Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you a few ways to line
up objects in Adobe Illustrator that you might not have thought of, or you might not know about
yet. All right, let's get started. Okay, now you probably already know about the Align palette,
this palette here. You can get to that under Window > Align,
and then select a few objects, and then align them by their vertical centers or that kind of thing.
But what if you want to align the right edge of this rectangle with the left edge of this
square? You can get pretty close by just trying to move it there. But a lot of times,
it's hard to get it exact. So there are a couple of ways that we can do this. First,
let's go to View and make sure that Snap to Point is checked. Now I'm going to get on my V tool,
which is the Selection tool, and you can just hit V on your keyboard to select that.
So I'm going to get my Group Selection tool. I'll get right on this point. And I'm going to
drag and now when I get close, you'll see it snap to the other point on the rectangle. So
that's what Snap to Point does. You can also see the cursor change when it's perfectly lined up.
And then just release. Now if I want to move it down, I can start dragging and then hold Shift
and it'll go right along the same plane unless you move it too far, of course, or you can just use
your arrows and move it up and down that way. I'm holding Shift to jump a little further. So now if
we hit CMD Y or CTRL Y, and zoom in really close, we can see that they're perfectly lined up. Let's
hit CMD Y or CTRL Y to get back. I'm going to zoom out a little bit with CMD minus or CTRL minus.
Now what if I want my circle to be lined up too? If we hit CMD or CTRL, we can see where the points
are. And let's say I want this corner down here to be lined up with this point. So there are a
few ways we could do this. We could rotate our circle to get that point to be right down here.
Instead - I'm going to undo that - we could also come up here to Object > Path > Add Anchor Points.
It will add points exactly halfway between two existing points. So now we have the same thing,
basically, just more points on our circle. So I'm going to get my Group Selection tool again.
I'm going to click right on this point and drag it up here to about where we want to be. And then
once it gets close, you'll see your cursor change, and you can release. And now if you have a random
shape... I'm just going to draw something with the pencil tool. So I'll hit N on my keyboard,
and I'll just draw a shape like this. I'll get close to the starting point, and you can see
that it's going to close the shape. Now, let's say that I want this corner of the square to line up
right here. I'll hit P on my keyboard to get to the Pen tool, which is right over here. And then
I'm going to get right along that path. You'll see you have a little plus added to your cursor now,
so that means you're going to add a point. Okay, let's get back on our Group Selection tool.
I'm going to click right on that point, for some reason the shape disappears, but that's okay.
And then when I get close to that corner point, my cursor will change. I think it disappeared because
we have no fill and no stroke. I'm going to hit I to get to my Eyedropper, and then I'll just
select the red to make it red. And you can see that those two points line up perfectly right
where they should. Now before I go, I want to show you one more thing, a quick way to align
your points with the Align palette. And that is to set a Key Object. So I'm going to select
all of these shapes, and let's say I want them aligned to the left side of the circle.
So now that they're all selected, I'm still on my Selection tool, I can click any one of these
shapes. So I'll click the circle. You can see it's got a thicker blue outline now, and that means
that you've chosen a Key Object. Now we can come down here to our Align palette, and just choose
whichever alignment we want. In this case, I'll choose the Horizontal Align Right.
And now everything is aligned along this side of the green circle.
So that's all you have to do - select everything, click on one thing,
and then align however you want. And this all needs to be with your Selection tool. This is
basically the same thing as selecting all, coming down here to Align To and choosing Aligned to Key
Object. It's just a much faster way of doing it instead of having to come down here all the time.
And if you're not seeing this right here, you can always go to the little flyout on the Align
palette and choose Show Options here. Alright, if you liked this video, please click on the
Like button. And I'll see you next week with another graphic design tutorial. Thank you!!!