I'm trying to break myself into making my own graphics for websites and I've come to my first roadblock.

I need to make the commonly used icon that resembles >> in photoshop. The problem is that I'm not able to just draw the four lines it would take with the line tool well enough by hand, and need a precise way to control the starting point of the line, its length, its endpoint, and other aspects of it after I've created it.

Is there a way to do this in photoshop CS5?

  • the perfect solution for this is using pen tool... – Jack Mar 14 '12 at 6:47
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    Type tool. You can use for example greater than symbol like you use in your question or like andy suggested there are quite a few special arrow symbols. You can also change font to cycle through different styles for the arrow and you can always stretch the arrow to get perfect shape. ( Both windows and mac do have special character list, so you don't have to figure out how to get them, just copy paste from the list. ) – Joonas Mar 14 '12 at 9:56
  • It should be pretty easy with the line tool or pen tool. You just move the mouse to the place you want to place an endpoint and click; move again, and click, etc. You can hold shift to move in a single dimension. Zoom in, or use guides/grid, or duplicate and rotate/flip as needed. You can even look on the info panel to see if your X or Y coordinates match up. Or you can manually set the (X, Y) coordinates for each point. Flip through the manual to familiarize yourself with basic operations, especially of the pen tool, line tool, and selection tools. – Lèse majesté Mar 14 '12 at 11:40

Do you mean this: » ? That is option+backslash or option+shift+backslash on mac. I'd use that before making my own icon. otherwise I usually make a vector drawing in illustrator with the pen and then copy/paste it in to photoshop.

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