Graphic Design Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Graphic Design professionals, students, and enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
me again. I'm having trouble with logo creation. As you can see in the following images, I'm using a couple of circles which intersect, but after trying to remove the intersections on the inner side of the circle, it gets distorted and new unnecessary anchor points get added. I'm just wondering for a workaround for this and maybe tips for a better workflow in general :)
.
Illustrator have a lot of nifty tools which makes it easy to quickly draw complicated shapes, but some of them tend to add a lot of unwanted anchor points which can't be removed easily.
I can't give you a recipe for "the best workflow". It's more about knowing a lot of trick and workarounds and learning when to use them.
If you expand a circle with a stroke, the outer path gets additional anchor points:
If you instead create two circles and use Minus Front in the Pathfinder panel, you get a cleaner result:
So if you create your circles like that you can use Pathfinder operations for example like this:
The three rings consist of two circles each, a black outer circle and a white inner circle.
First I select the two circles which makes up one of the large rings and click Minus Front in the Pathfinder panel to subtract the inner circle from the outer one. In other words, I use the inner circle to create a hole in the outer one.
I do the same with the other large ring.
Then I select the small outer ring and the two large rings I just created and click Unite in the Pathfinder panel to combine all the black parts.
Lastly I select this newly created black part and the inner circle of the small ring and click Minus Front in the Pathfinder panel. This way I subtract the inner circle of the small ring from the rest of the figure and that's it.
There are other ways to do this. The operations could be done in another order. This is just an example to get you started.
Shape Builder adds anchors whenever there's an underlying path intersection. Just how it works.
I DO see the distortion, although it's minor. The circle starts looking like a daisy with slightly bulged sections. Could be align to pixel grid - Just guessing. If you're working rather large the pixel grid alignment could cause these sort of subtle changes. Hard to say really.
Best way around both of these is to draw a new circle on top, remove that inner-extra-anchors-with-bulges-circle, and use Pathfinder to subtract your n circle from the shape. It'll be much cleaner.
Much of this is merely working around how sloppy shape builder can be. it's not meant to be a precision tool. If it were, it would remove redundant anchors, etc.
