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Ever wonder why InDesign has two sets of shape tools for making rectangles, circles, and polygons? One set is for creating empty frames. They have the word “frame” in their names: Rectangle Frame Tool, Ellipse Frame Tool, Polygon Frame Tool. And they create the shapes with a big X inside them. These shapes will always start out with no stroke and no fill.
The other set of tools allows you to define formatting, so every new shape you draw can have a certain stroke, fill, corners, or effects automatically. These are the Rectangle Tool, Ellipse Tool, and Polygon Tool.
To set formatting for these tools, select one of them, deselect everything in your document, and then set the formatting you want in the Control panel, Swatches panel, etc. To make these shapes go back to using default formatting, deselect everything in your document, select the tool, and press D (for default).
This article was last modified on March 4, 2023
This article was first published on December 11, 2018
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Good tip for the new kids on the block who never did paste-up on “flats”.. Huh? What’s a flat? LOL
Yes, it’s sooo very last century. And I can’t wait to bring up “wood cuts” at some point. :-)
Correction: “which draws a frame with an X* in it”
Thanks for this. There are also a few minor quirks: The Rectangle Frame Tool, which draws with a frame with an X* in it, creates a container with Object>Content>Graphic already assigned. And one can move the frame by simply clicking anywhere on it with the Selection Tool and dragging. The Rectangle tool has content value of “Unassigned” and one can drag it only by clicking on the frame itself or the center reference point (it seems). (Of course one can select and move by changing x/y coordinates.)
The X in the former frame is something of a throwback to the days when we newspaper designers used to draw layouts on “dummies” and draw an X inside a frame to make clear to the composing room person where an image would be going in the layout.
All that is true. And, giving credit where it’s due, QuarkXPress adopted the convention of a frame with an “X” in it first. Then InDesign also adopted it when it came out in 1999,