When extruding outward the edges of an oblong rectangle (say, wider than it is tall), the new edges are proportionately as oblong as the original, making for thinner top/bottom quads and thicker sides. It is frequent however that we want the widths of the new surrounding quads to be equal, as when forming a picture frame around the rectangle.
Scaling along normals with Alt-S or a solidify modifier go in the wrong dimension, since the normals are perpendicular to the quad, so what you’d need is for each vertex to scale along the line that bisects the angle of the shared edges of the vertex it’s extruding from, which for right angles would be 45 degrees.
Currently my workaround for such precision is to extrude each of the 4 edges separately, inputting the distance manually on each so they’re the same, but is there perhaps a more direct way to do this - i.e., a 2D Solidify?