> What if the figure design were changed slightly, for example the circle was to be inscribed in the rectangle? With Illustrator, it requires recomputing all the positions by hand; with Basalt, the change is one line of code:<p>Hi. I've been using Illustrator as my main art tool for most of twenty years.<p>1. Draw a circle. Give it a stroke in some color.<p>2. Open the Appearance palette.<p>3. Using the button at the bottom of the Appearance palette, add a new stroke. Make it another color.<p>4. Select this stroke and add effect>convert to shape>rectangle, relative sizing, add 0pt in X and Y.<p>5. Add effect>distort and transform>transform to the stroke. 70% in X and Y.<p>6. Open the Graphic Style palette and make a new style. Give it a name.<p>7. Visit the Appearance palette's menu and turn off "new objects have basic appearance".<p>8. Select the Graphic Style you made, draw some circles using it.<p>9. Turn off the Transform effect in the Appearance palette; hit 'redefine Graphic Style' and watch every circle change.<p>While your later examples like "make a little graph constrained to a shield" are more complex to make, there's still ways AI could help you do this stuff - you could maybe make a pattern brush with a circle for the end and corner pieces, and empty space for the main body, pile that on top of a plain stroke, and quickly drag some points around until you had a shape you like.<p>Eventually your examples get out of the territory of things I'd consider sane to do automatically in the tools AI has. But it can do more than you think.<p>okay enough procrastinating back to drawing my crazy comic in AI :)