But at times your demands need to take a different turn. Then what? Yeah, say you want the rectangle to rotate around the bottom left corner. You can rotate it as above, then move it, but that’s clumsy, isn’t it? Instead, select your object and then click the Rotate Tool (R) and you’ll notice that not only are the points and paths of your object are selected, but there’s a little crosshair/circle smack in the middle of the object. If you click and drag the mouse outside the object, the object will rotate around that midpoint, just as if you’d used the Selection tool. But here’s the cool part: click on the crosshair and move it to the place YOU want as the center of rotation. Click and drag outside the object, and you’ve got everything done in a quick few movements.

If you want a specific rotational angle, then you can use the Transform palette, but again, the rotation will be around the center. You can also open the Info palette (Window>Info) to watch your progress. The further your mouse is away from the center of rotation, the higher your accuracy. That said, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dragged it to exactly 10° only to let go of the mouse and see that it moved 10.71° or 9.13°! It’s tricky. Get used to Undo (Cmd/Ctrl+Z). If you want to be completely precise, double-click the tool to bring up the dialog box and enter the exact degree of rotation you want. You can choose to rotate a copy of the object, and have the option of moving objects and/or patterns.

A close relative to the Rotate Tool is the Reflect Tool. They even live in the same bin! The Reflect Tool rotates objects, but it’s a flip-flopper. Select an object and then click on the Reflect Tool. You’ll see the same situation on the object as when the Rotate Tool was selected. If you click the tool outside and drag, the object will be flipped or flopped horizontally or vertically. You really can’t tell what’s going on because it’s happening around the center. For an arbitrary reflection, what I usually do is drag the center crosshair out of the object and then click and drag outside the object. You’ll get a moving outline as the object is transformed, so you can keep track of what’s happening. Hold down the Shift key to keep things oriented in 90° increments. If you have a particular line or axis that you want to reflect around/over, then click the mouse outside the object to set the first part of the axis, then hold down the Shift key and click on another end of the line. The object will reflect across that imaginary line. For precision, double-click the tool in the toolbox to bring up the Reflect dialog box. Here you can set if the reflection is horizontal or vertical, and set an angle. What’s more important, you can choose to create a copy of the object to reflect, saving you copy and paste steps. You can see that you have the option of having objects or patterns reflected.