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How to Make a Pie Chart Line Graph & Bar Graph in Adobe Illustrator CC

Hey there in this video, we're gonna make charts and graphs and pie charts and things will even make them three D. Like this guy down the bottom here. Alright, let's go and do that now in adobe illustrator. Alright, so I've just started with a blank document. Next we want to go and find the tool you want. It is this tool here? Okay, so Hover down yours might look slightly different depending on which one was last used. We're gonna use the column graph tool even though I consider that a bar chart apparently Barschak goes or bar graph goes left to right. I'm gonna use this one. Now when I create my graph, you really need to decide how big you want it surprisingly hard to resize afterwards. I'm going to click hold and drag out kind of rough size for my graph, you can resize it but it's easier to do it here and what we want to do now, what you're meant to do is you need to click this option, import data and all data and from your exercise files, pick charts, bar, click open and it freaks o...

ut. Okay, so basically it has to be such specifically formatted data that is pretty much useless. So the easy way it's not useless but it is, it's quite specific. So open it up in something like excel or google sheets or whatever, you have access to what's the default for Mac. Remember anyway, I'm gonna copy and paste the data. I need not be very specific about what you copy. I'm gonna copy this, excluding the title because I'm gonna add that afterwards. It's not it's not super clever like XLs gonna copy it and I'm going to go to illustrator and in this first field here and paste it, I'm gonna take this tick box that little tick kind of says go and look at it again and it's pretty good. Huh? Now there's a couple of things you're gonna want to do. One is let's say I click on this and I accidentally, not accidentally, I close that because I'm finished with that. It's called the data panel. Now I want to go and adjust this. Okay, so let's say I want to change the fonts and grab my, it's nice to work with the direct selection tool. Try not to um group it because at the moment it's a dynamic chart that I can adjust afterwards. But if ayan group it, it kind of turns into shapes and pieces. So actually I'm just gonna select. Actually what I'll do is black arrow, select the whole thing and you can see over here my character panel. I'm just gonna pick museo. So this is where you add your um I guess your niceness, niceness and not all the word I want but you know um sex it up a little bit. Another nice word word that I didn't want. Anyway, I'm gonna go through and I'm using the white arrow. The direct selection tool is really handy for just going through going, I want you want you okay, thank you them all please hold. Alright grab this last one awesome. So yeah we've customized it a little bit now let's say we want to change it. Okay as in some of the maybe it's the sales report. So next month it's a little different now to update it. What we wanna do is whether it's selected on the new version of illustrator, you can just hit graph data and it pops back up. You can go and either copy and paste it and replace it or whatever you want to do. Let's say That things change and it's no longer 150 it's 110 things going bad for brewery click on the little tick and it's adjusted. Another thing you might do is you might adjust. Well that's on the new version, I'll just quickly explain for people in an older version, you go into object graph and data brings back the same thing data. Um Let's say we want to change the chart. Okay so in that option over here in the properties, go to graph type, we just go through and say there's all these options along here. I'm gonna pick a pie chart actually. Let's look at lunch nope let's do that. Let's click. Okay now the weird thing about pie charts is that you need to have the data in the right kind of format so I'm gonna go to graph data and basically what we need to do is this here we transpose Rohan height. It wants to see the the information kind of going that way. Watch this then click tick and life is good again except all my colors are gone which I couldn't live with so I've gone and colored it. Um so there are a couple of things you can also do now is with the white arrow we can select on this and like what we're trying not to do is breaking that link between it being like an active graph or so we can update it and change it easily. So I'm gonna grab my white arrow and we can do cool stuff like this where I drag it out to maybe have a pull out where I explain a little bit more. And the good thing about it is if I click on with my black arrow again this data is still live and I can go through and say actually this is back to 3 50 a minute mistake here, okay and click tick and everything adjusts. You're keeping that kind of connection to the data but there are times where you do need to kind of break that and I'll show you a couple of reasons why and we're gonna close this down. One cheap trick actually going to undo it. So that's back in there. A cheap trick is I want to make it like a donut like you saw at the front there or in the intro you could cut a hole in it or actually I'm gonna start from the center here. Okay hold down the shift and the adult draw a circle from the center. Okay. And I should knock a hole in it and make it a compound shape or just put a white circle in it. Okay. It looks like the the donut shape. The other thing I want to do is I'm going to