Follow this tutorial and discover how Illustrator Live Shapes work, their properties, and all the tips and tricks you need! They can definitely speed up your design work and generate creative new ideas.
If you don’t have the time to learn how to use Live Shapes in Illustrator, make sure to check out Envato Elements, where you’ll find plenty of resources that might inspire you to create cool designs or download them ready to use.
What You’ll Learn
- What is a Live Shape in Illustrator?
- How to use Live Shape with the Ellipse Tool
- How to use Live Shape with the Polygon Tool
- How to use Live Shape with the Star Tool
- Advantages and disadvantages of the Live Shape feature
1. What Is a Live Shape in Illustrator?
Live shapes are vector shapes drawn with the Shape Tools that respond dynamically. To help you modify shapes, Illustrator now displays on-screen controls that you can quickly use to customize the sides, points, radius, and corners of your circles, ellipses, polygons, and stars any way you like. It’s a powerful feature that gives you plenty of options and control, not to mention that the on-shape widgets are fun to use.
You can make more changes to these shapes like rotation, scaling uniformly, and non-uniformly or rounded corners using the Round Corner Widget. They will not affect the live shape properties. Let’s discover all the secrets along with the advantages and disadvantages of using the Live Shape feature in the following steps.
Step 1
Launch Adobe Illustrator and start with a blank document. Grab the Ellipse Tool (L) form the Toolbar, and then click and drag on your artboard to draw a simple circle. Notice the little handle that pops out of the bounding box called the pie widget. By moving this handle, you can easily increase or decrease the radius of the shape to make a pie shape or a semicircle in no time.
The same thing goes for an oval shape drawn with the Ellipse Tool (L). It doesn’t have to be a perfect circle.
Step 2
These new options are also available via the Transform panel, in the Ellipse Properties section. You can choose a specific value for the Pie Start Angle and Pie End Angle that you might need. There’s also an Invert Pie option, which still keeps the circle as a live shape that you can further edit.
Step 3
You can quickly create colorful pie charts or geometric patterns without the use of the Pathfinder panel functions. And the good news is that the shapes keep their live shape properties, and you can make edits anytime.
Moving on to the Polygon Tool, let’s draw a basic polygon on the artboard. The default polygon is six-sided, but with the new Live Shape feature, you can now increase or decrease the number of sides using the little diamond-shaped widget on the bounding box. Easy, right?
Let’s grab the Star Tool from the toolbar and then click and drag on the artboard to draw a basic star. While the shape is selected with the Selection Tool (V), notice the small widget on the bounding box and the cursor showing the +/_ sign when going over it.
To increase or decrease the number of sides (points) of a star, drag the widget upwards or downwards.
To change the inner radius of a star, click and drag its inner widget, which looks like a small white circle.
To change the outer radius of a star, click and drag its outer widget, which looks like a small white circle.
5. Advantages and Disadvantages of Live Shapes
Are you wondering if you can mask with live shapes and if you can apply effects, graphic styles, or patterns to them? Let’s find out which of these situations work and which don’t. While Illustrator live shapes are a very cool and useful feature, there’s always room for improvement.
Here’s an overview of the advantages and disadvantages of using the Live shape feature:
- Works for the Ellipse Tool, Polygon Tool, and Star Tool.
- Works with pattern fills, multiple appearances, graphic styles, and effects.
- Works as a masking shape.
- Does not work for Rectangle Tool, Rounded Rectangle Tool, Spiral Tool, Arc Tool, etc.
- Does not work for shapes created using the Pathfinder panel functions.
- Does not work for basic shapes drawn manually with the Pen Tool (P).
- Does not work for grouped live shapes.
How to Use Live Shapes as a Mask
If you want to mask a texture, a pattern, or any graphics using a live shape, Illustrator will display the on-shape widgets the same as before. You can modify the mask shape (ellipse, polygon, star) as you would modify a regular live shape.
How to Use Live Shapes With Graphic Styles
If you use graphic styles that include multiple appearances, not only with solid colors but gradients, pattern fills, and live effects, you don’t have to worry. Modify the live shape as you wish, and the existing appearances will update automatically too. Cool!
How to Use Live Shapes as a Group
Unfortunately, if you group a bunch of live shapes to make a pattern, for example, the control widgets no longer appear on the bounding box. You have to enter Isolation mode and modify the shapes individually. I consider this to be a big minus. Just imagine how quickly you could edit the entire pattern tile at once, or any other repetitive shapes in your designs. Hopefully, this will be possible in future Illustrator updates.
Conclusion
Now you know how to use live shapes in Illustrator. Explore all the widgets and options available, and create unique shapes in your designs, illustrations, logos, and so much more. It is also amazing for quick edits and will definitely speed up your work.
Remember that all these live shape options are also available in the Transform panel under the Ellipse Properties, Polygon Properties, and Star Properties sections. Feel free to explore these too, but the on-shape control widgets are so much fun to use!
Want to Learn More About Adobe Illustrator?
Did you like this tutorial about Illustrator live shapes? We have loads of tutorials on Envato Tuts+ that teach many other useful techniques. Here’s a list of tutorials specially made for you. Take a look!