How to scale a stroke in Illustrator to increase / decrease in size inline with object size
by May 22, 2010 10:48 pm 5,369 views32
Ok, so this is a website dedicated to Photoshop, but after 2 hours plus of searching the internet on how to fix this stroke issue in Illustrator along with a couple of forum posts with few replies, I thought I’d share the fix so perhaps others will be able to find it a bit quicker than me 🙂
The problem I had was scaling a logo that I’d created which had a stroke applied to part of the lettering. I used the stroke effect normally, which was fine for initial logos and concepts but not when I needed to create the print setup version.
When you add a stroke in Illustrator – a 6pt stroke for example. When you scale the logo down or up the stroke remains at 6pt when you actually need the stroke to scale in proportion to the type or object.
By default, Illustrator does not scale strokes and effects at the same proportion as the object, it will keep the settings originally applied. There is a very simple fix to this issue, all you have to do is:
On a mac go to Illustrator > Preferences > General and check Scale & Stroke Effects.
On a PC go to Edit > Preferences > General and check Scale & Stroke Effects
The stroke should now scale at the same rate as the object. The only problem with this solution is that when you change this in the preferences it’s only changing the preferences on your machine, IT DOESN’T MAKE THE CHANGE DOCUMENT WIDE. This can obviously cause problems if someone other than you is going to use the file, as you can’t guarantee that they will have this option checked. A way around this problem is to expand the stroke lines instead of changing the setting in the preferences.
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Laura October 8, 2010 at 5:39 pm
Excellent tip, thanks a lot. I’ve been trying to figure this out for a long time!
hannah October 8, 2010 at 6:22 pm
Glad you found it useful 🙂
Dean November 7, 2010 at 4:03 pm
You are an art saver. I always used Freehand, which I think is a better, more intuitive program, until I upgraded my Mac and now of course it’s unsupported and outdated. So I’ve been forced by Adobe to use Illustrator. Arrgh!
If not for you I might have ended up in the Self Inflicted Wounds column of the local paper…lol
hannah November 7, 2010 at 5:22 pm
Glad I could help 🙂
Anonymous March 11, 2011 at 9:05 pm
Thank you so much for posting this tip!! I was nearly pulling my hair out trying to solve this exact problem. The file I have was created by someone else, and had about 100 layers, so it was not logical to change the stroke on each layer. I have to scale down this file, and every time I would scale it down, I would get larger then normal stroke, and when I saved the document as a PNG, I would lose resolution, and the illustration would become pixelated. So glad I found this tip.
Once again, thanks so so so so much for postin this tip.
Rins Varghese December 29, 2011 at 6:13 am
Excellent tip, thanks a lot. I’ve been trying to figure this out for a long time!
hannah January 2, 2012 at 7:20 pm
You’re welcome 🙂 Glad you found it useful.
Emma January 30, 2012 at 12:36 pm
I could kiss you right now
Adrienne February 16, 2012 at 6:20 pm
So glad this is still posted! Just helped me solve a problem really quickly as we have a tight deadline. thank you thank you thank you!
Thomas February 26, 2012 at 8:14 pm
Thank you so much! My deadlines tomorrow and you’ve solved my problem that was beginning to drive me crazy.
hannah February 27, 2012 at 9:13 am
You’re welcome 🙂 thanks for your comment
Alexandre February 28, 2012 at 5:04 am
Just what I needed… cheers!
Tom May 10, 2012 at 11:21 am
You absolute babe
Amazing Sey August 20, 2012 at 5:06 am
Thanks this worked!
Another workaround is outlining the stroke (illustrator: Object -> Path -> Outline stroke). That way the file works fine on other machines.
James October 30, 2012 at 11:27 pm
Really helpful thank you!!
Shaw Fee November 15, 2012 at 12:17 am
Seriously, this has been annoying me for so long. Thank you for the help.
kassandra December 29, 2012 at 3:28 am
thank you so much!! i could kiss you too! @Emma haha
vengesh April 6, 2013 at 11:43 am
thank you very much
Iuri April 14, 2013 at 11:47 pm
thank you, this really helped
Hilary August 1, 2013 at 7:20 pm
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
beccy October 17, 2013 at 2:47 am
THANK YOU, THAKN YOU, THANK YOU 🙂
Pili January 15, 2014 at 6:44 pm
Thank you very much!
BOJAN April 4, 2014 at 9:03 am
Thank You very much. This is very simple tutorial and usefull too.
kamimi April 19, 2014 at 9:53 am
have been struggling for the issue, glad that i found your post. Save my time and eyes. 😀
k June 5, 2014 at 5:27 pm
THHHANNKKK YOU!!!!! This was driving me crazy, glad to have found your post and fixed the issue.
efy September 19, 2014 at 12:55 am
marry me
SimonSolar2C October 6, 2014 at 6:15 am
What a fantastic tip – I have so many little icon files that dont scale properly – strange thing is not all the strokes had this problem – only some within each picture – but now I dont need to figure that out – I change change that setting and voila
Thanks so very much
Smeeta February 16, 2015 at 1:04 pm
Thanks for the tip. I was struggling to find same 🙂
Siddharth arora May 14, 2015 at 10:18 pm
Thanks a lot for the help, i was doing this wrong for 3 years. God bless you for this 🙂
hannah May 15, 2015 at 8:21 pm
You are welcome 🙂 glad I could help
hitesh October 15, 2015 at 11:57 am
thank you so much for this post..
you just pinpointed my problem.
Jennifer Alvarado February 25, 2016 at 5:46 pm
Hi! Thanks for the tip! I can´t believe I’ve never seen that option on “General”… I was getting tired of changing the stroke size every time I shrink or enlarge a vector (: This was very helpful! Greetings from CR.