How to use Star Tool effectively in Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator’s Star Tool is a tool that not only can create lovely star shapes, it also can create the web badges which is popular right now in web design. To use Star Tool is very simple, just point your cursor to Illustrator’s Tools panel and select the Star Shape icon which grouped together with Rectangular Shape tool.

Then, you can start doing Star shapes by dragging across the canvas. Release the cursor to finalize the shape. It’s just that simple. But what if I want to have more controls to customize my Star shape? In this post I will teach you some essential tips so that you can use the Star Tool effectively.

The Star Tool consists of Radius 1, Radius 2 and Points, you can see this when clicking the canvas while using Star Tool and a windows appeared. Radius 1 is the outer point, Radius 2 is the inner point. Basically, the picture above sums up the essential controls to use while using the tool. But there is one thing I not very sure about the ALT, because I don’t know whether I got it right or not. Because when hitting ALT, the Radius 1 becomes inner point and Radius 2 becomes outer. However hitting ALT again does not change anything.

But the most useful tip is hitting the CTRL while dragging because, it can modify the Radius 1 and 2 easily. Plus, the minimum points you can decrease is down to 3. When writing until here, I found out that when hitting ALT with a 3 points Star shape, it becomes a triangle! I think it will make the Star shape in perfect angle, for example, 6 points star shape is made of 2 perfect triangles, 2 rectangles form a 8 points Star. But it won’t work for 4 points star shape, because it can’t be split to two!.

Haha, I learn something new while writing the post. Hope you learn something from this post too