How to make a 5 circles shape in illustrator

Pierre-Louis Anceau
2 min readNov 11, 2018

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It’s hard to describe this shape. A 5-circles logo? The 5 circles touch each other and form a pleasing geometric shape akin to a Mon emblem. Anyway How to make it? It’s not that hard once you figure out the trick.

First draw a circle and duplicate it.

How : Drag the circle while holding alt to duplicate and shift to stay on the vertical. Don’t worry about the size and distance, we will adjust the size later.

Make a copy rotated by 72°

How : Select the 2 shapes, select the rotate tool (press “r”), press enter and enter the value then click “copy”. 72 is 360/5.

Repeat the rotation/copy step a few times.

How : press ctrl+d (cmd+d on mac).

Now delete 1/2 circles, almost there !

Scale the circles so that they touch.

How : select all the shapes and open the “transform each” panel, it’s under object> transform > transform each. The value here will differ depending on the size of your object.

There you go!

Once you understand the method you can start experimenting with other shapes and other values, the possibilities are endless!

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