Do you ever draw something in Illustrator, whether it’s a shape or a freehand illustration, set all the stroke weights then resize it and find that the stroke weight is the same as it was before resizing? Then this week’s quick look has a handy hint for you.

I came across how to set it so that the stroke weight scales with the paths when I was working on my Fashion brief. Thought it might be handy if you don’t want to manually change each stroke weight.

Above I have three circles with different stroke weights (5pt, 7pt & 10pt) when you go to resize them their stroke widths remain the same, which when they’re really small isn’t very suitable.

To stop this simply right click > Transform > Scale… to bring up the following dialog box.

You’ve probably guessed it by the highlighted check box that you need to enable Scale Strokes & Effects, this applies to free hand scaling (when you’re dragging the frame corner handles) as well as the effects of this dialog box. Now when I go to scale it the stroke weights have scaled as well (to 2.032pt, 2.845pt & 4.064pt).

Well that was quick and easy.