Rounded rectangles in Adobe Illustrator CS3
Not so long ago I was talking to my brother online as he worked on a poster for a presentation. He is an engineer; using Illustrator was a new experience for him. He generally picks up new things easily, but as you may appreciate, Illustrator is often far from logical. We reached a point where he asked me about scaling rounded rectangles – this is where things started to get hairy.
- him: if I have a rounded rectangle and resize it, it there a way to stop it from changing the rounding of the corners (which I want constant for all my rectangles)?
- me: you can work out how large you want it to be and then double-click with the rectangle tool and you'll be able to enter all the correct values
- him: is there a way to change how curved they are after placing them?
- me: InDesign has a much better was of dealing with this issue than does Illustrator… in InDesign, the rectangle is treated as an object, and its corner radius is treated as a property in just the same way as its width, height, and position… this means that you can change the corner radius at any time…
- him: that's how it should be
Hmm. Since InDesign deals with rounded rectangles effortlessly, why does Illustrator make them such a pain? I did a quick Google search and found out how to create a rounded rectangle which can be scaled without affecting the corners. As with many simple tasks, Illustrator requires the user to carry out several steps:
- draw a rectangle of any size
- select it and go to Effect > Convert to Shape > Rounded Rectangle…
- in the Shape Options dialogue, check the Relative radio button, and set Extra Width and Extra Height to 0
- enter your desired corner radius, and off you go!
- Illustrator's Shape Options dialog, set up to enable rounded rectangles which scale correctly
Now that the shape has been converted to a rounded rectangle, the Shape Options dialog can be accessed by double-clicking on Rounded Rectangle in the Appearance palette.