- In this movie, we're going to draw with rounded rectangles.
Specifically, we're going to create this iPhone 6,
along with it's case and then the phone inside of it's case.
It's a pretty simple project but it helps to demonstrate
the power of rounded shapes here inside Illustrator.
I'm going to start things off, as usual, by going up to
the 'File' menu and choosing 'New From Template',
or you can press that shortcut of Ctrl+Shift+N or
Command+Shift+N on the Mac and then I'll
double click on my template in order to create an
empty art board along with a couple of center guides.
I want to add two more vertical guides that exactly
divide up the left and right portions of the art board.
I'll go ahead and click on the 'Guides' layer to
make it active and then I'll press Ctrl+R or Command+R
on a Mac to bring up the rulers.
For this project we're going to switch to inches.
You can change the units on a document by document
basis just by right clicking on either ruler and then
choosing the desired unit of measure, which, in our case,
is inches.
Now I'll drag a vertical guide from the left hand ruler,
I'm going to press the shift key so that I'm snapping into
alignment with those tick marks.
Then I'll drop that guide at three and a half inches,
you can tell it's at three and a half because it's midway
between the three and the four in the horizontal ruler
at the top of the screen.
Now I'll drag another guide from that left hand ruler,
while pressing the shift key, and I'll drop it at
10 and a half inches, which, of course is midway
between the 10 and the 11 on that horizontal ruler.
Now that I'm done with the ruler I'll press Ctrl+R or
Command+R on a Mac in order to hide it.
Now I'll go ahead and click on the 'Drawing' layer
to make it active and I'll select my rectangle tool
from the 'Shape Tool' fly out menu and remember that
you can also get this tool by pressing the M key.
Now I'll go ahead and hover my cursor over the intersection
between these two guides right here and I'll press the
'Alt' key or the 'Option' key on a Mac and click in order to
bring up the rectangle dialog box.
Make sure that the link is turned off and then you want to
dial in 2.64 for the width value
and 5.44for the height value.
The reason I know these values is because they're posted
on Apples website.
I'll go ahead and click 'OK' and because I Alt clicked it
or Option clicked on the Mac, I've created a rectangle
that's centered on those guides.
The thing that isn't posted on Apple's site is how round
the corners are.
I basically had to measure that using a ruler.
As I was telling you, a round corner is essentially
an arc of specific dimensions.
If the arc is a half inch tall then we would need
a half inch radius for our rounded corner.
It's pretty much that simple.
As it turns out the round corner for an iPhone
isn't quite a half an inch, it's more like 0.4.
I went ahead and pressed the A key to switch to the
white arrow tool and that allows me access to the
corners option up here in the control panel,
which allows me to change that corner numerically
to 0.4 inches, like so.
Now I'm going to go ahead and zoom in on the iPhone here
by Ctrl+Spacebar clicking, that's a Command+Spacebar click
on the Mac.
Let's go ahead and assign a few fill and stroke attributes.
I'll first change the fill by clicking on the first swatch,
up here in the control panel and clicking on black.
Then I'll increase the line weight value to two points
and I'll change the color of that stroke by clicking on
a second color swatch and changing it to a medium grey
in which all the RGB values are 128.
Now I want to add a little bit of a gradient to this stroke.
I'll go up to the 'Window' menu and choose the
'Appearance' command in order to switch over to the
' Appearance' panel and I'll click on the
'Add New Stroke' icon down here in the
lower left corner of the panel.
I'll change that new stroke, right there, the one on top
to this white/black gradient, which is one of the
default swatches that are included along with a
basic RGB document.
This gradient happens to be going at the wrong direction
notice that it's going from right to left?
I want it to go from up to down and to make that happen
you want to go to the 'Window' menu and choose the
'Gradient' command.
That brings up the gradient panel as we're seeing
right here.
Next I'll go ahead and click on this double arrow icon
a couple of times to expand the panel so that I can see
this angle value.
I'm going to change that angle to 90 degrees
and press the 'Enter' key or the 'Return' key on a Mac
and you can now see that the gradient goes from black
at the top to white at the bottom.
I still want to be able to see the grey stroke
in the background.
I'll drop down to the 'Appearance' panel,
click on the word 'Opacity' that's part of
the top stroke right there and then I'll change that
opacity value to 50%.
That gives us a 50/50 mix of the gradient
and the grey stroke behind it.
Finally, I want to set this shape off from it's
white background by giving it a drop shadow.
I can do that by going up to the 'Effect' menu,
choosing 'Stylize' and then choosing 'Drop Shadow'.
These are the values I came up with,
an opacity of 75%, the color set to black,
we have an X offset of 0 inches
so the shadows going straight down,
the Y offset is 0.1 inch and then we've got
a blur value of 0.1 inch as well and we can see
what that looks like by turning on a preview checkbox
only we're not seeing anything and that's because I've
made a tiny mistake here.
I'm going to go ahead and click 'OK' however.
The problem is that I had the stroke selected,
so I just applied the drop shadow to the stroke
instead of the entire path.
You can remedy this situation by first, in my case,
reducing the size of the gradient panel so I have
a little more room to work, and then go ahead and click
on that drop shadow to select it, and drag it all the way
to the bottom of the stack, underneath the fill and
directly above that opacity value,
to this point right there.
That will go ahead and assign the drop shadow to the
entire path outline as we're seeing here.
At which point you can go ahead and click off the shape
to deselect it.
That's at least one way to draw with a rounded rectangle.
In the next movie we'll add the screen as well as
the other elements of an iPhone.