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Lesson Info

Containers and Shapes

dealing with text containers, image containers, graphic containers, normal containers. Here we go. So over in the toolbar here, we've got two different sets off tools. We've got the rectangle frame too old the ellipse frame to own the polygon frame tool, and I draw my rectangle frame and it looks like that next to these I have my rectangle tool, my lips tool in my polygon tool. And if I draw a rectangle that looks like that, that's what I have. And people ask. Well, what's the difference between the two? I've got my actual frame tools here that has a big accident. And then I have my normal non frame tools that don't have an accident, and I always like to ask, and we'll see what people in the chat room have to say. Does anybody have any idea what the differences between the two We've got? Jared here. Let's see if he comes up with the right answer. One is to hold object and the other one that's the whole text. Yeah, and no. So don't you love answers like that? I do. Yes, it does, But no,...

it doesn't. Okay, Jim one has an X through it. One doesn't. That's exactly right. That's pretty much right. At the end of the day. Yeah, maybe. Yes. So here's the thing. People think that there's actual different reasons for these to be used, and in reality, it doesn't make any difference. Okay, this one I can put in image in, I can put type in and I can feel with a color, this one. However, I can put type in, I can put in image in, and I can fill with color. So why would I use one over the other? Well, really, when you want to split hairs when you have an image container and you take the image out and you leave the container there, it just shows you that a graphic was in there. Do you have to use that container is a graphic container? No, Because watch what happens when I take my type. Too old. Oh, look, it's now a type container. Okay, I put type in there. If for some reason I have that selected and they place an image on, I put that in there Oh, it's no longer a text container. It's now an image container. The difference between the two of them. Nothing, really. It's just a matter of what content goes in them, so it doesn't matter. My theory is I'm going to use the one that's closer. That's how I do it. Shortcuts for drawing these m is the rectangle tool. L is the lip tool Phillips tool. So just like when we were going in and we would drag our guides onto the page, we have our little tool hint that when we drag these, it shows us the within the height of our object. You can kind of fuss with that and try to get it exactly the same size work as hard as you want to, but really, in essence, just said it the way you want to before you draw it. So if I'm trying to draw a container, an absolute specific size of little tool hints are kind of hard to get exactly right on the measurement that you're looking for. So don't strain yourself, make it nice and easy. Instead of taking the container and drawing it, I'm gonna take my container cursor, and I'm simply just going to click on the page. No drag. Just click up comes my options for that, and I can type in the size that I want and I click return and there's the size of my container exactly the way that I want it set. Now if I go in and I draw my container and I'm trying to use that little tool hint and I don't get it quite quite right. Don't fret about it because you can go right up into your control bar here and there's your within your height right here. So if you draw a container and you want to set that afterwards, then I just go in and say, OK, two inches by two inches, and now I've been able to set it even after the fact. Either way, you get the size that you want to without trying to fuss with it and make sure the tool hint is exactly where you want it to be. Don't waste the time now if I want to go in, and I want to draw a perfect circle or a perfect square when I'm drawing my object. All I do is I introduce the shift key once they introduced the shift key and shift will always constrain the key to This is when you're done drawing let go of your mouse first, and then your shift key. If you let go of your shift key first it's gonna go out of proportion. So shift drag, Let go of your shift key and your container is gonna go out of square out of round. So let go your mouse first, then let go of your shift key. Simple stuff. One other little trick you see when I click and drag, I'm always dragging and I'm drawing from a corner. What happens if I want to draw my container right from the middle? So I have a very specific point where I want this container to be. If I hold down my option key while I'm dragging, option allows me to draw from the center of my object. Of course, if I throw in my shift key to option allows me to draw from the centre shift will constrain it into a perfect circle or a perfect square. Of course, if I didn't let go of my mouse first, this is what I end up with. Let go of your mouse first, then your keyboard. The same is true with the Ellipse tool. I can draw a normal ellipse. Just click and drag. I can just take my lips tool and just simply click on the page, and it calls up the parameters so that I can type in the size. If I want to draw a perfect circle, hold down the shift key. Click and drag. Let go of the mouse first so that it stays. If I want Teoh, say, draw another circle in the middle here, well down the option key. And then I can shift, click and drag, and that allows me to draw from the center as well. Same here in the control bar. I have the ability to go, win and control the width of my height on my selected object. Simple and easy. Withdrawing the 3rd 1 is going to be my polygon tool, and I know people are like It's so frustrating. My friend can draw stars, but I can only draw us excited containers. Why are they special? And I'm not well, it has everything to do with what the parameters were last used for the tool. So the way we set the polygon tool is by the way this polygon tool does draw something more than just a sec. Cited object. You may have thought that says all. It does know. So if I had my polygon tool, I can simply click on the page and up comes my options again, Steptoe within the height. But then I consent the number of sides. So if I want a three sided polygon that's called a triangle, I know people like you can draw triangles and in design yes, you can perfect ones. One of the other options you'll see in the polygon is what's called the star inset star and sets a little bit hard to understand. