Merging and deleting regions with the Shape merger in Vectornation

Overlapping shapes are easy to draw and awkward to finish. The Shape merger, on Shift+M in Vectornation by Zaweba, deals with the awkward part. You select a set of overlapping shapes, drag across the regions you want to join, and they merge. Hold Alt and the same drag deletes them instead.

The basic moves

Select the shapes first. The tool works with the selection, so everything you want to take part needs to be included. Then press Shift+M and drag across the regions that should become one. A drag can cross as many regions as you like, which means a single gesture can join the body of a character, its ears and its nose into one outline.

Deleting works the same way with Alt held down. Drag through the leftover slivers, the inside of a letter that should be hollow, or the piece of a circle sticking out past the edge of a badge, and those regions are taken away. Between merging and deleting you can shape almost any outline from a handful of basic shapes.

Where the colour comes from

The detail that matters most day to day is colour. The merged shape takes its colour from the source or from the current fill. In practice that gives you two ways of working. If your parts are already coloured the way you want, merging keeps the look of the artwork you started from. If you set a fill before you drag, the merged region can take that colour, which is a quick way of building and colouring a shape in the same pass.

It pays to glance at the fill swatch under the tools before you start, because it tells you what a merge will produce when the current fill is the one in charge. If the colour that comes out isn't what you expected, undo, change the fill and drag again.

Jobs it suits

The Shape merger is at its best on icon and logo work. A padlock is a rounded rectangle plus a ring: merge the two, delete the inner part of the ring, and the outline is done. A heart can come from two circles and a turned square. A badge with a ribbon behind it can be built from a circle and two rectangles, then trimmed with Alt so nothing pokes out where it shouldn't.

It is also handy for cleaning up imported artwork. Files that arrive from other programs often carry overlapping shapes that were stacked to fake a single outline. Merging them gives you one real path, which is easier to recolour, cut on a plotter or hand on to a printer.

Shape merger or Shape builder

Vectornation has both a Shape builder and a Shape merger in the same group of tools, and they overlap in purpose. Both merge or delete regions of overlapping shapes by dragging across them. The Shape merger is the one with its own shortcut, Shift+M, and the clearly stated rule about colour. The Shape builder is listed with gap detection, which helps when paths don't quite meet. If your artwork comes from careful geometry, the Shape merger is quick and predictable. If it comes from loose drawing or tracing, the gap detection side may save you time.

For combinations that should stay editable, such as two shapes joined but still movable later, look at the Pathfinder panel and its live compound shapes instead. The merger makes a permanent change, which is often exactly what you want, but not always.

Getting clean results

Zoom in before you drag through small regions. A drag that clips the edge of a neighbouring region will include it, and at a distance the difference is hard to see. Work from the largest region outwards, merging the main body first and the small details afterwards. When you need to remove a region, make sure Alt is held before the drag starts, not halfway through. And keep a copy of the original parts on a hidden layer if you think you may need to rebuild the shape differently later.

None of this takes long to learn. After a few logos the Shift+M habit becomes second nature, and the simple shapes on your artboard start to look like raw material rather than finished work.