Creating a Gear Icon in Illustrator: Step-by-Step Tutorial

In this video, we'll be working on our gear icon. So, let’s start by looking at our PDF to view our gear icon.

As we can see, we have a circle in the middle, and on the outside, we have what appears to be a circle with multiple rectangles coming out of it, as well as some rounded inside corners. Let’s now begin.

We’ll go into Illustrator and shift our perspective, this time using the Hand Tool, shortcut H on the keyboard.

We’ll drag our perspective to the next artboard. Next, let’s get started by creating the outside circle. To do this, we’ll use V on the keyboard, and we’ll create our gear icon using the Ellipse Tool.

For this, we’ll click and drag a circle, about this size. Next, let’s create the rectangles for our gears. To do this, let’s use the Rectangle Tool. Go back to our toolbar and select the Rectangle Tool.

To create these, let’s roughly create each of the gear edges to be about this wide. Using the Selection Tool (V shortcut on the keyboard), we’ll click and drag this so that it intersects with our circle when we see the center alignment.

This means it’s evenly spaced within our circle, and we have our first edges on the top and bottom.

To recreate this three additional times, let’s hit CTRL + C on the keyboard. To paste this, we can hit CTRL + V; however, it doesn’t paste it exactly evenly.

So, let’s hit CTRL + Z to undo this, and instead of just CTRL + V, let’s hit CTRL + Shift + V to paste an additional rectangle in the same spot.

We automatically have this rectangle selected, so we’ll simply rotate it by going to one of the edges until we see the rotate cursor, then click and drag it to 270 or 90 degrees.

We’ll then release, and now we need to create two more.

Rather than doing this two more times, let’s hold Shift to select both rectangles at once, then hit CTRL + C to copy and CTRL + Shift + V to paste in place.

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We’ll then rotate both of these rectangles by looking for the rotation icon on the top-right corner, and we’ll click while holding Shift until we’ve rotated to the right.

While this looks complicated in the middle, understand that we have our spokes on the edges.

The only thing we need to do now is transform each of these into one shape.

To do this, we’ll use our Shape Builder Tool, but first, we’ll want to drag a selection box over all of the shapes.

We’ll then go to our Shape Builder Tool, and we’ll drag across each of these shapes, making sure we’ve combined them all into one shape, then release.

I missed this one, this one, and this one, and we now have the outside of our gear.

Let’s use the Selection Tool now to resize it so that it fits within our artboard. Remember to hold Shift so that we rescale proportionally.

Next, let’s round out the inside edges.

To do this, we’re going to use our Direct Selection Tool, shortcut A on the keyboard.

Additionally, we can round out these corners by using what are called live corners.

As we’ll see, if we select just one anchor by clicking on it, we can use live corners to adjust how round our corner is.

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However, instead of adjusting each anchor point individually, we can select only the inside anchor points and adjust those all at once.

To do this, we’ll use a new tool called the Lasso Tool. This is grouped with the Direct Selection Tool, so we’ll click and hold to select the Lasso Tool.

The Lasso Tool allows us to add a selection of just the anchor points inside our lasso.

We’re now going to draw a lasso by clicking and holding around the inside anchor points, leaving out the outside anchor points.

When we’ve completed it, we’ll see that only the inside anchor points are red, indicating that they’re selected.

We’ll then go back to our Direct Selection Tool by clicking and holding it.

Finally, we’ll round out these corners until they look more gear-appropriate.

We’ll then hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect, and we have the outside of our gear.

We’ll hit CTRL + S on the keyboard to save our work, and in the next video, we’ll be completing our gear.

See you there!