Adobe Creative Suite 6 Design and Web Premium All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 4: Creating Basic Shapes

In This Chapter

Using rectangles, ellipses, stars, and polygons

Resizing shapes after creation

Creating shapes

Shapes, shapes, shapes — they’re everywhere in Illustrator. Basic shapes, such as squares, circles, polygons, and stars, are used in all types of illustrations. With the right know-how and the right shape tools, you can easily create these shapes exactly the way you want. In this chapter, you find out how to use these tools to control a shape’s outcome, create shapes based on precise measurements, and change the number of points a star has.

The Basic Shape Tools

The only visible shape tool in the Tools panel is, as a default, the Rectangle tool. If you click and hold down that tool, you can access the Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon, and Star tools, shown in Figure 4-1. (Although you see the Flare tool, it isn’t a basic shape.)

Figure 4-1: Basic shape tools.

You can tear off this tool set so that you don’t have to find the hidden ...