How to create your very own cool shapes with the Custom Shapes tools: Part IV-Combine

This is the final installment of a 4-part series on the Custom Shapes tools. If you haven’t read those posts, I recommend reading them first.

1. Part I: Union (This part tells you how to find the tools, which are hidden by default.)
2. Part II: Subtract
3. Part III: Intersect

Combining shapes

You might think that Union and Combine would do the same thing and the difference between them isn’t obvious from their name. In fact, Combine Shapes is the opposite of the Intersect feature. And it has similarities to the Subtract too, because it creates cutouts.

When you combine overlapping shapes, the overlapping section is removed. (When you use Intersect, the overlapping section is retained and everything else is removed.) The order of selecting the objects does not matter and you can select more than 2 shapes. Just select the overlapping shapes and choose Shape Combine.

Here are some patterns I created using the Combine Shapes feature.

Can you think of useful ways to use Combine Shapes? Send me a sample and I’ll add it to the post if I feel it would be valuable to other readers.