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you a five pointed on 5 20 polygon with a star in set of 50% and I get what we normally refer to as the Star. Now the 50% inset is kind of interesting to understand how the 50% ins inset works is this was a five sided object here. Okay, so if I were to draw five sides, star inset is literally 50% of the distance between the flat edge and this point and then 50% between the center of my object and there that's what the 50% star inset actually means. So there's a senator of my star, and that point, that side has pulled halfway in 50% of the way. If I use my polygon tool and I do is a star instead of 90% that I'm going to get a very sharply pointed star. If I do historian set, you know, with lots of sides here, then I do something like this. And if I were to fill this with yellow, I would be a favorite character on Fox TV show. That's kind of Simpson like I call that the Lisa Simpson here. So these air also great for, like, going out of business 50% off, you know, nice little bevel in Boston. A little gold sheen on there. This is all part of the polygon, so you can control the number of sides and the inset. The smaller the inset number right here. You're going to get very flat sides. So this is a star in set of, like, 10%. So I kind of get that little kind of foil cupcake tin kind of thing. If I set that to be 90% that I'm going to get a very pointed, robust star. If I said it to zero, then I get flat sides. Refer a question. I sure am. Heidi would like to know. Can you make other shapes out of shapes like you do an illustrator where you can put it together, emerge? Um well, Heidi, I can do anything, but I'm glad you asked because I'll show you how to do that, Too cool. So there's our basic shape drawing. But here's the awesome part. Every time you do your polygon tool and you draw it, if you don't like it once you let go, you're done because I really don't have the ability to edit the tool like I wanted to. So in previous versions of in design, we had this really cool feature that if you went in and you took your object hearing you drew your object, you could use her up or down or left, right arrow, and it would change the attributes of this. But what they did is they switched that. And now when you go in and you'd use your drawing tools, we've got this really nice feature. So any one of my containers that I draw right here. If I draw my container and I keep my mouse key held down, up, Arrow will give me Rose right Era will give me columns, depending on what I draw circles, swears, polygons, whatever it may be. And that's really cool. That's called the grid. If I effect that, I can take one and I can make multiples of it. The key to that is is click and drag, But do now let go of your mouse key until everything is done and set. Then you can let go of your mouse. If you let go of your mouse in the middle of this process, you will have to delete them and start all over to do the same thing with my circle here. I'm just gonna draw big lips on the up arrow, right arrow like so. And if I hold down my shift key, I can get all of my circles. There's a great way to draw multiple objects. I can use these for color. I can use this as a pattern. I could put images inside there as well. Well, the same is held true for the polygon tool. So when I do the polygon tool, I draw this up Arrow, right arrow. I can draw multiples and I can let go. But that one little feature that you can do an illustrator where you be able to click and drag and control the number of points and size of the points They hid really well. They hid it so well that I can't even tell you. Okay, so I will you draw your shape and with your mouse key held down this is the trick. You tap your space bar once and only once I know. Yes, Nothing seems to happen. Correct. Now that I've tapped the space bar I use my up arrow I can control the number of points down era will take the points away right era will bring the points in left Arrow will bring the points out and there it iss So if you don't believe May and I just draw here and I just use my upper down arrow It just simply duplicates. Now I have my mouse key home down space bar. See? You saw it right there on the screen. Once they go into space bar, that allows me to edit the points and pull those points in and pull those points out. Yeah, that's slick. Uh huh. I love those features. So great way and I because I don't know what my polygons are gonna look like. So I draw it, tap the space bar, get it to be exactly like I want the points pulled in, the points pulled out however you want them to be. And it's just right when you draw that polygon, that's your basically new presets. So every time I draw another polygon here, it's always gonna be exactly the same. So that's how you do it. But the key to that after you draw it, is don't let go your mouse key. Tap the space bar. Then you can edit it for you illustrator users. It's very similar to how illustrator works slightly different, but we could still modify it and very much the same way we're doing it so kind of cool feature, isn't it? Absolutely. So now that we can draw our basic container shapes here, what can we do with these containers? Well, we can do a lot of things