Sultan Yaqub: Easy iTunes Icon Tutorial

Make an Easy iTunes Icon Tutorial

An easy 5/10 minute tutorial to recreate the iTunes icon into vectors using Adobe Illustrator. Download it via box.net if you want to use it/work on it. There are lots of pictures so don’t figure to click them all or you might get lost and skip a step or two.

Lets serve 5/10 minutes :)

Start out by creating a simple box, preferably not exactly square. Color it anything so you can see it.

Go to Effect>Stylize>Round Corners and then a window should pop out. Write anything for “radius” but make sure the corners are very round. Here 53 for my radius has been used.

We recommend, having smart guides on for the next series of steps (Cmd+U). Now, hold option/alt and drag out a perfect circle and color it. Now click Shift+D to switch to the draw-behind mode. Now hold option and drag out another circle that is fairly bigger than the original. As you can see, you’ve drawn behind the original circle.

Select the two circles. Now click Shift+M to activate the Shape Builder tool. Hold option to make a minus appear and hover over the inside of the two circles and click the inner circle to cut out that part.

Now make the circular object have a white color. Now draw inside the empty space, a big music note.

Now draw several small white circles around the edges of the black rounded box.

Select all the white circles or use the magic wand to select all of them easily.MAKE SURE TO GROUP THEM AFTER YOU SELECT THEM OR NOTHING WILL HAPPEN. Now go to Effect>Blur>Radial Blur. A window should pop out. Make the amount 100, set the blur method to zoom, and set the quality to Good. If set to best, it will really slow down your program. Now add the same effect again to make the streak longer.

Click the black rounded box and go to Object>Expand. Copy the box and paste in front and click Shift+Cmd+] to send it to the very front. Make sure the box is selected and click “/” on your keyboard which will make it have no fill/no stroke whatever be the case. Now select the no fill box and click the steaks and right-click then choose Make Clipping Mask.

Draw an elongated ellipse that covers about half of the box. Switch to draw-behind mode and Cmd+F to paste in front the previous black box we had copied before. Make the black box into a blue box. Select the blue box and the ellipse and activate the Shape Builder (Shift+M). Delete the excess area, we only want the box shape. See the picture.

Select the red part and give it a nice gradient that goes from very light-pink to normal light-pink. Now select the bottom part and give it a gradient as well that goes from dark-pink to light-pink. Then send these boxes to the very back so click Shift+Cmd+[.

Make the music note and the circular object a group. You should know by now that groups are important. Now go to Effect>Stylize>Drop Shadow. A window should pop out. Leave the opacity to 75 but you can change it if you want. I set the X and Y offset to zero and left the blur on five.

Make sure the pink gradient segments are a group. Now go to Effect>Blur>Gaussian Blur. A window should pop out. Set the blur to about 15.

Paste in front the very same black box. Select the box and click “/” to make it have no fill. Guess what we’ll do now. You got it? Well, if you guessed a Clipping Mask then you following along nicely. So make sure to select the gradient group and the box(that is in the front) then right-click and choose Make Clipping Mask.

Select all of your vectors then switch to the draw behind mode and Cmd+F two times to paste in front(or same position) two black boxes. In the picture, they are made red so you can see there are two of them whose outlines intersect one another. Make the top box have a highlight-like gradient. make the bottom box have a shadow-like gradient.