How to Illustrate a Professional Looking Apple iPad

How to Illustrate a Professional Looking Apple iPad

Nabeel Khalid on Apr 21st 2010 with 26 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Program: Adobe Illustrator CS3
  • Difficulty: Beginner
  • Estimated Completion Time: 40 min
Download Source Files

Final Product What You'll Be Creating

In this tutorial we will learn how to make a realistic looking illustration of an Apple iPad using the Rounded Corner Rectangle, Gradient Mesh and Gradient Tool. Don’t let the professional finish fool you; this tutorial is perfect for beginners and experts alike.

Step 1

First Create a new A4 portrait document. (Command + N)

Step 2

Select the rounded rectangle tool and make a square 360 pt x 450 pt, by clicking once and entering the measurements.

Step 3

Select the rounded rectangle tool and go to Effects > Stylize > Inner Glow. Then Select normal and the color black or #000000 and opacity 65. The blur is 3.

Step 4

Make a rounded corner rectangle but place it at the bottom and select with the direction tool or hit ‘A’ on the keyboard and making sure it’s the white mouse icon, then cut off the top by hitting the delete key. Color it black(#000000). Join together, should look like this.

Step 5

Select the black highlight and go to Effect > Blur > Gaussian blur. Set Blur to 1.5 pixels.

Step 6

Then go to the top right hand corner of our rounded rectangle tool and make a blackhigh light repeating the same process as before.

Step 7

Duplicate the highlight and position it in the left-hand corner. Select the left-hand highlight and reflect it. Select the both and add the same blur as before.

Step 8

Create a rounded rectangle with these dimensions – w 355 pt and 445 pt – then make another square with these dimensions – w 350 pt and h 440. Add a black to white gradient, keep it linear and make the white only show at the top edge.

Step 9

Scroll down to the bottom of your iPad and make a circle in the middle with the size of 21×21.. Change the stroke size to 0.25 and add a Gradient of #58595C to #000000. Keep it linear.

Step 10

Select the rounded corners tool and click on the top left side of the circle and change the height and width to 6 and the corner radius to 1. Opacity is set at 44.

Step 11

To make the screen. Select the square tool and click, make the height 360 and in the width 270. Make it plain black and add a stroke of 0.5 with the color of this #3F3F3F.

Step 12

To make the buttons. Get the rounded corner tool and make a small rectangle at the top with the width of 20 pt and the height of 1.5 pt and the corners set to 1. Add no stroke but add the same fill.

Step 13

To make the volume buttons. Make a small button on the side of the iPad by selecting the rounded rectangle tool with the width of 1.5 pt and the height of 5 pt. The add a black to white gradient and keep it linear but make the white only show at the top edge, and no stroke.

Step 14

Finally select the rounded corner tool and click below the button and change the height to 37 pt and the width to 1 pt, click and make an anchor point in the middle of the right hand side. Press the left key. the style for this is the same as the style for the other buttons. No stroke but add a black to white gradient and keep it linear, make the white only show at the top edge.

Step 15

The following steps will create the back of the iPad. Select the rounded corners by holding down on the square icon. and click. The type this in : W – 360pt H – 450pt Corner – 24pt.

Step 16

To insert a mesh select the rounded rectangle and the go to Object > Create Gradient Mesh. 4 column by 4 rows. Adjust the mesh to match the example below.

Step 17

Add color to all sides except the top. Select the left,right and bottom sides and set the color.

Step 18

Set the 9 middle points to #E1E1E1.

Step 19

To make the logo. Get the text tool and set the size to 84 pt, hold Alt + Shift K with the font Helvetica. The select the text and go to Object > Expand. The stoke is 0.25 pt and the color is #3F3F3F. Apply a soft off white to black gradient to the logo.

Step 20

To make the buttons. The on/off button is the same gradient as the logo. Its a Rounded Cornered Square with no stroke.

