The Pathfinder

Quick reference

• 00:04 Now, the Shape Builder Tool is great, and it does what it sounds like.
• 00:07 It helps us to join or group shapes together, to unite them, and
• 00:11 make it easier to make selections.
• 00:13 But we also have another very handy tool in Illustrator called the Pathfinder Tool.
• 00:18 And this works in a similar way, although it allows us a few more options
• 00:22 that we don't get with just the Shape Builder Tool alone.
• 00:26 So in order to demonstrate this, I'm just gonna create two overlapping circles, and
• 00:30 I'm gonna create several copies of them.
• 00:34 I'm gonna maybe create eight copies of these circles.
• 00:38 Okay, and then in order to bring up the Pathfinder,
• 00:40 if you don't already have it in your panel to the right,
• 00:43 you can just come up to the Window Menu and choose Pathfinder towards the bottom.
• 00:47 And once you have it, if you do wanna keep it over in your panel,
• 00:50 is you can just drag it and drop it over here.
• 00:53 So once I open the Pathfinder, you'll notice that I have two columns.
• 00:57 The first is called Shape Modes and the second is called Pathfinders.
• 01:01 And I tend to think of them as one and the same really,
• 01:03 they're all kind of grouped together here, and they do similar things.
• 01:07 So let me just zoom in here for a second on this first grouping of circles here, so
• 01:12 that I can show you guys what this first option does.
• 01:15 The first option in the Pathfinder is called Unite.
• 01:18 And when I click on that, it's basically going to do the same thing that our
• 01:21 Shape Builder does, and unite or join any overlapping shapes together.
• 01:26 Now, the second option is called Minus Front.
• 01:30 And just as it sounds, if I click,
• 01:32 it's going to subtract one shape on top from the other shape underneath.
• 01:39 From there we have another option called Intersect, which is going to basically
• 01:43 only leave the area of the negative space created from your overlapping shapes.
• 01:49 And the opposite of that will be the last option,
• 01:52 which is called the Exclude option, and
• 01:54 that's going to exclude the area that is intersecting from your two shapes.
• 02:00 And if I come down here to the bottom, we can see what some of these other options
• 02:05 do, such as Divide, where this is actually going to just trim everything
• 02:10 apart as if we had cut through it with a knife.
• 02:13 So, if you remember earlier when we slice through something with a knife,
• 02:16 it allows to select individual pieces once we cut through.
• 02:20 And that's basically the same idea that is happening here whenever we use
• 02:23 the Divide option.
• 02:25 And once we do that, we can select these pieces, and we can change the colors of
• 02:29 them, we can move them around, pretty much anything that we want.
• 02:34 Okay, so moving along, we also have the Trim option, which is kind of gonna
• 02:38 do the same thing, except it's going to cut this piece out, right?
• 02:43 So it's just gonna trim it, so that now I can separate this piece
• 02:47 freely without having the piece in the middle, all right?
• 02:51 Next to the Trim option, we have Merge, which is very similar to the Unite option.
• 02:56 It's basically just going to merge any overlapping paths together, okay?
• 03:01 Next to Merge, we have the Crop option,
• 03:04 which is basically going to use the top shape similar to how you would use a mask.
• 03:09 And these icons can be helpful,
• 03:11 because they kind of indicate what it's going to do.
• 03:14 So you can see that the top square here is serving as a mask and
• 03:17 only revealing the shape that's inside, okay?
• 03:21 So that's how the Crop option works.
• 03:23 And then next to that we have Outline,
• 03:26 and this is just going to create outlines out of your whole shape.
• 03:30 And lastly, we have this option here called Minus Back,
• 03:33 which is the exact opposite of our Minus Front option.
• 03:37 So when I select that, whichever shape is in the back is actually going to be
• 03:40 subtracted from the shape in the front.
• 03:43 And if I zoom out a little bit, you'll see that it's actually created the exact
• 03:46 opposite shape from the Minus Front option that we used earlier on.
• 03:51 So this is the basic idea of the Pathfinder Tool and
• 03:53 how it works with basic shapes.
• 03:55 There's a lot you can do with it and it's a very versatile and
• 03:59 robust tool when working in Adobe Illustrator.
• 04:01 And one of the nice things about it is that if you were using this to create
• 04:05 text, for example, you could easily add on and
• 04:08 build onto a shape using the Pathfinder.
• 04:12 So let me just show you what I mean really quick.
• 04:14 I'm just gonna create some text, convert it to outlines, and
• 04:18 now I'll use my Pen Tool to just create a little extra shape here for the X.
• 04:24 So let's say I wanted to do something like this, and
• 04:26 I just wanted to add on to this letter.
• 04:29 Now I do have to make sure that it's converted to outlines first,
• 04:32 otherwise this won't work.
• 04:34 But once I do that, I can select all of this text, and I can come back to my
• 04:38 Pathfinder, and now I can choose one of these options like Unite.
• 04:43 And that's going to allow me to join those shapes together and combine them into one.
• 04:47 Now if instead, I wanted to do something a little bit different,
• 04:51 like maybe some subtract this from the X, well,
• 04:54 I could grab both of these shapes and then I could choose, Minus Back.
• 05:03 Or I could do Trim, and then just remove that piece of the shape there.
• 05:09 So you can see how handy this would be when you're trying to do things like
• 05:11 create custom type or a logo in Adobe Illustrator.
• 05:15 So I encourage you guys to experiment with the Pathfinder Tool, and to see what kinds
• 05:19 of things you can come up with on your own using a combination of text and
• 05:23 geometric shapes.

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