From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Fundamentals

Guidelines and center guides - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Guidelines and center guides

- [Instructor] Over the course of this chapter we're going to create this piece of artwork using the simplest of drawing tools inside of Illustrator, which are the line tools. And I've set up this project so that you can follow along with me even if you don't have access to the exercise files. So in other words, we're going to be creating this artwork from scratch. And I would be delighted if you would work with me from the very beginning to the very end. We're going to start things off with a look at how you create guidelines inside of Illustrator which are custom snapping invisible objects that look like these guys right here. And in the end, we'll create a couple of center guides. So the first thing I'm going to do is go up to the File menu and choose the New command, or you've got that keyboard shortcut of Ctrl + N here in the PC or Command + N on the Mac. Then I'll go ahead and switch to Art and Illustration which allows you to create device independent artwork. Notice my unit is set to points and I'm going to go ahead and dial in a couple of custom values here. I'm looking for a width of 1,008 points and a height of 672. And these are just values that work well inside our videos. And this will also allow you to get the exact same results. Now notice here, if I twirl open Advanced Options that I can see that my color mode is set to RGB, which is what I want. You only want CMYK if you're creating artwork that you intend to commercially reproduce. So in other words, you're going to take your artwork to a commercial print house. If you're creating screen art, obviously you want RGB. You also want RGB however, if you're going to be printing from a local inkjet printer or even a laser printer, by the way, both of which are designed to automatically convert from RGB. Now we're not looking to create borderless artwork, so you don't need to worry about the bleed values at which point I'll click the Create button. You Macintosh users, remember that it's very possible that the Create button is on the right hand side instead of the left. So I'll just go ahead and create this new piece of artwork like so. Next what you want to do, is go to the View menu, choose Rulers and then choose Show Rulers or you have that keyboard shortcut of Ctrl + R here on a PC or Command + R on the Mac. And the reason we need the rulers, is because you create guides by dragging them from the rulers like so. So not surprisingly if you want to a horizontal guide, you drag it down from the horizontal ruler up here at the top of the document and if you want a vertical guide, you drag it from the vertical ruler on the left-hand side. Now I always find it to be a best practice to relegate my guides to an independent layer. And so what I'm going to do here is make sure that the layers panel is up on screen. If you're not seeing it, you can go to the window menu and choose the Layers command. Do not however choose that command if it has a check mark in front of it because that will hide the panel. Now I want my thumbnails to be bigger than this and so I'll click on the fly out menu icon in the top right corner of the panel, and I'll choose Panel Options. You can go with Large, but it's not that big. Bear in mind that what we're seeing right now, itzy tinzy winzy is medium. So Large is just slightly larger. What we want one is to dial in our own value. And so I'm going to select Other and change that to 60 pixels and then click, OK. That way we've got a nice meaty thumbnail so we can tell our layers apart. Now, I'll, double-click on the current name of that layer in order to rename it and we'll call this layer Guides like so. Now a few other things you can do by the way, if while you're dragging you press and hold the Shift key, then you're going to snap your guideline to a tick mark up here in a ruler. Do you see that? And so, as I'm moving, I'm going from one tick mark to the next and the distance between tick marks is determined by the zoom ratio. So if I zoom in, you can see that we've got more tick marks to work with and so, as you can see here I'm Shift dragging in order to snap from one to another. Another thing you can do is double click directly on the ruler in order to add a guideline at that location. So if you double click on a horizontal ruler, you'll add a vertical guide, and if you double-click on the vertical ruler, you'll add a horizontal guide. If you want to snap it to a specific tick mark, notice I'm not hovering over a tick mark here. Then you press the Shift key as you double click. In that way Illustrator will go ahead and snap to the nearest tick mark like so. Another option that's available to you is to go ahead and as you're dragging, press and hold the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and that's going to rotate the guide 90 degrees. So let's start it off as our horizontal guide right here becomes a vertical guide when I press and hold the Alt or Option key. And that goes for a vertical guides as well. If you drag it out from the vertical ruler and then press the Alt or Option key, it switches to a horizontal guide. Guide I would admit, I never used that one. I guess it's designed for people who go, gosh, I think I'll create a horizontal guide, oops, that was a mistake. I wanted a vertical guide instead, but it is an option. I'm going to press Ctrl + zero or Command zero in the Mac to zoom out and notice that I have a whole mess of guides right here. If you want to get rid of your guides at any point in time, go up to the View menu and choose Guides way down here at the bottom and then choose Clear Guides and that'll get rid of every single guideline inside your document. But I want to create some center guides. And so I'm going to start off by creating two guides at the same time which you can do not by dragging from the intersection of the rulers because that'll move the zero zero point as we saw in a previous chapter, instead, you want to press and hold the Ctrl key or the Command key on the Mac and drag from the intersection of those two rulers and you will get two guides like so. So once again, that's a Ctrl drag on a PC or a Command drag on the Mac. Now I want to center him and so I want to select them by marking with my black arrow tool, but I can't. It's not working and that's because in my case, the guides are locked. If you run into something similar, then go up to the View menu, choose Guides once again, and choose Unlock Guides. If this command reads Lock Guides, your guides are already unlocked. Anyway, I'll go ahead and unlock mine and then I'll mark key those guys and notice that selects them and they appear dark blue because that's the color assigned to my layer. Now I'll click on the word Align up here in the horizontal control panel. And by the way, if you have a larger monitor, you may just see those align icons inside the control panel all by themselves meaning that you don't have to bring up a panel. You will have to click on this guy however in order to change it from align to selection to align to our board, and then you want to click on this icon Horizontal Align Center which is going to horizontally align that vertical guide and then click on Vertical Align Center which is going to vertically line the horizontal guide and you now have two center guides at which point I can dismiss the aligned panel by pressing the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac. And that is not only how you work with guidelines inside of Illustrator, but also how you create a pair of center guides one vertical and one horizontal, which is oftentimes a great way to create a new piece of artwork.

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