Knowing I could make color choices after building the basic artwork, I dove into Illustrator’s drawing tools.īeginning with the Rounded Rectangle tool, I drew a rectangle as the body of a camera. A design that combined a camera with a mountain came to mind. I wanted an icon for the page banner that visualized landscape photography. Once a tool or feature like symbols prove valuable in my typical workflow, I’m not often motivated to explore its full potential.įast-forward to my recent task of creating a landscape photography portfolio site. I’d become a creature of habit when it comes to Illustrator. The design of a symbol for a fire station or a shopping mall doesn’t vary-it’s simply repeated across the map as geography requires. Each symbol I create for a map is uniform. The panel presents tools for editing, naming, adding and removing transformations, as well as storing new or revised symbols. On some projects, I feel like I live in Illustrator’s Graphic Symbols panel. Over the years as a mapmaker, I’ve built many icons and symbols. In the process of trying to experiment with color variations for an icon I’d created for an Adobe Portfolio website, I discovered an Illustrator feature I had been ignoring: Dynamic Symbols. You can find Steven’s artwork at and see his bio below. In this post, Steven Gordon expands on a gallery he wrote as a member of the WOW! team for The Adobe Illustrator WOW! Book for CS6 and CC, 2nd Edition, published by Peachpit Press.

Creating symbols in illustrator