Step 21

To make the volume button. Make a Rounded Cornered Square the same width as the button above, then add an anchor point in the middle of the Rounded Cornered Square and drag it inwards. Finally add the same style gradient as the logo and the buttons.

Step 22

To make the small text. The iPad text is black 15 pt Myriad Pro. Position it below the logo.

Step 23

To make the box with text. Make a box with rounded corners, 1 pt round and 12pt wide with a hight of 7 pt. The color for the stroke is #515151.

Step 24

To make the text. The text inside the rounded square is Verdana and the size 3.7 pt, the color is #515151.

Conclusion

For an extra professional finish you can add drop reflections in either Illustrator or Photoshop. I hope you enjoyed this tut.

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By Nabeel Khalid

Rollover to read this author's bio or click through to see a full list of posts by this author.

Hi I'm Nabeel, I'm 14 years old and i love to draw. I found out about vector at school and since then I haven't stopped making awesome vectors. I've recently stared a web site called icontut.com  

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Discussion 26 Comments

  1. Magnus says:
    April 21, 2010 at 8:50 am

    Cool, but you never applied the correct font to the “iPad” text. It is still Verdana. :-)

    Reply
  2. hal says:
    April 21, 2010 at 8:53 am

    Some of the wording in this tut is a little rough / vague could really do with some editing. That being said great final product and anyone with some illustrator experience should be able to tackle it despite the language.

    Reply
  3. Joy says:
    April 21, 2010 at 8:59 am

    Super cool!

    Reply
  4. Aravind says:
    April 21, 2010 at 10:37 am

    It’s nice works…..

    thanks,

    Reply
  5. Erebus says:
    April 21, 2010 at 10:40 am

    hi,

    thanks, the outcome really looks great…
    but I don’t seem to be able to follow step 4… :S

    Reply
  6. Elektric says:
    April 21, 2010 at 10:48 am

    Looks amazing, thanks for sharing.
    A question though. In ‘step 19′ you make the apple symbol with a key board shortcut.
    I am on a pc. How do I get the apple symbol?

    Reply
  7. Lena Tailor | DT says:
    April 21, 2010 at 11:07 am

    Great Job. Really Out standing outcome…

    Reply
  8. Ben says:
    April 22, 2010 at 9:48 am

    Cool ! Very nice outcome !
    Thanks for sharing.

    Reply
  9. Steven David says:
    April 22, 2010 at 11:21 am

    In the moment im viewing this page with an iPad and I can only see the first picture!?!
    One of the reasons for buying this iPad was to read tutorials and blog articles . And now i cant read tutorials on ma favourite website for tutorials :(
    Please guys fix it :)
    best regards

    Reply
  10. Leo Aslan says:
    April 23, 2010 at 3:08 am

    nice tutorial,
    But i prefer non-apple-products and creative drawing tutorial
    There are loads of the apple-product drawing, but there is no point to have more

    Reply
  11. Amstram says:
    April 23, 2010 at 1:07 pm

    Hello,

    This looks nice.
    I’m a beginner so i really didn’t understand what to do in Step 4
    I just skipped it

    Can someone explain with more details, please ?

    Thanks

    Reply
    • icontut says:
      April 24, 2010 at 9:23 am

      Certainly what he means is make a rectangle with rounded corners like in the picture in step four but then
      using the direct selection tool (the white arrow) delete the top half of the rectangle. You can do this by just selecting the points you dont need and press delete. Then finally just colour what is now left (the stroke) black or #000000.

      I hope this helped : )

      Reply
    • chris says:
      April 24, 2010 at 2:14 pm

      I had some significant trouble with this as well. The end product looks really good! And, for that, the young author is certainly to be commended. (I really like the way in which the few initial blurs quite effectively simulate a reflective metal texture.) But, I could make neither hide nor hair of step #4, either.

