Designing With Shapes Is Easier Than Ever
Whether you’re making a logo, watermark, or graphic design from scratch, chances are you’ll be using a variety of shapes to get the job done. Customizable geometric shapes have always been available in our ever-growing Graphics Library, but we found a way to make them even more accessible and easier to create with than ever before. Now in the Graphics tab, you’ll find a new section called Basic Shapes featuring all the geometric design elements and more customization options for designing with them than ever before!
The world around us is built from basic shapes like squares, rectangles, circles, triangles and diamonds. That means you can build any graphic you need with these Basic Shapes and a little imagination! We’ll walk you through how to add and customize shapes, plus how to put them together for entirely new shapes. Your design game is about to be stronger than ever.
How to Add Shapes
You’ll find our new Basic Shapes section in the Graphics tab of our Photo Editor, Collage Maker, or Graphic Designer. Whatever kind of project you’re working on, you can click the Heart icon in the left side menu to open the Graphics tab. Once you’re there, you’ll see seven shapes to choose from under Basic Shapes: Rectangle, Ellipse, Triangle, Star, Polygon, Line, and Arrow.
Adding a shape to your project is as easy as clicking on the shape you want. It will automatically appear on your photo, collage, or design template ready for you to customize. Each time you add a Shape, notice that there are a few different ways to resize and reshape them using the items in the dashed lines that appear around them.
You can click and drag the blue circles to grow or shrink them while keeping the aspect ratio the same, hold Shift while you click and drag the blue circles to unlock the aspect ratio while resizing, use the white rectangles to crop the shape, and use the tallest blue circle to rotate the shape.
How to Customize Shapes
Each time you add a shape, a Properties menu will appear with all the customization options you could ever need. There are different Properties menus based on each different shape you choose, so be sure to play around with the different customization options on a shape-by-shape basis. We’ll show you some of the basics:
Color Customization
In any Properties menu, clicking the tile next to Fill will bring up a color palette for you to change the fill color of your shape. You can use the Intensity slider to increase or decrease the intensity of the fill color.
Some Properties menu will have an additional color option called Stroke. Clicking the color tile next to it will bring up a color palette for you to change the color of the stroke, or outline, of the shape. When you choose a Stroke color, you’ll notice a little box that appears next to the color tile with a number in it. The number indicates the width of the Stroke, and you can click the box to increase or decrease the width with a Stroke Width slider.
Notice that you have the option to change the Fill color to transparent if you want to create an outlined shape instead of a solid one.
Shape Shifting Customization
Like we mentioned before, each Properties menu will be different based on what shape you choose. For example, the Star Properties menu has a Points slider that will allow you to increase or decrease the number of points in your star shape. In addition, you can use the Inset Weight slider to increase or decrease the thickness of the points.
In the Polygon Properties menu, you can change the number of Sides in your shape from 3 sides to 12 sides, so you always get the perfect polygon with just one slider adjustment.
The Line Properties menu will allow you to choose three different styles of lines: Solid, Dashed, and Dotted. Depending on your line style, you’ll be able to control the width of each segment in your Dashed line with the Segment Width slider, and the size of the gaps between segments with the Gaps slider.
The Arrow Properties slider will allow you to choose a Thick or Thin arrow, as well as increase or decrease the Weight of the lined portion of the arrow with the corresponding slider. You can even choose to make it Double Sided by checking the box!
More Customization Options
Each Properties menu has a button called Options that will allow you to change the Blend Mode, Opacity, and orientation of the shape. If you’re designing with multiple shapes, it’s in the Options menu that you’ll find the ability to Move Backwards and Move Forwards for shape layering perfection.
Alternatively, you can right click any shape to bring up some of the same items in the Options menu, such as moving backwards and forwards, alignment options, and more.
Graphic Design is Easier than Ever
Pretty amazing, right? These Basic Shapes may seem unassuming at first, but with all of the ideal customization options at your fingertips, you can create anything you want with them in record time! And the coolest part is, you can add images into your shapes by simply dragging-and-dropping them in from the Image Manager. You're going to love the new design options you've got in BeFunky!
Click the link below to start designing with shapes. We can’t wait to see what you create!
