Shapes, Boolean Operations, and the Pen Tool

Every complex icon or illustration in Figma is ultimately built from a small set of basic shapes, combined and reshaped. This lesson covers the shape tools themselves, then two ways to go beyond them: Boolean operations and the Pen tool.

Every shape shares the same right-panel controls once drawn — fill color, stroke, corner radius, opacity — covered in the interface tour lesson.

Select two overlapping shapes and combine them with one of four Boolean operations, found in the right-click menu or the toolbar's shape-tools dropdown:

This is how a lot of custom icons get built — a rounded rectangle with a circle subtracted out of a corner, for example — without ever touching the Pen tool.

For a shape that doesn't reduce to a combination of basic shapes — a speech bubble, a custom icon, a heart — the Pen tool (P) draws freeform paths by clicking to place straight-line points, or clicking and dragging to place curved points. It's the same tool concept as Illustrator's or Photoshop's pen tool, and it takes practice — most designers start with Boolean operations and only reach for the Pen tool when shapes genuinely can't get there.