- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you
how to create and rename symbols.
And so, if you have access to my Exercise Files,
I've got some really good ones for you that provide you with
what I consider to be, some valuable assets.
And this is one of them.
Basically, what we're looking at is a bunch of custom shapes
that are available to you, not inside Illustrator,
but rather inside Photoshop.
And so, in other words, Illustrator doesn't really provide
you with an auto drawing tool, whereas Photoshop does.
And so, if you were to go to the Window menu
and choose the Symbols command,
in order to bring up that Symbols panel,
notice if I expand the panel, that we've got tons
and tons of custom shapes available to us,
all of which I brought over from Photoshop.
And, let me show you what that looks like.
Just in case you want to create your own such file.
I'll switch over to Photoshop here.
And then I'll drop down to the Shape Tool,
which by default is going to be the Rectangle Tool.
And then I'll click and hold and select
the Custom Shape Tool from the fly-out menu.
And now you can go up here to the horizontal options bar
and click right there in order to select a custom shape,
which by default is this guy right here, Blob 1.
But let's say I'm looking for something
a little more jazzy, such as Fleur-De-Lis.
So, I'll go ahead and select it.
And then all you have to do is drag here in the image window
in order to draw a Fleur-De-Lis.
So, the great thing here is that somebody's gone ahead
and done the work for us.
So, we don't have to meticulously draw
all those anchor points and control handles.
Now, if you don't want the shape to be tall and skinny
or short and squat, then go ahead and press the Shift key
in order to constrain it's proportions.
And, I'll make it about this big,
let's say, and then release.
And we end up with a new vector-based shape layer.
So, this is a layer inside Photoshop that's made up of
anchor points and control handles, just as in Illustrator.
Now, it's pretty cool that
these shapes are available to you.
It would be actually kind of lame
if this were all of them, but it's not.
And, so if you want access to all the shapes
that ship with Photoshop, then click on this gear icon
right there and choose All.
And that is going to include the shapes that we've already got.
So, don't append, cause then you'd end up
with a bunch of repetitions.
Instead, just click OK, and you will now see
this huge list of custom shapes.
At which point, I'll go ahead and grab, let's say Crown 2,
and then I'll press the Escape key
to hide this pop-up panel.
And I'll just go ahead and draw a crown.
Well, again pressing the Shift key,
in order to constrain its proportions.
Alright, now let's say you want to
take these guys over to Illustrator.
Well, the first thing you need to do is
put both of the shapes on the same shape layer,
so that you can copy them together.
And notice right now that's not the case.
So, what you need to do is press CTRL + X, or
Command + X on the Mac, in order to cut those path outlines.
And then, with the Shape 1 layer active,
press CTRL + V, or Command + V on the Mac, to paste them.
And now notice, both of these custom shapes
appear on the same Shape Layer.
Alright, now what you need to do
just to ensure that everything's going to work properly
is press CTRL + K or Command + K on the Mac,
to bring up the Preferences dialogue box,
same keyboard shortcut you have in Illustrator.
And then notice this checkbox right here, Export Clipboard.
Normally, I recommend people turn it off because
otherwise you run the risk of copying huge images
inside Photoshop, and then when you switch to a different
application, Photoshop has to hand off that huge image to
the operating system, which is a process that usually fails.
But in our case, we need to have the checkbox on,
as by default incidentally,
so just make sure it's on, then click OK.
And now, I'll switch to the black arrow tool,
which Photoshop calls the Path Selection Tool,
but it's got a keyboard shortcut of A for arrow.
And then go ahead and marquis these two shapes
to select them, and then press CTRL + C,
or Command + C on the Mac, in order to copy them.
Now, let's switch back to Illustrator and press CTRL + V,
or Command + V on the Mac, in order to paste those shapes.
At which point, you'll get this alert message asking you
if you want to paste them as a compound shape,
which is great when you have really super complex artwork.
But, in our case, compound path is going to work,
not faster really, just better.
And the reason it's better is because
these are fairly simple shapes.
They do have holes in them,
but they don't have any complex pathfinder stuff going on.
Alright, so I'll go ahead
and select that option and click OK.
And we end up with these two paths right here.
Now, it may alarm you that they're neither filled
nor stroked, but that's not really a problem.
