: How to make an area transparent in Illustrator In the image below you'll see the white section (highlighted blue). The black section behind it is one path, and the white another. How do I

@Gloria351

Easiest thing that works for me is going to tools on the left and selecting live paint bucket and selecting "none" in the swatches then painting the space I need gone!

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@Karen819

I would like to recommend another way of creating the transparent areas: the 'Knockout Group Option'. It is extremely useful especially when working with text objects (but of course it works with any kind of shapes). Here is a short example:


Create white rectangle (background) and put it into the separate
layer:





Create a new layer (e.g. text) and draw black rectangle:





Put your text over the black rectangle (the same layer):





Set Text Fill and Stroke Colors to None:





Go to Appearance Panel > Add New Fill:





Drag the new fill below the Characters:





Click on the Opacity link (below the new fill) and set Opacity to 0%:





Go back to your artboard, select the black rectangle and the text and group it (Object > Group)
Go to Appearance Panel > Click on the Opacity link > and check the Knockout Group option:





And here it is! The black rectangle has been punched with the text:





Note that this method doesn’t expand your text – you can freely change the string content and Adobe Illustrator will recalculate your work fully automatically. Like this:

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@Smith574

This answer addresses if the above has THREE shapes and not two. Vincent's answer is correct if there are two shapes.

I would take your designs as so:



In this instance I would select ONLY the Polygons:



Navigate to Object -> Compound Path -> Make or cmd+8:



If I select everything:



and do Pathfinder with an option of Minus Front on a design that has three shapes it will result in:

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@Chiappetta793

By selecting both shapes and hitting Subtract on the Pathfinder Palette:

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