What’s up guys? Hope you’re doing great, today we want to show you a couple of tips that you’ve probably overlooked before with Illustrator strokes that can help you make some pretty awesome designs, the following screenshots were taken in Illustrator CS5 but we bet that these tricks can also be done in older versions of the program.

So for start we have a regular shape, on this case a circle. There’s nothing particular on it, we just grabbed the ellipse tool, choose a color and trace it.

The next thing you learn regarding strokes is changing their stroke, variable and definition, these are the tools that every designer masters when he begins the Illustrator experience, now let’s take a look at some more advanced features.

Go to the Window menu and activate the Stroke panel, this will grant you access to many great features and hence create even greater strokes.

As you can see, this panel gives plenty more options than the top toolbar that people use by default, let’s experiment with each one of them to see how they work:

With Cap you can change the way your vectors finish when they’re not closed figures, you can switch between straight caps or rounded caps.

When you have vector strokes with straight turns, you can use Corner to decide whether these corners will be sharpen or something a little more rounded.

These 3 circles are exactly the same size, but still they look different. What happens is that with Align Stroke you can define whether the stroke goes centered, on the inside or the outside.

Dashed line is one of the most awesome features of the Stroke panel, it lets you make sewn-like lines that can be customized in 3 different aspects. The two options that you see at the right side give you the chance of select whether the line conserves the same line length in each dashed line or if the caps are shorter than the rest. Regarding dash and gap, these two options will set the appearance of your dashed line, dash determines how long each line is going to be, while gap determines the space between every dashed line.

The level of customization that you can have with Illustrator is super. The final section of the Stroke panel gives you the chance of inserting custom arrowheads, which definitely can save you a lot of time, you can decide separately the style of the head and tail, the scale and if you want them to fit within the stroke length or go beyond it.

There are many great things that you can accomplish whilst experimenting with strokes on Illustrator, these tips that we have showed you, are just an entry for even nicer examples that are going to be showed on next posts, if you enjoyed this article, please leave us a comment or help us with a tweet, it will be really great to aid Mishes, hope you guys have a good day and we’ll see you on the next article.