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