In a lot of designs whether we're working with the grid for a website or magazine
layout or even in logos and illustrations, you often want to align
things with each other. One way to do that is with a grid or guides. In order
to insert custom guides, we need the ruler up here and over to the side.
So if you don't have that, just go to View and then Rulers, Show Rulers or the CTRL R
on the PC or Command R on the MAC. And to insert a guide, you just have to hover over with
the mouse over the ruler. Click and drag it down
and then you'll insert one. And then if you go over to the left hand side, hover over, click
and drag, you can insert another one as well. Now if you're hovering one over and
you click and drag from the top, and you hold ALT on the PC or OPTION on the the MAC,
it will switch to a vertically oriented guide instead of horizontal and vice versa.
So you can do multiple different guides on a layout. So if I click and drag with the
Rectangle tool and I can see I can get right along this intersection here.
And I can click with the magnifying glass tool. See I'm right, I'm not quite there,
pretty close. There you go.
So now I've aligned it with whatever design I'm doing. Now you can go to
View and then Guides and then Clear Guides if you want to get rid of all the guides that
you've drawn out. You can also do Hide Guides. You can lock guides so they can't
be moved. You can also go to Show Grid and check Snap to Grid. So if I do a Show Grid,
and then I go Snap to Grid, what that does is if I click and drag a shape out here,
you'll notice it only lets me draw this rectangle along that grid,
right, kind of snaps into place. I'm going to add
a stroke here so we can kind of see the edge of it. There we go.
And if you don't want to see that grid, we can go to View, Hide Grid and you can
also turn off Snap to Grid and I'll add a stroke to this one.
Another thing to be familiar with is Smart Guides. So if you go to View, and I have
Smart guides checked. If I uncheck that and I want to draw another shape up here.
Notice there's no green text coming up or lines or whatever. I just click and drag
some shapes out and I don't know if it's aligned. If you go to View, then Smart guides
and then make sure that it's checked, and that's CTRL U on the PC or Command U on the MAC.
Now I get these little intersect words, right. What it's saying is now I'm
perfectly centered with this shape here or with the top of some of these.
So this has a lot of shapes over here. So let me just delete all that out here. So now if I tried to
draw a new one, you notice there's a green line there,
a green line there and a green line there. That's because I'm perfectly aligned with the
bottom of that one over there. So I don't have to measure it and then I'm perfectly aligned
with the top one there and I can use the Eyedropper tool and grab those same
attributes and there we go. Now they're perfectly aligned. Now it's not just
when we're drawing one out. Also I can click and drag and move a path that already exists and it
will align perfectly.
With that you can also line up not horizontally but also vertically.
There we go. And then if I pull out Guides,
you can see these are perfectly aligned and it's all because of Smart Guides.
So that's the basics of grids and guides in Illustrator.
I will see you in the next lesson.