- In this movie I'll show you how to create
the classic dotted outline,
that is to say a dashed outline
that comprises round dots.
So assuming that you went ahead
and created that template a few chapters ago,
go up to the File menu and choose New from Template,
or you can press that shortcut of ctrl + shift + N,
or cmd + shift + N on a Mac.
In my case the template's called RGB with center guides,
and now I'll go ahead and click the New button
in order to bring up this blank document
with a couple of center guides.
Alright, now go ahead and select the Rectangle Tool
from the shape tool fly out menu,
again you have a keyboard shortcut of M for that tool,
and then I want you to position your cursor
at the intersection of the two guide lines,
press and hold the alt key, or the opt key on a Mac,
and click to bring up the Rectangle dialog box.
Now as you may recall the Width
of this artboard is 1008 points,
and the Height is 672 points,
so I'm just going to dial in those two values.
And then I'll click after the Width value
and enter -80,
and I'll do the same thing for the Height value.
And then after pressing the tab key
to let everything update, I'll click on the OK button
in order to create this new shape.
Next I want the fill to be transparent,
so I'll go ahead and click on this first swatch
up here in the control panel and change it to None.
And by the way, just in case you're ready for a tip here,
assuming that the fill is the active attribute,
which it is, you can see that here in the Swatches panel,
then you can set it to None
by just pressing what this thing looks like,
the / key.
And so I'll just go ahead and press the / key
and you can see now that we have None for the fill.
Alright, now I'm going to change the line weight
to 20 points.
And I'm going to change the color of that stroke
to a shade of orange, which is this guy right here,
R 247 G 147 B 30.
And that will give us this thick orange stroke.
Alright, now I'll press the escape key to hide that panel
and I'll click on the word Stroke
to bring up the Stroke panel.
And I'll select Dashed Line like so.
And I'll take the dash value up to
something like 20 points let's say,
and then I'll set the gap value to something very large
like 50 points.
In which case we'll end up with the separated squares
that you see here.
And the reason that they're absolutely square
is because the dash value matches the line weight value.
Now I can round off each and every one of these dashes
by changing the Cap from Butt Cap,
which as you know is the default setting,
to Round Cap.
And that will stroke every single one of these dashes
like it's a miniature path outline.
And so essentially at this point
we have a bunch of Tic Tacs,
or flattened cylinders if you will.
If you want to turn those into circles instead
then you go ahead and take the dash value
all the way down to 0 and then press the tab key.
And now we want to just change the gap value
to something bigger than the line weight.
Because if we change it to exactly the line weight
then these dots will end up running into each other.
To give them a little space go ahead
and set that gap value to 30.
And then make sure that this
second icon is selected right here,
otherwise if you click on the Preserve icon right there
then your dots will no longer align
to the corners of the rectangle.
Alright, so I'll go ahead and turn on that Align icon.
And then I'll press the escape key to hide the Stroke panel.
And then I'll press ctrl + shift + A,
or cmd + shift + A in order to deselect my artwork.
And that is how you create a classic dotted outline
here inside Illustrator.
In the next movie I'll show you
how to use a dotted outline
in order to create this very simple gear.