click a and I want to get rid of the stroke around the outside. Okay. Um I can do that easy enough stroke said to I'm guessing here, can you do that? You can totally awesome. That circle also needs it. Cool now it's looking okay. So we've still retained all that I guess connection. Okay. So what I want to do now is I want to actually break that connection because there's we'll do something called three D. Stuff like you saw at the beginning. So I'm making a copy of my good one with all the data still connected. But there are times where you want to say actually just want to smash this two pieces. So I can do some cool things with it and to do it. You feel like you want to go object expand but you can click on that forever and it doesn't work. You need to actually go on group in this case which is a little strange. It says it's gonna break that link. I say yes because I've got some stuff to do. And what I might do first of all is I might do a proper compound shape. Okay where I select all of this. Okay these are all connected. They are so I'm gonna have to group them, greet them again. Now they're all pits and pieces, everybody's still connected. Stop being connected. Um grouping lots. Now they're all separate pieces. So I'm gonna click all these, gonna grab my shape, builder tool. Okay And remember I hold down my option key on a Mac or a Pc or a little circle and now there's a hole in the middle. How do I know there's a hole in the middle. I can use my shortcut command shifty. Okay to see the transparency grid and turn it off. You're on a pc. It's control shift. E. Why do we need an actual hole? Because we want to make that three D. Shape. So with this selected what I might do is make another copy of this, like to have copies everywhere. Um Let's go to effect, let's go to three D. And extrude and bevel is gonna do the look we want. Now this click on preview. Um it's not group so that's going to do really weird stuff with this hit cancel. So we need to group it and also make sure there's no Stroker on the outside. If you have a black Stroker on the outside it makes it look a little lame when it gets into three D. It'll just have black edges So back into effect three d. extrude, click on preview and now I get to do some fun stuff. Well fun as fun as graphs. Get. It's pretty cool though. Huh? I like it anyway let's click. Ok. And one thing you can do is you can go to outline view, so command why or control why? Okay or view. It's this one here, double that in and out and you can kind of look at it still in plain view and what you might decide is grab the black arrow, it's grouped double click it to go inside the group. Now I'm going to click this one chunk. It's gonna be a little slow because it's doing three D. Stuff in the background. I'm gonna click this arrow loads of times until it disappears. I'm gonna command y again to go back and you can kind of do this like three D. Pull out thing. You feel like it needs to be rotated around. I should have done this in a three D. View because it's it's really weird if you try and rotate it, it's rotating it. But then going back to the three D. And doing some weird stuff. But anyway, we're not gonna cover line charts and scatter graphs. It's all basically the same, dumping the data. You might have cleaned the data up a little bit and then it's then it's kind of making it look nice. Now I've like, these are some examples of things I've done. You know, they're not beautiful but it's, you know, it's trying to like fancy up graphs and data for annual reports, those types of things. Yeah. Um All right. That is going to be it about how to do it. There's a couple of other things I want to show you and one yeah. Actually let's go and jump to the other stuff now. Alright, where are we? We are in the middle of a sales pitch kind of um I guess I want to show you where to take it from now. So I often get my kind of graphs to a certain level and then I want to animate them, right. And um illustrators not the tool to do it. It's generally after effects and I I've got a course for that and I'm going to kind of show you not to sell the course kind of to sell of course. But just to show you like what you can do with graphs. So it's called data visualization and animated infographics and there's lots of pictures of me. I should have to shave. But it does a lot of things that we transform graphs from say Excel or illustrator and we do ready. I'm gonna mute it. You can kind of see those same grass with a little bit of, I don't know, a little bit of animation. Just kind of brings them to life if you're doing PowerPoint presentations um you know, things for youtube. Yeah, so it just covers any other nice looking things in it. Just me and so yeah, check out that or you don't have to do my course but go and check out, check out after effects for animating that sort of thing now don't go yet. Okay, the next one is not a sales pitch but it is future awesomeness. Let's jump to that now. Alright, where have I brought you? I brought you to watch you two with me um It's worth watching, I promise you I'm gonna, you can go and just put look at project Lincoln. Bernard Kerr, he's a kiwi guy and this is W max right there. Big conference they have every year, I'm lucky enough to speak at it if you ever get to go. This year is in L. A. Last year was Vegas very exciting, right? 