495 Turning off Live Rectangle widgets in Illustrator CC

- Hey, gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques! Now, I'm a big fan of Adobe Illustrator CC. They've made a ton of improvements in the last few years. You can now freeform draw, with either the Pencil tool or the Blob Brush, they're both really great. We've got new reshaping controls, a better Pen tool, dynamic round corners, so much stuff that I have a course called "Draw Better and Faster "with Illustrator CC" right here inside the Lynda.com library. But with any advancements come the occasional hiccup, and the one feature, the one new feature that's absolutely driving me nuts is Live Rectangles.

Basically, what happens is, you draw a rectangle, and then it lights up with a ton of doodads, you'll see what I mean in a second, even when the Bounding Box is turned off, and they just get in your way of drawing more rectangles. And I know a lot of other people agree out there, because the most popular question I have seen, where this feature is concerned, is, "How do I turn it off?" Which, it is by no mean obvious, which is why I'm going to answer that question in this very movie. All right, so I'm going to start this impassioned diatribe with a look at exactly what are dynamic Live Rectangles inside of Illustrator CC, because after all, normally, when you hear the word "dynamic" or "live," that's a good thing, and for the most part, it's true.

Illustrator, depending on how you count, probably offers a few thousand live dynamic features, and, for the most part, they are absolutely great, because they allow you to change your mind any time you like. And then, I'll show you why I, for one, can't abide Live Rectangles, I just hate them, and then, in the rare event that you agree with me, I'll show you how to turn them off. So, let's start by changing the Fill color here, just so that we can see the rectangles as I draw them. I'll change it to orange because I'm working on a blue layer, so we'll have some contrast here, and then I'll go ahead and select the good old Rectangle tool.

All right, so let's say I draw myself a rectangle, and, you know, I might make it any old size I want to. I can even press the spacebar to move it on the fly; you know all this stuff. Here's the deal: after you get done drawing a rectangle, it would be selected and it would show off its anchor points. Nowadays, it lights up with all these doodads, and that's just the selected rectangle. You're only going to see this junk, these so-called Widgets, on the selected rectangle. So if you go and draw a new rectangle, like so, then the old one goes dormant for the moment.

All right, so here's the problem. Imagine that what I want to do is I want to draw a new rectangle from the bottom left corner, down and to the left. Why do I want to do that? Who cares why I want to do it, I just want to do it. Well, if I try, like I would in the old days, then I'm going to end up scaling the rectangle, which is a bit ludicrous in my opinion, and here's why I resent it. If I go up to the View menu, you can see this command right here reads "Show Bounding Box." That means I have long ago turned off the Bounding Box, because I don't happen to like that feature.

It's not a feature I use, and yet, even though it's turned off, I have a Bounding Box imposed on me by the Rectangle tool? So what I have to do, of course, is press Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z on the Mac in order to undo that modification, and let's say I make the mistake of thinking, "Okay, I'll just kind of get close to the rectangle "but I won't absolutely touch it," and I'll start dragging, then I rotate the rectangle! Now, of course, who wouldn't want that feature? After all, this is the Rotate Rectangle tool, right? Oh, no, it's not, it's the regular old Rectangle tool.

What is it doing rotating shapes? So what I'll do is I'll just go ahead and press Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z on a Mac to undo that move, and then I'll go up to the Select menu, and choose the Deselect command, or I can press Ctrl+Shift+A or Cmd+Shift+A on the Mac, and now that the rectangle's deselected, I can draw that rectangle that I was trying to draw a moment ago. Now, it's not all bad news. I'm going to zoom in here so I can show you that there's two features that I kind of like about this. One is that you can drag the center of the rectangle to move it to a different location.

You know, you might want to do that, who knows? I'm going to undo that move, because I don't really want to drag it to a new location. Here's the really great function, these round-corner widgets, which allow you to adjust the roundness on the fly, dynamically. You can double-click on one of them to bring up the Transform dialog box so you can enter a numerical value, for example, and, I'll go ahead and close that guy, you can click a second time on one of these guys in order to light it up independently of the other ones, and then that allows you to change the roundness of just one corner and not the others.

So, that's a really great feature. Now, there's a lot of people out there who are complaining about these dynamic rectangles, because most of us, I don't think, want a Bounding Box around our rectangles. But what you hear, oftentimes, in fact, I haven't actually heard an accurate response yet, I've seen a lot of inaccurates, which is that what you want to do is hide the Corner widget, so you'd choose this command, Hide Corner Widget, from the View menu, but that gets rid of the good stuff. It gets rid of the Corner widgets. Now, you can bring it back by clicking on one of these handles, or double-clicking, I think, is what you have to do, and then they come back temporarily, but later, they're going to disappear once again.

So, I don't recommend that you choose that command. I recommend you leave the Corner widgets turned on, and then you go up here to this option. See the word "Shape" up here in the control panel? If you click on it, that's going to bring up some Shape options, for example, I could say, "You know what? I don't want round corners. "I want to get rid of them." I'll change the corner radius value to zero and then press the Enter key, or the return key on the Mac, to invoke that change. But, we still have the Bounding Box, as you can see, but notice, next door, right next door to the word Shape, is this very well-hidden icon that allows you to hide the Shape widgets, and if you go ahead and click on it, then the Bounding Box disappears, and now, watch this, I can draw a rectangle from the corner of the selected rectangle as much as I want.

So I could draw two rectangles right next to each other. So much freedom! Now you might think, well, you just got rid of your Corner widgets. Not true, I got rid of them where the Rectangle tool is concerned. However, if I switch back to the good old White Arrow tool, that Adobe calls the Direct Selection tool, even though it has a keyboard shortcut of A for Arrow, then there are my Corner widgets right there, and I can use them in exactly the same way I was accessing them with the Rectangle tool. Just know that you can bring back or get rid of that Bounding Box by switching back to the Rectangle tool.

So, you have to have the Rectangle tool selected, and then you go up to this innocuous icon right there, and either show the Shape widgets if you love them, or, if you're like me, turn them off. All right, if you're a member of Lynda.com, I have a follow-up movie in which I take you on a tour of a couple of Live shapes that I really like, which are ellipses and polygons, once again, inside Illustrator. If you're waiting for next week, I'm going to show you how to turn off another feature that's not being met with a ton of enthusiasm, and that is the Start screen, the CC Start screen, which is part of both Photoshop and Illustrator.

Deke's Techniques, each and every week! Keep watching.