James / May 14, 2007
Pie Charts in Illustrator
Pie Charts are the epitome of boring. Ughh. Figures again. To top off the boringness, it usually means joining Excel in a joyful number crunching, board room pleasing game.
It doesn't have to be as painful for us designers though. Our friend Illustrator can be a saviour when it comes to putting together a few pies for those presentations. Just follow a few simple steps, and you'll view pie charts in a whole new light!
That's my completed pie chart, showing the breakdown of time we seem to end up spending on web development. Here's how to make it.
First of all, let's open Illustrator and make a new document [always helps!]. Click on the pie chart tool in the tools palette, as shown above. By default, the column graph tool will be shown, so click and hold the icon down to show all of the graph tools, and select the pie chart tool.
Now draw a rectangle to show how large you want your pie chart to be. Alternatively, you can just click anywhere on the canvas and enter the dimensions you would like by hand. As soon as you have entered the dimensions you will be greeted by the data entry palette shown above. Now enter the figures you want to show in a row. If you would like a legend, enter your titles in the first row. Once you've put in all the information you want, hit the tick button and close the data entry palette.
By default, Illustrator colours pie charts in grey scale. I suppose this is handy if you need to make photocopies for all of the other office slaves who might need to read it, but it's usually a good idea to bring some colour to your presentations whenever you can. By clicking on the Direct Selection tool from the tool palette (short cut: control or alt A), you can select each slice of the pie individually, and change it's colour by choosing from the colour palette.
Now that you've coloured your pie chart, you're pretty much done. However, if you want to really impress your colleagues, we can take it to the 3rd dimension.
To get yourself some 3d pie, just select your pie chart, and go to Effect > 3D > Extrude & Bevel... This will bring up the 3d palette as shown above. Choose Isometric Top from the drop down menu. You can move the cube around to get the angle you want, or manually enter the digits (Excel users will feel at home on that front). I found that the best balance between readability and looks went like this:
From top to bottom in the angle boxes: 45, 35, -30 degrees.
Extrude to about 20 or 30pt.
Keep surface as Plastic Shading.
It also helps and saves time if you check the Preview option, so you can see what the finished pie chart will look like without having to close and reopen the 3d Extrude & Bevel window hundreds of times. Once you have found the ideal angle and look, hit OK.
To finish it off, and give your colleagues that even bigger desire to copy your presentation and design skills, add a subtle drop shadow. Shown here, the shadow has an X-offset of 0 and a Y-offset of 2. The shadow has a blur of 3.
Ta da! You're done. And because you have applied all of these effects without doing any expanding or flattening, you can still edit your data. Have a go yourself, you know you want to.
Oh, and I've included an Illustrator file just for you to play around with 
Arpit Jacob said,
May 15, 2007 at 2:49 am ()
How about adding some Shine and gloss too. I always wanted to know how to do that.
Ehab said,
May 15, 2007 at 3:28 am ()
Hahahahahahhahahaha
80+ % spent on making it working on IE hahahahaha :D
that was awfully funny bro : )
A very clean squeky tutorial !
thumbs up.
p.s - where is the DIGG THIS ?
Joel Laumans said,
May 15, 2007 at 2:34 pm ()
Whoa!
just one more reason to love illustrator =)
thank you
++recommend
Love It said,
June 25, 2007 at 9:46 am ()
LOVE IT
Phil said,
September 20, 2007 at 11:09 am ()
Thanks a lot! I love illustrator!
yasam said,
October 31, 2007 at 1:09 pm ()
It's Fine.
Majo said,
November 2, 2007 at 7:49 am ()
I would also appreciate to have explained how to add shining, reflections / gloss.
M.
Suraj said,
March 20, 2008 at 11:07 am ()
thanks, zats great..
designature said,
March 27, 2008 at 10:44 pm ()
this is an excellent tutorial! I used it to make a board room presentation n I'm not a designer! Thanks so much--saved my soul.
