Stop drawing logos freehand
Watch a beginner build a mark and they open a blank canvas and start clicking with the pen tool. Watch someone who does this for a living and they draw a circle, draw a rectangle, align them, and cut one out of the other. The pen tool comes out for the parts nothing else can make.
There is a practical reason. A circle drawn with the ellipse tool is mathematically a circle. A circle drawn by hand with the pen tool is four slightly wrong curves, and at 6 metres or in a 16-pixel favicon, "slightly wrong" is what people see without being able to say why. Primitives are exact for free.
The five boolean operations
Select two or more objects and combine them:
- Union (Weld in CorelDRAW) fuses them into one outline.
- Difference (Minus Front, Trim) removes the top shape from the one beneath.
- Intersection keeps only the overlap.
- Exclusion (Exclude, XOR) keeps everything except the overlap.
- Division (Divide, Break Apart) cuts the shapes into separate pieces along every intersection, which is the one people forget and the one that does the most work.
Where they live:
- Inkscape: the Path menu, and they are keyboard-driven, which makes them fast. Union Ctrl++, Difference Ctrl+-, Intersection Ctrl+\*, Exclusion Ctrl+^, Division Ctrl+/.
- Illustrator: the Pathfinder panel (Window > Pathfinder), and the Shape Builder tool, Shift+M — drag across regions to merge them, hold Alt and drag to delete a region. Shape Builder is the fastest way to work and worth the hour it takes to get used to.
- CorelDRAW: select two objects and Weld, Trim and Intersect appear on the property bar; the fuller set is in the Shaping docker. Boundary creates a new outline around a selection, which is useful for making a knockout behind a group.
Build something concrete
A wifi mark. Four concentric circles, all centred. Convert the outer three to rings by subtracting a smaller copy of each. Draw a rectangle covering the lower half and rotate it to a wedge; select all and use Division, then delete everything outside the wedge. Add a dot. That is the mark, and it is exact, because every element started life as a mathematically perfect circle.
A play button. Circle, plus a triangle made from a three-point polygon, then Difference. Ten seconds.
Alignment does the rest of the work. Learn one thing per program: Illustrator's align to key object — click one selected object again to make it the anchor, then align everything to it. Inkscape's Align & Distribute dialog has a "Relative to" dropdown; set it to "Last selected". CorelDRAW aligns with C for centre-horizontally and E for centre-vertically, and P centres on the page.
Booleans are destructive, and that costs people work
Union throws away the originals. Difference throws away the cutter. There is no going back after you save and close.
- Duplicate first. Keep an untouched copy on a locked layer named
source. This costs nothing and saves an afternoon. - Illustrator will make a compound shape instead of a flattened path if you Alt-click a Pathfinder button; the components stay editable inside it until you press Expand.
- Affinity Designer holds Alt while clicking a boolean to keep the operation live, and it is genuinely better than the alternatives here — you can move the cutter afterwards and watch the result update.
- Inkscape has no live boolean. Duplicate first, or you are relying on undo.
The bug everyone hits: the hole that will not appear
You make a ring by combining a big circle and a small one, and it previews as a solid disc.
The cause is the fill rule. A shape with more than one subpath needs a rule for deciding which regions count as inside. Non-zero winding counts a region as filled when the subpaths around it wind in the same direction, so two circles drawn the same way both count as inside and you get a disc. Even-odd counts crossings, so the inner region is outside again and you get a hole.
Two fixes, both one click:
- Reverse the direction of the inner path. Inkscape: Path > Reverse, Shift+R. Illustrator: the Reverse Path Direction button in the Attributes panel. CorelDRAW: with a compound path, use the Shape tool and reverse the subpath.
- Or set the object to even-odd fill. Inkscape's Fill & Stroke dialog has the two buttons next to the fill type; Illustrator's Attributes panel has "Even-Odd Fill Rule"; in SVG it is literally
fill-rule="evenodd".
This same rule is why a letter "O" imported from somewhere sometimes fills solid, and why a die-line with an interior window prints as a block.
Strokes are a promise, not a shape
A stroke is a rendering instruction: draw this path, this many units wide. It is not geometry until you make it geometry. That matters in three places, so learn the command now:
- Inkscape: Path > Stroke to Path, Ctrl+Alt+C
- Illustrator: Object > Path > Outline Stroke
- CorelDRAW: Object > Convert Outline to Object, Ctrl+Shift+Q
Do this before sending anything to a cutting plotter, a laser or an embroidery digitiser, and before applying a boolean to a stroked object. Also check "Scale strokes and effects" in your preferences — with it off, scaling a logo down leaves the stroke at its original weight, and your 2 mm outline becomes an inky mess at business-card size.
Everything in this lesson works identically in the free tools. Nothing here is behind a paywall.
Before you move on