with the containers. I'm gonna go into my window menu, and I'm going to go under my object and lay out on the call up. My Pathfinder and my Pathfinder is quite awesome, because when we're working with in design, we don't really do a lot of illustration or creation off images or icons or graphics here. Generally, we're going to do that in another application, usually illustrator and then we bring everything in. But there may be a time or two. We want to create a very basic shape or combination of shapes, and we want to put this together. If you've use Illustrator. It's exact same Pathfinder tools in here as they are an illustrator. And how this works is I can go and I can draw a container. And maybe I would like to have this container actually have kind of like a circle coming out the edge of the container. Now it's two separate containers, and I would like to make thes all one unit trying to draw this manually here and in design. You can, but it's kind of complicated, but I would like to take this and I would like to take these two containers or multiple containers and put them together so the Pathfinder tool is going to be my friend. The Pathfinder tool. We have five basic functions and or combined or unite different terminology. Subtract the object in the front, leave the intersecting portions of the object, take away the center portion of the objects there or subtract the back. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to make these different colors so we can clearly see how each and every one of the Pathfinder modes actually works. So here's my two objects. If I take my two objects and select two or more objects, I could go to my Pathfinder and I can unite or add or combined them together. Whatever object was on top of those objects. Those attributes and the object on top will then be the attributes for everything in the containers. Undo that so you can see So my orange one is on top. My magenta one is in back. I joined them together. They become one solid container and then I have uniform Phil and stroke around that. So back to undo. The next one is going to be minus front, which means anything that's in front of my object is going to be subtracted or taken away. I have both of these selected, So the resulting shape that is going to be left by this Pathfinder mode is going to be this square minus the circle because of circles in the front, it's on top, so the result is has gone. So if I want to take that out, do that. The 3rd 1 is Onley where they overlap. So if I have two overlapping ones that I have the resulting chunk where the overlap, if they don't touch, you're not gonna get anything. And then this one's going to actually knock out that portion so that this becomes clear. It's kind of what I call my donut effect. Where they overlap, they just get knocked right out. So just like a doughnut where you have two circles, it knocks out the middle because that's where they overlap. And then the last one here is my minus back, and so whatever's in back simply goes away. So if you want to create some type of basic shape, you could certainly do that in design. We wouldn't create logos or graphics in here, really, because then they would be unique to in design. So anything that we're going to do here is gonna be fairly simple, fairly basic way of just moving containers around in uniting them in very basic ways. Really complex things You're gonna do an illustrator. But if you've use Illustrator, this is going to work exactly the same way as you've had before. Now there are times when we talked about this a little bit when we've drawn something, and I would like to go in and make sure that there's a perfect circle or perfect square, or I've changed my mind on the shape. I've got my container selected with my selection tool, I could go into the object menu, and I can choose convert shape. By the way, there's also the Pathfinder there as well. We can call it up the panel, but we can also call it up here under our object menu. The convert shape right here gives me the ability to go in and convert this shape to a rectangle, which it already is, or one with rounded corners or one with kind of radius corners, inverted corners. I could turn this into a lips triangle, a polygon. Whatever it ISS. I turned that into a lips or a triangle or a square or a rectangle or rounded corners. It's a quick and easy way to convert whatever it is that I'm doing here, two different shapes instead of removing it and redrawing that particular object. So not a very commonly used feature here, but it's nice to have. We can go in and convert the shape, especially when somebody has gone in kind of tweaked a box a little bit out of whack. We're going to show you how to do that and how to get it back by using our convert shaped tool so we can take anything text container, image container or just a plain basic container, and use our past finder tool or convert shaped tool in order to convert it to unify them, chop them apart or actually convert them to something else. So basic containers. Now, if I have, say, a normal rectangle here, I drew the rectangle and I would like to go in, and I'm going to fill this with nothing right now. I would like to go in, and I would like to do some corner options on this. I would like to have some rounded corners, some flat corners do a few other items on this as well. I could go under my object menu and I could call up my corner options, which allows me to come in here. And I can turn on my corner preview so I could do fancy corners and they can increase the size. And I could do beveled corners or insect corners are rounded corners here on my object. I can also set these separately. Right now, the chain in the middle of my dialogue box here is showing that all these air linked together But the reality of it is I could have a square one on one side and I could have a square one on the other side. And I could