The real problem is that they're grouped together.
Illustrator just loves to group things.
We can see that this is the case, because of the word Group
on the far left side of the Control Panel.
So, the first thing you need to do is
go to the Object menu and choose Ungroup,
or you can press CTRL + Shift + G,
or Command + Shift + G on the Mac,
at which point we'll see compound path,
because both of these guys are in fact now compound paths.
And so, I'm going to give them a fill by clicking on
this first color swatch and selecting this shade of red,
just to make them stand out.
Now this guy does need to be a compound path, incidentally,
because he's got a bunch of holes, you can see that.
And this guy doesn't.
He doesn't have anything going on, so if you wanted to,
you don't have to, but you could go up to the Object Menu,
choose Compound Path and choose Release,
so that he's just a standard path outline.
Alright, now you would presumably
turn these guys into symbols.
The thing is I've already saved both of these shapes
as symbols in advance here.
And so, you can see if I scroll down a little ways,
there's Crown 2, so the king's crown,
and there's the Fleur-De-Lis.
However, I haven't got around to
saving these tiny paths right here,
which are located more or less in the center of the artwork.
And so, to see what those look like,
I'll deselect my artwork and then zoom in on them.
And you may wonder why they're so tiny.
Well, that's because all of the original symbol definitions
in this particular piece of artwork are very small.
And so, I want to match them.
Alright, so I'm going to scroll down the Symbols Panel,
and maybe make it a little taller,
until I can see that italic I that represents Information.
Alright, so let's say I want to put these paths
right next door to the info icon, for the simple reason
that that's the way things are organized inside Photoshop.
In that case, I would go ahead
and select the paths, like so.
And notice that they're organized
into a single compound path.
And then I would drag them and drop them
to this location right there.
And that's going to bring up the Symbol Options dialogue box.
Now, the first thing you want to do, of course,
is name your symbol.
So, I'll go ahead and call mine Campfire.
And then I'll briefly run through what's going on here.
Export Type is set to Movie Clip, by default.
That's an old Flash thing.
And what that does is it just goes ahead
and gives the symbol a time code.
If you're working exclusively inside Illustrator,
then it absolutely doesn't matter what you set this to,
which is a great reason to ignore it.
Then we have Symbol Type, which can be Dynamic or Static.
That's a relatively new thing inside Illustrator CC.
I'm going to be explaining exactly what's going on here,
in a future movie.
But for now, just set it to Static.
Then you can set a center point,
which is going to be your default transformation origin.
We might as well leave it set to Center,
because you can always override it later.
And then we have 9-Slice Scaling,
which again I'm going to be dealing with in a future movie.
And, so for now the only change you have to make
is to select Static Symbol and click OK.
And now notice that we have a new campfire symbol
right next door to Information.
Now, let's say, instead of putting a symbol
at a specific location here inside the panel,
and you can move these around by the way.
You can drag them to different locations if you want.
I don't want to do that though, so I'm going to put them back.
Let's say you just want to add a symbol
to the end of the list.
In that case, just go ahead and select the item,
which is this guy right here.
And then you can click on the little page icon
at the bottom of the Symbols panel
to once again bring up that dialogue box.
I'm going to call this guy World Wide Web,
set it to a Static Symbol and click OK.
And we end up with this new World Wide Web symbol
at the bottom of the list.
Also worth noting, both of these guys
have now been converted to Instances.
Notice we're no longer seeing
the anchor points and control handles.
Instead, we're just seeing a rectangular bounding box.
Alright, now there's just one more thing here.
Notice this star that's just above the Information symbol.
It doesn't have a name.
So, next door we have Boom 1 and Boom 2.
And then we've got New Symbol 164.
If you want to rename a symbol, don't double click on it
because that's going to take you into the symbol edit mode,
as we saw in the previous movie.
Instead, click on it to select it,
and then drop down to this little dialogue box icon
at the bottom of the panel and click on it.
And that will once again bring up
the Symbol Options dialogue box.
At which point, I'll just go ahead and name this guy
Sculpted Star, let's say, and then I'll click OK.
And notice now, if I hover over that symbol,
that I have indeed renamed it.
And that is how you create new symbols,
as well as rename existing symbols here inside Illustrator.