I’ll be sharing a few basics as I come across simple little Illustrator tricks. Today’s quick tip: How to quickly make a triangle in Adobe Illustrator CS4. There are two ways to do it; one will make you a triangle of two equal sides (isosceles), while the other will make you a triangle with all three sides identical (equilateral).

Method One: Making a Triangle From a Box (Isosceles)

Skills learned: Using Average and Join.

1. Use the rectangle tool from your sidebar tool set. Hold “shift” while you drag in order to make a perfect square.
2. Choose the Direct Selection Tool, otherwise known as the white pointer arrow, from your sidebar tool set (or by pressing “a” on your keyboard), click along one line of the box (you won’t get any highlighting to confirm this, unfortunately), and press “delete” on your keyboard. The line itself should vanish, not the points. Update: A commenter pointed out difficulty with selecting just the line segment this way; their solution was to drag a box between the two points to select it.
3. Drag a selection box around the two points.
4. Right click one of the points and choose “average,” then “both” from the resulting dialog box.
5. Still with both points highlighted, right click the points and choose “join,” then “corner.” (If you accidentally deselected the points after step 4, drag a selection box around the tip of your triangle to re-select them both again; clicking the top point will only select one of the two points.)

Method Two: Making a Triangle Using the Star Tool (Equilateral)

Skills learned: Tool selection, direct parameter entry

1. Click and hold over the Rectangle tool in your sidebar tool set, then choose Star Tool.
2. Single click anywhere on your canvas to bring up the direct parameter entry dialog box for the tool. Choose 3 points, enter a reasonable size (which you can adjust at any time later using the Select tool and drag), and press “OK”.

Now you have  two perfect triangles! Maybe in their next iteration, Adobe will just give us a triangle shape.