10 Adobe Illustrator Align tips in 10 minutes or less - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Introduction to 10 alignment tips in 10 minutes: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, 10 Adobe Illustrator align tips in 10 minutes or less. Today we're going to look at 10 alignment tips. You'll learn how to align objects to each other and to the art board. You'll learn what a key object and a key anchor are, and how to use them. You will learn why objects often don't line up neatly when they have strokes around them, and how to make sure that they do. You'll learn how to align to guides and how to put two objects up against each other, or to separate them with a fixed amount of space. By the end of this 10 minute video, you'll know pretty much what there is to know about alignment so that you can work more quickly and effectively in Illustrator. As you're watching this video, you will see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying this class. These kind of recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so, I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Now let's get started on our 10 alignment tips in 10 minutes or less. 2. 10 alignment tips in 10 minutes: In the class project area, you're going to see a link to download all 10 files that I'm working with today so that you can follow along. The first tip is to align to the artboard and align to a selection. We're going to use the align panel here, you can get to this by selecting it from your bar down here or choose Window and Align. You're going to open the flyout menu and choose Show Options, that's important because these options are important. I'm going to select here Align to Selection. Now when I select over these objects and do something like select Vertical Align Top, they're going to be aligned to the topmost object. If I choose Vertical Align Bottom, then they're going to be aligned to the bottom-most of these objects. If we choose left, they'll be aligned to the left. If we choose right, they would be aligned to the right. In contrast, if we choose Align to Artboard, when we select these objects and choose to align them to the top, they're going to be aligned to the very top of the artboard, or the bottom, or the left, or the right. The next tip is aligning to a key object. It's an option here but it's grayed out right now, I need to select over these shapes before I can use it. I'm going to click here and specify Align to Key Object. You can see that the hexagon has a darker, deeper blue border around it, I'm going to make the key object the circle. The key object always has this border around it and you can just select any object to make it the key object. Well, this means that everything is going to be aligned relative to this key object, it won't move, everything else will move. If I want to align everything to the center of this object, I can just click here on Vertical Align Center, the yellow circle is not moving, everything else will move. Any one of these alignment options can be set to Align to Key Object and you would use that when you want everything to line up or you have a particular object that you do not want to move in the process. Tip 3 is aligning to guides. You can create guides in any Illustrator document by choosing View, Rulers, Show Rulers. You can drag a guide off the ruler line into the document. I'm going to select over all of these shapes and choose Align to key Object. The guide is the key object by default because it is the topmost one of the selected objects in the layers panel, that will always be your default key object. Of course, you can change it to any other object by just clicking on that object, but I'm going to leave it to be my guide. I can now align objects to this guide, for example if I choose Vertically Align Bottom, all of these shapes will align their bottom edges to the guide. When I'm done with the guide, I can just click it to select it and press Delete. Tip 4 is grouping objects before aligning them. I have a series of individual paths in this document, I'm going to select either all of these shapes and I'm going to align them to the artboard. I want to center them on the artboard, so I'm going to click Align to Artboard and I'm just going to click the Horizontal Align Center option. Unfortunately, what I might have expected to happen has not happened. Each of these shapes has been treated as an individual shape and sent it to the artboard, but that wasn't what I wanted. I'll press Ctrl Z, and now I'm going to select over all of these shapes and group them by choosing object group. This time when I go and select the Horizontal Align Center, the object in total is going to be centered on the artboard as a single object, not as a series of individual objects. Tip 5 is arranging equal spacing between objects. There are a number of ways that you can specify equal spacing between objects. I'm going to select all these rectangles here, I'm going to choose Align to Selection. I can equally space them between the left and right most objects by clicking here on Horizontal Distribute Center, and now they're evenly spaced. If I wanted to specify how much space, then I can use distribute spacing, but for this I'm going to need to Align to a Key Object. It doesn't really matter what object I choose, but it may to you, so make sure that you have the correct key objects selected. I'm going to align these with a 100 pixels of space between each of them. I have a 100 pixels typed in here and now I'm going to choose Horizontal Distribute Space. Now there's a 100 pixels of space between each of them, and the blue object has not moved because it is the key object. You can also align objects relative to the artboard. I'm going to select all of these, I'm going to choose Align to Artboard. In this case, if I choose an option such as Horizontal Distribute Center, they're going to be aligned across from one side of the artboard to the other with their center points equally distributed across the document. For each one of these horizontal alignment options, there are also a set of vertical alignment options that you could use to distribute objects in a vertical direction. Tip 6 is butting two objects up against each other. For these two objects here, I want to align them so that there is no space between them at all. I can use the Distribute Spacing option to do this. First of all, I'm going to select one of these as a key object, and I'm going to set the spacing to zero pixels and then click Horizontal Distribute Space. The result is that there is zero pixels between these two objects, which by definition means that they are butted up against each other. Of course, they don't have to be the same style or shape. Again, Align to Key Object, zero spacing, Horizontal Distribute Space, and these two shapes are now butted up against each other too. Tip number 7 is using pixel preview. In some circumstances, you might need to make a visual check to make sure that objects are aligned as you want them to be aligned. I'm going to click on the zoom tool and just zoom in here. It's difficult right now to see that these objects are aligned perfectly, but if I choose View and then Pixel Preview it becomes a lot easier for me to see if they're aligned and I can just drag in a guide to just double-check. When we look at this one in Pixel Preview and drag in a guide, you will see that these are not well aligned. Well, I can go to the selection tool, select this object and just move it over. I'm going to re-select my guide, press Delete, and then Ctrl 0 to zoom back out. I'm confident in my knowledge that these two objects are now aligned. Tip number 8 is aligning to anchor points. In addition to aligning shapes to each other, you can also align anchor points. I'm going to the Direct Selection tool here. I'm going to select over this anchor point and Shift drag to select this one. These two anchor points are selected, and this is the one that is farthest up the document. I'm going to choose align tool and make sure it's set to Align to Selection. I want to align both of these so that they're both at the same level in the document matching this height. I'm just going to click here on Vertical Align Top, and that moves this point so it's aligned perfectly with this one. Tip 9 is aligning to a key anchor. It's possible to align anchors in a similar way to the way that you align objects using a key anchor. The trick here is that the last anchor that you select is going to be the key. I'm going to the Direct Selection tool, I'm going to select over these anchors and I'm going to hold Shift and select over these three. Finally, I'm going to select the anchor that I want to be the key anchor, which is this one here. Now, if I select Align to Key Anchor, and then click here on Vertical Align Top, the points are all going to be aligned to the position of this particular point. The final tip is using preview bounds. I'm going to select either these two shapes and I'm going to align them to their left edges. I'm just going to choose Align to Selection, and I'll click here on Horizontal Align Left. Now, you might be surprised by what's happened. These two shapes haven't aligned perfectly to the left, and the reason for this is that Illustrator doesn't count the stroke as being part of the object. What it's done is it's said, well, this is the object and this is this object, so I've aligned them perfectly. If you want them to align so that their strokes are aligned, select either both of the objects and from this panel here, choose Use Preview Bounds. That changes the behavior of the alignment and when I click Horizontal Align Left, this time the shapes are aligned so that their left edges including their strokes are now in alignment. That concludes our 10 alignment tips in 10 minutes or less. Your project for this class will be to tell me which of these tips you think is going to be the most useful to you. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned a lot about alignment in Illustrator. As you're watching these videos, you would have seen a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class, do two things. Firstly, give it a thumbs up. Secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed it. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might like. Now if you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and your questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.