Transcript:
Hi, there this is Theresa Jackson with another creative tutorial for you. While you’re here, make sure to subscribe to my channel, and if you’re interested in a more hands-on approach to your learning, visit my website orchardviewcolorcom I offer one-on-one classes tailored specifically to your learning needs. Alright, let’s get on with the tutorial Illustrator. Smart guides and guides can help you accurately align objects on an artboard lets. Look at how each of these work. I’ll start with smart guides because these happen automatically as long as you have, them turned on and the easiest way to check for that is in the properties panel. If we look over here to the right in the section that says guides, the last icon is for smart guides. So right, now they’re turned on if I click on this. And now we get a lighter gray now. They’re turned off, so Ill. Turn this back on well. Take a look at how those work smart guides pop up automatically as you drag an object around the artboard. So as I move this text, We’ll see that it’s looking for that center point. If I move it over here, It’s going to find the edge of that illustrator icon. Sometimes you have to move your objects. Kind of slow to see these pop-up. Smart guides can also be used to find equal spacing between objects. I’ll draw some shapes here to illustrate that doesn’t really matter what I’m drawing. I’ll go to the Select tool and then just take this select it and move it over slowly and we’ll see those icons pop up to show that those now have equal spacing on the left and the right. And when I released it jumped it. That happens sometimes, so you have to do it kind of slowly, so we have equal spacing. Let go, let’s now position this one so that it has equal spacing. So now all four of these shapes have the equal amount of space between them, using those smart guides by default. Those smart guides are pink, but you can change that in the Preferences. Let’s see what the options are in the preferences. I’ll go to illustrator. Come down to preferences and choose smart guides. And this is where we see the color, Magenta. You could change that to whatever you. I usually leave it at Magenta. There’s other options here too. I have this set to all of the default settings. This one here that says spacing guides. That’s that smart guide that shows you the space between the objects. That’s it for smart guides. Now let’s take a look at guides. A guide is a non printing line on an artboard that you add manually to add a guide. You first need to turn on the rulers and the easiest way to turn on. The rulers is in the properties panel, but we don’t see that option in the properties panel right now, because this shape is still actively selected as soon as I click away from it to deselect it Now we see the properties panel that includes the guides and the rulers so here, where it says rulers and grids, this first icon turns on the rulers. I’ll click on that. And now we see a ruler. Across the top of the artboard and down the left and guides are found by just clicking in the ruler and dragging out, so I’ll click, and I’ll drag down to create a horizontal guideline and I can use the ruler along the left edge to place that guide at one inch. I can do the same thing to add a vertical guide by clicking on the left edge and dragging out until I see it hit the one-inch mark in the ruler above and release now. I have a guide. That’s one inch down from the top and one inch in from the left. I can never add another guide at the bottom the same way and we’ll release that right there. So now we have one-inch margins along the top and the left and the bottom. Now we can use these guides to align our objects, so I’ll take this shape and drag it down and sometimes we’ll find that it doesn’t snap very well to that guide. So here’s a tip for you. I’ll zoom in to show this a lot closer. The snapping is actually looking for the cursor, not the edge of the shape. So if you select your shape from the edge of the shape, it’ll snap right to that guideline. So we’ll move over here to this side and I’ll show you again. I’ll click right on the edge of that shape and drag down and it snaps right to the guideline. You can also create custom guides from any shape. Then back out to show you how to do that. I’ll do a command zero and then all draw a circle for this. I’ll deselect the shape. That’s there with a command shift day. I’ll use the smart guides here to find the center of the artboard and then I’ll hold down my option key so that I can draw from the center out and I’ll use the shift key to get a perfect circle and now that we have a shape. The shape has to be actively selected. You go to view come down here to guides and then make guides and the keyboard shortcut for that is Command V on a Mac and Control V on a Windows machine and that draws a non-printing guide line from that shape, so that’s the basics of guides. Let’s take a look at how you can turn them on and off and lock them, and we can do that with the properties panel, which we don’t see right now because I’m still on the shape tool, so if I go back to the selection tool now in the properties panel, we see the options for guides. This first one turns the visibility on and off. So if they’re getting in your way, you can just hide them. The second one locks and unlocks the guides most often. You’re going to leave a guide locked. If you unlock it, you can select it and move it around just like any other shape, and now that I have that actively selected, We don’t see the properties again, so I have to click away, so it’s not selected. Now we see the guide properties. I can turn this back on. If you want to start over and clear, all of your guides, go up to view come down to guides and over here to clear guides. So that’s the essentials of using smart guides and guides and illustrator to guide you in your creative process. I hope you found this helpful. Leave a comment. If you did or feel free to ask a question. If there’s something else you would like to learn.