How to draw a perfect star in Illustrator

Illustrator's star tool can do so much more than just create stars. So if we select it, you can click anywhere and enter values here, but let's not do that. There's a better way. So we're going to cancel and let's find the center of the artboard and then click and drag to create a default star. Now we can press up and down on the keyboard to adjust the number of points and don't worry about the rotation. We'll fix that in a second. What we can also do is hold down alter option and you get this alternative star shape. And then when you're happy, hold down shift and it will sit upright and we can resize it. Now we can also click and drag on this little icon here and we can adjust the number of points after because this is a live editable shape. And we also have control points here to adjust radius one, which is the outer points and then radius two over here, which is the inner points. So basically we can make our spiky star more or less spiky. Now, if this is a bit too sharp, we have control points to adjust the radius and we can round off the corners like this as well. And we still have the flexibility to adjust the number of points. So as you can see, you can get very creative with this tool. All right, let's make it a pinch bigger. And we're going to go and thicken up the stroke weight just so I can actually see what I'm doing. And then if we go to the more options for the transform panel, we get a slider that we can use and a bunch of boxes as well. So if you do need any degree of mathematical precision, working from this panel may be a bit easier. All right, let's go and D round off those corners. Let's go spiky again. And we can press shift X to swap the fill and stroke. And let's make this bit spiky as well. Very good. And there we go. We've created a starburst shape, the kind of shape that you see on every special offer poster ever.