Seventeen ready-made shapes in Vectornation by Zaweba
Vectornation by Zaweba has 17 extra shapes, from arrows and callouts to cogs, clouds, hearts and a cat, ready to drop into diagrams, icons and posters.
Beyond rectangles, ellipses, polygons and stars, there is a whole set of shapes people draw again and again. Arrows for diagrams, speech bubbles for comics, hearts for invitations, cogs for settings icons. Vectornation by Zaweba saves you drawing them from scratch with 17 extra shapes, in the style made familiar by other design apps.
The full list is triangle, diamond, trapezoid, pie, donut, segment, arrow, double arrow, rounded and ellipse callouts, cog, cloud, crescent, heart, tear, square star and cat.
The geometric group
Triangle, diamond and trapezoid fill gaps between the basic tools. They are handy for diagrams, warning signs, play buttons, layout blocks and simple illustrations.
Pie, donut and segment are circular shapes with a piece missing or a hole in the middle. A pie is the familiar wedge of a pie chart, a donut is a ring, and a segment is a slice of a ring. They suit charts and infographics, progress rings, gauges, badges and decorative borders.
Pointers and speech
Arrow and double arrow are the workhorses of diagrams, signs, maps and instructions. Drawing a neat arrow with an even head by hand is surprisingly fiddly, so having one ready is a real time saver.
The rounded and ellipse callouts are speech and caption bubbles, with a pointer to show who is speaking. They are the obvious choice for comics and storyboards, but also for labels on a product diagram, highlights on a screenshot and friendly notes on a poster.
Everyday symbols
Cog, cloud, crescent, heart, tear and square star cover symbols that turn up constantly. A cog for settings and engineering, a cloud for weather or storage, a crescent for night, a heart for love and likes, a tear for drops of water or emotion, and a square star for badges and seals.
And there is the cat. It is a shape like any other, ready for a pet shop flyer, a child's party invitation or a playful icon.
Using them well
Treat these as starting points rather than finished pieces. Draw the shape at roughly the size you want, then use the Transform panel to set exact dimensions. Combine shapes with the shape builder or Pathfinder: a cloud and a few tears make a rain icon, a donut and an arrow make a refresh symbol.
Apply styles as you would to any path. A simple fill and stroke suits icons and diagrams. Live effects, gradients and brushes can turn the same shapes into more decorative artwork.
If you need to change a shape's outline in ways its own settings do not allow, you can edit its points with the Point picker, but keep a copy of the original in case you want to go back.
How they fit with the other shape tools
The 17 shapes sit alongside the live shapes and the Shape sketcher. The Shape sketcher turns rough strokes into lines, rectangles, ellipses, triangles and polygons, which covers the plain geometry. These extra shapes cover the more complex outlines that would be slow to sketch or draw.
For corners, the corner tool and corner widgets can round or chamfer the points of shapes like the triangle, diamond and trapezoid, which softens them for friendlier designs.
A quick example
For a simple weather graphic, draw a cloud, add three tears beneath it for rain and a crescent behind for night. Colour them, group them, and you have an icon in a couple of minutes. That is the kind of job these shapes make quick in Vectornation by Zaweba.
