I’ve got a square-ish logo on a transparent background, a bit like the one below. I want to see what it would look like with all the sharp corners slightly rounded orf.

Possible?

Things I’ve tried before turning to a MTB forum:

Illustrator – Offset Path = unpredictable results, some corners more rounded than others.

Illustrator – Round corners = seems to only round two corners, and not the inner ones.

Rounded rectangle tool?

Hmm, yeah. You mean start again and make a new logo rather than try and adapt what I have. Good think.

Tip ex?

Or create a new layer over the existing art, add the rounded square to that, mask out the old square below.

Select the square around the logo
Go to Select – Modify – Smooth
Set the pixels for the radius and thhen you have a rounded box selection, invert it and delete

Yep, rounded rectangle tool is the simplest. Like this:

just cut off the outside bits of the corners and stick em onto the insides?

Effect>stylize>round corners works fine here. Perhaps you have issues with your path or there’s a layer above.

It’s actually more complicated than a square, just thought I’d use that as a simple example. But yes, I think the easiest option is just to do it again with the Rounded Rectangle tool.

Problem solved. Thanks a lot!

bones – Member
Effect>stylize>round corners works fine here. Perhaps you have issues with your path or there’s a layer above.

I think you’re right. I’m not too hot with Illustrator. I imported the image in as a PDF, then went to ‘Image Trace’ then tried the Round corners command. Seemed to only adjust two corners.

I’ll keep at it, want to get better at Illustrator. Not too bad with PS and ID.

I imported the image in as a PDF, then went to ‘Image Trace’ then tried the Round corners command.

This is probably the cause of the problem. Illustrator image trace throws up some very odd results, I wouldn’t use it unless there was absolutely no other way. You might have a multitude of filled objects or multiple nodes where you’d only expect there to be one. That’s before we start to consider the origin of the pdf. I often get handed pdf files that have multiple objects overlaid on one another, curves made up of hundreds of nodes, just all sorts of nonsense going on. The worst offenders seem to be pdf’s exported from CAD packages.

If it’s something simple, like a square with rounded corners it probably is better to delete the original and redraw a nice clean accurate version yourself.

Interesting. Thanks for that. So I was using the wrong tool for the job? Am I right in thinking it needs to be traced before I can use things like ‘Offset Path’, ‘Round Corners’ etc? Or is tracing just for vectorising images.

I will be doing it again like you said, just generally interested in these things.

Depends. A pdf file can contain bitmap and vector elements. if they are bitmap elements and you want to manipulate them in the way that you describe then you’re going to need to convert them to vector and that’s what image trace is for. I use it very sparingly, wherever possible I prefer to keep the bitmap elements as bitmaps and draw/mask around/over them to get the result I’m looking for.

The problem with tools like rounded corners is that if you’ve got two nodes overlaid on one another or in very close proximity the corner isn’t going to ’round’ the way you think it should and Image trace produces a lot of odd nodes. You’ll spend an age tidying up the imported graphic in order to make it usable when 9 times out of ten it’s quicker to just redraw and know that it’s done properly from the off.

It’s hard to get a feel for what you need.
If the imported file is a bitmap, then you might be better just masking it with a rounded corner rectangle, then using a copy of the rectangle to apply a stroke over the top.