Shapes, lines & the Pen
Rectangles, ellipses & corner radius
Rectangles and ellipses are the quiet workhorses of a design — the cards, backgrounds, buttons and badges that everything else sits on. Because they're true vectors, they stay razor-sharp at any size and any print resolution, so you can scale one from a business card to a poster without losing an edge.
Picking a shape tool
The shape tools live in the toolbar above the canvas:
| Tool | Shortcut | Draws |
|---|---|---|
| Rectangle | R |
A rectangle (or a square) |
| Ellipse | O |
An ellipse (or a circle) |
Hover any tool to see its name and shortcut in the tooltip. Press the key or click the icon to arm the tool, then draw on the canvas.
Drawing a shape
Click and drag on the canvas to draw. The shape grows from where you started dragging to where you release. Hold Shift while you drag to constrain the shape to a perfect square or circle.
As soon as you let go, the tool hands you back the Select tool (V) with your new shape
selected — so you can immediately move it, resize it, or tweak its color without switching
tools.
Sizing and placing precisely
Eyeballing is fine for a rough pass, but print work usually needs exact numbers. With a shape selected, the Properties panel on the right shows a transform row you can type straight into:
- X and Y — the position of the shape on the canvas
- W and H — its width and height
- Angle — rotation in degrees
- Opacity — how transparent the shape is
Type a value and press Enter to apply it. These fields honor the document's unit — millimeters, inches, pixels and so on. To change the unit, right-click the ruler along the top or left edge and pick one; there's no separate units menu. See Canvas size, units & presets for the full rundown.
Tip: to line several shapes up perfectly, select them all and use the alignment controls in Align & distribute rather than nudging by eye.
Rounding corners
Rectangles can have rounded corners; ellipses have no corners to round, so this control only appears for rectangles.
With a rectangle selected, the Properties panel shows a Radius field (its tooltip reads Corner radius). Enter one value and all four corners round equally. Set it back to 0 for crisp square corners. The radius is capped at half the shorter side of the rectangle — past that point a corner can't get any rounder, so a very wide, short rectangle turns into a stadium/pill shape.
Individual corners
Sometimes you want only some corners rounded — a ticket stub, a tab, a speech bubble, a card with one square edge. Turn on the Individual corners toggle and the single Radius field expands into four:
| Field | Corner |
|---|---|
| TL | Top-left |
| TR | Top-right |
| BR | Bottom-right |
| BL | Bottom-left |
Give each corner its own value — say, round the top two and leave the bottom two square for a tab. Collapse the toggle again and the shape flattens back to a single uniform radius.
Fill and stroke
Every shape has a Fill (the inside) and a Stroke (the outline), and you can use one, the other, or both. Choosing and managing those colors — including background fills and transparency — is covered in Fill, stroke & background color. Stroke width, end caps and corner joins have their own guide in Strokes & lines.
Handy habits
- Duplicate a shape with
Cmd/Ctrl+D— great for repeating cards or dots. - Hold Shift while resizing to keep the shape's proportions.
- Remember the corner radius cap: it can never exceed half the shorter side.
Where to go next
Give your shapes an outline in Strokes & lines, or when a rectangle and ellipse won't cut it, combine shapes into custom forms with Pathfinder.