The border-radius property is perhaps the easiest way to make a circle, for example. Select the shapes, go to the Pathfinder Panel and click Minus Front.

wrapping text into shapes with shape-outside See Adobe Illustrator: Tips and Tricks for similar articles.

Here are some of the ways in which you can make a shape on the web:

In this post I want to roughly outline some of the most common ways to make circles, triangles, and polygons, as well jot down the advantages and disadvantages for these methods so we can experiment with those that might be a little unfamiliar to us. But what happens if we want to experiment a little? How many different ways are there to make shapes? Pathfinder does not do well with Strokes- hence your circle object must be expanded (Object>Expand). When we make a new component on a website, we’re effectively creating rectangles of different sizes, whether we realise it or not. In your case I think that simply expanding the white stroke shape and using Pathfinder Minus Front will get the results you want.

Illustrator minus front not working