Free Transform Tool

The Free Transform tool lets you scale, rotate, skew, and perspective-distort your shapes. Simply select a shape or symbol (or multiple shapes or symbols), click the Free Transform tool, and then use the handles on the bounding box to click and drag to apply transformations. As you can see in the image above, you can select a fill independent of its stroke (or vice versa) and scale it on its own.

By default you can perform all four functions of the Free Transform tool simply by moving your mouse cursor to different areas of the bounding box until it changes to the appropriate symbol to depict the transformation that you want. However, you can lock the tool to a single transformation, as well.

Free Transform Tool Options



The options tab at the bottom of the toolbar area lets you lock the Free Transform tool to a single transformation just by clicking on the appropriate button. They are, listed from left to right and top to bottom: Rotate, Scale, Perspective, and Skew.

Another useful trick to know is how to constrain your proportions on scaling. Just by holding down the shift key while clicking and dragging to scale, your shape/symbol will scale proportionally instead of squashing or stretching.