Making a Clock Face in Illustrator

With the tick mark selected (NOT the circle!), click the rotate tool in the tool box, then option/alt click on the exact center of the circle (now you see why we needed to use the Attributes palette earlier) to open the rotate dialog. This will set the point of origin at the center of the circle. We're going to let Illustrator do the math to see the angle we need to rotate the hour markings. In the rotate dialog, type 360/12 in the Angle box. This means 360¼ divided by 12 marks. This tells Illustrator to figure out the angle needed (which is 30¼) to place 12 marks for the hours evenly spaced around the point of origin you set at the center of the circle. Click the Copy button so that a copy of the original tick is made, and it doesn't move the original. The dialog closes and you will see two tick marks. To add the rest, we use the duplicate command. Type cmd/ctrl + D 10 times to add the remaining 10 tick marks for a total of 12.