20,000 creatives doing course doing presentations and awesome things so come check it out but they've got this thing called adobe snakes and all adobe sneaks are, is like what Adobe are doing in the background is not released yet but stuff they're trying to work on and enough talking, I'm just going to let this play out, this is me ending the video, you don't have to watch anymore, it's six minutes long, you can watch it, you don't have to, but man, it's cool, I hope it's going to be out soon. Okay, let's hit you don't mind me saying everybody welcome Bernard Kerr with project Lincoln, I can't turn my microphone off so I'll Hello max who have you out there has ever had to make a nice looking chart or data visualization. Okay, I'm going to write, have you found the process painfully slow and frustrating? Yes. Would you like some super powers to be able to do it at lightning speed? Alright. I gotta say this is the first time I've heard a crowd cheer for data visualization. Alright. In the past you've probably used one of three different approaches. You might have tried drawing something from scratch, you might have found a template that was close but not quite exactly what you wanted or you went off and learned how to code or some combination of the three. So all of these approaches start with data that sort of stuffed into a machine and spits out a visualization. But project Lincoln flips this idea on its head and says what if you could sketch first and then bind your drawing to data. So that means any of the visual properties or something you've drawn could be bound to data that could be its position, its size, its color, even text could be bound to data, These data driven drawing tools live on top of the drawing tools you already know and love so let me show you how this works by trying to build you a poster from my friend kim Chambers. You remember kim sneaks post for the last couple of years. She's not only to speak, so she is also an extraordinary swimmer and only 71 of seven people on the planet to have swum the ocean seven instead of grueling marathon swims all around the world. So I'm gonna make a poster for her. And so I'm gonna do here in Lincoln, I'm gonna bring in a simple spreadsheet and this is for the North Channel swim. Okay, so from the spreadsheet, we're gonna grab these variable names from the top of the spreadsheet and put it into this palette and this is what we're going to use to bind our drawing to data. So if I want to make a bar chat, I just make a bar the size and shape and color that I want. And then when I hit the repeat grid, get a bar for each of those swimmers. Now, if I want to set the length of this bar, I can select the right hand side and bind it to the time variable. And now all of these bar points are bound to time and I can adjust them with this access control. If I add some text. Yes, I just I just added some text here at this point. It's the same all the way down. But I combined that two swimmers names, I could do the same for time. And I'm going to open up my symbol library here and then grab a swimmer. So I've got the swimmer sitting here repeated the same way all the way down. But I've got this new concept which I call a sticky anchor, which lets me set up a relationship between the anchor point of one object and anchor point of another. So now they have this offset. Yeah. Now I'm gonna throw in a flag. Obviously not all these swimmers are from new Zealand like me and kim so that the country variable. Sorry, fill that in. All right. So here's here's kIM and she looks like she's doing the wrong bathing suit. So let me bind that swimmer to the gender variable. So now we have actually three women swimmers who have done these crazy swims look 17 hours in the water is a long time. Right Okay. So now they've sort of happy with my design here. I can apply apply all these bindings for each of the other swims. So now they automatically just regenerated based on the data. That was amazing. You can also throw these all on the same page at the same time. So small multiples and I can control the spacing between them too. So, you know, bar charts. Maybe not your cup of tea. Maybe we'll try something a little more sophisticated. Alright, so now I'm going to do a weather radio now, if you know what a weather radio is. It's actually a visualization of weather showing you the high and low temperatures for every day of the year. For entire year, all in one go. So this would be really useful for kim to know about Uh when she's planning these swims to know what time of the year to go for these crazy swims. So this time I'm going to find the right hand side of this bar to the high temperature for the day. The left hand side is going to be bound to the low. Now when I hit the repeat grid, I have 365 of these bars in an arranged chart. And now I'm going to bind the color of this bar to the average temperature with this new color control. So these guys are running off the page 365 and now I'm going to throw them into a radio pattern and then we have so of course we can apply these bindings to all those different cities that you would be swimming from to work out what, where you should go. I don't have time to do a full poster here, but here is a sort of design that I worked on earlier. He charleston. Okay, So I just built 14 data visualizations, simple and complex ones with total creative control and freedom in less than four minutes. Wow, cool guys. Alright, that was also alright. I'm hoping we're all going to do a class very soon on how to use Lincoln or whatever they end up calling it. Yeah. Alright. That's the end of this one. Um Happy, good fun watching Youtube with you. We should do it again or in the next video. We'll do something a little bit, a little bit more illustrator. Let's go and do that now.