CreativePro Tip of the Week: Resetting the Bounding Box of Objects in Illustrator

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This CreativePro Tip of the Week on resetting the bounding box in Illustrator was sent to CreativeProse email subscribers on March 1, 2017.

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Most of the time, we take it for granted that scaling an object in Illustrator is as easy as selecting it and dragging a corner of the object’s bounding box. Hold Shift if you want to keep the original proportions, and that’s all there is to it. But if you rotate an object before scaling it, the bounding box is rotated as well, which can make it a little harder to scale in the way you want by dragging.

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Fortunately, it’s easy to restore the bounding box of a rotated object to its original orientation. Just select the object and choose Object > Transform > Reset Bounding Box.

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Voila! The object remains rotated, but now you have an unrotated bounding box you can use to scale it.

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Editor in Chief of CreativePro. Instructor at LinkedIn Learning with courses on InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, GIMP, Inkscape, and Affinity Publisher.
  • andy says:

    is there a way to do a similar thing with objects in photoshop?

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