Rectangle drags out a rectangle from one corner to the opposite one; with Shift it is a square. It is the tool in hand when the studio first opens, and the plainest cut a sheet can take: a bite with straight sides and right angles.
What it does
Press M, or choose ‘Rect’ on the rail. On a phone the four shapes share one ‘Shapes’ button in the bottom bar; tap it and choose.
Press where one corner should be, drag to where the opposite corner should be, and let go. A click with no drag makes nothing, and a press that slips no more than three pixels on the screen before you let go (eight with a finger) counts as a click, at any zoom. A drag dead straight across or straight down makes nothing too: it has no height, or no width, so there is nothing inside it to cut. One pixel of height is enough to make a shape. Once the drag has started:
- Shift makes it a square, as large as the longer of the two sides you have dragged, with the corner you started from staying put.
- Option (Alt) draws from the center: the point you pressed becomes the middle, and the rectangle grows both ways at once.
- Space moves the rectangle without changing its size. Let go of Space and the drag resizes it again from its new place.
Shift and Option can be pressed and released as often as you like during the drag, and the outline answers at once. The order matters, though: the keys must go down after the drag has begun. Held before you press, they lend you another tool instead, Shift for Curves and Option for Points, with Command for Move. The hint line at the bottom of the window says as much while a shape tool is in hand. On a touch screen, the modifier button at the edge of the canvas stands in for the keys: hold it for Shift, or slide out to its outer ring for Option.
The finished rectangle is four corner anchors joined by straight lines, with no handles. It is an ordinary path: Points can add an anchor to a side and pull it, and Curves can round any corner with a drag. Unlike the Pen, the shape tools do not snap. To line a rectangle up with the sheet or with other shapes, use Align.
Where you draw it decides what it does. Over the sheet it becomes a cut, with its piece folded out over an edge. Drawn mostly outside the sheet, it is mirrored onto the sheet across the fold of the piece it covers, or else the nearest edge, and the flip chooser opens with that edge’s arrow ready: press it and the piece lands where you drew it. See Flipping.
Why it works this way
Corner to corner is how drawing programs have made rectangles since the early days of the Macintosh, and it is how a hand measures a box on a table: from here to there.
The keys come after the press for a reason particular to this app. The shape tools, the pencil and the Pen share the same held keys for borrowing the tools that adjust a shape. Pressed before the drag, a key fetches a tool; pressed during it, the same key shapes what you are drawing. It is the rule the Pen’s 45° and the pencil’s straight line already follow, so one habit serves every drawing tool.
A Shift square takes the larger of your two sides so that it grows with the pointer instead of jumping away from it.
The metaphor
The rectangle belongs to the drawing board: a T-square sliding against the board’s edge for horizontals, a set square resting on the T-square for verticals, right angles guaranteed by the tools rather than by the eye. It is also the paper itself. Every sheet in the app begins as one.
Where the metaphor breaks: nothing in a drawing office made a whole rectangle in one gesture. Stretching a box from corner to corner is a computer’s idea, and a good one. Nor is the result fixed, as an inked rectangle would be. It is four points, and any of them can move.
A history
In art
In 1915 Kazimir Malevich exhibited a black square on a white ground and presented it as a fresh start for painting. In 1950 Josef Albers painted the first of his Homage to the Square pictures, squares set inside squares, and went on to make more than two thousand of them over the next quarter of a century, using the plainest shape he could so that color alone had to do the work. The principle suits a notan well: when the shapes are simple, the relations between them carry everything.
Notan itself came into Western art teaching inside a rectangle. Arthur Wesley Dow’s Composition, published in 1899, taught students to arrange masses of dark and light within a frame, and gave the Japanese word notan to a generation of American art teachers.
In printing
Letterpress is a world of rectangles. Every piece of metal type is a rectangular block, whatever letter stands on its face. A page was built inside a heavy steel frame called a chase; the space the type did not fill was packed with blocks of wood called furniture, and the whole was locked tight with quoins, making a forme ready for the press. Every letter, word, line and blank space was a rectangle pressed against the next.
Paper sizes are rectangles chosen with care. In a letter of 25 October 1786 the German scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg noted the advantage of a sheet whose sides stand in the ratio of one to the square root of two: cut it in two across the middle of its long sides and each half has the same proportions as the whole. Germany standardized the idea in the early 1920s, and it became the A sizes now used across most of the world.
In technology
The screen you are reading this on is a rectangle of rectangles, rows and columns of pixels. Bill Atkinson’s QuickDraw, the drawing engine of the first Macintosh, was built on rectangles. In a story told by Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Jobs in 1981 took Atkinson for a walk to show him how many things in the world are rectangles with rounded corners, until Atkinson added those too. Web pages are laid out the same way: every heading and paragraph of this help is a rectangular box placed beside or inside another.
In professional software
The rectangle tool is the same nearly everywhere: press at one corner, drag to the other, Shift for a square, Option (Alt) from the center. What differs is how you give it an exact size. Design programs let you click without dragging and type one; CAD programs expect you to type it from the start.
- Adobe Illustrator. The Rectangle tool (
M) takes the same keys, and Space moves the rectangle in the middle of a drag. Click once without dragging to type an exact width and height. The result is a Live Shape: drag the small circles just inside its corners to round them, or change its size and corners later in the ‘Properties’ panel. - Adobe Photoshop. The Rectangle tool (
U) draws a vector shape layer when the options bar is set to ‘Shape’, and plain pixels when it is set to ‘Pixels’. A shape layer’s corner radii can be changed afterwards in the ‘Properties’ panel. - Autodesk AutoCAD.
RECTANGasks for one corner and then the other, which is usually typed as a distance from the first, such as@60,40. Its options round or bevel the corners and turn the rectangle, and the result is a closed polyline. - Autodesk Fusion (formerly Fusion 360). Sketch rectangles come as 2-Point Rectangle (
R), 3-Point Rectangle for one at an angle, and Center Rectangle. While drawing, type the width, press Tab and type the height; the numbers stay on the sketch as dimensions that hold the rectangle to that size. - Cricut Design Space. The ‘Shapes’ panel offers a square. With the lock beside its size open, type a width and a height to make any rectangle.
What carries over. Press first, then add the keys, and let go of the pointer before the keys: in almost every program that order keeps a square square. Studio Notan is stricter than most about the first half, because a key held before the press lends you another tool here, while in Illustrator it simply applies from the start.
Try this
- Start a rectangle, then press Shift halfway through the drag and let it go again. Press Option too, and watch the outline answer each key.
- Hold Shift before pressing: Curves is lent to you until you let go. Then press and drag with no key down.
- Take Curves and drag outwards from one corner of a placed rectangle to round it.