go in and round that corner and I could around this corner. And when I'm done, I end up with a shape like that. So that's kind of the manual way of going through in doing it. So what I'm going to do here is I'm gonna draw another one and in my dialogue box in my control bar right here. I have the ability to go in with that selected, and I can set my corner options right here in the control bar. And this allows me to set my corner options overall on by container. And I can change the size of those corners as well. But another cool feature about using the control bar is this. These are my corner options right here. But I would like to get to that dialogue box that allows me to control each one separately. Yes, I can go under my object menu, and I can do this, but that's a long way over. So if I go here and I actually hover over this, it tells me what to do. It says option click to call up my options right here. We're gonna use this quite often. So even though I have a very small version of my corner options here I go here, hold on my option key option. Click on that and it will bring it up. Nice will shortcut to have. Okay, so either way, but yet again, that's a nicer shortcut, then going on to the menu and we have 1/3 shortcut. That's the intern. You tell the intern I want rounded corners and you want them done before lunch and then they come over and they do it. And you're all good. No, not really. Okay, So what we're gonna have here is we have what's called life corners and live corners show up. When you click on the container, it's this yellow box that shows up on a container right there in the upper right hand corner. No, that's not a pull handle. It's actually your life corners. If you don't see that, this is only available in C. C. You go under your extras here, and you can see that under your extras. We have live corners, and live corners are on by default. The way you get to your live corners is you collect your container with your selection tool and you click on that. And all of a sudden you will get your little handles right here. Now they become pull handles. You click over them. It says, drag deceptive size. So I could dragged us in so I could get Mawr. Or I can drag us out and I can get less and everything's working in unison. Well, it says press to shift press shift to change one corner. So if I hold down the shift key. I go in and I take this and I run this over here and with a shift key held down, I'm able to change just that one corner. And when we change that one corner were able to go through and set those to be a square set those to be a circle. However, we want to do that. So if I don't hold down the shift key, it's gonna do everything all at once. So the shift key will allow me to change those corners all by itself. Just hover over it. And it tells you if you forget this stuff, the newer features, they're getting really good at very thoroughly explaining what's going on with each and every item. So is your run across these? Take that second toe, hover the cursor over and find out what it does. So if option will allow me to go through and change all of these at once, shift will allow me to go through and change one at a time here. I wonder what happens if I go in and do something else. So it says option click to change the shape. So I hold on my option key and the option click on as a option Click through. That's going to go through and it's gonna change. Shapes of my corners get basic five different corners rounded, fancy flat, square and in verse. But they're so option will allow me to change that shift. I can change the size of just one option. I can change all of my corners together. So now I think if shift will do one, an option will change shape. They don't tell me what shift option would do, right? So I'm gonna try it anyway because this is how I think so. If I hold down my shift in my option key, that allows me to change just one of the corners all by itself. So I love it. So now I can go in and I can very clearly and quickly see how my corners look. So if I have my rounded corner here, I can do that. So there's my rounded corner and then I can go ahead and pull those altogether. If I want Teoh and make them all the same size our option Click to change shape all together. Now if I have rounded corners on here, and I make them in particular size. My tool hint will tell me what size they are as I go through, but it's like, you know, maybe I go through and I just don't know what size I actually made my rounded corners. Not a problem. If I go into my rounded corner options here, it's gonna show me exactly what size those ours. If I want to go when I want to duplicate this on another container, I may do this by I. And then if I need to know the exact measurements, I can do that. I can call up my options right here, and I can actually make a mental note or copy that down. Now I know what size my corners are, so it's not like lost. When I do it manually, I can have those options when you click off your container and click back on your container with a selection tool that's going to go back into non editing mode until you click on that again. So once you see that if you don't see that coming up, you'll have to go into your view menu under your extras and make sure your live corners are turned on and that little box is your live corners. Anything good there, Jim? Loving me The live corners, right? Oh, gosh. Yes, yes. So let's let's throw this one, um, from Connor. Do we have a shape builder tool? Like an illustrator in design? Nothing like that. Okay, in the shape. For those of you with shape builder, tool is a way that you could put multiple shapes together and you drag over the overlapping areas that allow you to begin to build shapes because in design really isn't made for illustration, page layout application. Our ability to put containers together is kind of limited. Teoh Just very basic