All prisms take a two-dimensional shape and use it as the top and bottom faces in parallel. The top and bottom are then joined to make a solid, so that all the sides are parallelograms. These parallelograms can be rectangles or even squares. The area of the prism is the surface area of the solid, usually including the top and bottom surfaces.
The top and bottom faces can each be the same triangle, quadrilateral (including squares, rectangles, trapezoids, etc.), or polygon (star, pentagon, hexagon, etc.). If the top and bottom have n sides, there will be n parallelograms forming the length of the prism. The area of each parallelogram is base times vertical height, where the base length is the length of the particular side of the base figure on which the parallelogram stands. The volume of the prism is the area of the base times the vertical height. For example, if the top and bottom faces are the same regular hexagon (like a pencil), there will be 6 rectangles forming the sides of the prism, each with the same area, A. The surface area of the prism is 6A plus twice the area of the base, or bottom face.