll. Come to your line and come up here to object, expand appearance and now it’s a shape now. We’ll click the shape that we created And I’m gonna create the outline well. Make sure that this shape is on top of the new shape we created we’ll hold shift and we’ll click. So both shapes are selected. Now we’ll come over to the Pathfinder Tool. Click – from front, and now we have a perfectly symmetrical shape, negative space surrounding the circle. Now before we move on, we’re going to ungroup this object and the reason we’re gonna ungroup this object is because if we try and do another clipping, it basically deletes the object, which is really weird. I I don’t know the ins and outs of that, but just trust me on this. It’s Pi. It’s needed to do and let me show you A quick example, so the creative’s quick Square select my object again and -, and it deletes this side and this, so you see that I I don’t know why it does, but that’s what it does, so we’re gonna command Z that out and just always make sure you uncut group or as you see, shift Control, G or command shift G on a Mac. So now that object is ungrouped, we’re gonna create a shape here like so a little bit of angle to it. Click down here. Reunite the shape. Get up to our selection tool again. Select these two shapes and – from front. And there you go, You’ve now created two symmetrical shapes and a really nice spacing and they’re very even across the board. Thanks for watching this tutorial today about how to use the Pathfinder tool again. If you have any questions or you want to see me, make other tutorials, please comment below. If you get to subscribe, I highly recommend doing so and don’t forget the Bell notifier. So you don’t miss out on any of the content again. I’m Benji Keyser of Benji Kaiser Comm and this was an episode from punch media [Music].