From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

922 Precisely sizing any polygon in Illustrator

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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922 Precisely sizing any polygon in Illustrator

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week is about precisely sizing a regular polygon here inside Adobe Illustrator, which may sound scary, or boring, or both, but allow me to present my case. And so, let's start with a basic question. Have you ever clicked with Illustrator's polygon tool, whether to create a hexagon, pentagon, triangle, or some other regular polygon, and wondered how in the world the radius value works? Well, the radius value of a circle, that's half its diameter. And so a circle with a radius of 200 points, measures 400 points wide. But let's say you want to draw a hexagon that's exactly 400 points wide when pointed upright, so that its left and right sides are vertical. If you create such a polygon with a radius value of 200 points, it falls inside the confines of a similarly sized circle, and so it's width measures much less than 400 points. To create a hexagon that measures exactly 400 points wide, it has to fall exactly outside of its similarly sized circle, meaning that it requires a radius value of more than 200 points. I say all this not to confuse you, but to invite you to kick back and let the next few minutes, which are going to make a whole lot of sense, by the way, sink right in. All right, so here we have that upright hexagon that's exactly 400 points wide. And you can confirm that's the case by going up to the View menu and checking to make sure that your smart guides are turned on. And then select the best measuring tool in all of Illustrator, which is the Line Segment tool. And just go ahead and drag from this anchor point here, to its opposite, or at least you're dragging from side to opposite side, at which point you'll see that the distance value is 400 points. So everything's the way it needs to be. I'm going to press the Backspace key, or the Delete key on the Mac, to get rid of that line. And I'll go ahead and click and hold on the rectangle tool in order to bring up the shape tool flyout menu, and I'll select the polygon tool. And then I'll go ahead and drag from the center outward, that's how this tool works, until I snap into alignment with this point here. And you can see that I get a width in that Heads Up Display of exactly 400 points, which is just what I'm looking for. So, that's all you have to do if you've drawn such a pentagon in advance, but of course, it's very unlikely that you will have done such a thing. So I'll press the Backspace key, or the Delete key on the Mac, to get rid of that guy. And we'll create the polygon by the numbers instead, which you do by clicking with the tool. And so I'll click at the intersection of those two guidelines, in order to bring out the polygon dialog box. We want six sides, of course. Now, this dialog box is asking for a radius value. We want a diameter of 400 points. And so to get the radius, you would just enter 400 divided by, that is slash, two. And then that'll give us a radius of 200 points, at which point click, okay. And you'll bring up a shape that, sure enough, measures side-to-side, 400 points as we're seeing here. However, it's come in at the wrong angle. That's not a problem. All you need to do for that is switch to the Rotate tool, which you can get by pressing the R key. The origin point is already set up there right in the middle of the shape. And so I'll just go ahead and press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to bring up the rotate dialogue box. I'll set the angle value to 30 degrees, and I'll click, okay, and we now have an upright shape, the shape I wanted in the first place, but it's not big enough. And so, if I were to now grab the Line Segment tool and drag from side to opposite side, you can see that I have a distance value of 346.41 points. Why in the world is that? Well, that's because I'm measuring the polygon incorrectly. I actually want to drag from an anchor point to the opposite anchor point, which would be this way instead, at which when I'm seeing a distance value, sure enough, of 400 points. And so the radius of a polygon perhaps works differently than you might think, but in fact, it works exactly the same as it does for a circle. So let me show you what I mean. I'll go ahead and select all of these shapes by pressing Control + A, or Command + A on the Mac, and then assuming that your guidelines are locked down as mine are, all you have to do is press the Backspace key here on the PC, or the Delete key on the Mac, to get rid of them. All right, now I'll go ahead and click and hold on the polygon icon there, and select the Ellipse tool from the flyout tool menu. And this tool, by the way, works a little differently. First of all, if you want to create a shape from the center outward, you have to press and hold the alt key, or the Option key on a Mac, as you drag. But I want to create the shape numerically. So I'll get rid of that guy. And I will alt or option click at the intersection of those two guides, to bring up the Ellipse dialog box. Now, this dialog box is not asking for a radius this time around, instead, for whatever reason, it wants a diameter. So I'll enter 200 times, that is asterisk, two, and then I'll tab to the height value and change it to 400 as well. And I'll click okay in order to create that shape. And I can confirm that it has the exact diameter I want by once again, switching over to the Line Segment tool, and I'm going to drag from the center of the shape right there, all the way to the top. And you can see that sure enough, I have a distance value, not diameter, but distance value of 200 points, at which point I will release. So I have a circle with a 200 point radius. Now, just so we can compare that to a pentagon which has six sides, I'm going to duplicate this line so that we have a total of six of them. And so I'll go ahead and switch to the Rotate tool once again. And then I'll alt or option click at the bottom of this line, and I'll enter an angle value of 360 divided by six, 'cause we want six lines in all. And that means I want to rotate this line by 60 degrees, at which point I'll click the copy button in order to copy that line. And then I'll duplicate it four more times by pressing Control + D, or Command + D on the Mac, a total of four times like so, at which point we have a kind of pizza. All right, now I'll go ahead and switch back to the polygon tool, and I will drag, this time around, from that center all the way out to the end of one of these lines, it doesn't matter which one. And notice that one of the values in my Heads Up Display is reading 400 points. And it's always going to be the height value in this case, by the way, just because of the way I've set up my lines. And a reason it's saying 400 points, is because, if I were to grab the Line tool once again and drag from the top of this shape, down to the bottom, which is the height of the shape, incidentally, I will see a distance value of 400 points. All right, but that's not what I want. What I want is a width value of 400 points. And currently I have a width, if I were to drag from one side to the other, of 346.41 points, which is not what I want at all. And so here's what you do. I'll go ahead and undo that line. And I'll drag along this guy right here, just so I can find its angle value, which is saying 329 degrees, it's actually 330, and I can confirm that's the case by getting rid of that line and then clicking right there at the intersection of those two center guides. Notice the angle is telling me 330. I'll just go ahead and change the link value to 400 points so I have a very long line, and I'll click, okay. All right, now I'm going to press the V key to switch back to my Black Arrow tool, and I'll shift click on the circle right there to select it. And what we're going to do is turn these guys in the custom guidelines, by going over here to the layers panel, I'll drag this red square right here down in order to move these items to the correct layer. And then I'll right click inside the document window and choose, make guides. And I have a couple of custom guides. All right, now, watch what you do. Go ahead and switch back to your polygon tool, then switch back to the shapes layer, and I'll go ahead and drag from the center down along this guideline, until I snap in alignment with the outside of the circle, at which point, look at that Heads Up Display. We now have a width of 400 points, who cares about the height value? This is the polygon I was looking for. And the reason that it works is because instead of aligning the polygon inside of the circle, I'm aligning it to the outside of the circle. And the reason we needed this custom guideline right here, was so that this edge is exactly vertical. And that is how you understand the radius of any regular polygon here inside Illustrator. Looking forward to next week. Well, that's when we're going to create this three-pointed triangle. "But, Deke," you say, "Don't all triangles have three points?" Yes they do, but here's something special. We're going to take that triangle and turn it into this classic Mercedes star. "But Deke," you say, "Mercedes is a German brand, "isn't America number one?" Yes, it is. In video training, by me, Deke's Techniques each and every week, keep watching.

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