Everybody has seen them – those trendy, swirly designs used by countless web designers and print ads. Many techniques for creating these designs focus on Photoshop, but Illustrator gives us the tools to create a vector image that becomes infinitely scalable and editable. This tutorial teaches several techniques for creating custom swirls using the Swirl Tool.

 
1. Start with a new document in Illustrator.

2. Grab your Swirl Tool. It is often docked with the Line Tool.

3. Click in the center of your canvas and drag to the upper right-hand corner. Don’t let go just yet as we will discuss the some hot-keys you can use to adjust your swirl.

4. Hold the Ctrl key down and drag towards the upper right-hand corner. Note how the swirl “uncurls” the farther you drag it. Go ahead and release the mouse once you have a shape you want to work with.

5. Here’s another way to create a curl. With your Swirl Tool still selected, single-click on a blank space anywhere on you canvas and use the following settings. The Radius allows you to adjust the size of your swirl. Decay % is the amount of swirl. Segments are how many points you want in the curve – fewer is better. Style let’s you pick the direction of the swirl.

6. Use your Selection Tool to grab the big swirl we made and go to Object -> Path -> Offset Path. Use the following settings:

7. Click the center line of the swirl – commonly called the “spine” – and delete it. This leaves you a clean swirl. Note that you can still edit any point of the swirl using standard Direct Selection and Pen Tools.

8. Repeat steps #6-7for the small swirl we created, but use these settings:

9. Using the Selection Tool, we arranged our shapes like this:

10. Zoom in on the point where the two swirls connect and use your Direct Selection Tool to adjust the smaller swirl to appear that it is connected to the big swirl.

11. Repeat for as many swirls as you want. When you are finished building a swirl, just use the Section Tool to select all the swirls, right-click and select Group.

Now you can scale the swirl, add colors, and apply other effects as needed.