Digital Tutors - Designing Futuristic Menus in Illustrator

In this series of tutorials we will follow a step by step process for creating futuristic menus in Illustrator.

We begin by watching a clip that the menus will eventually be composited into and get an idea for what kinds of motions the actor in the clip makes. This gives us an idea for the scale and the types of menus that we need to be creating for this setting.

This course teaches some time saving workflows for working quickly in Illustrator and building lots of varied shapes that can be used to build endless combinations of buttons and applications for our interface.

If you have some Illustrator knowledge, and you are ready to make a really fun project that will speed up your workflow and teach you some tips for readying your artwork for animation, then this course is for you.

By the end of this course, you will have your own set of futuristic menus as well as the tool set to make many more buttons that still look like a cohesive set.

Designing Futuristic Menus in Illustrator content:

1. Introduction and project overview

2. Getting a feel for the footage

3. Look development and creating a frame style for the phone

4. Building the folder shapes based on the phone frame

5. Constructing the photos dock

6. Using the align panel to make a bank of app icons

7. Making circle varieties with the stroke panel

8. Creating a straight ruler using blend shapes

9. Producing symmetrical dial shapes with duplication and rotation

10. Arranging numbers on a path to look like measurements

11. Building a fan shape

12. Easy line-graph creation

13. Constructing a radar

14. Building the count-up dial

15. Creating the news button

16. Making the maps button using a clipping mask

17. Building the clocks

18. Using existing shapes to create more buttons

19. Placing the elements into a useable grid

20. Continuing the interface layout

21. Splitting and naming individual layers