A Colorful Spirograph

Okay, this has been bugging me for years, so I’m glad I finally found the answer: In Adobe Illustrator, if you want to -

  • Rotate an object
  • By a specific amount of degrees
  • Around an axis that is not the center of the object

This is what you do:

  1. Have the object selected
  2. Select the rotate tool in your toolbox, or just hit “R”
  3. Figure out where you want the rotation axis to be (e.g. the perimeter of an object)
  4. Option Click on that point (or, on Windows, Alt-Click)
  5. A dialog box will appear that lets you specify the rotation in degrees
  6. If you want, you can hit “copy” and make a copy of that object

Source - from Adobe’s help

What can this do for you? Well, for one thing, you can make pretty sweet spirographs with ease, like this:

Another colorful spirograph