stuff. So something like this if I wanted to have, you know, an interesting container or something like this where I could put content in her together. Or maybe I wanted Teoh merge these two together like this so I could create just a color and use that as a background or something in the corner. That's about the extent of what is going to be used for. Illustrator is going to get very specific on a very deep level on being able to actually create objects we can here, but in a much more simple way. Terrific. And, ah, black, being creative would like to know. Can you freeform edit from those shapes now that you've created them, for instance, Adding points move stuff around and certainly absolutely. And so what we're gonna do here is I'm gonna show you a couple different things because this is going to be very informative because it's not just drawing the shapes is getting them to do what you want. So I'm gonna put my couple shapes here. So when I have an existing shape right here, I can always go with my selection tool. And I get my pull handles, which allow me to change the size of my shapes, just like we did with the text container. The one beautiful thing with the live corners here and in design. Unlike illustrator, when you'd have something with corners like this and you change the shape those corners stay absolute. They don't get all stretched and flattened out. Illustrator, unless you do them a very particular way, tends to flatten them out, not an in design, so I can make any one of my containers that are applied my corners to longer, shorter, wider, narrower. And it's gonna keep those radius, which is a huge thing. It's awesome. So when I do that, I'm still working with the overall container. This is just allows me to go and pull and scale individually. If I wanted to get in and I wanted to specifically change the size of the container, and I keep in mind, we've only been working with oval squares, ellipses, things like that and then rounded corners. I may want to go in. They make you want to get very specific. I may have a container here that I would like to go in, and I would like to create kind of an angle right here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to bring in my direct selection tool, and my direct selection tool allows me to go. We end. And if I click on my object using my direct selection tool, you'll notice how I don't have pull handles in the middle, is here and then also my pull. Horner's pull corners here are like super super super tiny right there. Well, this direct selection tool allows you to directly select the connection points or in line segment or a corner individually from everything else of your content. So with a direct selection tool, I can select my container here, click on that corner and pay attention to what the cursor is telling May, because then you'll know you're on the corner when you actually see that, I can then click on this corner with my direct selection tool, and I can pull off and change the size of my container or the shape of my container again. We don't do this as often in design, but you do need this. Here's one of the things you have to remember if you have your content, your container selected with your spouse selection tool and you go back in with your direct selection tool and you try to go in and you try to move. Appoint People say it never works. It always moves everything. Here's how it works, folks. When we go into our direct selection tool, I'm gonna shut this container border off here so we can see it very clearly when I go in and I want to specifically change the size or pull one individual corner in my container with my direct selection tool. I click on it with the direct selection tool, and you will see that those little boxes are empty. They those little pull handles are not selected. When they're empty, they're not selected. When I click on them, they now become selected land filled with blue. And then when I go in and I move that Onley, that point is going to move. And I get so many comments with people saying, I try to do that but it just moves everything. And here's the reason why it moves everything. If you have selected your container with your selection tool, your entire container is selected. If you then collect on your direct selection tool, look at every single one of your corners. Do you notice how they're all selected? Guess what happens when you try to move them. All the corners are going to move, so get in the habit of clicking off your object and then click back on your object with your direct selection tool. Or you can simply click and drag over whatever corner he would like to activate. You don't have to use your cursor, by the way. You can use your arrows if you just want to move something right, left up or down, but you can use your tool as well. But so many people come from having it selected with the selection tool to the direct selection tool, and they don't realize that everything still selected. So just click off it. If I click and drag over multiple points, those points are now going to act in unison together. And so I've got that, and I could move all of that separately anyway, that I want to. If I want to do just the bottom ones, I can click on just the bottom ones here, and then they can move just that you name it if I have three of them selected. But if I have all been selected, the whole container will move just like I have my selection tool. I can also go in and not have any point selected. I can just grab on a line segment here and just move the line segment. However, I'd like if I have gone in and I've tweaked something and it isn't quite right, and it's like, you know, I've been trying to get this back to be a perfect rectangle. I can't seem to do that. Go back to the convert shape and say they get back into a rectangle taken. Snap it right back. Also, if you want to go in and you would like to go ahead and