Unable to draw logo with correct strokes and shadow

Question

I am trying to design a logo for my company. However I have tried for 12 hours now making the design below, but I have huge problems getting what I want.

I want the road to be crossing the other one like it was a bridge. It should not look like a intersection like it does now. Can someone give me instructions to how to manage to create a shape like this?

This is what I have.

Answer 1

I assume you're trying to do all this with a single stroke?? Things really depend upon how you currently have objects constructed.

In order to get the appearance of an "overlap" you need an overlap. So draw a section of road to cover the overall path:

Same stroke style applied to an additional path on top of the base path. You won't be able to create the appearance of an overlap, regarding the white stroke, with a single path and the Appearance Panel.

To deal with those hairline bits that appear on the ends due to anti-aliasing, you can add an Effect the the base black stroke. This is really just a drawing anti-aliasing artifact and won't be visible on export (Art Optimized) or in print. But if it bothers you or you are uncertain it really isn't an issue, you can tweak things to remove it.

Highlight the base stroke... Choose Effect > Distort & Transform > Transform from the menu. Enter a very small scale change in the top two fields of the Transform Options dialog window:

This will cause the black base stroke to be slightly larger than the underlying white stroke, and subsequently remove that hairline you may see.

Answer 2

Here's a little bit easier way to make this:

• Draw a perfect circle and add a nice thick stroke to it. This will be the base of the road

• Duplicate the circle, move it over. Group them and center them on the artboard, then ungroup them again

Result:

• Hit the A key to grab the Direct Selection Tool

• Drag a selection over the center of both circles and press the Del key:

• Hit the P key to grab the Pen Tool and make a path to connect the top of one semicircle to the bottom of the other:

• Hit the A key again, click on the part you just drew and press Ctrl+C and then Ctrl+F to copy that section of the path and paste it in front:

• With that piece selected, hit the O key to grab the Reflect tool, and while holding down the Alt key, click in the center to bring up the Reflect dialog, choose Horizontal (or Vertical in this case) and press 'OK':

So this is what we want to see at this point (colors changed for demonstration only):

• Before adding strokes to round out the appearance, select both paths and press Ctrl+8 to make a compound path

• Go into the Appearance Panel flyout menu (blue arrow below) and deselect 'New Art Has Basic Appearance':

Now add your new strokes as desired to make your road. When you get to the dashed yellow stroke change it to 'Projecting Cap' and also set it so Illustrator 'Aligns dashes to corners and path ends, adjusting lengths to fit'. This way all of your dashes will line up nicely...

Now we're at this point:

(This is the point you were already at but I had no idea how you got there... My method assumes that it was done my way from the start.

If you've done it the way I've shown here then all you have to do now is release the compound path (Object > Compound Path > Release) and you're done: