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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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