constrain certain aspects while you're changing this, I would like to make this kind of into a parallelogram. I could select the bottom ones here, and I could just use my arrows left or right to move that left or right as well. If I want to move something, say, I want to keep this perfectly horizontal along the bottom and I select this one point here. I could move this all around freely. But if I hold down my shift key shift is going to constrain it. So if I pull along that way, it's going to keep it flat for me or keep it vertical, depending on which way and starting and pulling from so lots of really cool items that we can do with these objects. The direct selection tool allows me to directly go in and select individual points. If I have more complex shapes right here and I go and I do this you'll notice, even though I have my rounded corners here. When I go in and I change this, this tells you something about the rounded corners. It really isn't an actual rounded corner. It's a rounded corner effect. But what's cool about this is if I want to pull this to be a different shape right here and I'll take my direct selection tool and do this right here. I can go in. And so if my tool is active here and I try to pull with my direct selection tool, I get my container. But here I could go in. And now I could individually do these as well. You can really screw them up. In this case. You go over both of them, and then you can pull them as well. Don't a lot of different ways that you could work with this. It's not something we generally get into. But if you ever have to change the shape of something, direct selection tool key to it is click off whatever it is you're doing. Then click back on it with a direct selection tool. Got a question? Yes, sir. Without doing kind of the free transform thing or figuring out the math? Would there be a way to say, like at a 45 degree angle? Teoh One of the shapes with something like this? How I would go ahead and I would do a 45 degree angle to something like This is I would literally go in and I would like draw square like that. And then if I wanted, like, a 45 degree angle here, I could go in and I could just draw another square right here, and I could literally just take off this point and I could connect these two points together and then they could marry those together again. This is in design is not an illustration program. So it takes, You know, it takes certain things Teoh a little bit more effort to get through this, unlike illustrator, because generally we're gonna create these kind of shapes. It's probably more for illustration side of things, but there's a couple different ways. Did you go through and do that? You just get creative. So that's the direct selection tool. You can edit anything with the direct selection tool. Make sure you click off it first before you click on it or else you're going to be, have to be having every single point selected, and it's gonna move around just like it normally would. If this election to overactive. Couple of the things when you have multiple containers, this is a feature I really like an in design you can see whenever I click on a container. I can always go in and just simply resize that container and keeps all the attributes. If I want to move several items together, I can just click and drag over the several items and be able to move those all around as well. You'll notice how we get a very large bounding box around absolutely everything, and that's because it's acting as one unit. This is not being grouped. Being group is something a little bit different when I select them, they're acting is an entire unit. What's nice is that I can scale them as one entire unit and I can transform. That was one in terror unit. If I want to rotate or something like that, they're not grouped because if I click off them and click back on them, you can see that they're all individual objects now We used to group things together because that's the only way in design would actually recognize them if they were all selected together and who wanted scale or transform or rotate them together. So if you do want to go in and group your items together so that every time you select them, all of them gets elected and you move them as an entire unit all the time, we go under the object menu and we can choose group, which is command G. When objects were grouped, you'll see this dotted line around the entire object that tells me that all of these are in a group. Now they're in a group, and in order to move them around, you'll have to ungroomed them, right? Well, yes, and kind of know they're group together. So yes, I can scale them together. But you know what? I just want to move this one down. Ever so slightly. Awesome feature. It's grouped. Got the dotted line around it. We're going to in design. I'm gonna double click on the one that I want to move it. Still grouped, but I've been able to isolate this one in the group. Now I can move this all around freely. I can move it, My arrows, Move it wherever I want to. I can click off, Click back on it again and it's still part of the group. I did not have to ungroomed pit, move it, select everything in group it again. Still grouped. But I could isolate that one in the group to change or edit it without taking it out of the group. I know Fantastic works really good. So grouping objects Absolutely fantastic. Feature. You can just go and isolate. Bring it right back out. No need to ungroomed group every single time we're working with these so we can draw shapes. We got a rounded corners. We know how to constrain things by holding down the shift key drawing with option from the middle we can use our Pathfinder tools to merge things together or break things apart. We can convert all of our shapes around the corners, do all that stuff, take our direct selection tool and edit these items. What more could there possibly be? Huns stuff