Homestead Blog

A lot of you have noticed how you can modernize your site by using our rounded rectangle element. Here’s Chris, one of our graphic designers, to show you how to make rectangles with neat, rounded borders - Rochelle.

Have you ever looked at Homestead’s website and envied its rounded gray border? Well here’s a quick tip that you can use to give your site the same professional look.

Creating the pieces

The key to this technique is using two rectangle elements, one carefully layered on top of the other. Here’s how it’s done. First create a new rectangle with the rectangle tool above your page. Next, choose a rounded corner type and the color you want your border to be in the ‘Basics’ tab on the right of your screen. In this example I’ve chosen the Small Rounded option and the color gray to imitate the look of the Homestead site.

Now position and resize your rectangle to fit your needs. Once you are satisfied with your rectangle, write down its position and size information. My rectangle information looks like this:

Right-click your rectangle and select Clone.

You’ll notice that your new clone looks exactly like your original rectangle, which isn’t going to do. In the ‘Basics’ properties change your clone’s color to the color you would like your content to sit on. For our example imitating Homestead’s look, we’ll use white.

Sizing and positioning the clone to make a border

To create the border effect we will have to alter both the clone’s position and size information. First step, reset the position value: select your clone and add the thickness of the border to the left position value. In our example my rectangle’s left value is 25, and I want my border to be 1 pixel thick. 25 + 1 = 26, so I would change the left value to 26. Change the clone’s top position in the same way and you’re almost done!

You’ll notice that the clone is now too big for the effect you want. That’s easy to fix with the second step: adjusting the rectangle’s dimensions. Just take the thickness of our border, which for our example is 1, and multiply it by 2. Take that new number (2), and subtract it from both the width and height. That gives us new values for the dimensions of our clone, 748 wide and 728 high.

If you’re following along with our example your position and size values should now look like this:

That’s it! Your two nested rectangles now appear to be a single rectangle with a neat, rounded border, with everything lined up perfectly. Just drop your content right on top, and you’re done!