G / 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 
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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
Fundfetzen said,
May 21, 2007 at 11:54 am ()
Gutes Tutorial für Tortengrafiken in Adobe Illustrator...
Wie erstellt man schnell ein ansprechendes 3D-Tortendiagramm mit Adobe Illustrator?
......
links for 2007-05-23 : Greg Palmer said,
May 23, 2007 at 1:39 am ()
[...] liquidicity » Pie Charts in Illustrator I like this both for the tutorial and for the example graph they’ve used. (tags: design) [...]
Pie Charts in Illustrator with Liquidity! « NI-Limits Blog said,
May 25, 2007 at 7:05 am ()
[...] with Liquidity! As read by Odiogo.com [0:59m]: Play Now | Download The new blog from Liquidity has been posting some interesting [...]
Love It said,
June 25, 2007 at 9:46 am ()
LOVE IT
Ryan Imel » Linking: Tiny Resource Edition said,
August 5, 2007 at 7:13 pm ()
[...] Create cool pie charts with Illustrator. Anytime a solution is presented that eliminates the need for a Microsoft product, I’m all in. Plus, these charts just look cool. And I would much rather navigate Adobe’s interface than big M’s. [...]
Phil said,
September 20, 2007 at 11:09 am ()
Thanks a lot! I love illustrator!
links for 2007-10-04 « Mandarine said,
October 4, 2007 at 5:28 am ()
[...] liquidicity » Pie Charts in Illustrator (tags: tutorial vector charts visualization) [...]
Open Source Charts « Syslance Studio said,
October 25, 2007 at 9:44 pm ()
[...] GoSquared showed us how to create beautiful Pie Charts in Illustrator. Just follow a few simple steps, and you’ll view pie charts in a whole new light. [...]
The Geeky Blog Updates » Blog Archive » Pie Charts in Illustrator said,
October 30, 2007 at 8:15 am ()
[...] Read the rest of this great post here [...]
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.
New Media Workshop » Blog Archive » MJ & BJ Week 9 Class Notes said,
November 5, 2007 at 8:39 am ()
[...] liquidicity » Pie Charts in Illustrator [...]
How to Create Professional 3D Pie Charts in Illustrator | GreatSo.com said,
March 2, 2008 at 11:00 pm ()
[...] GoSquared showed us how to create beautiful Pie Charts in Illustrator. Just follow a few simple steps, and you’ll view pie charts in a whole new light. [...]
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
Sueblimely said,
April 11, 2008 at 5:40 am ()
It sounds fantastic. The question is - this post is absolutely new and original, isnt it? It seems to me I've saw it somewhere before.
サイトでグラフを使いたい時に使えるまとめ | DesignWalker said,
April 11, 2008 at 6:42 am ()
[...] 5. Pie Charts in Illustrator | GoSquared [...]
Illustrator Tutorial 3D Kreis Diagramme » » pixey.de said,
April 17, 2008 at 11:06 am ()
[...] zeigt sehr anschaulich in Englisch in einem Illustrator Tutorial wie man schicke Kreisdiagramme erstellt. Diese Icons verzweigen auf soziale Netzwerke bei denen [...]
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.