Recently Jef­frey Zeld­man lin­ked on on a nice UI design frame­work for web desi­gners and after I down­loa­ded it, I saw that all the files are AI files. Illustrator.

But mostly I use Pho­to­shop for user inter­face and web design. So I nee­ded to con­vert the vec­tor shapes in Illus­tra­tor to vec­tor shapes in Pho­to­shop so I can use them. To do so I need them to be added to the „Custom Shapes“ sec­tion which is acces­si­ble via the Custom Shapes Tool in Pho­to­shop. I keep all my icons and shapes in there. You might think that this has to be fairly easy but after I tried for 20 minu­tes I finally found a way to do it.

As you know, when you drag or open files from Illus­tra­tor in Pho­to­shop, they’ll be ren­de­red as pixels (often with bad anti-aliasing). So we need to do a spe­ci­fic action which brings up the prompt, that will offer us the oppor­tu­nity to add paths first. The only way to do that is c/p. Select the shape you want to con­vert with the Direct Selec­tion Tool inside of Illus­tra­tor, hit CMD+C, skip over to Pho­to­shop and hit CMD+V to paste.

Now a dia­log box appears which wants to know how you want the shape to be con­ver­ted: A Shape Layer will pre­serve the shape’s out­go­ing set­tings when edi­ted but can only be re-edited in Illus­tra­tor, the second one will con­vert the shape to actual pixels and then „Path“ or a shape layer. Select „Path“ and click OK.

Then, with a vec­tor tool selec­ted (e.g. Direct Selec­tion Tool) right-click any­where on the can­vas and choose „Define Custom Shape“. Ano­ther dia­log box lets you choose an appro­priate name. Click OK and the shape will be added to the Custom Shapes sec­tion. Done.

Unfor­t­u­na­tely you can’t do that with more shapes at once. You have to go through the whole pro­cess for every shape you’ve got. After you’re finis­hed, you find all those nice hel­pful shapes in your drop down menu.