Draw Rectangles


The Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon, and Star tools are found on the Rectangle tool tearoff. Joining them, but out of place on this tearoff, is the Flare tool. The easiest way to use these tools is to simply click and drag. Alternatively, you can generate shapes from a dialog box that opens when you click any of the shape tools and then click on the artboard .

Note  

The odd-duck Flare tool works differently. You double-click on the Flare tool to open the dialog box. Alternatively, you can select the tool and then click and drag or click on the artboard and then click again in the document window to generate a flare.

To draw a rectangle, select the Rectangle tool and then click and drag anywhere on the artboard. If you hold down SHIFT as you click and drag, you constrain the rectangle to a square. If you hold down OPTION ( ALT ) as you click and drag, the location from which you start to click and drag becomes the center point for the rectangle instead of a corner of the rectangle. Holding down SHIFT plus OPTION ( ALT ) as you draw creates a square with the initial point being the center of the square.

Holding down the tilde key (~) as you draw a rectangle generates multiple rectangles, as shown in Figure 5-2.

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Figure 5-2: Drawing a square and generating many squares using shift and the tilde key

Size a Rectangle Precisely

The other way to define a rectangle is to select the Rectangle tool and click anywhere on the artboard without clicking and dragging. The point where you click becomes the upper-left corner of the rectangle. The Rectangle dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 5-3.

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Figure 5-3: Defining a rectangle by entering width and height values

This technique of defining a shape size in a dialog box can be applied to all shapes (except, of course, the otherworldly Flare tool).

Draw a Rounded Rectangle

To draw a rounded rectangle, select the Rounded Rectangle tool from the Rectangle tool tearoff. As with the regular Rectangle tool, you can either click and drag to interactively define the rounded rectangle, or you can click once on the artboard to define the rounded rectangle in a dialog box.

The Rounded Rectangle dialog box differs from the regular Rectangle dialog box only in that you can also define the size of the corner radius. The size of the radius determines how much rounding to apply: larger values increase the rounding. Once you define a radius, it applies to each rounded rectangle you draw.

Note  

If you want to change the units that appear in the shape dialog boxes, select Illustrator (Edit) Preferences Units & Display Performance. In the Preferences dialog box, change the selected unit of measurement in the General drop-down list to pixels, points, inches, or one of the other measurement options.




How to Do Everything with Illustrator CS
How to Do Everything with Adobe Illustrator CS
ISBN: 0072230924
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 175
Authors: David Karlins

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