Creating center guides

- [Voiceover] Over the course of this chapter we're gonna create this kind of stylized factory icon and we're gonna be doing so using Illustrator's most basic line tools and we'll creating the artwork entirely from scratch, which means you'll be able to follow along with me even if you don't have access to the exercise files and I would be delighted if you would follow along from beginning to end. Now in this movie I'm gonna show you how to create guidelines, which are snapping non-printing guides inside of Illustrator. So the first thing you wanna do is go up to the File menu and choose the New command or of course you can press Control + N or Command + N on the Mac, and then let's just go ahead and call this document Factory guides because I am gonna start off with the guides.

You wanna set the profile to Basic RGB and the great thing about Basic RGB is that you're not really committing to print or the web or a device or anything. You're just making the most basic kind of document you can inside of Illustrator. Also, by the way, the RGB Color Model is perfectly suited to local printing. So any document that you plan on printing to an inkjet or laser printer should start life as a basic RGB file. We want one Artboard no more and let's say we're working in points, in which case go ahead and set the width value, if you wanna get the same results as me, to 1,008, just happens to work well and then set the height value to 672, and the reason I go with these values is because they work really well inside of our videos.

If you have Advanced world open, don't worry about it, there's nothing you need to change down here. Just go ahead and click Okay in order to create your new document and I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in to 100%. Alright, now go over to the Layers panel. You should be able to see it if you've set up your one-on-one workspace as I advised in the previous chapter. But if not if you can't see it then go to the window menu and choose the Layers command but do not choose the command if it has a check mark in front of it because that will actually hide the panel. Alright, now what you wanna do is make this thumbnail bigger by clicking on this flyout menu icon in the upper right corner of the layers panel and choosing panel options.

And then, as opposed to changing the Row Size to large, which is still extremely dinky by the way, go ahead and turn on Other and change it to let's say 60 pixels and then click Okay and you can see that we now end up with a much larger thumbnail and that way we'll be able to better see what we're doing inside each one of these layers. Now let's go ahead and rename the layer by double-clicking on it's present name, that'll light it up like so and then just go ahead and cal it guides and press the Enter key or the Return key on a Mac and the reason we're calling it guides is because this is where we're gonna be putting all of our non-printing guides inside of this artwork.

Alright, now the easiest way to create guides is to go up to the View menu, choose Rulers, and then choose Show Rulers which has that fairly ubiquitous keyboard shortcut of Control + R here on a PC or Command + R on a Mac and that will bring up the rulers along the top and left side of the screen. Alright, now a few basic guidelines for creating guides inside of Illustrator. First you can go ahead and drag a guide out of a ruler and then just drop it into place and the same is true of creating a vertical guide as well, you just drag it out of the vertical ruler.

Alright, now let's say you want to be able to snap to these tick marks. See these little tick marks inside of the rulers? Then as you're dragging down on the guide, for example from the horizontal ruler at the top of the screen, then go ahead and press the Shift key and hold that Shift key down and notice then you will snap from one tick mark to the next and the same holds true when you're creating a vertical guide, you're gonna snap from one tick mark along the horizontal ruler at the top of the screen but you have to keep that shift key down throughout the length of your drag.

Alright, here's one you might wanna know about. I never take advantage of it, but it's one of your options. As you're dragging out a vertical guide if you press and hold the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac it'll change to a horizontal guide. How about that? And the same thing holds true if you start off with the horizontal guide if you press and hold the Alt or Option key it'll turn into a vertical guide but again only so long as you have that key down. If I release the Alt or Option key, I'm gonna return to a horizontal guide. If you wanna create a guide at a specific location, I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in by Control + Spacebar or Command + Spacebar clicking like so and notice now that I'm zoomed quite far in to 3,200% right here so that I can see 369 and 372 and so forth along the top ruler.

You may be zoomed in to some other location in your document, it doesn't really matter. But let's say you want to create a guide right there, well just go ahead and double-click on the ruler in order to create a guide at that location. If you want it to snap exactly to the nearest tick mark then just go ahead and Shift + double-click and notice even though I Shift + double-click right about here I created a guide exactly at 372 points. So again, that's a Shift + double-click on that ruler. So in other words any time you have the Shift key down you're going to snap to a specific location.

Alright, I'm gonna press Control + 0 or Command + 0 on the Mac to zoom all the way out and you can see that we have some guides very close to each other, doesn't matter because we're gonna get rid of them but I do wanna show you one more trick. You can create two guides at the same time by dragging from the intersection of the two rulers, but you don't wanna just drag because as you may recall that's gonna change the 0,0 point inside of the document. Instead you press the Control key or the Command key on the Mac as you drag and then you can drop two guides in place at the same time which is gonna save you a lot of time when creating center guides and here's how that works.

The first thing you wanna do is get rid of all this garbage by going up to the View menu, choosing Guides, and then choosing Clear Guides and that'll get rid of all the guides you've created so far. Then press the Control key or the Command key on the Mac and then drag from the intersection of the two rulers to lay down a couple of guides at a time. Don't worry if they're in the center of the Artboard or not. Just go ahead and drag 'em out there. Then press Control + R or Command + R on the Mac in order to hide the rulers and now what I want you to do is go up to the View menu, choose Guides, and choose Lock Guides to turn it off.

And now with your black arrow just go ahead and partially drag around those two guides like so to select them, at which point they'll appear blue, then go up to the control panel click on this Align icon right there, make sure it's set to Align to Artboard and then click on the two Center Align icons, Horizontal Align Center and then Vertical Align Center and now you have two guidelines that are exactly aligned to the center of your document. At which point you can go ahead and lock your guides again by returning to the View menu, choosing Guides, and then choosing Lock Guides to turn the command back on.

And that's how you create a new basic RGB document, which is the most flexible kind of document you can create inside of Illustrator as well as establish two guides right through the center of your Artboard.