      At that point, I ended up duplicating the initial rounded rectangle twice (in front), bumping up (along Y) the 3rd instance a bit, selecting the 2nd and 3rd instances, and (if memory serves) intersecting the shapes with Pathfinder. Then, I scaled the resultant shape down a bit in both X and Y and played around with the blur, and fill, until I got something similar to the images in the tutorial. Then, I mirrored that shape along the horizontal axis, moved it to the top, and used the eraser to get rid of the middle portion. Not at all elegant, but, through trial and error, I got something similar.

      In fact, for me, obtaining the results in this tutorial’s images was actually a tutorial in and of itself: How do I get my image to look like his when I have absolutely no idea what he’s actually doing?

      I had to make significant modifications to the size of the rounded rectangles, the size of the rounded corners, etc., just to come close. At some points, the explanatory text and the provided images of particular settings do not match, and are actually opposite.

      Further, I would note that the shading of the final vector one ends up with by following the tutorial (check out the shading of the main front body at Step 11, which isn’t later modified in the tutorial) doesn’t at all match the final shading of the main front body in the provided concluding image (the provided image is much darker).

      Young Mr. Khalid is very talented and inventive, and I trust he will go far. There’s no question about that. But, this tutorial was, at least for me, just impossible to follow as written. Perhaps that’s more a testament to my lack of skill than it is to the quality of this tutorial.

      Vectortuts is probably the major draw for me to go Premium (I’m a Photoshop guy, and need to improve my AI skill set), but this tut makes me question whether or not an editor actually completed the tutorial prior to approving it for publication.

      For Nabeel: please do continue submitting tuts. But, also, please be a little more fulsome and accurate in your presentation in future.

      Best.

      Reply
      • Alex says:
        May 11, 2010 at 5:57 pm

        I believe I figured out what the author did in Step 4. Basically he closed the loose ends with the join, added two new anchors with the pen tool and then moved them down… I just hacked together a small step by step description with images which you can find here: http://www.athenstean.com/site/Developer_Blog/Entries/2010/5/11_Illustrator_Path_Tool.html

        Hmm… hope this will be useful to someone, figuring it out and writing it done took so much time I actually had no chance to get to Step 5 yet…

        Alex

        P.S.: By the way, Step 3 looks like much more than 3 Pixel blur. At least when I do 3pt it looks much less than what’s shown in the image…

  12. designfollow says:
    April 25, 2010 at 8:16 pm

    great tutorials

    thank you very much.

    Reply
  13. Jos says:
    May 14, 2010 at 9:32 pm

    “Create a rounded rectangle with these dimensions – w 355 pt and 445 pt – then make another square with these dimensions – w 350 pt and h 440. Add a black to white gradient, keep it linear and make the white only show at the top edge.”

    I am lost in step 8 I created square with the specific dimensions and I tried to do gradient but I am not sure about adding black to white gradient – could anyone please explain how to do white gradient and add black?

    Thank you for the help.

    Reply
  14. Benjamin Welch says:
    May 20, 2010 at 11:17 pm

    This tutorial is confusing and seems to be lacking some key info. Of course, I could just be insane. Judging from the comments above, I’m not the only one.

    Reply
  15. chinmoy roy says:
    May 26, 2010 at 2:30 pm

    we want more detail tutirial. sometime its very complex but we make it simply.

    Reply
  16. Narender says:
    October 18, 2010 at 8:11 am

    nice tutorial,

    Thanks

    Reply
  17. Rob says:
    November 1, 2010 at 2:20 pm

    I was also unable to make any sense of step 4.

    Reply
  18. Bashierah Arnold says:
    December 15, 2010 at 2:38 am

    Thank you so much. Tutorials like this make learning so much easier and fun *_*

    Reply
  19. Roy says:
    December 17, 2011 at 10:13 pm

    For everyone working on a PC needing to find the Apple logo, there is a font called Mac Dings and its available from dafont.com.
    The little Apple logo is lowercase “a” using the Mac Dings.
    Note: having set the font logo, you should convert it to outlines (Shift-Ctrl-O) so it will display correctly on any machine.

    Reply

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