How to Make a Circular Habit Tracker in Adobe Illustrator

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There are so many different kinds of habit trackers, but one I’ve been seeing heaps of lately is the circular habit tracker. So, today we’re going to create one of our own using Adobe Illustrator and the polar grid tool.

This tutorial is a little more advanced than other tutorials I’ve created, and there are a lot of steps involved, but it is still acheiveable by someone who is new to Adobe Illustrator.

First, create your document. It can be whatever size and format you want.

Then, we’re going to switch our tools to Illustrator’s advanced toolbar. To do that, click the three dots at the bottom of your toolbar, and then in the bullet/hamburger menu choose ‘Advanced’.

We’re changing our toolbar because the polar grid tool is not available in the basic toolbar.

To get the polar grid tool, either long press or right-click on the tool that looks like a / (slash), otherwise known as the line segment tool.

Once you’ve selected that, double-click it to change the settings. With the style of habit tracker I am creating, I want 41 radial dividers (the spokes) and 5 concentric dividers (the circles within the circles).

Then, just click and drag to create your polar grid, and hold shift to keep it proportional.

Then, I’m going to ungroup it. The radial grid is a bunch of simple lines to create one complex shape, but because I want to edit it, I need easy access to all of those lines. To ungroup it, you can either use the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+G (or Cmd+Shift+G on Mac) , or you can click in the bottom of the properties panel “Ungroup”.

You will need to click this a few times until it says “Group”. This is because the polar grid will be made up of a few different groups. However, you won’t need to reselect it to keep ungrouping.

You’ll know it’s ungrouped when you can click a single line and it just shows up as that line selected.

I don’t love the orientation of this grid, so I’m going to rotate it a little to make the horizontal line more straight. You don’t have to do this yourself, however, but you can rotate it at any point of creating it if you change your mind.

Since it’s ungrouped, now I need to click and drag to make a selection box around it. You will need to have the move tool (shortcut: V) selected to do this.

Next, I am going to delete parts of the habit tracker. What’s highlighted in yellow is what I’m going to delete.

This is where things are going to get a little more complicated. We need to extend the lines that are at the end of the area we want to remove. This is because the tool we will be using next will need a barrier to erase. Here are the lines you want to extend.

Using the direct selection tool (shortcut: A), click the end of the line you want to extend. Then, click on the anchor point. This will highlight it, but the colour will depend on the layer you have it on. If it’s on layer one (like mine is), it will highlight in blue.

Once it’s highlighted blue, drag it out to extend the line. Do the same to the other line. The distance doesn’t matter, because it will be erased further down the line anyway.

Once those two lines are extended, we are going to use the shapebuilder tool to erase everything I highlighted above. Using the move tool (shortcut: V), click and drag to select your polar grid.

Then select the shapebuilder tool. The shortcut for the shapebuilder tool is Shift+M.

The shapebuilder is a tool in Adobe Illustrator that lets you combine shapes or minus shapes from others. You can do this with ungrouped objects with many overlapping components, which makes it more powerful in some ways than the pathfinder tool. However, both have their uses.

Using the shapebuilder tool normally will add objects together, so hold Alt (or Option if you’re on Mac) to subtract objects.

Then, you can either click once to erase an object, or you can click and drag to erase multiple. It will act like it’s drawing over what you want to erase, so do this for all of the sections that were highlighted yellow earlier.

Once the gap has been erased, just click on the ends of the lines you extended to remove the tips.

This is what we’re left with.

Now, we want to add some lines for the user to label their habits.

This is really easy. You can either do this with the pen tool or the line segment tool. I’m using the pen tool because that’s what I prefer.

Click the start of the habit tracker and hold Shift to keep your lines straight. Click where you want your line to end.

Then, hit V or Escape to finish your line. I’ve noticed in newer versions of Illustrator that you need to move your mouse before hitting escape with the pen tool.

With the line segment tool, you would instead click and drag, instead of just clicking, but you don’t need to end your line since it’s ended for you.

This is what we will be left with:

That’s the basic shape. Let’s add some text now.

There are a few different ways to add text in a circle like what was shown in the opening image of the habit tracker. The way I am going to show you is kind of stupid and definitely incorrect, but it works, and it’s the easiest method.

And if it’s stupid and it works, then it isn’t stupid.

First we’re going to create a new layer. Click the plus at the bottom of the layers panel to create a new layer. Then, select the outer ring of our habit tracker and copy it (Ctrl+C or Cmd+C)). Then, we’re going to lock our layer 1. Click the empty space next to the eye on the layer to lock it.

Click on layer 2, and paste in place (Ctrl+Shift+V or Cmd+Shift+V).

Next, we’re going to use the scissors tool. The shortcut is C, which for me is easy to remember because C is for Cut.

Cut the points highlighted in the image above.

Then, delete the inner path. We’re going to use that big almost-circle as our typing line where our numbers will go.

Click and hold or right-click the type tool and select “Type on a Path”.

Then, click the beginning of the path. The path should immediately will with lorem ipsum.

If your text is upside down, then double-click the tool and check “Flip”.

Erase all of the type, and then replace it with the numbers 1–31. Ignore that I accidentally had “21” instead of “31” — I’ll replace it later on.

Then, I’m just adding spaces between each letter to centre them on the polar grid spaces. This is a very messy way of doing this, but like I said: it works.

Now, I’m doing this quickly for the sake of the tutorial, but make sure everything is actually centred when you make this. This is where this method lacks precision.

Another method that may work for more advanced users is to create one text box and an anchor point at the centre of the habit tracker, group them together, and use the rotate tool to pivot the numbers around the habit tracker, but I feel like I’ve been mean enough with the number of steps in this tutorial.

To move the numbers up and away from the path, we need to increase the baseline. To do that, go to the properties panel, click the three dots under “paragraph”, and tick up the numbers for the baseline.

And then we’re done! You can now decorate it if you wish, or just export it as-is.