-Regards,
D
Toni Stark said,
May 9, 2008 at 6:18 pm ()
How do you add the percentage on each label?
G said,
May 10, 2008 at 2:49 pm (Administrator)
Hi Toni,
If you want it looking like the example image at the top of the page, I don't believe there is an automatic way of adding percentages to each label (at least in Adobe Illustrator CS 2).
So I would simply add the percentage onto each label manually for reliable results.
If anyone else has any ideas on this, give us a shout.
Thanks.
Gary Spedding said,
May 18, 2008 at 4:03 pm ()
Addressing questions on gloss (and also adding images into pie-slices) this is one of the best Illustrator Graph tutorials thus far:
http://www.modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk/article/howto-make-pretty-pie-charts
John Brown / Free Online Games said,
June 19, 2008 at 4:00 pm ()
thanks, great.........
Anna said,
August 28, 2008 at 5:26 pm ()
I was wondering if there was a way to achieve the same thing with gradients instead of a solid color? Whenever I try to do it the edges are jagged.
stephen said,
March 9, 2009 at 3:48 am ()
Nice tutorial, thanks. I'm a designer and used it for a typography demonstration of the word "color". I used the pie chart as a spinning color wheel in flash. This is the easiest way to make a "Pinwheel" such as that. Just break the segments down into equal parts.
Thanks.
Melissa said,
March 26, 2009 at 4:21 pm ()
Why is the legend still in black and white? And, how do you change it?
James said,
March 26, 2009 at 6:04 pm (Administrator)
Hi Melissa,
You can change the colour of each box in the legend by dragging the appropriate colour from the colour palette to the respective box.
Hope this helps!
Anonymousse said,
March 26, 2009 at 10:27 pm ()
Hi! I'm new to this and I must say I found your tutorial very helpful!
However, I'd like to know how you colour the 3D part of the pie chart... When I extrude the pie chart, the new cylindrical "wall" that appears is black, unlike the one you show in your tutorial, which looks very nice. Could you please tell me how you made it look like this?
Cheers!
James said,
March 26, 2009 at 10:34 pm (Administrator)
Hi, glad you like the tutorial!
The easiest way to colour the pie chart segments is, once you have extruded, to drag and drop the colours that you want from the colour palette onto each segment. It should also work if you colour the segments before you extrude as well.
Hope this helps, thanks for stopping by!
Anonymousse said,
March 26, 2009 at 10:45 pm ()
I'm sorry if I haven't explained myself clearly :) I am able to colour the segments perfectly, but my problem comes when I have to colour the curved wall resulting form extruding the pie graph. When I extrude, I get it completely black, whereas yours appears blue.
Any hints?
Thanks!
James said,
March 26, 2009 at 11:00 pm (Administrator)
Oh sorry, the "wall" part is dependent on the shading settings. In the extrude and bevel pane, where you applied the 3D effects, there is a button underneath "OK" and "Cancel" called "More Options". This will slide down a more advanced pane to reveal some more fine tune settings for how you shade the "wall" part of the shape. A good start would be to choose "Custom" on the "shading colour" drop down menu, and then play around with the lighting effects.
Hopefully you'll be able to achieve the desired effect by working with those settings.
Thanks again for stopping by and I hope this helps.
Anonymousse said,
March 26, 2009 at 11:04 pm ()
This is my last comment just to say a big THANKS! That was exactly it :)
Please keep doing these wonderful tutorials, James!
Good night and good luck!
Jon G. said,
June 9, 2009 at 1:26 pm ()
I realize I'm late finding this but I wanted to tell you that this tutorial was helpful to me in a very deadline-intensive situation. Thanks very much!
James said,
June 9, 2009 at 1:38 pm (Administrator)
Anonymousse - thanks very much, we'll aim to provide some more tutorials soon.
Jon - thanks! Better found late than never. Glad we could be of help.
esra said,
June 19, 2009 at 2:57 pm ()
very cool !!thanxx
Trackbacks said,
July 3, 2009 at 2:00 am ()