Extend Object without warping cut edges - Adobe Illustrator

Question

I am new-ish to Illustrator, coming from a Photoshop background and I have an object that I am looking to extend, however it has cut corners. Any time I extend it, the cut corners are also being extended/warped.

Despite selecting specific nodes as suggested on this topic How can I resize this object without distorting it in Illustrator? I cant seem do it without warping the curves on the outside edges of the brown box.

I'm far too tempted to take it into photoshop and chop it up and fill it in, but I would really like to know how to do this in Illustrator CS6.

Any help would be great

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

After you draw your artwork please follow the hereunder steps:

Select all your artwork and Convert it into symbol by dragging it into the symbol panel.

a symbol option dialogue box will appear, make sure to Enable Enable Guides for 9-Slice Scaling by check its "check box" and then hit OK

Now you have just created a symbol that may be stretched without distorting the corners.

Now drag the new symbol from the symbol panel into your artboard and stretch it as you like. But you may notice the result is not so perfect.

For Better result bouble click over you new symbol in the symbol panel. we are trying to edit the symbol that we have just create it. This will open your symbol into isolated mode the way you can edit you symbol separably. You will notice there is some guides drawing into your symbol dividing it into 9-slices as the screenshoot hereunder.

Move your guides to the corners as if you are slicing an object into Photoshop.

Now you symbol is ready to be stretched the way you want.

Answer 2

You don't need to select every single path point one by one by clicking them:

You can simply trace a big rectangle with the "direct selection tool" (white arrow) to select these points, and then drag these paths where you want... while holding the shift key to make sure it's straight.

For example with your graphic, you simply trace a rectangle that will include all the top or bottom part of your graphic. This way you can move the circles at the same time and increase the size of your graphic the way you want, vertically or horizontally.

On this image below, the rectangle only selected the paths that were within it.

Maybe that's not a very complex and elegant solution but it's very fast.