Need Help Creating inset borders with radius in Illustrator

[sleepyeyed]

I was wondering if anyone who uses Illustrator for their design work could point me in the right direction. Is there a quick way to create a sign with an inset border with thickness and radius measurements? We used to use Gerber Composer and the border tool which we loved, but are having a hard time finding an Illustrator equivalent.

 

[GB2]

I'm not quite sure if I understand exactly what you are looking for but in Illustrator you can use the Round Corner Rectangle tool that you can set for exact size and radius corners and then you can do negative offset paths of exact dimension to get your borders.

 

[Brennen]

Round corner rectangle tool is the illustrator equivalent of the Composer border tool...you can set the thickness and not have to mess with offset paths as well

 

[clarizeyale]

Just to add, if you click "stroke" where you have options to make thicker/thinner, you can also change the alignment of it (outside, mid, inside) and change the look of the corners, etc. Dashed lines and all that are there too.

And the newer versions (from my knowledge) added the round corner tool which is super wonderful (like everyone else mentioned)

 

[Solventinkjet]

Good suggestions above. I would say the quickest way is to create a rounded rectangle and then make the stroke as big as you want and then outline strokes. Since strokes are designated by points it might be hard to get an exact thickness. in that case, I would just do the offset path method. It only take a couple more short steps and you can be sure it's exactly a quarter inch instead of guessing or converting points.

Edit: I just played around with the stroke tab and you can input inches into it and it will convert it to points automatically. So if you type in 1" in the stroke box, it will change to 72 point. You learn something new every day!

 

[TravinFlavin]

Good suggestions above. I would say the quickest way is to create a rounded rectangle and then make the stroke as big as you want and then outline strokes. Since strokes are designated by points it might be hard to get an exact thickness. in that case, I would just do the offset path method. It only take a couple more short steps and you can be sure it's exactly a quarter inch instead of guessing or converting points.

Edit: I just played around with the stroke tab and you can input inches into it and it will convert it to points automatically. So if you type in 1" in the stroke box, it will change to 72 point. You learn something new every day!

Another handy tool is that you can also use math in most measurement boxes. So if you to double your stroke just add *2 to the end of measurement (ex: 1 pt*2) then hit enter. Bam! 2pt!