Rounding and chamfering corners with the corner tool in Vectornation

Sharp corners say one thing and rounded ones say another. A hard edged box looks technical and serious; the same box with soft corners looks friendly. Cut the corners off at an angle and it looks like a label or a sign. Being able to change corners quickly, and change your mind, is a big part of shaping a design, and the corner tool in Vectornation by Zaweba is built for that.

The tool shows widgets on every corner of the selection. The context bar chooses the kind of corner, Round, Inverted round or Chamfer, and a radius.

The three corner types

Round is the familiar soft corner, a quarter curve joining the two edges. It suits buttons, cards, app icons, panels, frames and anything that should feel approachable.

Inverted round curves inward, as if a circle had been bitten out of the corner. It gives a classic ticket or coupon look and suits decorative frames, certificates and vintage labels.

Chamfer cuts straight across the corner at an angle. It suits signs, tags, industrial and technical styles, and badges with a strong, cut edge.

Working with the widgets

Select a shape and take the corner tool. Widgets appear on every corner. Set the type and radius in the context bar to apply the same treatment to all of them. For a more visual approach, drag on a widget to adjust the rounding on the canvas and see the result as you go.

Because the widgets sit on every corner of the selection, you can work on several shapes at once. Select a row of buttons or a set of cards and give them all the same corners in one step, which keeps a design consistent.

Related ways to shape corners

Vectornation has a few routes to the same result, and each suits a different moment. The Point picker shows live corner widgets on the points you are editing, which is handy when you are already refining a path. The Corners command in Object, Path applies round, inverted round or chamfer with a radius, on chosen points or every corner, and keeps the result live. Relative rounding, added in version 0.9.15, lets the rounding follow the size of the shape.

Use the corner tool when corners are the job in hand, the Point picker when you are adjusting a path anyway, and the Corners command when you want a specific setting on specific points.

Choosing a radius

Keep radii consistent across a design. If cards have one radius and buttons another, choose them on purpose, often with the smaller elements having the smaller radius. Very large radii on small shapes can swallow the straight edges entirely and turn a rectangle into something close to a pill, which may or may not be what you want.

For print, think about how the corner will look at the final size. A rounding that is pleasant on screen at high zoom may vanish on a small business card, while one that looks fine on the card may look heavy on a large banner.

Mistakes to avoid

Applying corners to a shape with many small points, such as a traced outline, can round corners you did not intend to touch. Choose specific points where that matters. When a shape will be scaled a lot, check whether its corners scale with it in the way you expect. And if a file is going to another program that may not understand live corners, expand the shape to plain paths before sending.

Corners are a small detail with a large effect on how a design feels, and the corner tool in Vectornation by Zaweba makes them quick to try and easy to change.