Adding a Border to your Plan

In some circumstances, depending on what you are drawing, you might want to add a border. In fact, you might want a standard border for all of your plans, kind of like a logo or a way for your customers/clients/friends to quickly identify that the work they’re looking at is from you. Almost like a trade mark or identifier.

There is no specific border tool in Ez-Architect. But there are plenty of tools included that make creating a border easy enough. You can even create a border and save it as a library object so you can use it over and over. You can create several different borders for different types of projects.

You can easily come up with a way to create your border. I’ll just give a couple of simple examples. (I’ve drawn these smaller than a full page so they’d capture more easily.)

First start with a simple hollow rectangle. See the fill pattern with the dash in it at the upper left. That’s your empty fill “color.”

This is simpler than you’d want for a special saved border. But it’s a good place to start.

Next, change the rectangle’s line thickness by selecting the rectangle and then clicking on the thickest line icon. Then right-click on a color in the color palette. (Be sure the rectangle is still selected before right-clicking on the color.)

Here’s the border, now in blue with a thicker line.

Note, the fill is still empty, but now your corner color indicator shows up in blue. You’ve made the simplest border of all!

Next I make an arc pie.

The little Arc Pie, selected.

Then I rotate it.

Use Ctrl 2 and Ctrl 1 to rotate the arc into a new position.

And next, I duplicate it 3 times.

Duplicated Arc Pie.

Now the fun begins. First group the new object. (Forget about the old rectangle. No one needs that any more…)

Then duplicate it again. You can experiment with difference offsets to make it interesting. I settled on 60″ to come up with this. It’s just duplicated 3 times.  The first object plus the 3 dupes. Be sure to use the duplicate tool (it’s shown in the icon bar to the left of the border) so that you have perfectly spaced duplicates. If you don’t use the tool, you’ll have to carefully place them individually which is a silly exercise, if you ask me. (You didn’t, I know.)

Duplicated group

I experimented with a variety of fills for this pattern. But I like the dynamics of how it looks “empty.”  Fills made it look flat. But you can certainly experiment, and depending on what object shape you begin with, a fill pattern may be just what you need for your own unique border. Fill the pattern if you wish and then continue to group and duplicate it until you have a complete border. You’ll have to rotate it a couple of times, too.

Here’s the complete border. After positioning everything, I did group it. I didn’t want any of the segments to go astray.

Complete Border. The right, left, and bottom were rotated and/or flipped.

One more thing (as Colombo was wont to say). Be sure to place the border on its own Ez-Architect layer. That way it won’t interfere with other objects in your drawing, nor they with it.

Next time, we’ll look at saving it as a library object that you can bring into any new plan.

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