Urgent! Need help with Illustrator. (Icons)

[JoeyNL]

Hey guys!


Thanks for reading this post, i searched for 3 days but couldnt find a easy soloution so i came to Talkgraphics hoping you guys can help me out.

I try to be realy clear about my problem, and excuse me for my English.

I am new to illustrator, more into photoshop but for my work i need icons for any size.

So let me show you what i got :



This is the end product, but there is a problem.

I made it out of simple rectangle shapes :



So the "Blue" background is not really a background but just a colored rectangle.


It needs to be transparent so you can place it anywhere :



So how can i make the something like this without overlapping alot of layers like i did, i hope you guys understand my problem.

Thanks in advanced,

Joey

[JoeyNL]

I did a live trace to show what i want, but with live trace the lines will never be perfect, but to give a idea :

[Albacore]

The way I see it, that there is only 1 shape that has been reflected, duplicate and scale. Draw the outside large rectangle, then the window like inner rectangle, -- Use Pathfinder-Subtract. That gives the window with no fill. You now want to give this window a bit of Perspective (many ways to do this) I would the Warp menu found half way down the Effects menu--use Shell Lower-0 bend, then turn on preview then move the horizontal values positive/negative to have left/right perspective. That's it really but I would now Expand Appearance so that you can scale and reflect shapes. Use the Pathfinder Tool again but this time use Add to combine the smaller window shape to the larger one.